Maybe Foreign Affairs is not the best choice of bedtime reading: Just as I was being lulled to sleep by former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's article on the daunting tasks facing the next U.S. president, I was jolted awake by what the author called a "cautionary tale."

Thirty years before Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for scaring people into going green, then-President Jimmy Carter went on prime-time TV to try to rally his nation to kick the foreign oil habit. As Holbrooke writes:

Wearing a much-mocked cardigan sweater, he said that his energy-independence project would be the "moral equivalent of war." When someone pointed out that the initials of that phrase spell "meow," the press had a field day, ignoring the substance of Carter's proposals.

Oh, yeah, Holbrooke adds, "One of Ronald Reagan's first acts as president was to remove from the White House roof the solar panels Carter had had installed." Genius.

So here we are, 31 years later, spending plus-or-minus four bucks a gallon on gas and sending billions of dollars a year to global bullies, like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. And instead of MEOW, we've got GWOT.

You'd think we'd learn. But here comes the McCain campaign, mocking the suggestion that Americans could save as much or more oil by properly inflating our tires and getting regular tune-ups as by off-shore drilling.

And recent polls show that more and more Americans are falling for it.

Looks like the new acronym is HISS: Ha-ha, I'm still stupid!

Kitty cardigan available here.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

For the second day in a row, I'm shut in my house with my septuagenarian mom, my teenage son, and my four dogs, waiting out the tornado and flood warnings across the state of Florida that come along with slow-moving Tropical Storm Fay.

There's a lot of barking and sulking, but that doesn't sound so bad compared to what's happening elsewhere in the rain-whipped world.

Apparently, there are annual floods in West Africa which routinely wipe out roads and bridges and increase the spread of communicable diseases. This year, the dangers are more severe since many more people are malnourished than before, because of rising food prices. According to ReliefWeb, the World Health Organization requested $418 million for emergency health care in the region, but so far has received only 22 percent.

That doesn't even factor in the help needed because crops in these areas have been destroyed by the floods, pushing food prices even higher, or the number of people who have lost their homes: 12,000 in Togo; 24,000 in Niger; and 150,000 in Benin.

Call it a perfect storm -- of misery.

Meanwhile, 1,400 people have died so far this monsoon season in India. The season lasts through October, so there's still time to catch up to last year's devastating toll of 2,700.

At least in Thailand, where 8,000 have fallen ill to water-borne diseases as a result of flooding, the government is implementing a plan to get local folks to pour chlorine into the water and is sending out mobile medical units to check on children and the elderly.

While I'm lying around my house, listening to the storm outside, at least I can go online to offer a little help. I hope you'll join me.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What? Never happened to you? Okay, it's never happened to me either. But the U.S. Navy has been disrupting whale breeding, causing injury, and even death, by emitting lethal sounds meant to detect enemy submarines that can bother whales as far as 300 miles away.

That's about to end, as a coalition of friends of the whales, lead by the Natural Resources Defense Council, won a lawsuit alleging that the Navy's low frequency sonar use in 70 percent of the oceans around the globe is illegal. On Tuesday, the U.S. District Court in San Francisco agreed.

Next up, a second lawsuit is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court that would limit the Navy's use of mid-frequency sonar to specific areas necessary for national security.

"This agreement confirms we can achieve environmental protection while maintaining our important national security standards," said Jeffrey Flocken, Washington, D.C. director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

There are rumors that the whales have a request of their own: If the Navy must blast us with noise, can they at least make it something by Barry White?

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I approached the football player warily. The massive 16-year-old was usually a gentle giant, but the past few days he'd been prickly. When I spoke to him earlier that day, interrupting his turn on a video game, he'd practically snarled. Still, I had to ask him a few questions so we could give our patrons at Miami Dade County Cultural Affairs (and the mayor and county commission) a sense of how well this two-week arts workshop at a youth crisis shelter had come off.

"What's poetry?" I asked him.

"It's the rhythm of your soul," he said, matter of factly, as though reciting his social security number. Then he smiled.

Wow. I was as amazed by his answer -- the best definition of poetry I'd ever heard -- as by his change in mood.

But, of course, he was happy. He'd just triumphed as the lead bombo player in a conga drum ensemble. He was the big guy, playing the big drum, and giving the heartbeat to the whole group. Tap-tap-tap-TAP. Tap-tap-tap-TAP.

The Miami Bridge Carnival had plenty of emotional ups and downs. Think about the worst day you've ever had: losing a loved one; losing a job; crashing your car. Now imagine that right in the middle of that, someone hands you a drum and asks you to keep time.

That's basically what we're asking of the teenagers at Miami Bridge when a group of volunteers -- and some accomplished professional artists -- invade their shelter and coax them into making art.

Some days the teens simply refuse. The first time drummer Jimmy Daniel of Beats4Feats arrived, with a battery of drums for playing Brazilian samba -- some of the loudest drums on earth -- a half-dozen teens managed to sleep through the din on couches arrayed around the instruments.

But the next day, they were up and drumming.

Another morning, when we meant to review the poetry the group had cheerfully written the day before, a mutiny broke out in a too hot room and then somehow morphed into a frenzied dance party -- and let me just say they were not dancing the conga steps we were trying to teach.

"Why are you making that face, Miss?" a young lady asked, noticing that my usually cheerful countenance had suddenly clouded with intense concentration as I surveyed the melee.

"I can't figure out what to do to redirect this," I told her. (What did we do? We switched rooms.)

Then, just as serendipitously, the teens will click into a groove, intently painting masks or listening closely to each other to keep the right beat. Sometimes it seems like they've worked so hard at one session, they have to fall apart the next time. Other times, it seems like they only come together because they were able to fall apart.

When showtime comes, the result is almost always the same. Suddenly, the group is gripped by a sense of purpose. A transgender teen, who earlier in the week had been expelled from a practice session because she could not settle down, was transformed the day of the conga show into a completely in-control director/producer/stage manager/costume designer. The professional choreographer Elena Garcia (also of Beats4Feats) and I, who had come fully prepared to oversee the preparations for the show, stepped back in awe.

The teen sketched out the troupe's entrance on a pad, crafted the order of presentation, directed the arrangement of the furniture in the audience, herded the performers into the dining room/dressing room for costume fittings, then lined them all up for the performance.

Then just as inevitably, in the minutes before curtain, panic set in.

"I don't want to do this," our star dancer told the choreographer as he took his place.

No one did. And everyone did. And anyway, it was too late. The shelter's executive director Stephanie Solovei was already introducing the show. The performers paraded in their costumes. The mask-makers explained the meaning behind their masks. The drummers drummed and the dancers danced.

They displayed, as the football player might say, the rhythm of their souls.

See video from Miami Bridge Carnival.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.