The blogger from Afghanistan, hair covered in a plain dark Muslim scarf, asked that no one take her photograph. As did the blogger from Bahrain who appeared in skinny jeans and attitude. Their words appear regularly on the internet, for all the world to see. But not their faces.

The two were part of a group of international activists honored by BlogHer, a community of women bloggers who fill the internet with their thoughts on everything from becoming an entrepreneur to surviving teenagers. More than 2400 women bloggers assembled last week in New York but the outspoken activists were the most impressive. These are not women who can twiddle on their laptops in the kitchen when inspiration strikes. They live in places where opinions are illegal. Before they hit the post button they look over their shoulders. Some of them live where “people are raped and killed just for their faith,” said the woman from Bahrain.

I was in New York to find out more about this new media. I’m old media, a long time print journalist and a real baby in the blogging world. Make that even a skeptic, until now. Like many, I’ve been resistant to adding some stranger’s journaling to my pile of reading material and found it easy to dismiss much of the blogosphere as bloated with self indulgent silliness and malicious unfound gossip.

But there are articulate, smart, necessary voices out there too which can make you finally appreciate what an inclusive, essential tool this blogging stuff can be. Even a life support.

I found women who openly share the terrors of post partum depression and crack each other up with shared humor about their disabilities. But the brave activists, especially those who live where ideas and women are routinely silenced, are the real heroines of the blogging world.

Freshta Basij-Rasikh writes for a site called the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

In New York she softly read from her poem “My Red Eyes.” Blood, she said, has replaced the tears she cries for her country. “Cry for your land which is like a ball that everyone kicks, that everyone plays with,” she wrote. “Cry for the country which has rich mineral deposits but great poverty…Cry for its war which won’t stop.”

Esra’a Al Shafei, from Bahrain, blogs for Mideast Youth which links the voices of young people who live in places where she says, “If you don’t have a history of killing someone you are probably planning on killing someone.”

She and others on her site use all the latest techy stuff combined with video, cartoons and plain good writing. Esra was threatened along with her family after appearing on Al Jazeera TV in a rally for an imprisoned blogger who called the president of Egypt a dictator. She said her goal is “to piss off as many dictators as possible.”

Dushi Pillai, a journalist from Sri Lanka in silk yellow tunic and pants, showed us her photo essay for the webste, Humanity Ashore, of a prosthetics factory where war victims go to be fitted for new hands and feet to replace what was ripped from their bodies by land mines.

Marie Trigona writes out of Buenos Aires for Mujeres Libres. One of her goals is to remind the world of the brutal purge of political enemies that happened 30 years ago in South America which she does by telling the stories of tens of thousands tortured and killed by the military and police.

People were killed back then for daring to advocate for fairness and justice, just like these digital dissidents are doing today. The internet brings us their stories. And visa versa. It’s like what Freshta from Afghanistan said about the internet. “You are my eyes. Without you I can’t see the world.”

A guy I know who works with troubled kids says the more horror stories he hears the more grateful he is for his own childhood. He was never abused. His parents loved and protected him. His schools were safe.

Me, too. I was so lucky that when I went to my first consciousness raising session as a young feminist in the 1970s I had nothing personally sad or bad enough to share. And yet in all my years since, as a journalist, I’ve been constantly reminded of the fragile line between good and bad fortune.

The faithful worker gets downsized. The steady job disappears to Mexico. Riding high in April, shot down in May. That’s life, sang Sinatra.

I would bet that even those cushioned members of Congress who have never personally experienced poverty or want still realize that fortune can flip on a person. And while that doesn’t necessarily turn one into a sympathetic bleeding heart, like my friend and me, it must create some awareness that we are all vulnerable and at times need each other.

Yet, in deciding whether to extend emergency unemployment insurance many of our leaders, largely Republicans, seemed to have locked up their hearts in their safety deposit boxes. No more pity. No more money.

Rachel Maddow assembled some pretty shameful comments by those scornful and suspicious of out-of-work Americans. There was Tea Party sweetheart Sharron Engle saying the unemployed are spoiled and need to go looking for an honest job. Orren Hatch of Utah declared that if you give the unemployed money they’ll use it on drugs. Andre Bauer of South Carolina said providing checks to the unemployed is like feeding stray cats who just keep on breeding.

These people act like the jobless are no longer part of their world. What about the fact that the unemployed use their checks to buy the goods and services that keep other people working? And that unemployment recipients pay federal income tax on their benefits. And that people who are unemployed vote. Plus, they are not suffering alone. A Pew report showed that more than 55 percent of adults in the U.S. labor force are feeling the impact of unemployment or wage and work hour reductions.

Some misfortunes that wipe people out are pure bad luck, like illness, accidents and natural disasters. But those who have lost jobs, homes and opportunities in these bleak times might rightly consider themselves victims of manufactured calamities. Their personal disasters were in large part produced by some very rich and powerful people, bankers, speculators, hedge fund operators and regulators who didn’t do their job. And by the politicians who let them get away with it.

Eleven point four million Americans are out of work and trying to figure out what to do next. For members of Congress, who are always so worried about keeping their jobs, to turn their backs on their unlucky brothers and sisters is heartless and short-sighted. Some might even say un-American.

I was thinking that the Tea Party could rename itself after the volcano in Iceland, the way it suddenly grew angry and blew hot air, dominating the news because it was such a weird scary phenom and no one knew how far and wide its damage would be.

That would be Eyjafjallajokull, which is kind of a mouthful. We could just call it the Volcano Party. There are a few differences. A volcano has a certain beauty. And it’s a natural function of a volcanic mountain to build up a head and just go off, not caring who gets hurt.

But I don’t get the reason for a bunch of Americans to erupt into just plain nastiness and try to obscure the truth with their gray muck. You know what I mean? The stuff about the country going socialist. Obama favoring black people over white people. And my favorite Tea Party delirium: that big business is a friend of the little people.

I know this tea party is named for the colonial protesters, but calling a violence-inciting mob a tea party is like naming a battleship Darling Nell.

I don’t think of them as a party at all. They’re about as joyful as a tantrum.

When the Tea Party got started a lot of people assumed it was primarily a goon squad for the Republican right. Paid thugs looking for a fight. But a recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed Tea Party types are largely white, older, educated Americans. I know a lot of white older Americans with half a brain and they’re not having tea tantrums, although they too have done their share of protesting in the streets. Mostly for civil rights and against war, for which they were called un-patriotic.

One thing I don’t get is how you get old and consider yourself educated and still not understand paying taxes. Of course, nobody likes taxes. The first time you get a paycheck you wonder where it all went and then someone like your dad explains that this is how the system works. You give money to the government and it provides roads and police and firefighters and schools. If you lose your job it will give you some help while you look for another. And provide a cushion when you want to quit work after 45 years.

The Tea Party says it worries about the economy and people losing jobs. And who doesn’t? But its leaders direct their rants toward the current Congress and the guy in the White House, the poor saps who inherited the mess made by the ones who did us in. And this wise older educated flock believes them.

Early on I expected some clear-thinking fair-minded Republicans to step forward and say you’re embarrassing us. Instead the Tea Party started telling Republican leaders what to do.

I had a chance to ask NPR’s European correspondent Sylvia Poggioli a few questions when she was visiting the public radio station in Santa Rosa (Ca.) I asked what gives her the most hope, considering all the world turmoil and unpleasantness she has covered.

She said she takes her hope from “here.” Here? I asked. You mean this country? And she said yes. Ooh, I groaned, along with others in the room. We are in trouble. She explained that France and Germany are torn up by racism and hostility over immigrants. Italy suffers from basic corruption. She said it was getting pretty ugly.

But how pretty are we? Tea Party people accuse members of Congress of being domestic enemies, paint Hitler mustaches on Obama and rev up the trigger-happy. Now, Arizona wants to run roughshod over illegal immigrants or anyone who might look like one. And what billious hot gas will that unleash?