Bright Nepenthe

Palate Cleanser #163

2012-02-08T22:30:00.000-05:00

Lycium palladium by Stan Shebs

One. More. Step. Toward. Equality!!!!!

2012-02-07T14:19:00.001-05:00

Imgae via The Daily Affair

The US District Court of Appeals has concurred with Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling that California's Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, violating equal protection rights of same sex partners!

Honor Killings and Protective Intervention: Does a Universal Morality Exist? Should It?

2012-02-04T14:55:00.002-05:00

Zainab Shafia

Rona Amir Muhammad and Sahar Shafia

Geeti Shafia

In a week that was dominated by the FL GOP primary, Mitt Romney not caring about the very poor, Susan G. Komen setting itself on fire and then dousing itself with tea and sympathy, as they apologized so very, very sincerely, two barely mentioned in the US news stories have stuck with me. They perfectly elucidate the crash of culture, of law, of the concept of honor between Afghani culture and that of the West.

On Sunday, a jury in Ontario convicted Mohammed Shafia, age 58, his second wife, Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son, Hamed, age 21, of killing their three daughters (and Hamed's sisters) Zainab, age 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13. Mohammed's first wife (it was a plural Muslim marriage) Rona Amir Muhammad, age 52, was also killed by the trio, reportedly because she had been too indulgent with the three girls, not her own but evidently much loved by her. (Mr. Shafia had taken his second wife, Tooba Yahya, because Rona could not bear children.) The four women were found dead on June 30, 2009, purportedly drowned in a car that crashed into a canal in Kingston, Ontario, as the family returned from a leisure trip from Niagara Falls. Mr. and Mrs. Shafia claimed that their elder daughter had taken their car without permission, going for a joyride with her younger sisters and other mother and crashed into the canal. The police, however, believed that the women had been either drowned or incapacitated elsewhere, placed in the vehicle and the car pushed into the canal. Jurors in the case did not even need to hear excluded testimony, that of an 8 year old child who had been awake in his nearby house, who saw two, not one, cars, at the scene, heard the splash as one vehicle entered the water. Hamed, once in jail, told a slightly conflicting version from the initial story of the parents and that of the 8 year old, saying that he had followed his sister and accidentally bumped her Nissan with his Lexus, causing it to fatefully fall into the canal. No word on why he drove away and left them to drown, if that was the case. Early on in the investigation, however, allegations that this was an honor killing emerged. The wealthy family, who had moved to Canada in 2007, reportedly never really adjusted, or should we say, Mr. Shafia had never adjusted, to Western mores.

What could possibly induce a father, mother and brother to kill the three children? Zainab had been caught by Hamed sneaking around with her boyfriend. Sahar also had a boyfriend, who had been photographed with his arms around her. As if these hussies weren't bad enough, little Geeti, at 13, was evidently a rebel as well. The girls didn't want to wear hijab and there were an abundance of scandalous photos of them, some where they even were wearing shorts or sleeveless dresses! Why, they could almost be mistaken for regular Canadian girls!

From Hamed's damning Google search history ("where to commit a murder" and "can a prisoner have control over his real estate" being among the topics) to a court-ordered wiretap that caught Mr. Shafia mourning his dead girls by calling them "filth" and "whores" and that he would "defecate on their graves." When Zainab met a boy she liked at school, Shafia forced her to quit school. When it became apparent that all three girls would fight his authoritarian rule of his home, the conclusion of the Ontario jury was that he simply killed them all.

In a fateful wiretapped phone exchange between Shafia and his son, Hamed, he was heard to say:

"Be I dead or alive, nothing in the world is above your honor. Isn't it right my son?"

He's also said they could hang him and he'd still have his honor.

On Sunday, Ontario superior court Judge Robert Maranger declared "It is difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable, more honourless crime." "The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour ... that has absolutely no place in any civilised society."

This same week, mind you, there was the pretty much equally horrific story about a mother and son who killed the son's wife, known simply as Storai, age 22, because she had borne him a third daughter. We have no lovely photos of Storai, whose fate as the mother of three seems little better than Rona Amir Muhammed's fate as the de facto mother of none.

As the Women for Afghan Women director Manizha Naderi points out, "Girls are looked down upon in Afghanistan." Ms. Naderi, who has seen more than her share of horrors visited upon Afghan women and girls, and not just at the hands of the Taliban, I might add, was surprised, however, at the death of a wife for bearing female children. (I am too, since it's evident to me that Storai's husband's sperm are likely to blame here...) It's worth pointing out that Storai's husband, Sher Mohammed, is purported to be a member of a local militia (arbakai) in Kunduz province, and therefore not a Talib. Mr. Mohammed absconded and left Mommy holding the bag. His mother, Wali Hazrata, is in police custody for the deed. Of course, we know how it goes. I will always remember the harsh fate of Bibi Aisha's brutal father-in-law Suleiman, released from jail after a scant six months. I'm sure Mrs. Hazrata will be out in no time. After all, Storai was just a girl. It was like one piece of property killed another, not anything more. (Look, by the way, to the end of this post for an update on Aisha...)

In sum, we have the murder of three girls and their co-mother, because of honor, and the killing of a 22 year old because she was producing wrong sexed children, which isn't really honor-violating exactly, but maybe somehow it impugned Mr. Mohammed's sperm.

So here's the thing, the point I want my readers, many of whom work in the child welfare sector, to really mull over. Honor killings are on the rise, worldwide. Or at least, the awareness and reporting of them is increasing. We have one set of murders in the West, another murder (among the the many) in the East. Oh those mad, bad Afghanis. But... wait a minute. A mass honor-killing, here in North America? Weren't we supposed to be doing better here? I mean, you know, in theory, women, even Afghani women, should be safer here in the West, where women and men, girl children and boy children, have equal rights and equal rights to safety and well-being, correct? What do we do when culture and morality, when culture and gender equity, collide so terribly? What do we do when people come to the West from other cultures and fail to adapt to our morals and laws?

The other day I listened to several BBC World Service radio programs on honor killings, including one of 24 minutes and a more in-depth program, here and which I highly recommend, of almost an hour. The latter program dealt with the failure in Canada (and let's be frank, it could just have easily happened in the US or in any European country) to protect the three Shafia girls from their father. Christie Blatchford of the National Post has detailed, over the course of many months, the daunting protective failures in this case.

Looking at only a few months before the girls' death, Zainab Shafia went to a women's shelter in Montreal. She feared for her life because her brothers had told her father she had a Pakistani boyfriend. As is all too common in cases of domestic violence, nothing was done to really aid her, or her sisters, who remained at home with the father that Zainab reported she was extremely afraid of. Sahar was in the same risky boat, with the family trying to force her to marry an Afghani man, because she had been alone with her Brazilian Catholic boyfriend, who was so wholly inappropriate it was unthinkable. Geeti was... Geeti and irrepressibly willful.

There was much mention made, on the radio and in the press, of how timid social service agencies are to intervene in cases involving people of different cultures and faiths. Not just in Canada, or the US, but in the UK, as well. Of course, here in the US honor killings have also occurred, as you can see here with the horrifying murder of Noor al-Maleki, or here. There has been a fierce debate about media coverage (or lack thereof) of honor killings in the West, with criticisms from both sides of the political divide, see here and here, for example. As usual for me, rather than just looking at media coverage issues and whether the public even pays attention to these horrors, I also view things through the social services intervention paradigm.

Look at this bit testimony from the Shafia trials, quoted from Christie Blatchford's blistering article after the verdict in the case:

Det. Lefebvre was a child-abuse investigator (who) interviewed the children, and one of Sahar’s chief complaints was a lack of freedom.

Prosecutor Lacelle asked her, “How did Sahar appear?” and Det. Lefebvre replied, “Well, I was surprised. She said she had no freedom, but she was well-dressed, wore jewelry, had nice makeup. She did not seem depressed.”

And the detective told Sahar that: “I said, ‘no freedom?’. I said, ‘You’re well-dressed, have nice makeup.’”

Social workers in a women's shelter looked at Zainab and saw an exotic, beautiful, well-spoken, well-dressed woman, dripping with jewelry and thought she couldn't possibly be abused. Zainab claimed that her authoritarian father was out to kill her. And she was right, of course. But there were so many other protective failures: school and other social service entities including the police, disregarded the threats to these girls, the oldest two of whom had warned boyfriends and boyfriend's family to never, ever act as if they knew them if they saw them in public and were with family, even their brothers, because it could mean their death. Interviews were conducted by investigators after various complaints and reports, some of which used the family's children themselves as translators (do not get me started!), to no avail. Reports were filed but nothing was done. The timidity of social workers and first responders to get involved, reportedly stemmed from cultural differences. Or perhaps more accurately cultural ignorance in not believing that the threat was real.

Although I know the source might disturb my atheist readers, I found an interesting article on Uncommon Descent about Bibi Aisha's mutilation at the hands of her family (another honor-related attack, rendered only slightly less heinous by the fact she has survived). Uncommon Descent, which I'll warn you from the start is an Intelligent Design Theory blog, hooked me into reading this article, although I disagree with it on a number of points, because of its opening thesis: A teacher shows students a photo of Aisha and asks for their reaction and is appalled. (The UD article is also valuable for its thorough discussion of the despicable practice of baad, which is how Bibi Aisha ended up in her horrible circumstances.) There is actually a sequential series of articles or blog posts from differing sites, discussing the moral ambiguities involved ("Is it wrong if another culture says it's right?") which stemmed from a post of the same title and A Teacher's Surprising Discovery, which in turn led me to the original source: "Moments of Startling Clarity", an article by Dr. Stephen L. Anderson in Education Forum magazine. I strongly encourage all my readers to check out this thought-provoking article, if you read only a single link from this blog post.

I have alluded to the results of Dr. Anderson's philosophy class's reaction to a photo of Bibi Aisha and what happened to her. When shown her photo, rather than the strong aversion he anticipated, he was rather dismayed by student commentary, such as:

"Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there, that's okay."

Another offered:

"It's just wrong to judge other cultures."

As Dr. Anderson describes it, his students were absolutely morally timorous in decrying what had been done to Aisha. He fears that unskilled teaching of cultural tolerance and non-judgmentalism is yielding a result of ethical paralysis in youth today. I think we should question whether it is yielding similar results in the world at large. It certainly did in Canada, where as Christie Blatchford puts it:

"In the long weeks and months before their deaths, knew they were in danger, that they were afraid, and that their pleas for help were misunderstood or minimized."

These are, of course, difficult issues, which tread dangerously on the edge of civil rights and the rights to follow one's faith, culture and tradition in a new country. The chance for oppression, of someone, at either end of the situation, is ever-present. And yet these are issues which we must address, within our own country and in the world at large. Just as France has moved forward, after much dialogue, with its hijab/niqab ban, we must begin here in the US, and in Canada, to address the issue of safeguarding citizens and residents who come from different cultures as best we can, even if we must bravely face controversy in doing so.

A thoughtful commenter on one of the BBC radio programs summarized his own, and that of his family's, adjustment to moving to the UK. He decided that the same freedoms that drew him to England would ultimately mean his daughters must join that freer world. Another gentleman said that this was nothing to do with honor but the power that many men felt they had to have over their families and specifically their daughters and that it was a personal power trip for some Afghani men. These two callers were Pakistani and Afghani respectively. So it's not as if émigrés aren't capable of getting the broad points of living in these different and more open cultures.

Recently, I attended a child welfare meeting and read a draft Case Manager Role statement. One of the supports that was requested of GALs (which was not the capacity in which I was attending and thus I could not comment upon it) was:

GALs should consider the child, family and caregivers in the context of culture and circumstances in which they live, and their values and aspirations.

In principle, I think, yes, yes. But I look at the photos of the beautiful Shafia girls and the beloved co-Mother and I'm not so sure I can flatly agree with the intent in that statement anymore. Should I just accept other cultures' customs without question? Did considering the family cultural values in the Shafia family properly safeguard Zainab, Sahar and Geeti?

When do we stop accepting culturally-accepted mistreatment? At what point do we risk controversy to step in?

There are, as I say, no easy answers. But this dialogue must begin if we are to safeguard women and girls at risk of harm.*

Protecting children from harm is a universal moral issue. It supersedes cultural tolerance. And as Dr. Anderson says, if the cost of peace is denial of social justice, the price is too high.

*Of course, Muslim culture, even with its honor killings and female circumcision and practices like baad and mut'ah, are not the only cultural practices that harm. I am not solely talking about Western moral assessments of culturally-accepted misdeeds against women and children in the Muslim world, but those seen in any culture. This post, however, specifically addresses the plight of women and children subject to harm under Afghani cultural norms.

Edited to add:

On Saturday, Muslim clerics of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada issued a fatwa against honor killings, domestic violence and hatred of women. Fatwas are morally binding religious edicts issued as a community reminder of the fundamental teachings of the Qu'ran. Prior fatwas issued by the ISCC include a condemnation of the terrorist actions of 9/11, and against the Taliban for forbidding girls to attend school.

Several of my longtime readers have requested an update on Bibi Aisha. In November 2011, Aisha moved in with an Afghan family where she is regarded as a daughter. They have expedited her application for political asylum in the US and taken charge of her medical and educational needs (Aisha had been illiterate, as is common for many Afghani girls). She is learning English. She has been seeing a psychiatrist and therapist, as well as a medical doctor. With asylum, she will fully rebuild her life on her own terms. Readers may recall that there have been delays in Aisha's surgery to reconstruct her nose and ears. Those who query the delays in her surgical procedures should consider what these invasive procedures may pose to her, in terms of triggering traumatic memories. Now 21, she has plenty of time.

You can keep up with Aisha's progress reports at Women for Afghan Women.

Palate Cleanser (Not Really) #162

2012-02-03T17:46:00.000-05:00

From Buzzfeed

Posted on the Susan G Komen Facebook wall:

As a contributor in the past, who is now done with your organization, I think the SGK brand is forever tarnished. Whether we are pro-choice or pro-life, or just pro-end-breast-cancer, the political expedience with which SGK planned to eliminate funding for services for poor and uninsured women and then flip-flop on a shameful decision that never should have been made in the first place, will remain with women, all across the country, who formerly supported you. From the moment that decision on funding left your boardroom, there was no way that you could make things right...

No More Pink For Me: Cancer Shouldn't Be Political

2012-02-02T18:35:00.001-05:00

Now that I'm done joking with friends that men who vote Liberal should no longer get screened for prostate or testicular cancer, I have to say that I'm still not over the cutting of funding to Planned Parenthood.

I have more than a few friends whose lives have been touched by breast cancer, including one of my closest friends, who lost her mother at age 8 to the disease. My maternal great-grandmother lost both her breasts (not at the same time, either) to breast cancer. She had radiation burns and peeling skin and terrible scars that haunted her until her death in her late 90's. I have heard so many stories about the horror, the sorrow, the loss, of breast cancer. And so I gave every year, and generously, to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Remembering my grandmother Gracie, and my many friends affected by the disease. I bought pink, in more ways than one. I bought into an idea of women sticking up for other women. Of women insisting upon better healthcare for women.

But no more.

Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen were both organizations that appeared, for a time, to want to support ALL women's healthcare, irrespective of their race, religion, creed or political stance. However, paraphrasing eloquent Mollie Williams (truly, what a class act this woman is!), the now-resigned top public healthcare official at SGK, put it to The Atlantic, "the divide between the two organization is quite sad". Ms. Williams resigned as soon as the funding cuts were announced. She had administered SGK grant funds. She clearly did not agree with their decision. But as Ms Williams, and Deb Anthony, the head of SGK in Los Angeles who has also resigned, have seen, SGK is putting politics in front of helping ALL women. SGK and the conservatives pressuring it have made a decision not to help women who do not buy their party line prevent cancer easily.

I can see no less immoral, or less petty (but costly of lives) stance here, no matter what the spin doctors for SGK now say.

Putting my money where my mouth is:

I think all women deserve access to cancer prevention information. Don't you?

I've taken the first part of my yearly SGK donation and applied it to Planned Parenthood, which I already supported. I am not alone. According to a report on CNN, they raised more than $400,000 in less than 24 hours after the SGK decision to cut funding was announced. (See video below, with an interview with Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards). I'm sending the rest later in the year, when all the hoopla has died down.

I want to help poor and uninsured women, or really any women who go to Planned Parenthood, know if their breasts might kill them. I don't care if they want an abortion. I don't care if they're poor but Pro-Life. I just want them to know they need to seek care and get guidance on how to get it, and support on how to deal with it.

It might surprise you that some Pro-Lifers are as appalled as Pro-Choicers. As but one example:

I've seen other Pro-Life women, and men, say much the same on the Susan G. Komen page. Thankfully, the folks at SGK appear to have given up on deleting these posts, which I guess are the most frightening of all to them. What can you say about a Pro-Lifer that is appalled if you are at SGK? Miscalculation? The Pro-Lifers that get the fact that this decision potentially affected women who had no other source of ob/gyn health care. Who don't have the luxury of other services.

These balanced, moral, Pro-Lifers understand what the Conservatives pressuring the Board of Komen seemingly did not.

This is a universal issue.

Even people who think differently from you or me deserve early detection and cancer screenings.

Even people who are diametrically opposed politically deserve this piece of healthcare.

If you want to sign petitions, you can go to:

PP Action

MoveOn.org

And don't forget to support Planned Parenthood on Facebook. Like them on Facebook here after you have Un-Liked Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

And if you can afford to, donate to Planned Parenthood, so they can make up for the funds lost from SGK. Not just now, but later.

Don't let the Christian Conservative Political Machine throw poor and uninsured women under the bus.

Don't let them think that throwing anyone under the bus of Cancer is acceptable.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2012

Sanctity of the Uterus and its Fetus vs. Breasts?

2012-02-01T17:44:00.000-05:00

Hi! Now that I have your attention, I have a little quiz for you! It's only two questions and then you can get right back to staring.

Please study the images below.

Q. Which cancer-ridden breast belongs to a Pro-Choice woman?

Okay, since you can't tell from the mammograms, try this one:

Why did Susan G. Komen for the Cure make this (see below) unavailable, or harder to get, at Planned Parenthood Clinics?

Clinical Breast Exam image borrowed from Imaginis.

A. Pro-Choice women don't deserve the Cure or even the prevention. They deserve to get breast cancer and lose their breasts.

B. Poor women, who may or may not be Pro-Choice, don't deserve the Cure or the prevention and and heck, they might deserve to get cancer and lose their breasts.

C. Breast cancer is a disease that shouldn't affect god-fearing, faithful Pro-Life women, but Pro-Life women who can only afford to go to Planned Parenthood (that hellish place!) probably deserve it for going there for their pap smears and birth control. Because Planned Parenthood is like Sodom and Gomorrah.

D. ANY women who go to Planned Parenthood probably don't need, I mean deserve, Clinical Breast Exams or the Cure. They've just got baby-killing on their mind. Who cares about breasts?

E. All of the above.

What? You got a problem with that? Seems like you're not alone.

I say that you can take it to the boards, people.

You can start with Facebook where I posted the following:

Breast Cancer has no political agenda. Planned Parenthood clinics prevent unwanted pregnancies not just end them, and often are the only clinics that poor women can go to for regular exams and birth control. This decision strikes at the heart of healthcare. Politics has no place in the early prevention of cancer.

You can blast it to the top of your lungs on Twitter.

And finally, you can write to Karen Handel, the architect of Susan G. Komen's downfall from the Righteous Women's Organizations List:

Karen Handel
Susan G. Komen for the Cure
5005 LBJ Freeway, Suite 250
Dallas, TX 75244

Let her, and SGK's Board of Directors know what you think of breast cancer being a political disease. Let her know what you think about cutting breast exams for poor and uninsured women.

Is your fetus-bearing uterus more important than your breasts?

You've heard of Sophie's Choice? Now you've got Karen's Choice.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2012

A Sunday Happy

2012-01-29T09:49:00.001-05:00

Lilies of the Valley!

In spite of the fact that my favorite flower grows only in zones 4-8, I have successfully managed to trick some (gardeners call this 'forcing') into growing for me here in Miami, in January in our 78+ F weather, indoors, on the violet cart. Ha! Take that Mother Nature, you sly minx! Longtime readers of the blog may remember part of the reason I'm so taken with the flower and have been since childhood. I'm lily of the valley-ed out over here. And now it turns out that it's my son's girlfriend's favorite flower after she saw some photos of lilies of the valley on the internet.

I wish I could do a scratch and sniff post so you guys could smell these lilies of the valley. So fresh. So SPRING!

Anyway, it's Sunday and since you might have just a bit of time on your hands, I want to direct readers to a new tab on the blog, Be the Change. Rather than that big international list of stuff on Marzie's Favorite Links, Be the Change gives you some resources on things you can do in your own backyard. It could be as simple as volunteering once in a while to read bedtime stories or play games with children in foster care or at your local Ronald McDonald House, the proverbial home away from home for children undergoing longterm medical care. Or maybe you can go and play Bingo in a retirement home, cheering the elderly. Or maybe after reading all my many posts about children in foster care, you're curious about the guardian ad litem program in your area? Or maybe, after hearing about Marina and Serena, my aged out, disabled former GAL youth of whom I'm now permanent legal guardian, you wonder if this, too, is something that you can do? Or maybe you're cleaning out your closet and realize that you have business wear that you don't want to wear anymore but someone else could really use to get and keep a job.

When I started volunteering I was a shy and tongue-tied 15 year old. I eventually decided I liked feeling useful more than I felt shy. My husband had never really volunteered until his early 40's, when I started dragging him to the Ronald McDonald House to play games, of all things, with ill children. (You'd have to know how oxymoronish that whole business seems with my husband to understand...) So it's never too late. And sometimes you surprise yourself with what you're willing to do to make a child or an older person or a lonely person smile.

The Hurting

2012-01-27T04:46:00.000-05:00

"History repeats itself..." is a phrase I first remember seeing in an Anne book (one of the Anne of Green Gables books, I think Gilbert Blythe says it in Anne's House of Dreams) and then was amused to see evidently sort of originated with Karl Marx by way (in theory) of Hegel, possibly by way of Santayana. History repeats itself. Maybe it does. But I hope not.

Look at these chimes, then press play below and enjoy for a bit:

video by kwachula

The sound of wind chimes are sounds rooted deep in my memory. I used to associate glass chimes with my maternal grandparents' house. They had a simple set of chimes hanging outside near the back door. (Which everyone always treated as the front door of the house, because it was nearer my grandfather's garage workshop, wherein he created wondrous circuit boards.) I have many memories of falling asleep to the sound of those chimes on hot summer afternoons in a Barcalounger, in their Florida room, which had a wide spanse of jalousie windows, and through which the same welcome breeze that stirred those chimes would occasionally waft. Those lazy summer afternoons, wedged into the recliner with a cat or two, with my grandparents' dog Jeteye close at hand, listening to those chimes while my grandmother hummed as she did her crossword puzzle, defined my memories of chimes, and possibly a sort of bliss, for quite some time. But the association forever changed on April 28, 1997.

I first met my friend Cindy in 1988. We took a microbiology class together. Early in the semester, exiting the second floor of the building, she stumbled on the stairs, dropping a few items. I helped her up and when I asked her if she was okay, she replied in perfectly droll British accent, "I'm not dead yet." I burst out laughing at the reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And thus a friendship was born. On the surface, beyond just the shared love of Monty Python, we had a lot in common. We were both significantly older than our peers in our classes. I was 27 and she was 29. As I look back, it's really hard to capture how engaging Cindy was. She had a marvelous sense of humor, a quick mind and a warm heart. She was a great animal lover, an avid reader and loved science with a passion. We became fast friends and I really adored her. But it became evident, over the next three years as we shared various classes, that she was troubled. Deeply troubled.

Cindy was open about the fact that she was a recovering alcoholic, and that she struggled with depression. She was tall, about 5' 10", and somewhat heavyset. She struggled with a bad knee, and with limited financial options for surgery, was frequently battling pain. She felt bad about her weight, her body and was depressed that it was hard to exercise because of her discomfort. A string of painful personal relationships, strained family relationships with her father, brother and sister seemed to conspire against her. Her mother, almost a mythical figure in her mind, had died when she was a teen. All of it made her sad and made holidays, and any event you'd normally want to share with loved ones, painful for her. She spent a lot of time with me and my mom. After several years of being friends, she confided darker things, buried in her past. She battled personal demons, who gnawed at her self-esteem, her happiness and eventually her sanity. She told me about several years of her being committed, as a teenager, in a well known mental institution, for what first appeared to have been rebellious behavior (a disturbingly common phenomenon in the 1970's and 1980's for teenagers) but then too, for what later was stated to have been about allegations of incest against her father. As in to shut her up. I never knew exactly what had happened to put her there, but I knew what it did to her.

We parted ways in 1991, to go to our respective graduate schools, planning to keep in touch. She headed off to medical school in South Carolina with her cats, Oscar and Keisha, and a Golden Retriever, Bacardi, who had been the beloved pet of a friend of mine who died of HIV in 1988. She had taken him in when I could not. In turn, I had taken in Tiffy, the kitty she couldn't afford to risk keeping because of cardiac problems (the problems were real but Tiffy lived to be 21 years old, so there, you EKG machine you, so there.) I visited Cindy in Columbia over a long weekend in the spring of 1992. She was stressed and agitated, but we hung out with her med school roommates, swilled down massive amounts of coffee and browsed in book and antique stores. That spring I had a setback with my health and returned from Texas to Miami, to restart my PhD. I was pretty shaken by the interruption of all my plans. I'd been very ill with severe allergies, battling unexplained giant hives and cold urticaria and then pneumonia due to immunosuppressing steroid treatments. But I came back to Miami, charged full ahead in an environment in which I'd been healthy, and resumed working on my PhD, trying not to be too downtrodden.

Less than a year later, Cindy's world fell apart, too. Whether due to the pressure of medical school or abuse of pills (all of it, all rolled into one?), she had a psychotic break that landed her in the hospital. Unlike my situation, however, it all but ruined her chances of finishing medical school. After refusing to let her return until she had a clean bill of mental health, the medical school discovered her prior mental health history, which she had not accurately reported. She was dismissed, with little ground, and no finances, with which to fight her dismissal. Being dismissed also left her with a year and a half of medical student loans to repay.

From that point on, there was a steep descent into a depression that was difficult, as a friend, to watch and deal with gracefully. Returning to Miami, she shifted from job to job, borrowing money from family, friends, moving from place to place. She finally landed, in late 1996, at a health insurance company, reviewing claims, specializing in diabetic patients' claims. She hated her job. She lived in a duplex up in Hollywood with her now four cats and Bacardi. We didn't see each other very often. I was busy and plus I felt awkward. She was out of her grad school. I was having success in my research. She loved to give gifts but giving gifts meant she was spending borrowed money on the wrong things, like funny tchotchkes instead of rent, etc. No matter how I insisted that we wouldn't exchange gifts, there she was, Christmas 1996, with presents for me, for my stepchildren, for my cats. I remember feeling like I was contributing to her problem and had increased difficulty dealing with her moods and demands. I felt bad for her but frustrated by her. I was beginning to write my dissertation, with my PhD defense scheduled for mid-March and felt that between my research and my family responsibilities, I just couldn't deal with her. The months slid by and we'd chat by phone but I brushed off getting together. Just about every moment was going to writing my dissertation and preparing my dissertation seminar. By mid-March I was the proud possessor of a 300+ page dissertation and a shiny new PhD. My friend, who had gotten her undergraduate degree at the same time I'd earned mine, sent me an email congratulating me and telling me how lucky I was because she hated her job, her life. It made me sad and I didn't exactly know how to reply. We made tentative plans to get together to celebrate (she insisted celebration was in order) but they got postponed. I went up a week later, though, and we laughed as watched a series of Monty Python skits (Dead Parrot and Cheese Shop were our faves) on videotape for about the thousandth time, went out for Thai food and played with Bacardi. She seemed more upbeat than she had in recent weeks, I thought. But we didn't chat much in the weeks that followed.

On Saturday April 27, 1997 there was terrible weather in Miami. The typical windy spring weather, but heavy rain accompanied it. In the late afternoon, I cryptically received a call at home from Cindy's father, who said that he had received a message from her, asking him to call me, to ask me check on her pets. Why didn't she call me herself, I asked him? He didn't know. I told him I had no idea what that was about but that I'd try to go first thing in the morning, because it was still such bad weather and I didn't want to make a half-hour drive in the dark when it was raining so hard. He said that was probably fine. I slept that night fitfully, wondering if I'd somehow forgotten that she was going out of town and trying to remember where she'd told me she left a spare key.

Bright and early Sunday morning, my husband and I drove up to Hollywood. I walked up the path to the small, white duplex in which she lived and figured I'd start with a knock, since the windows were open. I thought there was no way she'd have left town without locking up better. I knocked but there was no answer. I called out, but still nothing. And then, without looking for that spare key, I put my hand on that aluminum door knob and turned. As it opened, I just... knew. I walked inside, asking my husband to wait outside, in case she wasn't dressed or something. The pets, even Bacardi, were all in the living room and seemed oddly disengaged, barely noticing me. I walked to the right, to the bedroom and there I found her. She'd rolled off the bed, onto the floor, and seemed as if she must have thrashed a bit. Her eyes still open, mouth gaping, it was pure, unadulterated awful. She'd clearly been dead for more than 24 hours. The room smelled of death, a scent as real as roses or toast, if you've ever been around people who have died. The evidence of her quite effective means, which I won't get into because I'm not handing out ideas on the subject, were neatly organized on her bedside table. It was a method I'd discussed with my friend who was dying of HIV, but a toxoplasmosis infection in his brain robbed him of any choice in the manner of his death. She knew about it. She'd used it. And with some care, evidently.

Her brief note was a statement to her family that I was the only person she trusted to take care of her pets. In the weeks that followed, I understood why she'd left a stern note. Though I knew her father to be a rather irascible man, her siblings were something of an unknown quantity to me. They proceeded to tell me every bad thing they could about Cindy. That she was a liar and had borderline personality disorder and that she was a nut job and it was so selfish and it was so typical that she'd done this to them. They were glad I was taking the pets so they didn't have to deal with that on top of everything else. My poor friend. Her broken, unhappy life, finally gone and yet still being ripped apart. I wanted to remember the wonderful woman I met on the stairs in 1988. But all they did was rage on. I heard all of it as I helped them go through her things, as I found good homes for her pets, especially for poor Bacardi, who had lost a second owner. But during those weeks and hours that I helped them with her things, I kept living in that moment of discovery, that awful moment, in her room. I don't think I'll ever be able to forget that moment. The image, the scent, the sound. Ah... the sound...

Through the open bedroom window, I could see, could hear, a glass wind chime tinkling in the still brisk wind. It was one of those Chinese ones, with the painted glass. Very reminiscent of the one my grandparents had. For years afterward, I would hear chimes like that and smell death, or at least relive the moment of smelling death. I used to love those chimes. They were like shattered glass in that moment.

It's taken almost fifteen years to get a glass wind chime, the one you see above, which is called "Ice". Of course, I haven't hung it yet. (That's why you get sound from someone else's chimes.) But I am reclaiming glass wind chimes. I need them in my life. They remind me of my grandmother and grandfather and Jeteye and the cats and those languorous afternoons long ago, in spite of all odds. Well, after much reconsideration, let's say. They were a sound of deep comfort in my memory.

Maybe I need comfort, because in the most bizarre way, history is pretty much repeating itself, in a fashion so eerie, it's déjà vu all over again. Because what are the odds that another friend I met in the same year, 1988, at the same university, in another class, would also have lost her mother, been committed for three years as a teenager for her willfulness, damaged horribly, have a strained relationship with her father, brother and sister, have a nervous breakdown in graduate school a year ago, and now be on the brink of the same choices as was Cindy? Only my family and Les Comtesses have heard this sad story because it is just so achingly painful. My friend is so private. There will be no names that sound like her name. No greater detail provided. But here I sit, writing this at 4 am in the morning, sleepless, wondering if any day now, when I go by her tiny efficiency, if this is going to be the time. Her kitty seems to be her sole reason for continuing with her life and I'm constantly talking her out of putting her cat, who is old but otherwise just fine, to sleep. Every day I talk to her, it's about why she should just take one day at a time.

I like to think I'm doing better this time, both with her and with how I'm feeling about the whole thing as a very real and painful sort of déjà vu. I like to think it's not going to end the same way. But as time moves on, less and less of my beautiful friend is there. It's like a lathe is stripping away layer after layer of the person I've known for so long now. She is barely recognizable as the beautiful young woman I met in 1988, who had such brio. But it's more than just that. Tonight when I got there and called out her name, through her open windows, she started awake and said weakly, "The door's unlocked. Just come in."

I froze for a moment, with my hand on another aluminum door knob, twisting, twisting open.

Well, this time, the chimes are mine.

Working My Way Back But First: SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-18T12:19:00.000-05:00

Today many sites on the internet are black. Or blacked out. This is done to give you an idea of things to come if Americans don't take action.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

I've been working on ideas for posts and making some changes to the blog, but want to pop in to ask my readers to please watch this video about PIPA/SOPA proposed legislation that is before the US Congress.

This powerful and ill-conceived piece of legislation diverts the responsibility of digital rights management from the creators of copyrighted property (READ: The Entertainment Industry) to the owners and managers of websites (YouTube, Facebook, Blog sites, YouTube, etc). How does it work? If a single bad link is posted on a website, the owner becomes responsible and without due process the entire site can be shut down. Individuals may be liable for up to five years in prison.

How can all this be exploited?

Since due process is not involved, SOPA and PIPA legislation is tantamount to censorship.

Because of the stringent terms of this legislation, it will become difficult for new internet start-ups and the internet will become less safe.

And simple things, like videos of your child on YouTube, singing "Climb Every Mountain" or "I Believe I Can Fly" will be banned. Because, technically speaking, your child has not paid the royalties to sing that song. (And goodbye YouTube, by the way.)

This legislation takes what is a country that touts itself as a bastion of freedom and censors its internet. Shall we list a few other nations that do that? China, Iran, North Korea.

Should we join them?

Please watch the video above and take the time to contact your congresspersons:

http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

or go to Wikipedia or Google and take action.

Piracy is wrong. Censorship is also wrong.

The protection of copyrighted content is a just cause, but this my readers, is unjust legislation and an unjust price to pay.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2012

Palate Cleanser #161: Sami Style

2011-12-05T09:00:00.001-05:00

"Reindeer think with the nose, not the eyes. They go with the wind." ~ Nils Peder Gaup

Reindeer, Scandinavia

Photograph by Erika Larsen

This Month in Photo of the Day: Nature and Weather Photos

Sami herders follow the migrations of the reindeer as they move across northern Scandinavia and Russia from their winter grazing grounds to cooler areas during the summer months.

See more pictures from the November 2011 feature story, "Sami: The People Who Walk With Reindeer."

Watch a video of photographer Erika Larsen's experience among the Sami »

The video is lovely!

I find it interesting that in the Sami languages, where the work of reindeer walking is called boazovázzi, (my new favorite word- "Don't bother me right now, I'm boazovázzi.") the word for "herd" is eallu; the word for "life" is eallin.

Erika Larsen, you make me feel cool and relaxed with these photos and video. May the Quantum Field be kind to you and your work.

You can see and read more of Erika Larsen's extraordinary photodocumentary experience of living among, and keeping house for, the Sami for three years here.

visual palate cleanser concept © Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Nobody's Children, Nobody's Adults

2011-12-03T17:00:00.001-05:00

"This volcano blew up and made a rainbow but then it had to rain because whenever you have a rainbow, it rains. But sometimes, it just rains." ~ Serena K.

A long time ago, when I first became a Guardian ad Litem, in a bookstore in Sebastapol, CA, I picked up a book titled "Nobody's Children" by Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School. Bartholet is a pretty fearless figure in my mind. She has championed the cause of adoption, over kinship care or hasty reunification in very troubled families, and has very frankly examined some of the factors leading to the greater representation of African-American children in the dependency system. Her chosen phrase, "nobody's children," for the many children languishing in foster care or with some vague hope of reunification with their parents (and therefore not really our problem) or in the gulag of kinship care with the same kin that may have spawned their present dependency plight, has stuck with me for almost a decade. It truly captures the lives lived by far too many children in foster care and those who will age out, and become "nobody's adults". Nobody's child has... nobody. Just paid professionals and let me tell you, sometimes, you question what you're paying for. I remember as I read the book thinking it was an irony that "Nobody's Children," written in 1999, followed Hillary Rodham Clinton's aspiring ideals set forth in "It Takes a Village" (1996) by only three years. What if you don't have a village? What if you don't have anyone?

I'm sure you notice the edge to that tone in the last sentence, right? Yes, it is interesting how quickly one gets to the point of feeling frustrated with one's fellow humans when it comes to the issue of care for children and youth. Well, I say one, and really I mean me. It's interesting how quickly I get frustrated with the lack of interest so many people have, or their flat-out saying that they don't want to bother with stuff like "all that depressing stuff." Children in foster care? Children who age out of foster care and end up homeless? Disabled children (youths) who age out of foster care, and who have no one really looking after their interests? Why talk about stuff like that? It's such a drag. Don't be such a drag. Don't be so dark. (As an aside, at a holiday party I really didn't want to attend yesterday, I was surprised to meet a couple who really did care. It was... a breath of fresh air, actually.)

To be honest, lately, I feel angry a lot of the time. Angry and really judge-y. As Cynical Nymph would say, I feel like I ought to change my name to Judgey McJudgerson sometimes. That's me, right now. I'm a harsh and judgey critic of the way we treat children in our country who are poor (another aside: what kind of an a$$hole says we ought to relax child labor laws and make children work as janitors in their schools to reduce the number of poor children?) and those in foster care and who age out of foster care. I'm a harsh and judgey critic of people just turning a blind eye, saying it's somebody else's problem. I mean, it's one thing if you're really not at a point and place in your life where you could do anything to help, but don't ignore it. Don't pretend it isn't there and doesn't exist as a serious problem facing many children and youth. Don't tune out and say it's just too big and too bad and too sad for you. These are your effing fellow human beings we're talking about here. The children and young adults of your country, your future. They are still your moral responsibility, even if they make you feel bad and sad.

Yeah, I can officially say this week sucked. I'm recovering from the kidney infection/I-better-do-everything-in-my-power-not-to-build-a-stone. I still feel fatigued and to say I have a lot of stuff to do before December 19 would be like the understatement of 2011, which has so not been a cheery year. But anyway, my week? My week has been splendid compared to that of a few friends and that of one of my former GAL kids. She's former because on Friday afternoon I petitioned the Probate Court to become her emergency legal guardian.

"This girl had to break the glass to get away. Get away from what, sweetie? Bad things. She got away from bad things. But she had to break the glass to get away." ~ Serena K.

It's a really bad thing when an overburdened school, with obviously very overburdened staff, who are so fed up with someone who doesn't want to cooperate with their community-based outing schedule, gets so overburdened that they Baker Act the youth for "suicidal ideation." And that instead of successively calling the people on the youth's contact list, they called the first person and don't leave a message and then skip to number 6, the part-time group home staff person, on the contact list, and report they're in the process of Baker Acting the youth because she's been 'suicidal' for four hours. (*cough* yes, even at lunchtime while she ate she was suicidal)

In this particular instance, part of the really bad thing is not thinking about what it's like when you're an 18 year old girl who spent the first 14 years of her life being incestuously sexually abused by her biological father and two brothers, was then adopted and had the same thing occur all over again with her brother and adoptive father. Because after that, the big burly guys from EMS who come and strap you down to a gurney and take you to you-don't-know-where, where their ward turns out to be full after they start intake, have to sedate you because you're upset, and then call a new ambulance to take you to the new you-don't-know-where might be kinda retraumatizing to you.

But hang on... it gets better. Because then there was the fact that this young woman aged out of the foster care system. I had applied to become her permanent guardian but we are dependent (ha ha, right?) on the wholly overburdened Legal Aid Society in Miami-Dade County to process the Probate application for me to be her permanent legal guardian and therefore... wait for it... There is no one to sign anything for this young woman because she was examined and found incompetent, yet she is legally an adult so we need someone to sign for her but there is no one, oh dear.

To her admitting psychiatrist's credit, he was refusing to release her until he had seen her on her medication. That, as many of you know, and I know all too well, is really, really rare. But at the same time, they weren't giving her any medication, not even medication currently prescribed for her, because there was no one to sign anything and they "couldn't do that". I was informed that she was getting aggressive, and, I know this will stun you, really stressed out. It was Friday morning, when I showed up with (praise the Quantum Field for extended jurisdiction for aged-out dependent youth in Florida, which continues through age 19 if the youth accepts or the GAL recommends for youths who will be ruled incompetent upon age-out) my Guardian ad Litem appointment documentation and documentation showing that Serena (not her real name) was under the extended jurisdiction of the dependency court. That bought me the chance to talk to her doctor, and to see that really, I needed to be her guardian Now. Like RIGHT FRAKKING NOW. Because they wouldn't release her if they didn't think she was stable on meds and since they couldn't (or wouldn't, since she wasn't meeting criteria) give her meds, they didn't know if she was stable. Catch-22 much?

But if she isn't meeting criteria, why hasn't she been discharged, I asked innocently, in the voice with edge and teeth.

"Because she was Baker Acted."

But you just said she isn't meeting criteria. Usually, aren't patients not meeting criteria released?

"But she is aggressive and talked of self-harm. I can't release her like that. I need to see what she's like on meds. I need to be sure."

And I, therefore, need to be this youth's legal guardian, like, yesterday!

Enter Angels.

So there I was, totally and I do mean totally screwing up the day of two Dade Legal Aid Angels, who are in charge of all the freebie probate cases for all the aged out foster youth and the in-general poor adults who have no other legal recourse cases, in all of Miami-Dade County, population 2.5 Million people. They currently have 600+ cases they are working on by the attorney's estimate. Files out the wazoo. Saw 'em. Saw 'em EVERYWHERE in that office. Yet they stopped everything and helped me, because they are just like that. They are just that amazing.

After signing documents at 12:30 pm, I was Serena's Emergency Legal Guardian by 2:27 pm.

Yes, it was truly amazing, especially considering their case load and their working reality. I am sending them both flowers on Monday.

"This is a girl who is bleeding. What happened to her? She got hit. She got hurt. But she wants to fight. Are those fists? Yeah, that's how she fights back. What are those circles near her eyes? Those are her tears. She cried." ~ Serena K.

But, here's the thing. In the course of talking with this attorney, who was, all things considered, incredibly nice about the fact that I had totally screwed up her entire Friday, along with screwing up the entire Friday of her smashing legal secretary, she told me things. Horrifying things. Things that make me deeply question the entire system, top to bottom, everyone involved, from psychologists, to guardians ad litem, to who the frak says things like... the stuff in these reports they have to pore over!

So here's what the attorney told me. You should really be sitting down, especially if you're like a Comtesse or something. Because there will be outrage. Outrage aplenty.

On one case of an aged out foster youth who is intellectually and/or developmentally disabled, the youth will need a guardian because she is not competent as to her own care and needs. No one was stepping forward to meet this need. And so, an evaluating psychologist, a man (I can honestly say) against whom I hold an unbelievably deep and irrevocable grudge* said in writing that maybe the Court should consider the father of her child as an option for guardianship. Mind you, this was, the attorney told me, the man who got this young woman pregnant at age 13 when he was 30ish. That's right. This is what we are coming up with as guardianship solutions in this County? Psychologists who recommend that a now 18 year old be placed under the care of the man who got her pregnant at 13? The man who took advantage of a disabled 13 year old foster child? Yeah. Thank the Quantum Field that this attorney and the head of Dade Legal Aid said that was a big NO. So I guess she went to the overburdened and exquisitely indifferent Guardianship Program of Dade County for all her needs.

We traded stories, this attorney and I. Our horror stories. I told her about Marina's bilobar pneumonia and the doctor that hadn't even bothered to listen to her lungs when group home staff said they thought she was sick and how they pressed on and took her to the ER. She told me that it is a nightmare trying to find anyone to look after these young adults and older disabled adults. And I voiced what I have thought since I became Marina's permanent legal guardian. That I simply do not understand how someone like a guardian ad litem can visit these kids at least once a month, every month, for years, and be indifferent about what happens to them when they turn 18. I just can't do that. I am not built of that same stuff. Personally, now I'm 2/2 of the under-IQ-of-55 clients that I am now legal guardian of. (You'll remember Marina from prior blog posts.) I still think of and occasionally talk to or see Keyonce. I still talk to Snow White and take her to doctor's appointments. I mean... I can't get them out of my head, my heart... I realize that I'm fortunate to be in a good position both age-wise and economically speaking to be able to do the stuff that I do. But I am totally stunned by the indifference of so many people as to the plight of these young women and men that our state took into care, who have aged out, are cut lose, and now... and now?

Nobody's children are now nobody's adults...

"That's a girl with a baby inside. And what happened there? They cut her and took it away. That's blood where the baby was. They cut her."

~ Serena K.

Serena makes incredibly powerful drawings. They take my breath away. Her thinking in them is poignant, often disturbing, but sometimes tangential and even occasionally psychotic. She suffers from PTSD and a Mood Disorder. It is amazing she is still able to express herself so powerfully, after all that has happened to her in 18 short years. Her art is the most vital part of her. They wouldn't let me take stuff to draw with her in the hospital tonight. It made me feel bad. She is so desperate to go home to her group home. She wanted to draw and to listen to music. She was tired and pretty blue when her group homeowners and I left at the end of visiting hours.

She is right that sometimes it rains. It's raining hard the past few days. But yesterday, thanks to Dade Legal Aid, there was also a rainbow.

*This guy wrote an evaluation that resulted in two little girls, who absolutely haunt me, being left in the care of a maternal uncle who had so bullied them and his adult, unmarried sisters with his creepy evangelical ways that I still shudder to think of what their life is like. A former teacher, who later recanted her comments to me when subpoenaed to repeat them in open Court, had told me that the older child had started failing classes she'd liked best in school and was frequently clingy and crying. The girls had been removed from that school and had been placed in a public school setting. The younger child was diffident. The older child was wide-eyed and afraid and just held my hand. I will never forget her and the lingering suspicions I had of incest or its potential there. But this same psychologist said they were fine and happy. Yeah. And 18 year old intellectually disabled girls should be under the guardianship of their statutory rapists.

Economic Solutions in the Child Welfare Sector

2011-11-19T10:50:00.001-05:00

So today's blog post is short a multiple choice test. Some background information you will need to take this test:

Road to Independence Funding: RTI, in general, provides funds for young adults who have aged out of foster care and who meet requirements of "progress" academically. The funds are intended to help youths complete their education and/or training, providing them with a cushion to allow them to make a start in life as they earn their education and hopefully have food, shelter and clothing while doing so. Monthly stipend for qualified youths in Florida: $892.

Bus fare on Miami MetroBus: $2

Transfer on Miami MetroBus if you do not have an Easy card: $2 for every bus you ride when you pay cash.

Number of School Days in an Average Week: 5

Number of Buses to School: 10 if you travel without transfers

Number of Buses to School If You Are Really Unlucky: 20+ with transfers

Weekly Fare with Easy Card: $20 weekly

Weekly Fare if You Pay Cash: $20 without transfers and $40 or more with transfers.

Just for kicks:

Median Rent in Miami-Dade County (with Lease): $890, lower quartile: $676

The Baker Act: A Florida law that provides for a 72 hour hold for a person who you believe to be a risk to themselves or others, due to a mental health crisis.

Agency for Persons with Disabilities: APD, an organization undergoing severe budget cuts under Governor Rick Scott's inimitable (thank the quantum field) governing style.

Agency for Health Care Administration: The people who administer Medicaid in Florida.

Certified Behavioral Analyst: A person who helps develop behavioral strategies for children or adults who have significant behavioral issues due to their mental health status or developmental disabilities.

Total Annual Cost for Level 1 (supervision) and Level 3 (biweekly documentation of plan and implementation reviews) CBA services for a 13 year old child: $4300

Locked Mental Health Unit Crisis Hospitalization, 10 days: estimated cost on state Medicaid dollars, perhaps $2500- $5000 daily? Estimates vary based on the facility surveyed. (please note that it is evidently impossible in most facilities for any patient hospitalized on a 72 hour hold toward the end of a week to be discharged on a Saturday or Sunday. Of course, they get out on Monday!)

And now for our quiz! Excitement!!!

Question #1:

If you wanted to cut costs in your Independent Living Program for your aged out foster care youth, you would:

A. Stop providing bus cards for your aged out youth in good standing in your RTI program.

B. Make youths in good RTI program standing apply for bus cards, and have their applications approved or denied, thereby creating a situation where it is a burden for youths at far ends of your very large county to come in and apply, go home, wait for a decision and then if they are lucky, come back and get their bus card. (Oh, by the way, that would be using the public transportation that they likely don't have a bus card for... Hmmmm.) Hey, maybe they won't bother to apply. That's $$$ saved!

C. A and B.

D. Realize that if students can't afford to get to their classes on public transportation that they may then fail in school and that you can therefore drop them from your RTI program! Yay! You saved money!

E. All of the above.

Question #2:

If you wanted to save money on APD service provision for Behavioral Focus Clients/Consumers, you would lower them off the expensive Behavioral tier of service and:

A. Eliminate their behavior therapy services because they really didn't need them anyway because, hey, they're not on that service tier.

B. Make the staff in the consumer's group home responsible for their own behavioral strategies in working with this client. (Hope they don't get too frustrated or anything...)

C. Provide fewer dollars for the group home owner to compensate their staff for handling behaviorally challenging consumers in their group home. (Hey, those 15% cuts to group homeowners were necessary!)

D. Decide that spending $4300 a year on behavior services is not worthy preventive care. Preventing $50,000+ in 4.5 months on 10 days of crisis hospitalization for 13 year old with lifelong, deeply entrenched behavioral problems, and who has now been Baker Acted twice in the 4.5 months since you eliminated her behavioral therapeutic service is way stupid and not your problem. Besides, AHCA is picking up her hospital stays and that's not money coming directly out of your APD coffers! Yay! You saved money!

E. All of the above.

I'll leave it to you to figure out the right answers. M'kay?

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Vile and Despicable

2011-11-08T15:31:00.000-05:00

In the wake of the scandalous child sexual abuse cover-ups by the Vatican, I suppose that we should be surprised by nothing that adults want to sexually perpetrate on children, nor the extent to which people in power are willing to cover up and/or ignore it anymore. Still, it's hard to absorb the fact that accused pedophile rapist Jerry Sandusky was evidently sexually abusing minors, extremely vulnerable at-risk minors, and coaching staff and administration at Penn State did nothing about it.

Accused Pedophile Jerry Sandusky

(photo credit: Associated Press)

Sandusky, who retired as an assistant coach at Penn State in 1999, founded a group called Second Mile in 1977. It was a perfect grooming opportunity for his victims. Second Mile serves disadvantaged and at-risk youth. You know, kids unlikely to complain, or to be taken seriously when they complain, about being molested or raped. Virtually every reference to Sandusky, other than the statement now on the organization's website home page, has been stripped from Second Mile's website. They had removed him from their activities in late 2008. I cannot imagine how utterly horrifying it must be to the staff of the organization to think that Sandusky used them, and the children they sought to help, as a means of grooming new children to molest and rape. Only, wait a minute there, it seems that some did know that there was something not quite right about Sandusky. Namely, CEO Jack Raykovitz who you would think should know that Jerry Sandusky shouldn't be showering in the nude with a child.

In spite of my immense cynicism and extensive writing on the Catholic sex abuse scandals, the Centre County Grand Jury's findings that led to indictment of Jerry Sandusky (40 counts of child sexual abuse), Penn State athletic director Tim Curley, and former Penn State Vice President of Finance Gary Shultz are absolutely astonishing to me. Their 23 page report alleges at least nine victims of clear child molestation and/or rape. (The ninth victim was unable to testify to the Grand Jury as he is stationed overseas with the military.) And it is almost as damning a report, with respect to Penn State, as it is to Sandusky.

Recounting the timeline, thanks to CNN, is simply nauseating.

1977 -- Sandusky founds "The Second Mile."

1994-1997 -- According to the grand jury report, Sandusky allegedly engages in inappropriate conduct with three different boys he met separately through the Second Mile program. One boy was 7 or 8, another was 10 and the third was 12 or 13 at the time. According to the grand jury report, the now-grown men said Sandusky engaged in inappropriate conduct ranging from touching to outright sexual encounters, including several incidents during the night before Penn State football home games, when the team, staff and boys Sandusky had allegedly invited were staying at a hotel.

1998 -- Penn State police and the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare investigate an incident in which the mother of an 11-year-old boy reported that Sandusky had showered with her son and may have had inappropriate conduct with him. In a June 1, 1998, interview with investigators from both agencies, Sandusky admits showering naked with the boy, admitting that it was wrong and promising not to do it again, according to the grand jury report. The district attorney advises investigators that no charges will be filed and the university police chief instructs that the case be closed, according to the testimony included in the grand jury report of the police detective who investigated the incident.

1999 -- Sandusky retires from Penn State after coaching their for 32 years, but stays on as a volunteer and retains full access to the campus and football facilities.

2000 -- Sandusky allegedly showers with a young boy and tries to touch his genitals during overnight stays at the coach's house, according to the now 24-year-old man's testimony included in the grand jury report.

2000 -- Tim Calhoun, a janitor at the Lasch Football Building on the Penn State campus, tells his supervisor and another janitor that he saw Sandusky performing oral sex on a young boy, according to the grand jury report. A second janitor reported that he saw Sandusky and a boy leave a shower room and walk out of the building hand in hand. No one reports the incident to university officials or law enforcement, according to the grand jury report.

March 2, 2002 -- According to the grand jury report, a graduate assistant allegedly tells Coach Joe Paterno that he saw Sandusky in the locker room shower the night before, performing anal sex on a young boy he estimated to be 10 years old.

March 3, 2002 -- Paterno reports the incident to Athletic Director Tim Curley, saying the graduate assistant had seen Sandusky "fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy," according to the grand jury. Later, the assistant is summoned to a meeting with Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz..

While the assistant insists to the grand jury that he told Curley and Schultz that he saw Sandusky and the boy engaged in anal sex, Curley and Schultz told the grand jury they had not been told of such an allegation. Instead, Curley said he had the impression the conduct amounted to non-sexual "horsing around." Schultz said he couldn't remember details, but seemed to recall that "Sandusky might have inappropriately grabbed the young boy's genitals while wrestling," according to the grand jury. Sandusky's locker room keys are confiscated, he is told not to bring his Second Mile participants to campus and the incident is reported to the charity, but no law enforcement investigation is launched, according to the grand jury.

2002 -- The Second Mile learns of the shower incident. Curley tells them that "the information had been internally reviewed and that there was no finding of wrongdoing," the group said in a statement Monday.

2005 or 2006 -- Sandusky allegedly befriends another Second-Mile participant whose allegations would form the foundation of the multi-year grand jury investigation.

2006 or 2007 -- A wrestling coach at the high school where Sandusky was volunteering allegedly surprises Sandusky and the boy "lying on their sides, in physical contact, face to face on a mat" in a cramped weight room. Sandusky jumps to his feet and told the coach the two were just working on wrestling moves, the coach later recalls in grand jury testimony. As time goes on, Sandusky allegedly begins to spend more time with the boy, taking him to sporting events and giving him gifts, including golf clubs, a computer, cash and clothes. During this period, according to the grand jury report, Sandusky allegedly performs oral sex on the boy more than 20 times, and the boy performs oral sex on him once.

2008 -- The boy breaks off contact with Sandusky. Later, his mother calls the high school to report her son had been sexually assaulted and the principal bars Sandusky from campus and reports the incident to police. In grand jury testimony, the principal, Steven Turchetta, recalls Sandusky's behavior as suspicious, and said Sandusky was often "clingy" and "needy" when a student no longer wanted to spend time with him. The ensuing investigation reveals 118 calls from Sandusky's home and cell phone numbers to the boy's home.

November 2008 -- Sandusky informs The Second Mile that he is under investigation, and he is removed from all program activities involving children, according to the group.

September 2010 -- Sandusky retires from The Second Mile, according to the grand jury.

Friday -- The grand jury report is released.

Saturday -- Authorities arrest Sandusky on seven counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and numerous other charges, including aggravated indecent assault, corruption of minors and endangering the welfare of a child. He is freed on $100,000 unsecured bail. Curley, 57, and Schultz, 62, are each charged with one count of felony perjury and one count of failure to report abuse allegations.

Sunday -- Curley asks for and is granted administrative leave to deal with the charges, while Schultz steps down from his post to retire.

How many children has Sandusky violated, one wonders? And how, HOW, could the Penn State individuals who knew of this live with knowing what this monster was doing, and live with their choice not to call the police? Only high school principal Steven Turchetta appears to have acted on Sandusky's suspect behavior, which he termed, even without any further evidence than close physical contact, unacceptable and decided that Sandusky be kept away from his school's children. Only Turchetta called the police! Even the graduate assistant (reportedly Mike McQueary, whose statements, according to the indictment, page 8, were considered to be "extremely credible" by the Grand Jury) who reported his horrifying observation of Sandusky subjecting a child he estimated to be only ten years old to anal sex in a Penn State locker room shower, did not call the police. Instead, he called head coach Joe Paterno, who felt his duty was done when he told athletic director Curley. While I can better understand a graduate assistant's fear of being a whistleblower (more courage evidently, would have been required to ask why Sandusky wasn't then arrested, why he himself was never interviewed by police, even campus police about an incident that was so clearly illegal), I cannot comprehend Paterno's lack of action nor the State's Attorney's lack of charging him with failure to report sexual abuse allegations involving a minor, at a minimum. Joe Paterno had much on his side in coming forward with this illegal behavior. He had a powerful reputation, which is now, justifiably, forever tainted with his cowardice.

As the New Jersey Star-Ledger's Editorial Board puts it:

"He knew this much: Sandusky, little boy, shower, vacant locker room. What more detail did he need to alert authorities that something might be wrong?"

and,

"Paterno insists, “I did what I was supposed to do,” by handing off to Curley, but Paterno did only the minimum the law required. Telling Curley doesn’t absolve Paterno from a moral obligation. He should’ve taken action himself. Failing to do that allowed Sandusky to victimize boys for another seven years."

Calls for Paterno, who has still not been charged, to step down are coming from all quarters, as well they should. As it is, Paterno's own written response is so wholly off-mark that one wonders if he sees anything at all wrong with child abuse.

And Curley and Schultz? Let's be frank about what Penn State's agenda was here and call a spade a spade. This was a business decision for them. They chose their bottom line with donors, who might balk at the idea that the football program had held a sexual predator among its ranks, over the welfare, health and psyches of children of their community.

What was Penn State's basic reaction to the revelation that Jerry Sandusky was raping children in the locker room showers on the Penn State Campus?

Paterno, Schulz and Curley only told Jerry Sandusky that he could no longer rape little boys on Penn State's campus.

And for that, they should ever be remembered as the men who enabled Sandusky's pedophilia.

These men, while not as vile as Jerry Sandusky, are despicable cravens.

Penn State's Shame:

Joe Paterno, Tim Curley, and Gary Schultz

(Photo credits: Little for the AP, Sports Illustrated, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Oh, and talk about irony, six weeks ago, Penn State dedicated it's new Child Care Center in the name of retired Penn State Vice President Gary Schultz. Because, you know, Gary's all about caring for kids.

Photo credit: Mark Viera via DeadSpin.com

Comtesse Palate Cleanser

2011-11-07T08:52:00.000-05:00

this one comes with hugs...

Wow, These Protestors....

2011-11-04T15:19:00.000-04:00

I really wish these OWS people would get it together and have a clearer message. They're just a bunch of... Oh... Wait a minute...

ACCOUNTABILITY?

Mais Non!!!! Anything but that! Now they're not even just talking about corporations... political accountability? No!

As for corporate greed knowing no bounds, hey, they aren't fooling people. At least not in my family.

Two Weeks Ago in a Publix parking lot- A conversation with my 15 year old about his sister's BOA account and why she is upset with their planned (now backpedaled) policy of charging for use of a BOA debit card:

Me: "No, it's not like a credit card because you're not using their money until you pay your bill off. It's funded with the money in your BOA checking account."

15YO: "Whoa... wait a minute... isn't that kind of like they are charging you to use your own money?"

Me: "I have such a bright child. BOA should talk to you, kiddo."

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

One of those days....

2011-11-03T17:42:00.000-04:00

No, don't read this. Have an otter instead.

It's been one of those days. Actually, one of those weeks (so far). Today alone I canceled my nephrology appointment to take my child to his doctor (leaving in 10 minutes), screwed up plans with eldest son (depressed, stressed, I have not seen him in three weeks) by accident and felt like a jerk, then one of my GAL kids was Baker Acted at school while I was talking to teacher and counselor and listening to screaming, sobbing, smashing child in background, and then I took Snow White some money and a bracelet for her birthday only to find her the most depressed I've ever seen her. EVER. Like postpartum was warm and fuzzies! Now I'm plotting how to get my son's psychiatrist, who used to be her psychiatrist long ago when she was in a group home, to see her private pay (my dime) for antidepressant treatment, but I have no idea where she's gonna get that cognitive therapy component on Medicaid. My youngest is going to tutor her in Algebra 2 (yay!) but will she be able to get to Planned Parenthood on public transportation in Homestead (boo! I better take her, right? Don't know about you but when I've been seriously depressed, it is exhausting even thinking about doing things...) All these many things filled my head as I drove home, or should I say as my student driver drove me home (thrills, chills!) from his school.

But then I got home and this is what a colleague had sent me (no, no, don't feel bad you did, okay?):

It was the perfect capstone to my day, my week, our reality in this country for the ill, the disadvantaged, the disabled, the former foster care, the 99%, Scott Olsen, the people living in all those Florida ALFs.

Here, have another cute picture. In this world, we need some happy. DESPERATELY.

DO I REALLY SEE A JUDGE BEATING HIS DISABLED CHILD WITH A BELT? REALLY?

“In my mind I have not done anything wrong other than discipline my child when she was caught stealing. I did lose my temper, I’ve apologized… it looks worse than it is.”

In my mind, I hope there is no statute of limitations on ASSAULT.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Natural Born Idiocy

2011-10-20T18:30:00.000-04:00

President Barack Obama and US Senator (FL) Marco Rubio

(Photo credit: Associate Press)

I live in a municipality in a Miami area for which Marco Rubio used to be my district Representative to the Florida House. He once spoke about his 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida's Future (few of which have come to pass, that's for sure) at one of our Miami Child Advocacy Network meetings, back in the day. I wrote to him on several occasions and before he was Speaker of the House, he sometimes wrote back either handwritten notes or clearly self-written e-mails. In person, he's a really pleasant guy, although clearly pretty conservative. Yeah, I have to say that in recent times, he's not exactly been my cup of tea. *coughgagomqfmarziethatwasbad* Yet, this morning I awoke to such a wad of crap in my Miami Herald that I was shaking my head. Poor Marco. He is just as unnatural as my ineffectual friend Barack is!

It turns out that Marco Rubio, hailed as the poster boy/wunderkind/future presidential candidate of the GOP, is not a natural born American Citizen. Now I know, since he was born in Miami in 1971, that this will shock many of my readers, even the Republican ones, who think the Tea Party is the party of the righteous. But just like Barack, Marco's US birth certificate has grave, grave defects. You see Marco's parents didn't become US Citizens until 1975. They actually came to the US from Cuba in the 1950's but tried and tried to deal with Fidel's Cuba and gave up, moving here permanently in 1961. They applied for and were finally granted US Citizenship in 1975. Four years too late!!!! (Why Marco's situation at birth is even worse than Barack's whose mother was at least a US citizen [praisethequantumfield], but whose father [darklooksabound] was Kenyan.)

Nope, Marco's out of the running say the Birthers. That's because Marco Rubio is not a natural born citizen of the United States of America and therefore, under Article 2 of the United States Constitution, Marco is not eligible to run for president, anymore than Barack Obama was.

The basis for this determination? In part a phrase from The Law of Nations by the Swiss diplomat and philosopher Emmerich de Vattel (yep, he's a haole, a gaijin, a ferengi... what are they thinking letting him determine US policy about such an important thing, I wonder?) which reads: "The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country of parents who are citizens." And hey, there is a load of historical cred for this view, since de Vattel lived from 1714 to 1767 (in Neuchatel, Switzerland) and so the Founding Fathers clearly had factored in his assessment when they wrote that whole Article 2 thingy back in 1787. Clause 5, the part that is in question, reads:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

I think it's really great that the Birthers are so keen on this idea of natural born citizenry. And that they think they have divined that our Founding Fathers meant that a president wouldn't be American enough unless his or her parents had been American citizens, too. Second generation is the bomb! I'm sure they're onto something there. But, I'm now totally bummed about one of our Founding Fathers. Because just like Barack Obama, he was fraudulently elected! Thomas Jefferson's (in office 1801-1809) mother Jane Randolph wasn't a Native American and she wasn't really American American because she was born in London and like, she was dead by the time America was America. I'm kind of surprised that the other Founding Fathers let this black mark on TJ's heritage slide and still let him be president for a few years. But you know, I guess it was a one-time pass deal and, I mean, he looked American and was so well-spoken and intelligent and educated and all.

Anyway, it's clear, thank goodness, that the standards have improved since then because we can't have any more of that. Except... Hmmm. That Barack guy... Man, he's a bad one. Even has that horrid middle name.

Yeah, there's still a lot of arguing about what the Founding Fathers meant with this whole business of natural born citizen. Frankly, I'm thinking the Birthers haven't taken it far enough. There are entire worlds of natural born standards to explore!

First off, I think we need to look at what we should do if someone was adopted by natural born US citizen parents. This could be tricky, especially if the person was adopted as an infant, you know like from Russia or China or something. They might look like they are American when they're really not, you know? And now they have a birth certificate that says the person is American, but we all really know that geography is thicker than upbringing, culture and documents from the US State Department or any circuit court. Definitely, you're out if you're a foreigner who is adopted. And because of this deep dark concern, I advocate for unsealing all records of any adopted candidates, just to be, you know, on the safe side.

But secondly, I've been giving this whole natural thing a lot of thought. Frankly, I think we should go a few steps further. Now, since I'm a woman and since, you know, women are always obsessed with home and family and children and babies and such, when I think natural, I think natural childbirth. So just to be sure, really sure, that we are dealing with natural born citizens, I propose that a person can only be elected President of the United States of American if they were born by natural childbirth. No caesarian sections, no in vitro fertilizations, no artificial inseminations, no inductions of labor, no pain meds. All of those are un-natural. I am sure that the Founding Fathers would disapprove of their unnatural birth. Gosh knows all that stuff wasn't even really available in 1787 when they came up with the whole Article 2 business. I'm sure they would be appalled to find out that it was possible to be an un-naturally natural born citizen. Yep, taking the strict constructionist view, I think we can say that we had better start perusing those hospital birth records of our candidates. There are going to be a lot of very disappointed people. Sigh. But you know, this stuff is really important. We need to avoid, at all costs, what Alan Keyes describes as: “Now you’ve got Republicans talking about Marco Rubio for president when it’s obviously clear that he does not qualify. Regardless of party label, they don’t care about Constitution. It’s all just empty, lying lip service.”

Step right up... get your share of natural born idiocy...

99% Palate Cleanser

2011-10-20T16:51:00.000-04:00

Les Comtesses Marzie, GlamKitty and Cynical Nymph were in Bryant Park during the early part of the OWS march to Times Square late in the afternoon on Saturday, October 15. Police, with their ample supply of plastic handcuffs, were everywhere. The theater district was eerily devoid of vehicles that evening. The protestors, at least when we saw them, were a well mannered bunch, not obstructing traffic and moving smoothly toward Times Square. They seemed mostly, *gasp*, to want to exercise their First Amendment rights. There's been so much talk about how everyone has a different reason to be marching, protesting, and that there is no unified message with "these people". Funny thing, it really looked and sounded like they were on point, chanting and bearing signs talking about social injustice, corruption and economic struggles. But I dunno... just my 2₵.

Some of what was seen and heard...

"Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out!"

Let Them Eat Cake? Mais Non.

2011-10-12T21:19:00.000-04:00

It's Tumblr Wars! (Formal Bad Language Warning, music possibly NSFW)

Here's your theme music:

Everlast, What It's Like, from Whitey Ford Sings the Blues

Perspective:

I'm trying to envision the scenario in which I, a rather high tax-paying American, living in my very nice home, with my excellent health insurance coverage, my pets living better than many people do around the world, even in the USA, my daughter in an out of state graduate school on my dime and my child in his swanky prep school, turn my back on the 99%ers and say "Shut Up and Stop Complaining" and, by the way, here's some pepper spray and an arrest for [whatever charge], that will make it even harder for you to get your next job, yes, I promise you. You'll probably never work again you pedestrian, lazy-ass squeaky wheel, you.

I'm not there.

Viewpoint 1: 53% View

Hell yeah, 53%ers, you have been so wronged, and you are so very right. America is mired in lazy slackers. All those 99%ers are wimpy babies who don't want to work, who are too picky and don't want to look at their own flaws that got them into their present situation, which really, in the scheme of things, isn't all that bad. Hey, it's better than Bangladesh or Somalia, so we're good! Right? Who the hell cares if you're a child, a veteran, a retiree, a disabled person? That liberal asshole Hubert Humphrey was all wrong about a society being judged on the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens. That is so fucking melodramatic and so typical of socialists (disguised as liberals) who don't give a damn about what's really important.

No, you shouldn't feel even an ounce of remorse about treading on uninsured infants, on old people whose social security and medicare doesn't cover their needs and stepping over unwillingly homeless people (who are out of work and foreclosed out of their houses by their own misdeeds), if necessary, in order for your chance to make it to the top of the almighty 1% heap. Those 99%ers are a pack of whining babies and deserve to be billed for the cost of the pepper spray and plastic handcuffs used on them at demonstrations, and for their stays in what ought to be privately run jails (because the State shouldn't be responsible for those either!) HOW DARE THEY? Neither a war initiated on the basis of lies, excuse me, misinformation, nor Wall Street and its corrupt policies have anything to do with our present financial circumstances. Senator Bernie Sanders is a mad man. There's no price fixing, only good business, which we need to make better business, by having fewer rules and fewer people get in the way of business. Less government will assure this. Fewer handouts to the little people. Stratification of society is a good thing. It gives people something to strive for!!! (Dickens was so wrong there. He was another long-winded whiner from, like, centuries ago.) It's like economic natural selection and all those godless liberals should just shut up and enjoy the fact that we've got a living example of some kind of natural selection! May the best capitalist win!!! And listen, our Founding Fathers clearly thought we shouldn't be taxed at all, remember? Oh. Wait a minute there.... there was that one thing about representation, wasn't there? Oh, and personal income tax wasn't even visited upon Americans until 1861 when that damned liberal president, slavery-loathing Abraham... What? Republican? Oh, wait a minute. Hmmm. That was old style Republicanism. Like Reagan or something, right? He's like our St. Christopher- the Patron Saint of Economic Reform, except... Hmmm.

Well, back to my point:

Those 99%ers are a pack of whining babies. Just stay focused on that. Here, look at some pictures that you don't really grasp from the first viewing. Let me set you straight:

This guy is a mess. What is his fucking problem? Why does he think he is punished? He just isn't as deserving as others. He needs to suck it up and work harder and maybe take out more loans and get a PhD or something. Moar debt! Just borrow more money! The interest he'll owe helps our country stay afloat!!!

Get this guy out of here! He is so messed up. Dude, you're a success story! Stop the altruistic crap already!

Without Fear of Violence? WTF? Here's another one of those bloody liberals that thinks they understood the right to dissent and that stoopid freedom of speech thingy in the Bill of Rights. A better life for all? LOSER!!!!!

So Grandma thought they were working for something? Like the American Dream? That's for special people, hon. Not you! Gosh! Get with it already! And I hope you are paying your taxes, including the property tax on that house you shouldn't have thought you could buy.

Cry me a river... What, you wanted to live in Scandinavia or something? You should get married and stop trying to make it on your own, sweetheart! Geeezus! Find a man with a good job and use his insurance!!!! You wanted to be an unhealthy, independent and educated woman in America? Really? How dare you! And WTF? Listen, without the 99%, the 1% wouldn't be so dragged down! There would be no one standing in the way of their massive corporate prowess! They would sell their goods and services to the Third World and dominate the entire frakking Milky Way galaxy!

OMG! What is WRONG with you people? Safety net schmafety net!!!!

Viewpoint 2: De Facto 47%ers, or maybe 99%ers with identity crises.

In all honesty, I am really puzzled by some of the 53%ers tumblr pages. (They have 10 pages, versus the 84 pages of the 99%ers, btw) But I am sure they are the majority of Americans (53%, after all), and especially they are Americans who pay taxes and are living perfectly wonderful lives. They are treated justly, and they instinctively realize the social equity of their situation.

This young lady is a poster girl for the American Dream. Her father moved here from Croatia. He is a thyroid cancer patient, and is working 72 hours a week in a manual labor job. She's not complaining. Croatia and the war in the former Yugoslavia clearly taught that worse could be had and what to be grateful for here, in her cushy American life provided for her by her cancer-ridden, hard-working father. (She's not being shot at, raped, mutilated or killed, or having to watch that happen to anyone she knows or cares about.) Life is good! To quote her: "That is the American Dream", circa 2011. (That liberal use of WE on her part is so irksome I don't know how to deal with it.... How many hours have you been working to help your dad?)

This gentleman is awesome. He is evidently in the 1%! (But also the 53%?) He is happy continuing to pay (NOT LESS THAN) 50% of his income to taxes while corporations like Exxon pay NO taxes and people like Warren Buffet, who would pay more taxes if asked, pay less or what this gentleman pays. Yep. Makes sense to me. Glad it does to him. What a trooper!!! :)

The firm opinion of one not yet in the job market is truly wonderful! While no one owes her anything, her government loaned her money. What if the value of her degree turns out to be more than her worth (salary) on a only bachelor's degree? Not that there's much of that going around...

Wake up people. Wake up.

We now return to our evenings of exciting cable TV, reality TV, football, the NBA strike, Call of Duty, Halo 3, or whatever it is that we use, ostrich-like, to avoid looking at what's going on around here.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Palate Cleanser #159: Dizzy Edition

2011-10-12T14:52:00.000-04:00

Yeah. This. It's all a blur lately...

OCTOBER 10, 2011

Ferris Wheel, Kansas

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

This Month in Photo of the Day: Photos From New National Geographic Books

The Ferris wheel at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson mimics a giant Lite-Brite toy. Long lines can form at popular midway rides, but in this long exposure all the stress melts away.

(From the upcoming National Geographic book Visions of Earth)

visual palate cleanser concept © Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Multiculturalism is Expensive

2011-09-30T12:41:00.000-04:00

Color me... disappointed.

Flesh Crayons by Nathan Gibbs

"The Flesh Crayola crayon became Peach in 1962. I bought these on ebay. The life of this crayon inspired the video Crayola Monologues."

So Les Comtesses were discussing a number of different hideous aspects of the assumptions people make about race, skin tone and we somehow arrived at the dreaded "Flesh" color Crayola Crayon issue. Since I work with a lot of children of children of color, at least one of whom has complained that she is "not pink" and that her foster siblings "aren't pink" and "why don't they make crayons for them", I decided to check out Crayola's Multicultural Skin Tones Crayons. On Amazon, the Amazon Prime box of 8 crayons is $7.35. Yes, that's right, $7.35 for free Amazon shipping. (For comparison a box of 64 crayons with the same Prime shipping is $5.99 and the Prime 8-count regular color set that is comparable to that shown below is only $4.35) The cheapest box of the 8 Crayola multicultural colors that I could find was $2.09 but would take several days extra "processing" time, but that's still a third of the cost of a box of 64 crayons and I'm still stunned. Of course, there's the Prang brand set, a seeming bargain at only $0.70 until I count in the $4.58 in shipping costs. (Hey one listing for the Crayola's has the price of the pack at $3.19 and $5.49 in shipping) One of the Comtesses found Sargent brand, but in the US I could only find them for $1.99 with $7+ shipping on GoogleShopping. All in all, I have to say that multiculturalism is rather pricey, mais non?

Be sure to check out Nathan's Crayola Monologues about how (and why) crayon colors have changed over the past 50-60 years.

Edited to clarify, since one person has already complained about lack of clarity. This is the Crayola regular color set of which I am speaking:

Thinking About Poverty, Part 3

2011-09-23T11:55:00.000-04:00

This is Part 3 in a two part series on Poverty. You can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 there. This part? It's the Outrage Part.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

~ T. S. Eliot in Burnt Norton, from The Four Quartets

On September 13, 2011 Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders gave a speech in the US Senate about Poverty. I encourage all my readers to please take the 8 minutes of time to listen to his speech.

A response salvo was fired off to the National Review on September 21st by that hail fellow, well met Senator from Kentucky, (I can feel Comtesse Glam cringing...) Rand Paul. ~~It took a full week to reply to Senator Sanders because Senator Paul was pouring over facts and statistics trying to controvert Senator Sanders's statements.~~ In contrast to Senator Sanders quoting those boring old statistics and facts and saying where he got them from, Senator Paul has given us broad statements of what I like to call, in Colbertian fashion, "truthy facts". Poverty, Mr. Paul assures us, is not a death sentence, and isn't really all that bad even! :)

"While we all hope to lessen the sting of poverty, we need to put poverty in America into context... Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has profiled the typical poor household in America. The average poor household has a car, air conditioning, two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and an Xbox. Its home is in good repair and bigger than the average (non-poor) European home. They report that in the past year they were not hungry, were able to obtain medical care as necessary, and could afford all essential needs."

I find it very strange that the US Senator from Kentucky is relying on the Heritage Foundation for specifics rather than sourcing his own facts and statistics from his facts and statistics obsessed government, but giving him the benefit of the doubt, I went to Heritage Foundation's Poverty and Inequality page and looked for information about where they got their figures. Emblazoned on the page is:

"Poor persons in the United States have far higher living standards than the public imagines. Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

The major causes of child poverty in the United States in any year will be the absence of married fathers in the home and low levels of parental work."

Okay, I'm not even going to touch the fact that the low levels of parental work are responsible for poverty (did they just say these kids' parents are lazy?) But you know, I could not find a source for this information. But I did find an article by Rector, claiming his stats are from a government survey (implying they were from the Census) in 2005, which was NOT a US Census year and which, oh, let me remember, was yes, before the economy really began to tank. There was no further information about where to get these facts and verify the information on their statistical accuracy. Hmmmm.

Well, Senator Paul and Mr. Rector, luckily for you I am the very soul of data on the issue of poverty at present. Especially child poverty, but in the course of looking for data on poverty faced by children, I have come across more than a few sources of information on the population as a whole. I'm sorry to say that unfortunately, some of them are promoted, funded or tallied by our US Government. I know that source may not be good enough for you.

But first let's start with some child statistics culled from that highly suspect organization the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Here are some screen captures from their site, Kids Count, which used data from the 2010 United States Census and various other clearly named sources:

Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (March supplement).1990-2006 data: The Urban Studies Institute at the University of Louisville, analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (March supplement). 2007-2011 data: Population Reference Bureau, analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (March supplement).

Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (March supplement).Population Reference Bureau, analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (March supplement).

Mortgage Bankers Association, National Delinquency Survey, 2007 to 2009; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2007 to 2009

Population Reference Bureau analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) Basic Monthly data 2007 - 2010

Why, all those kids aren't really under duress! Oh, no! And they have excellent healthcare, happy families and X-Boxes. Well, maybe they have no place to plug the X-Box in, if Mommy and Daddy's house was foreclosed on. But other than that, they are all fine! (Isn't it ironic that that children without healthcare stat is in part thanks to an Urban Studies Institute at the University of Louisville study? No, really?!)

I'm sure you remember the food insecurity issue for children from Parts 1 & 2 of my blog article on poverty but just in case you didn't, let's recap. 22% of all children in the US live in poverty, 42% live in low income households, the USDA provides 31 million free school lunches to children who qualify and there's the sliver that falls through the gap- children whose households make between 185% and 199% of the Federal Poverty Level Income but are still considered low income. And the total number of children in food insecure homes in the most recent year tracked (2009) was 23.2 according to the US Government's Child Stats site.

Hmmmm. I wonder who else might be food insecure, besides all those chickadees? Well, SAMHSA.gov provides some broad information on their homelessness portal, that applies not just to the homeless. For instance, there is the Food Hardship in America report for 2010, prepared by the Food Research Action Center. This report, listed by a US government agency blatantly states:

"The national data show that the struggle of tens of millions of American households to afford adequate food did not, by and large, get easier in 2010. While the nation’s Great Recession technically ended in mid-2009 (measured by growth in the Gross Domestic Product), it has not yet ended for most of the nation’s households. For them, 2010 was the third year of a recession that continues to have severe adverse impact on their well-being."

Or how about this SAMHSA.gov featured report, Food Insecurity Among Older Adults, prepared by the AARP. (Those damn lazy elderly/retirees! They are just dragging us down!) Some of their findings, and by the way, AARP offers up plenty of information about how their methods, how data was collected and what statistics were used to calculate their findings:

Our key findings on the trends and distribution of food insecurity are:
Across all categories and older adult age groups, food insecurity increased substantially after 2007. The increases were most pronounced among 40-49 year olds, followed by 50-59 year olds, and then those 60 and older. Food insecurity for 40-49 year olds increased to an astounding 68 percent between 2007-2009 compared to 38 percent for 50-59 year olds, and 25 percent among those over 60. Rates of very low food security rates among adults in their 50s had comparable increases to those in their 40s (69 percent versus 71 percent).

The increasing trend in food insecurity implies that by 2009, among adults age 50 and older, 15.6 million persons faced the threat of hunger (i.e. were marginally food insecure), 8.8 million faced the risk of hunger (i.e. were food insecure), and 3.5 million faced hunger (i.e. were low food secure). This is an increase of 66%, 79%, and 132%, respectively, from the levels of food insecurity in 2001 among this population.

The levels of food insecurity among the poor and near poor are two to three times higher in any given year than for the general population of those over age 50. However, there is not nearly as dramatic an increase in food insecurity after 2007 among the poor and near poor in comparison to those higher in the income distribution. Thus, the recessionary increase in adult food insecurity was most pronounced among those with higher incomes.

Yes, indeed, I just do not know where Senator Sanders got this idea that things were bad in this country. Things are just fine here, Senator Paul. Everyone is just fine.

Oh, and Senator Paul also makes the claim:

"Over 30 percent of those living below the poverty smoke, compared with 19 percent of the rest of the population. Obesity rates are significantly higher among the poor than the general population..."

It seems as if the Senator has never reflected on the fact that the nicotine in cigarette smoke is well known for its appetite suppressant effects and that obesity rates are higher among the American poor because their diet is skewed toward cheap, high fat and high sugar foods that they can afford to eat, when they can eat. Food insecurity is directly tied to obesity (btw, that latter link was to the most current article I found on the topic on that cheesy and unreliable National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine PubMed search engine) and it is also clearly tied to diabetes, as detailed in a recent report title "The Inextricable Connection Between Food Insecurity and Diabetes" by the California Pan-Ethic Health Network, which receives the bulk of its funding from the highly questionable California Department of Public Health.

Oh, and one final comment, about the Poverty and Inequity page over at Heritage Foundation. They have a couple of links there that are interesting, namely:

Maybe it's just me but the idea that the number of Americans who pay taxes continues to shrink might possibly have something to do with the fact that so many Americans are living in frigging poverty! It seems to me some of those poor people might need to depend on government assistance. But shucks, that's just my take.

Anyway, I'm done here. For now.

Zahra's Paradise

2011-09-23T09:19:00.000-04:00

Zahra's Paradise by Amir and Khalil

While I might mention books I'm reading, it's not often you'll see me saying "Hey, buy this book!". But Zahra's Paradise, both in story and purpose, are different. Set against the backdrop of the stolen 2009 Iranian elections, Zahra's Paradise, tells the very human story of a mother looking for her 'lost' son, Mehdi, who has been swept up in the reprisals and arrests. The title is a bitterly ironic allusion to Behesht-e Zahra, one of the largest cemeteries in Tehran.* Translated from the Farsi as Zahra's Paradise, Behesht-e Zahra represents the all too often fate of dissenters to the false reelection of Mahmoud Amadinejad in 2009. Those elections saw massive uprisings and terrible reprisals. From the cover of the book we see the remembrance of the Green Revolution and what made for a turning point in Amadinejad's miserable theft of the election: the cell phone cameras that documented what was really going on in Iran. Cell phones which documented Neda's murder and the atrocities against peaceful demonstrators, who were largely students.

Zahra's Paradise is the book version of the long running webcomic Zahra's Paradise, which began in early 2010 and has now been translated into thirteen languages. The webcomic is now in Aftermath entries. I'm not sure if you're still able to access the story itself online, but I encourage my readers to check out Amir and Khalil's links.

Likened to Marjane Satrapi's epic Persepolis series, Zahra's Paradise is an important and accessible work that documents what happened in Iran in 2009 and what it was like for families there. It is a battle cry in the fight for human rights in Iran, which has not, in spite of the regime's best attempts, been extinguished. It is a loud and clear voice against Amadinejad, Khamenei and their repressive regime. It is a moving and often frightening story that took courage to tell, week after week, for two men who still had families in Iran.

You can read an interview with author Amir at United4Iran's website, here.

*One of my longtime readers has just informed me that the title Zahra's Paradise is also a reference to Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian-Iranian photojournalist who was investigating the disappearance of dissidents in Iran. Ms. Kazemi was beaten to death in Evin prison in 2003. In spite of claims that she had a stroke during questioning, Ms. Kazemi's body showed a skull fracture, broken nose, very brutal rape, severe abdominal bruising, flogging on her legs, broken fingers and missing fingernails, upon a very controversial autopsy. Her death represented the first time a death in Iranian custody attracted major international media attention. Both her interrogators were acquitted of her murder. Ms. Kazemi was 54 at the time of her death.

Zahra Kazemi, BBC

Thinking About Poverty, Part 2

2011-09-22T13:21:00.000-04:00

This article is the second of two parts. You can read Part 1 here.

Part 2: Poverty, Homelessness, How We Count, and Exploding Some Myths

Old Woman at a Soup Kitchen from WikiHistoria (photographer attribution unknown)

In June 2011, 45.2 million Americans received food stamps according to the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The average benefit per person was $133.67 a month. That amounts to only $4.45 a day. I'm trying to envision what one can eat for three meals a day on $4.45. You know, thinking about it as if I was homeless, like my adopted son's biological mother, who is in her 60's and who looks not too different from the old woman above. She relies solely on food stamps and soup kitchens. Even with both those options, I'm thinking it isn't much food. And even someone with substance abuse problems both needs and deserves to eat, as far as I'm concerned. I've volunteered in soup kitchens before and other than for the holidays, it's pretty meager fare most of the time, especially if the soup kitchen relies on donations. What else will $4.45 a day buy her? According to The Economist's Big Mac chart of March 2011, prices for a McDonald's Big Mac vary from about $2.99 to as high as $4.28 across the USA. Even a bottle of water is more than $1, and in some of the convenience stores near her, likely closer to $2. She's not even five feet tall, and I'm thinking buying one large bottle and lugging it around (she's homeless remember- not a lot of storage options there) would be all but impossible for someone of her stature and overall health. (The average food stamp outlay per household, by the way, is $282.31, which comes out to $9.41 a day for a family.)

I won't tell you what I spend in a week at my local Whole Foods on my organic fruits and veggies, grass-fed beef and gluten-free and dairy-free alternative breads, milks and such. It would be too embarrassing at this point. But I'm not going to even try to pretend that someone can eat, let alone eat well, on $4.45 a day. You want to know what's that cheap? High fat, high sugar, highly unhealthy things that don't give you real nutrition but sort of fill you for the short term. And not fill you all that much, either. But those same foods are what can lead to obesity, metabolic syndrome and problems with diabetes. When you're poor, you have to eat something and if what's cheap is unhealthy, well, it's better than going to bed hungry at night is likely the way many adults look at it, for themselves and for their children.

But I know what you must be saying at this point- Marzie, Marzie, Marzie, those food stamps are supposed to *supplement* your income, not pay for all your food, silly! Well, the problem is, quite a few people don't have leftover income. My older son, a chef who makes just shy of $1800/month at a swanky hotel restaurant, which offers pretty decent benefits, typically eats at work for at least one meal a day because he eats for free there. He makes well above poverty level income. Nevertheless, after he was sinking into debt, we helped him make a better budget just the other day. He has very little left over for food after rent, utilities, car payment, car insurance, laundry costs, gasoline costs, medication costs, and of course, he doesn't even qualify for food stamps. Since striking out on his own with his shiny culinary degree he has lamented the cost of everything from bath mats to toilet paper to a simple bag of potato chips, let alone work needs like uniforms and his knives. Currently, he has no money for going out, for doing anything other than watching the occasional On Demand movie, although now he and his girlfriend are thinking even that's an extravagance they can't afford. That's right, he's learning the hard way, you can say. But see, he had us a rescue net- something that many, many people don't have, even if they have loving families that would want to help, if they could, but they simply can't help because they, too, are strapped. So our son is not pulling himself up, out of the not-a-speck of poverty of his upbringing, with his fancy-dancy Culinary Institute of America degree. Not at all. He's a low income "family" with his girlfriend and is working the maximum number of hours he can. Only, somehow, the thought that he will soon, as he will be aging out of parental healthcare coverage, be deciding whether to buy his mood stabilizer medication versus a week and a half of groceries is not very comforting to me. Only wait a minute, if he wants to eat at home but can't function, he won't have a job, now will he? But unless a miracle raise is on the horizon somewhere, make no mistake, that is exactly the choice he may be forced to make. You think it's an exaggeration, because after all, he'll have health insurance from his job. But he's taking a new-fangled medication, just like our youngest son is. Our co-pay, with top-notch insurance through my husband's work, for our youngest's single monthly medication is about $125/month. Yes, you read that right. That's our co-pay. The uninsured cost of the medication is somewhere around $800/month here in South Florida. And the medication for my older son is about the same. How would he be able to afford it, we wonder, if his health insurance isn't as good as his present insurance is? Take a different medication you say? Really? Of course, both psychiatrists have been totally arbitrary in their determination of our sons' needed medications, which in both cases have fewer side effects than previous generations of these medications. Taking a drug that pushes our older son closer to metabolic syndrome and diabetes just doesn't seem to be a good plan, somehow.

I'm sure many of us are aware of how hard it is to consistently get and/or stay on medication if you're homeless or poor. Those are difficult circumstances, even if you have federal health care like Medicaid or Medicare. (For more on this issue, check out Personal Failure's newest post over at Forever in Hell) But what about food? Surely there are many options if you're homeless or poor and hungry? Think again.

A Food Not Bombs graphic

This past week, the Miami New Times had an article about the group Food Not Bombs. The group seeks to feed the homeless and claims that money spent on the American military machine strips the impoverished and homeless of any chance to escape their bleak situation. The article opens with group founder Keith McHenry being arrested as he is making the group's banner "End the Criminalization of Poverty" at a free food event in Lake Eola Park in the Orlando area. Orlando has passed a city ordinance that outlawed the serving of food to more than 25 people at a time because the homeless people would eat and then disperse throughout the ritzy Lake Eola neighborhood, disturbing the residents. In addition, Food Not Bombs can only serve each park in the city area twice. Orlando Mayor John "Buddy" Hugh says this is to "dilute the presence of the homeless in the City's open spaces." (Yeah, I know... deep breath on that one, right?) Fort Lauderdale, one county north of Miami, is exploring similar legislation. Fort Lauderdale has evidently been aggressive in the past two decades when it comes to preventing gatherings of homeless people and feeding those people. While I can't speak to the entire ethos of Food Not Bombs, what I can say is that looking at all these poverty statistics makes me think about how many people might be homeless and hungry, or just... hungry. I couldn't find a current estimate, in the 2010 Census, of the number of homeless people in the US. (The figure is now convolved with the number of people living in poverty.) But, wait a minute now, in order to have been counted, you had to be LIVING IN/NEAR OR VISITING SOME SORT OF DWELLING/STRUCTURE/SHELTER. Specifically, according to the US Census's site:

People who cannot determine a usual residence - Counted where they are staying on Thursday, April 1, 2010 (Census Day).

People at soup kitchens and regularly scheduled mobile food vans - Counted at the residence where they live and sleep most of the time. If they do not have a place they live and sleep most of the time, they are counted at the soup kitchen or mobile food van location where they are on Thursday, April 1, 2010 (Census Day). (under score mine)

People at targeted non-sheltered outdoor locations - Counted at the outdoor location where people experiencing homelessness stay without paying.

But see, the problem with all that is that many communities appear to be making it harder for homeless people to gather, to be served, to be... somewhere. And I wonder if some homeless people just didn't know that they had to show up to be counted on April 1, 2010? Did census workers really go out and count that guy I see sleeping near the 878 overpass? Did they count the guy who sleeps under the bus bench sometimes on Sunset Drive? What if some of these people didn't want to be counted? Like they were afraid of people coming up to them with pen and papers and asking them a whole bunch of questions? I've actually seen claims on some conservative blog sites (but one example) that the homeless had to have been over-counted, whatever that final number really is. There just can't be that many of them! Of course, that mindset leads me to wonder about being impoverished and some of the "foreign citizens living in the US:"

Citizens of foreign countries living in the U.S. - Counted at the U.S. residence where they live and sleep most of the time.

Citizens of foreign countries living in the U.S. who are members of the diplomatic community - Counted at the embassy, consulate, United Nations’ facility, or other residences where diplomats live.

I have to say that, while I certainly do believe that not all of the illegal aliens living in the US are impoverished, (not by a long shot, really) I do believe that a fair number might be and that they might not be too keen about being counted. (Maybe it's just me, but there's been this kind of unfriendly atmosphere around here lately for people living in the US illegally. But I might be wrong. Maybe those twelve people crammed into a two bedroom apartment wanted to be counted, or those people quietly living off the books with their friends in a Section VIII home might be willing to come out and wave to the census worker?)

Soup Kitchen Today, August 12, 2011, North Carolina

used with kind permission of JW Hanley

But I digress with the whole census business and counting how many people are really living at or below the poverty level in this country. I was talking about food and poverty right? There are a lot of people, if we just look at the level of poverty and the number of food stamps recipients, who struggle with food. How are we helping people eat? What is this about communities not wanting to feed the homeless or placing limits on the number of homeless that can be fed? What are these people guilty of? (Either the ones who are hungry or the ones who feed?) They appear to be guilty of being there. I keep turning McHenry's banner over in my mind. Are we essentially criminalizing the impoverished? While I'm not exactly sure that we're calling them criminals, I am sure that there is more rhetoric these days that makes it seem as if people who are poor are somehow poor by choice, or by laziness or somehow as if they are at fault for their situation. This not-so-subtle undercurrent seems to suggest that if people would just pick themselves up and work harder they wouldn't be poor anymore. Kind of like that argument that if people worked better jobs, they'd have (better or any) healthcare, right?

So here's my first problem with that: for one in five people under the age of 18, I'm not really sure what they should be doing that they aren't doing, are you? If they were born to poor families, it's obviously a 'mistake' they can't remedy right now. In fact, if I go back to those ChildStat.gov tables, I'm likely to conclude born in poverty, stay in poverty. (Going back to Part 1 of this article, no doubt these kids should be working extra hard in school in order to be able to eventually get smartphones, so they can get jobs later. As for these kids' e-Reader situations, I'm recalling that alarming statistic from the National Institute for Literacy that showed that 47% of Detroit's population is functionally illiterate and thinking that if you're planning to teach people to read, having plenty for them to read is a very excellent plan and one that may not involve Kindles, Nooks or Kobo readers, let alone pricey things like iPads.)

And once again, there is my other big problem, which I've talked about before on this blog. Being poor is damned expensive. For example, when you are poor, you may not have a car to drive to a regular grocery store or a Costco or BJs in order to buy less expensive things. Even if you can get there on public transportation, you may not have the money to pony up for those big packages and then again, after trying to make it home on said same public transportation with those discount treasures, in your small dwelling you may not even have the space to accommodate those packages. No, as I know full well from friends and some of my GAL kids, you pay premium prices for a few items at a time, at your neighborhood convenience store or your small corner store that lets you slip the money into the pass-through drawer that slides under the bulletproof glass. In fact, you pay more for many, many things and when you're late on paying what you owe for those things, whether it's your credit card's minimum payment or that car insurance policy that you let lapse, you will pay still more in the end, because you didn't have the money to pay on time. And then, of course, there's the healthcare that you can't afford but like every human at some time or another, you will need. There's even just simple birth control, trying to prevent having another mouth to feed/shelter/clothe/keep healthy/educate/love. (Birth control? Now there's something expensive and getting harder to obtain, especially if Planned Parenthood has fewer locations. Because that's right, you better not be poor but if you are poor, heaven help us if you get pregnant and don't want to be. How did you even get pregnant if you're poor and can't afford kids? Surely there are scads of things you can/should be doing other than have sex, right? Sex is for people who can afford it, didn't you know that?) And about when you'll have time to be getting all that stuff? You know that food, healthcare, medication, stuff? If you're fortunate enough to have a job, any job, let's think about all that free time you'll have to get them when you work and you're working poor. Because you'll have lots of paid time off or vacation days to get it all done, right? Oh, all that can get done on the weekend? Well, okay, maybe not the medical. But I mean, really, on a week day, how much time would it really take to use public transportation to get to that clinic that sees patients for free, or for medicaid rates or for your insurance that lets you see any of five doctors in your entire county. You don't want to know how long it could take. Really, you don't. But we are not, I assure you, talking about your lunch break time. And heaven help you if your child gets sick. As my former GAL youth Snow White can tell you, having a sick child can derail not just your schooling, your job, but your entire way of life when you are poor.

But speaking of schooling and education, it's supposed to be the path out of being poor. Yes, if you want to make it out of poverty, which is, of course, your absolute moral obligation, you've got to pull yourself up, get yourself educated, get a college degree, so that you can.... make minimum wage and get no benefits while working as a receptionist in a realty office, like my daughter, who graduated in 2010 with a magna cum laude Bachelor's degree in Biology from FSU, did for a while. She's now in grad school, studying pharmacy. Here's how she's pulling herself up: her parents are paying for her graduate degree so she won't be in debt for much of the rest of her adult life with federal student loans. That would be the debt that no doubt would be cleared just in time for her to accrue further educational debt with her own adult children. The debt that is described as crippling students' hopes, dreams, credit ratings and which now has record rates of default. My daughter worked hard when she worked and could not afford to live on her own and could not find a job in her field of study. In at least one instance she was told she was just too overqualified. She gave up trying to find a better and more appropriate job. (Hey, your present employer is always soooo understanding about your looking for a better job than they one they're currently providing you and they're always willing to let you take longer lunches to go interview for those other jobs, right?) No, instead she bided her time for grad school admission. And she is far from the exception. Brittany Misra is another example sited in a recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A 2008 graduate from Emory with a degree in bio-cultural anthropology, Ms. Misra was making her cultural observations from behind the barrista counter in an Atlanta Starbucks. (Hey, she's lucky- everybody knows that Starbucks has a great benefits plan!) But seriously, as a recent article in the Washington Post points out, college graduates are the fastest growing sector of the population when it comes to bankruptcy filings. Education, clearly, is no shield from falling into poverty. Although, having an education certainly appears to give you a leg up when it comes to finding ways to cover yourself from falling further into poverty or even jail. So there's that. Hopefully if you got that college degree, you can fill out all the proper forms for your bankruptcy filing, unlike 47% of the population in Detroit. But if you want to talk about some of what education won't shield you from, look no further than the ChildStats.gov charts about food insecurity.

It comes as no surprise that having a parent or guardian without a high school diploma confers a certain risk of food insecurity. But the fact that having more educated parents is not as much of a buffer as you might think is rather stunning. From the table at ChildStats:

Looking at the increase in food insecurity since 1995, even for those who have attained a bachelor's degree or higher (which has almost doubled!), drives home the point that even education is not enough to shield families entirely from poverty. And that's what more people need to think about. I actually know quite a few people who are literate, quite well-educated and who struggle mightily with caring for their families, teetering on the brink of a financial abyss. Quite. a. few.

So what is it then, about poverty? What is it that we are blaming homeless or poor people for?

Yesterday I saw this article on ABC's news website that blazoned the title: Tax the Rich, Obama Says; Class Warfare, GOP Says. Well, it's no secret that I tend to be on the liberal social democrat side of things but I seriously wonder how the GOP thinks things have gone down, historically speaking, with a very large, increasingly impoverished, overtaxed class of citizens and a small, elite, undertaxed class of citizens, who considered themselves the "job-providers". Hmmm. Seems to me there were some revolutions a while back in similar circumstances. Of course, there are still plenty of semi-successful oligarchies around the world. (I'm trying to think of one not on an Amnesty International blacklist for something but am currently drawing a blank.) I look at brief articles like the one posted the other day on CNN about Rick Perry's own state's poverty debacle- one in five Texans live in poverty, their poverty level is growing faster than other states, they collect fewer food stamps and have less healthcare and Texas has one of the lowest per capita spending rates on its citizens. Perry's claims of job creation all deal with low paying jobs, which doubtless mean jobs with few, if any, benefits. Texas ties Mississippi for the highest percentage of minimum wage workers in the country. And all that just makes me look at the current unemployment figures of only 9.1 % and shake my head as I think about the people that gave up making claims or the people who are currently under-employed, in jobs that are just under full time or jobs that are at or below minimum wage and which will do nothing to help pull them out of poverty. Where are we going in this country? Class warfare? Isn't that where we already are?

I've just started reading Thomas Keneally's Three Famines. The premise of the book is that politics, not natural disaster, are key to some of the great famines in modern world history. He counts racial discrimination, distribution failures and lack of accountability of leadership as factors greater than crop failures in determining the course of famine. Keneally opens his book with a quote by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen:"No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy." Sadly, all I could think about after reading that quote was that Ireland's famine in the 1800's was basically driven by an oligarchy. Keneally talks about the amorality of famine.

Maybe a better dialog in this country would be served by talking about the amorality of poverty and what we're going to do about making sure that it doesn't worsen.

Stop blaming the poor for being poor. They aren't the problem here.

Against the Wall, 1934 by Dorothea Lange

Unfortunately, due to an absolute masterpiece of an article in the National Review by Rand Paul, countering Bernie Sander's take on poverty, I'm going to have to extend this article to three parts. Because there is just so much to despise and argue with in Rand Paul's statements, I couldn't even take it at first. Evidently he went to the Michele Bachmann School of Truthy Facts. You know, he's just following the practice of those truthy facts that Bachmann reels off like those about founding fathers fighting slavery and HPV vaccines causing mental retardation? Yeah. Only substitute Rand and poverty.

Mr. Paul, please see my gauntlet below. Have you been to any of your government's statistics websites lately? Well sir, I have...

Thinking About Poverty, Part 1

2011-09-21T10:20:00.000-04:00

This is the first of a two part article.

Part 1: Inequities and Child Poverty

Starting Over, 1935 by Dorothea Lange

People don't really like to think about poverty, let alone talk about it. I'd go so far as to say many people simply ignore it. Too depressing, I guess. For those of us that have, it seems as if turning a blind eye to the have-nots is all too easy. It's definitely less painful, if you're a person with even a modicum of conscience. But looking around these days, I think we're getting to the point where we need to talk openly about the homeless, the poor, the working poor and what is of absolutely no help to any of those groups: blaming them instead of coming up with some kind of meaningful plan. Sometimes, I think that as a people, and likely eventually as a planet, we need to start over and perhaps see things from different perspectives on the issue of poverty and its causes and responsibilities. What steps, seemingly random or calculated, have set a segment of the population on the path into poverty or assure that the impoverished stay poor.

Not everybody shrinks from talking frankly about poverty. Last week, I read an impassioned blog post by one of my favorite authors of fiction, Seanan McGuire. An author of fantasy, her post was pure non-fiction advocacy. It isn't the first time that she's stopped me in my tracks with one of her posts, either. She's written more than a few on her blog that cut through all the (excuse the English) bullshit and strike at the heart of what it was like growing up poor, bullied, and so bright that every indignity of what you were living was fully and painfully absorbed. She's processed her experiences in an insightful way for those of us who haven't quite walked that same path but ought to spend more time thinking about such paths if we are to be decent human beings. Her post last Friday, titled The Digital Divide, was about how many Americans cannot afford e-Readers, and that printed paper books must not be allowed to be die out because it effectively means that books will become all but inaccessible to many impoverished Americans. In her powerful post she speaks poignantly about what living in poverty and struggling to acquire books to read was like for her. (She is now a best-selling, Campbell/Hugo Award-winning author.) How, she asks, will our future generations of young people too poor to afford those light and sleek e-Readers or too easily robbed of them even if they had them, read? How indeed, I wonder. Because reading is knowledge and knowledge was supposed to be a path out of the hell that is poverty. As Seanan McGuire eloquently puts it, e-Books dominating the publication market now represent, in her mind, a deepening of the social and economic inequalities and threaten to become a barrier to the access of knowledge, enjoyment, and simple escape, for the poor.

Driving the idea of a digital divide still deeper in my mind was a link on Sociological Images, forwarded to me over the weekend by Cynical Nymph. It shows an image of a job posting in QR (Quick Response code). QR codes are those little square images you've probably seen in catalogs and ads. You scan the image with your phone by snapping a picture and details embedded in that image lead you, by way of a QR application, to a uniform resource locator (URL) with information. Great plan but in this instance that job listing is only accessible to those looking for jobs who are also fortunate enough to own smartphones. Steve Grimes, who found the image, also remarks on a growing reliance on technology that only the not-impoverished can afford. (Need a job? Hey, don't be so poor you don't have a smartphone with internet access and a QR reader app, okay? If you don't have a smartphone, this job isn't for you. Really, not smart of you not to have the money for that smartphone and its data package. Don't you be poor, you job-needer, you.)

QR code job listing, from Cyborgology

McGuire didn't just talk about the digital divide, though. She talks about what I've been surprised more people haven't been shouting about in the past week: the societal divide, as in wow, at least 15.1% of the population is living now in poverty in America and is that even really an accurate number?

I had posted a link, and even an image, about that 15.1% statistic on that my personal FB page (with about 300 friends) about a week ago and there were no takers. Not a single comment. I had also read a post by Suzy Khimm on Ezra Klein's WonkBlog at the Washington Post, in which she pointed out that the National Academy of Sciences estimates indicate that poverty is significantly higher than the Census Bureau estimates because the metrics the US Census uses to gauge poverty are so out of date. Some new methodology estimates from the NAS suggest the rate is higher, perhaps closer to 16% but other metrics say it's lower. Still, even if the poverty level in this country is merely 15.1%, it's a frightening figure. However, if we look at Census estimates of childhood poverty, the rate is stunning: 22% of Americans under the age of 18 are living in poverty. As someone advocating for child welfare, that is a stunning statistic to me. More than one in every five children in the USA is living in poverty. I had an article about that figure on my personal Facebook page and it didn't garner a single comment, either, although three people commented on my Bright Nepenthe Facebook page posting, including the former head of the Guardian ad Litem program here in Miami, who said that she recalled that in the 1980's it was one in four. I checked but the only figures I can see are those at ChildStats.gov which show that at its peak in 1983, child poverty was pretty much what it is now- 22%. But surprisingly it was equally bad in 1993-94. What is interesting though, rather than just looking at the number of children living in poverty, is the comparative distribution of income relative to the poverty line over the past thirty years. While the number of children living in extreme poverty and below the poverty level but not in extreme poverty has increased from 17.9% in 1980 to 20.1% in 2009, the number of children ages 0-17 living in high and very high income homes has increased dramatically, from around 21% in 1980 to around 40% in 2009. Low income (defined as a family of four at roughly twice the poverty income level or less) and medium income families have dropped sharply, from 65% of all children in 1980, to about 52% in 2009. While some families may have gotten better off in the past thirty years, the poor largely stayed poor. The increasingly stratified population was still, as of the measures in 2009, skewed toward children living better. But the middle economic class for children was thinning. In fact, the most current figures from the National Center for Children in Poverty state that in addition to the high level of children in poverty, they estimate 42% of all children now live in low income families, indicating a pronounced shift away from middle incomes is occurring, giving credence to the whole income gap and and growing perception of inequity in this country.

Anyway, as a voracious childhood reader and avid buyer of used books, I really grokked what Seanan McGuire was saying in her recent post. Eliminating print books potentially steals something from already poor children. Her recollections about being poor and wanting to read also made me recall an earlier post of hers, in which I'll never forget her mentioning that in her family, they were so poor that ketchup really was considered a vegetable. The memory of that post, and its reference to how you perceive food when you're poor, takes me to a few other things I've been reading.

In 2011, as the economy and joblessness have worsened, how many kids are going to sleep at night hungry? How many don't know where their next meal would come from? We don't really know, do we? (And in general, feeding the poor or homeless has become an increasingly embittered topic, especially in my state of Florida.)

First off, going back to ChildStats.gov, they have this table that talks about food insecurity, which basically means not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or if you'll even have one that night. From 1995, when they began tracking this figure, to 2009, the percentage of children ages 0-17 living in households with overt food insecurity increased from 19.4 to 23.2%. Not all that sharp an increase, unless you're a hungry child, of course. Food insecurity for children in low income and poverty income households increased from 70% in 1995 to 85% of those households in 2009. And among those living at 200% of the poverty level, surprisingly food insecurity increased from 4.8% of households to 9.1% of households, a pronounced increase in the number of children who, though not living in poverty or even low income families, didn't have the security of knowing where their next meal was coming from. We'll revisit that table briefly when considering the effects of education on poverty in Part 2 of Thinking About Poverty.

But, as something for you to think about today, consider this: the 2009 estimate of the child population in this country was 74.5 million. The USDA's National School Lunch Program, which provides free or reduced cost lunches (in addition to free breakfast and free after school snacks to qualified students in programs through Child Developmental Services departments), estimated that in 2009 some 31 million children qualified for free or reduced cost lunches. Children living in households with less than 130% of the federally defined poverty level income for their family are entitled to free lunch. Children living in households with 130 - 185% of the poverty level income are entitled to reduced cost lunch. So here's the thought: in 2009, the total number of children living in poverty and low income households (defined as up to 199% of the poverty level income) was 41.7% of the population. That comes out to about 31 million, actually. Well, more like 31.4 million. But does that mean if you were in that unlucky sliver of low income families with incomes between 185% and 199% of the poverty level income, you didn't get a reduced cost lunch? Yes, it likely does. That's falling through the cracks of the system, right there. It's quite possible to be poor even when you're not strictly speaking, in federal terms, living in poverty. It's possible to be poor and hungry.*

Current estimates for children in America: 22% live in poverty, 42% live in low income households.

Sharecroppers Children Gather Food by Dorothea Lange

Look for Part 2 tomorrow, where we will focus on the homeless, the poor, how we count them and one of the most disturbing comments on the homeless I've ever heard by an elected official. Of course, it was from right here in my own proud state of Florida.

*I have seen more than a few area public schools scramble trying to provide food for children who fall through those cracks. Teachers recognize when their students are hungry. I have seen kind-hearted teachers who will bring extra food for a child who didn't qualify or whose qualifications have been delayed, as sometimes happens when a child enters the foster care system and the paperwork for a free breakfast and lunch was not completely properly. I have also personally known children in foster care who were told by foster parents that they could not eat those meals at home on school days and who refused to provide those meals on the weekends. Foster children who feared a long, hungry weekend without those school meals. No kidding. Of course, when you see stuff like that, you report it. And hope the foster parent loses their license. But they don't always. If fact, one foster parent that I reported for not adequately feeding the three children in her care actually adopted a child after that report.

Palate Cleanser # 158: ZooBorn Edition

2011-09-20T20:26:00.000-04:00

These are very important.

They make me happy.

OMSqueaks!!!!

Kiwi chick at the Columbus Zoo!

Not to be outdone by....

BABY OTTERS! (look at those feet!)

From the LA Zoo.

Totally cool...

2011-09-16T15:33:00.000-04:00

Dinosaur feathers in amber! Layman's story here. The Science article here.

Creationists will be blanching at tossed off phrases like:

"About 80 million years ago, these feathers likely blew into some tree resin and...."

I still cherish the amber pendant my dad got me in the Dominican Republic back when I was 9. It has an ant in it. I was incredulous when he explained what it was. I have loved amber ever since.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Down the Drain

2011-09-15T17:54:00.000-04:00

Attribution Unknown

Yep. That about sizes it up.

I'm trying to envision the world in which dragging a 17 year old into court and, without even having his judge talk to him first, getting him to drop urine for a drug test (that was only mentioned by his GAL to staff as a possible concern because of his defiant behavior and repeatedly missed curfews and tanking grades) is a good thing. I'm having a really hard time with thinking such a world is a good place. Oh, wait a minute! That's our world. Darn it!

Somehow a special set hearing became all about a drug test (which was negative). That would be the drug test that was less of a concern to me than the fact he still has no driver's license in his legal name (kind of a bigger issue for someone breaking curfew in his municipality, too...) but a greater concern than the fact that his foster parent keeps saying that his foster care management agency still owes her $242 from the summer program that finished in June. Oh yeah, and all of it went down against the backdrop of my having to leave before the hearing for my fecking neurology appointment. And hey, I get to feel horrible because the case manager who had to drag the kid in canceled her dental appointment. I got to go to my appointment but she didn't get to go to hers. Nope, instead a mangled message and priority list awaited.

However it happened, I know a 17 year old young man who was stripped of his dignity with little if any explanation as to why this was happening and without even having a judge ordering him to be, on the basis of any concerns of the Court. A young man who says he doesn't believe anything anyone is telling him about why this was done. And suddenly, five and a half years of knowing someone and trying to gain their trust feels like it's totally.. down the drain.

Palate Cleanser #157

2011-09-15T17:22:00.000-04:00

BTD 3 by Marzie

The Pink Ride (Guest Post by Thelma Lee)

2011-09-12T11:11:00.000-04:00

Intro by Marzie

This blog is run by an atheist. Yeah, that's right, I'm an avowed atheist. And yet I follow the Dalai Lama on Twitter. Why? I like the guy and some of what he espouses. The fact that he's espousing compassion from a religious vantage point doesn't bother me. I believe in compassion. I believe, if not in karma, that what goes around often comes around and that it's better to be good-hearted and honest and compassionate. Because, like HHDL says, it makes me feel better and live in a better world by being part of making it better. And thus, I am willing to risk drawing further ire by not being afraid to say I'm an atheist who likes John Halcyon Styn. He may seem all new-agey with a Christian tinge and over the top, but I like what he says about love and hugs. And I love what he has to say about fear and self-loathing and what a waste it is. I like the fact that he wants to make people feel good and that he rejects hate, rigid gender identity and seemingly a lot of stuff that when you come right down to it, seems always to go back to a position of fear. Fear of the different, fear of the other, fear, fear, fear. To those fears, the fearless man with pink hair offers hugs. And thus, this atheist blogger gives you Thelma Lee's adventures in the desert, with the pink-haired grandson of a Baptist minister (who called himself near the end of his life a "Baptist Buddhist" and said that current religious definitions no longer defined him). John Halcyon Styn has taken it all one step further than that and colored it all pink to boot. He is the author of a book titled Love More, Fear Less. I haven't read the book, but it seems like a great motto to try to live by.

This is a great post to follow the lingering sadness, anger and loss from 9/11. Our world needs more John Halcyon Styns and fewer Osamas and his ilk.

The Pink Ride

by Thelma Lee Gross

A few weeks ago I was reading “The Jackrabbit Speaks,” which is theBurning Man E -newsletter. This is something I only do as the event approaches,being too lazy or unfocused to do so much more in advance. I suddenly saw the following:

“Halcyon is leading his annualPINK RIDE on Thursday at noon.
Meet @ noon at Pink Heart (9:30& Esplanade).
Wear pink; bring your bike andan open heart.
Details, video & pics fromprevious rides:
http://www.hugnation.com/burningman/”

PINK? WOW. I lovepink! It would be so pretty…WOW, aPINK line of bicycles on the Playa, everyone in PINK. A visual gift to Black Rock City! And I already have a PINKcostume!

I looked at a few of the photosfrom the previous ride, but I really didn’t investigate, not wanting to previewdetails of the 2011 Burning Man festival. (I deliberately didn’t look at theart projects online, for example, and was only accidentally told about theTrojan horse by a friend.)

What is Burning Man? It is an annual, weeklong event united by a sense ofcommunity, self reliance, gifting, and personal involvement in the human canvasthat is Black Rock City. The Cityis composed of curved, concentric streets that partially encompass the centralPlaya, where most of the art installations, as well as the Man, are found. Participation is through performance aswell as radical self expression via costumes or absence thereof. Events, objects, food and drink, musicand other performances, classes, clothing: all are gifted unconditionally fromthe wildly eclectic camps that serve as mini-communities throughout Black RockCity. The city, which this year contained over 53 thousand people, disappearswithout a trace within two or three weeks, fulfilling another of the centralprinciples: “leave no trace.” Manystructures are burned, including the temple, the Man, and other wooden artinstallations. Immediacy iscritical; nowhere else on earth (except perhaps India) have I felt so much “inthe moment.” For me, Burning Man is an opportunity to be in a continuousbrightly colored, interactive dream while being allowed to remain awake. It is literally one of the most exoticplaces on the planet.

On theday of the ride Pink Heart Camp did not disappoint. There it was, right on the esplanade along the Playa,looking so very pink! So pretty,pink and furry!

Pink Heart Location at Burning Man 2011

I took photos of the other pinkpeople and then lounged on a fluffy pink couch waiting for something tohappen. Suddenly there was aslender man, dressed in black with pink hair and sitting before us, the obviousleader. He announced that we were going to wait while a large group joinedus. Waiting….I looked at my watchthinking, “We are leaving late.” My anxiety over scheduling seemed out of harmony in the desert butpersonality is a hard thing to shake. He started to talk and I thought “Okay, he’s just stalling while wewait, okay, just let it go. Lethim talk; it’s his camp and his ride. Just relax and soon you will be on yourpretty pink ride, creating a pink stripe on the desert.”

Which is all I wanted, wasn’t it?

He started to talk about hisgrandfather Caleb, a Baptist minister with endless buoyancy and love forpeople, who died in 2007 at age 95, and their special and loving relationship.Suddenly I realized I was in the presence of a gifted storyteller and preacher,blessed by a perception and analysis of life that was untainted by truisms,platitudes, or an obsession with God. (He does not believe in heaven.) He began to speak about optimism andjoy in life, inspired by his grandpa’s example, and the choice we all have tolive in deep appreciation of each moment, one by one. He talked about the balance life offers between the “icecream cone in your hand and the crap on your shoes” and how dwelling on theshoes is like Shakespeare’s coward’s “a thousand deaths,” which he sees as auseless suffering over obstacles and possible outcomes, and the obsessive focuson “what ifs” instead of a commitment to the task at hand. And he spoke of spreading joy and loveto other human beings, which he does both actually and emblematically throughHug Nation, a movement he co-founded with his grandfather.

John Halcyon Styn is forty yearsold. His personal mantra is “love more, fear less; float more, steer less.” John has worked in online publishingand E-commerce as well as in public media. He has had a varied and intense lifestyle. Burning Man is the core of hisspiritual life. From his website [pronouns changed]:

“He does notconsider himself a Christian, but does consider Jesus to be one of his valuedteachers. He considers Buddha,Gandhi, Eckart Tolle, Mr. Rogers and many others to be valuable teachers,too. He believes that a spiritualpath is deeply personal. And whatever works for you is perfect. He distrustsanyone who knows ‘the true way’.”

John does a weekly “Belief Buffet” broadcast before Hug Nation each weekwhere he shares “ways that work for him”. Over the past four years he has spoken about gender labeling (“pink toenails” or see Bright Nepenthe's post here); relationships; the meaning of death; the significance of money and abundance; the importance of living in themoment; and the problem of terrorism and war, among other diverse topics. His opinions and perceptions arebalanced, good natured, self-effacing, and just plain smart. How do I know? Because I have been watching his online video blog since I returned from the Playa, and consider him a source offocused and positive energy that has been lacking in my life for longer than Icare to admit.

After his talk at the camp, he hugged every singleattendee with warmth, for he lives by his word. Wethen rode across the desert, but the aesthetics of the pink line seemedunimportant now. Instead we werespreading compliments and smiles with other Burners as we rode. We ended up in a huge, hand-linked,pink spiral in the middle of Central Camp where we then hugged in rampant,pink, extroverted joy. Andcosmically, if such a thing exists, suddenly there was my husband hugging metoo, somehow having showed up at the moment of this supremely happy and yes,pink moment.

I came for the color and I stayed for the message.

Text and selected images (as noted) copyright, Thelma Lee Gross.

Palate Cleanser #157

2011-09-12T11:03:00.000-04:00

Prime Memories, deviation by Marzie

A Palate Cleanser aside:

When I was a kid, my parents would argue a lot. (They divorced when I was thirteen, thank goodness. That left things more open for me to argue with them, like a normal teen.) Sometimes, when they would argue at the dinner table, I would tune out and self-soothe by counting primes. At age ten I was obsessed with primes. I had been introduced to them by Mrs. Berry Shaw at Everglades Elementary School. Easily one of the best teachers I have ever had, Mrs. Shaw thought that I was under-challenged and allowed me to 1) read whatever I wanted as long as I was done with my school work and would sit with her at recess and talk about what I was reading and 2) gave me the underpinnings of algebraic thinking and introduced me to some really cool ideas, including primes. Mrs. Shaw had a fearsome reputation that has lingered in the memory of many a student, but I liked her, I'd even say loved her, and she made a huge difference in my life. Back in the 60's and early 70's, Miami public schools didn't really have things like gifted and magnet programs. My parents switched me to a private school at sixth grade and I was able to eventually skip two years and graduate high school at sixteen. I was so relieved to get out.

My love of primes lingers. Every once in a while, I fall back on primes, or, because of the complication of primes being difficult to predict, on Fibonacci numbers, which were introduced to me by Mrs. Leona Blatt in 7th grade. Oh, and when Mrs. Jane Bruegger found out about that in 8th grade, she told me about Lucas numbers, which started at 2 instead of 0, but followed the same pattern as Fibonacci.

I still relish numbers. I know all my credit cards from memory and even my driver's license, insurance account, bank account numbers. I still remember my street address and zip code from when I was ten and in Mrs. Berry Shaw's class.

I'm currently reading a book currently called The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano. It's following a recent read that was a hard act to follow, but so far, so good.

Okay, enough about primes. On to PINK.

In Memoriam

2011-09-11T11:50:00.000-04:00

by Art Spiegelman

As we celebrate my mother-in-law's 80th birthday and I remember what would have been my beloved grandmother's 93rd birthday, and think of my dear friend Rahimah's 45th birthday, it still makes me angry that this day will forever be tainted with hate.

Join me tomorrow as Thelma Lee takes us for a Pink Ride, which espouses every opposite of the mentality that took down two towers, stole 2996 lives, broke many spirits and forever changed our American world, and the world at large.

I want Uzza.

2011-09-10T11:42:00.000-04:00

from ZingyGinger

Where is her blog? I want it back. She and her blog had better be just fine and it better all be a mistake that the blog is gone. In addition to her spirited feminist stance and her incredibly literate atheism, Uzza was just... swell.

I want Uzza! *sobs*

Update: No more Uzza? Who will tell me about SlutWalk in Toronto? Who will keep me posted on campaigns against rape or the simple absurdity of advertisements or video violence? Who will explain the apostles or the Qur'an to me?

I haz a big sad.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Warning: Extreme Cuteness

2011-09-08T20:32:00.000-04:00

Caution: May cause insulin burnout!

Cavies!!!!!!

Look at those feet! And those rabbity features. I *love* the crossed paws!

Make your day richer with a squee and smile. Check out ZooBorns.

And this whole business is entirely Cynical Nymph's fault. She got me hooked.

In love with Pink, Hugs, Styn

2011-09-07T21:15:00.000-04:00

Regular Bright Nepenthe contributor Thelma Lee Gross will be giving us a post about John 'Halcyon' Styn of Life Student/HugNation.

But until that post hits us, I just want to offer you this bit of Styn. An interesting take on sexuality, gender, public perceptions, private business and a taking back of the color pink. For any gender that might happen to want it...

What if it was just okay to be happy and to like what you like?

(Gosh, that makes me start thinking about what it might be like if you could just love who you love, no questions asked.)

{Gosh the Second, that makes me wonder if you could just marry who you wanted, few, if any questions asked.}

[Gosh the Third, that makes me think that maybe gender isn't all that important when it comes to love, marriage, children, colors and names and things like that. Oh my!]

Palate Cleanser #156

2011-09-07T18:28:00.000-04:00

Beauty Toward Detritus 2 by Marzie

Erin Go Bragh!

2011-09-05T18:03:00.000-04:00

“When the Taoiseach spoke in the Dáil, theTaoiseach was speaking for the Government and he was speaking, I believe, for thepeople of this country.

“The abuse of children is not acceptable.The abuse of children is intolerable. And those who didn’t discharge theirresponsibility to make sure that it stopped, or that those who were responsiblefor it were brought to book, they have a case to answer and the Governmentmakes no apology for stating that in the unambiguous terms that it was statedby the Taoiseach.”

~ Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Eamon Gilmore, this morning in the Irish Times

It's been a while since I blogged in general but about the Catholic Church Pedophile scandal in particular. But things have heated up so much that I had to post about it. I am currently so stoked to be part-Irish, I can't tell you. Of course, I'm no fan of the Church, as any regular reader of the blog knows, and I was silently cheering back inJuly, when Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny took on the Pope of the Catholic Church in a truly riveting speech on the floor of the Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Irish Parliament) on July 20:

Reactions worldwide to Kenny's blistering censureof the Catholic Church, the Holy See and the Teflon Pope were swift, stunned and almostly universally positive. (I'll leave it to your imagination for a moment as to where the negatives came from...) Said the NY Times: "The rare denunciation of the Holy See’sinfluence in this predominantly Catholic country came just a week after thegovernment issued a report accusing the Vatican of sabotaging Irish bishops’1996 decision to begin reporting suspected cases of child abuse to the police.”

Kenny's speech and position are all the more stunning because of his reputation as a Conservative Gael and the fact that he is a practicing Catholic himself. He took great pains to say how difficult this matter must be for priests who are innocent of any wrong doing and whose Church's attempts to protect the guilty have summarily tarred all priests with their taint.

What was the Vatican's reaction to PM Kenny's request, via the Irish Papal Nuncio, and his speech on the floor of Parliament for a Vatican reply to the Cloyne Report? The Vatican recalled their ambassador to Ireland, (*slap* take that you ingrate Celts!) and finally, on Saturday, the 3rd of September, issued a 25 page, 11,000 word reply, decrying Kenny's speech as making "unfounded" accusations against the Catholic Church, etc. etc. etc. Thankfully, Kenny has refused to back down on his statement that "the Vatican's intervention had contributed to an undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish State and Irish bishops."

Today, Ireland's Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) EamonGilmore has fired a very clear salvo back at the Vatican and their 25page denial of interference with the Irish policeinvestigations into the Irish Catholic Church's systematic abuse of children and youths. The Vatican'scorrespondence denies the principal findings of the Cloyne Report, a document commissioned bythe Irish government in 2009 and released in mid-July of this year, but mostly by ignoring it. Well, Gilmore will have none of it and says, as quoted above, that the Irish Taoiseach speaks with the voice of the Irish people.

For those who have not followed the story, the Cloyne Report investigated the role of the Catholic Church and the Irish State in theallegations of abuse put forth against 19 clerics in the diocese in CountyCork. The report, which you can read in full here, (Please note that while the full PDF is notthat reader friendly, you can go to the end of the 421 page document, where you dohave a full index to let you peruse more easily) is a fairly damning piece ofwork. It clearly finds that in most cases, the Irish gardaí (police) were not informedof allegations of child abuse or child sexual abuse. It further finds thatwhile the Church purported to support child protection procedures, theyfailed to show any genuine commitment to that support because they failed,consistently, to implement those child protection procedures but rather undermined them. The Church consistently erred onthe side of the accused predator and in one instance, in a case which was "clearly and unequivocally a case of child sexual abuse," stated that no abusehad occurred. In the reply sent by the Vatican on Saturday, the Holy See takes the position that child abuse, and child sexualabuse, by priests in Ireland is an Irish problem, not a Churchproblem. Because, gosh, it's not like this happened anywhere else. *cough* It'snot like there were pedophile priests running around in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany,India, Mexico, the Philippines, the USA, or anything. I mean, come on! What do you think, that the Church covered things up and just moved pedophiles around to newer and progressively more remote locations where they could continue prey on children without controversy? Mais non, it cannot be!!!!

The Vatican especially accuses Kenny of having misinterpreted, by taking it out of context, a statement made by the Teflon Pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, which went something along the lines "the standards of democratic society do not apply to the Catholic Church" (so shut up already because we so special and above the law of a sovereign state). I think the writing is on the wall that that's exactly what he meant, and what the Church evidently believes. They are above it all.

But are we really supposed to believe that God has given his/her/its imprimatur on the way the Church has handled pedophile priests around the globe? Really? Well, as the Irish Times said in their editorial this morning, the Church that holds itself the bastion of moral and spiritual superiority has given a "bureaucratic, self-serving, and legalistic response" that completely ignores reflection on the clear cut findings in Cloyne. Which only makes matters worse. They took more than a month to come up with a reply that cries foul but ignores the very heart of the issues in Cloyne: that the Catholic Church has sought to undermine Irish laws and protections in place for their most vulnerable parishioners, child victims of abuse. To me, Kenny's diatribe against the Vatican looks even better in retrospect when you read the Vatican's response. When they can only attack the messenger, instead of the message, clearly there is some truth, or maybe a lot of truth, in the message.

To Kenny, Gilmore and the Dáil and Seanad houses of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) who have made motions deploring the Vatican's "interference, undermining the Irish child protection framework" and the "inadequate and inappropriate response of the Church", all I can say is, More power to you! I cannot imagine how heartening Kenny's speech was to those who were abused. He has given a powerful voice to the cause of all those around the planet who were victims of these priests and then re-victimized by the Church's ignoring or subverting their cries for justice.

It is refreshing to finally see the Catholic Church is getting called on their centuries of subterfuge, abetting criminals and to see their façade finally start to dissolve a bit.

And to the Teflon Pope... the gloves are off. At last. When an entire government refuses to be silent, you have lost substantial ground in your campaign of Vatican-condoned coverups.

Palate Cleanser #155

2011-09-05T15:24:00.000-04:00

Beauty Toward Detritus by Marzie

Trust and Ugly Truths

2011-08-30T18:03:00.000-04:00

Trust Me by Tracey Emin

When I was growing up, my mom had this maxim that she repeated many a time. She said it just the other day when we were on our way to get her new (rescued) kitty, Ashley. She was talking about congress and the debt and such but she said it, with her usual emphasis.

"I'd rather have an ugly truth than a beautiful lie."

Having lived virtually my entire life in the lap of the luxury of a warm and loving family, never really wanting for much in particular other than things like world peace, an end to hunger and for my kids to stop bickering with their dad at the dinner table, I guess I never really gave it much thought about just how hard it might be to offer up the "ugly truth" to someone I didn't think had a vested interest in caring about me no matter what. Or maybe none of my truths were ugly enough to ever have me worried. Maybe I've led that fortunate a life.

~~~~~

In one of my current GAL cases, in the past year the assigned case manager for the youth has changed five times because of instability with his foster care management agency's staff. His present case manager, a not too competent but seemingly well-meaning young woman, has been on his case since shortly (read just days) before his judicial review in late February, 2011. At that hearing, which was before a citizen's review panel called Foster Care Review, she was like a deer in the headlights. But I was hopeful for this one. She used to play ball. Professionally, I mean. She looks really fit and has some fairly interesting tattoos. She has an edge about her, and I was hopeful that maybe that would be enough to bridge the gap a bit with my young man. But here we are at the end of August and, as she admitted to me at the end of July, at her second semi-annual judicial review for his case, he tells her nothing. She didn't know his sister got her kids back in upstate NY. She didn't know he still calls his deported dad in Suriname on my dime or that I pay half his school lunch money and her agency was picking up the other half because the young man got himself into a swanky magnet program at a school that doesn't provide free school lunches. She didn't know his cousins had been down here for a bit but went back to PA and that one of them had an arrest history for possession that I found in our Criminal Justice Information System. She didn't even know there were cousins because his case dates back to 1994 and even just since 2005 he's been in four different homes, had so many case managers it's dizzying and there are reams of reports in his five part file. He's been in the last home, a fabulous home (like the best foster home other than my home) for the past four years. The foster mom and I are the ones that tell his case manager the stuff that's really going on with him. When I asked this young man, who I've known since February of 2005, why he doesn't talk to her, his answer was brutally honest.

"Why should I? She doesn't know anything about me and she's not going to be around long enough to make it worth my while."

And there, in a nice, articulate nutshell, is the leading problem for children and youth in dependency.

On one of my now closed cases, a gifted 16 year old girl told me she wasn't going to be talking to therapists anymore. Over nine months of the case being in the system she had had three therapists. Her sister, age 13, was in the same boat. But the older young woman, seeing the opportunity to get it out there about what it was like being the oldest of five when your mom was so sick and addicted but really loved her kids and was having trouble taking care of them, really wanted to work with the first therapist. And she did. She talked, she made some progress processing her feelings of both anger and relief at not having to keep it all together anymore after the five kids were removed and their mom was in rehab. But the private agency providing therapy reassigned the therapist after three months, breaking the therapeutic bond abruptly when the therapist showed up and told her she was going to have to do a termination session. (That's where the therapist explains that they can't work with you anymore, why, and wishes you well and hopes you keep seeking treatment with your new therapist.) So the 16 year old started over with a new therapist. She was more guarded, but she tried. A couple of months later, you guessed it. That second therapist quit. She left the agency and then the agency assigned a new therapist. Now the 16 year old had nothing to say. She'd sit in her school's conference room or walk around the block with the therapist barely even speaking or just observing meaningless pleasantries. She had learned not to talk to a therapist. The system of care taught her how.

This is not, by any stretch, the first time this has happened with one of my GAL kids, either. It happened in the DCF days and it still happens far too frequently in privatized care.

The young man I described above is lucky on the therapy issue, though. He has had, through his foster care management agency, consistency in therapeutic services when he's needed therapy. His therapist is marvelous and would keep in touch with him by cellphone if he needed to touch base. It got him through a rough time when his mom died of HIV. But that is such a rarity in the foster care system. In fact, I'd probably pretty much say it was that therapist being there for him. She went out of her way for him.

Instability and loss of continuity in case management and therapy give rise to serious problems in my experience as a GAL. Not at all surprisingly, youths, especially, become unwilling to trust, to invest feelings and effort, into what is a fundamental therapeutic bond- that with their social worker and/or therapist- if it is continually being broken. Most of the kids in the system, if they've been in the system for any length of time, have been bandied from pillar to post, have seen a revolving door of case managers, therapists, attorneys and in some instances, even judges. I've wondered, more than once, about what this teaches children and youth in longterm care about interpersonal relationships. That they're fleeting and not worth investing a lot of yourself?

I asked my youngest, the one who's adopted, and who's now been in my home for seven years, during which time he's had the same therapist week in, week out, (even as I type this he's still in therapy because of what all happened way back when, for seven whole years, yes, really, and I think it's done him a world of good) what he would do if he had to change therapists and start from scratch all over again.

"I wouldn't. Do that, I mean. I wouldn't do that. Talk to someone else about all that stuff? No. No way."

I think it has to be pretty much typical, really. It worries me for him though, since his therapist is near 70 and not in great health. So much trust and shared information is vested in that therapeutic bond. It's simply irreplaceable.

Further evidence for the idea that it's damaging to have a loss of therapeutic or social worker continuity is that after countless therapists, case managers, targeted case managers, independent living case managers and support coordinators and such, my friend Keyoncé had not told his present case manager (who knew hardly anything about his past, not even that his sister was also their client) that he was making ends meet by engaging in prostitution. She was simply dumbfounded and it took most of my morning and finally several three way calls with a very angry and feeling violated Keyoncé to convince her that this was true. Leaving aside the conflict I feel about having shared his private info with her in order to try to keep him safe and out of the clutches of what I can only view as someone preying on him, I'm left with the lingering, almost plaintive remarks she made to me when he was off the line. She didn't know why he hadn't told her, why he was covering things up, why he didn't tell her about all his traffic charges, the sugar daddy who paid them off, the fact that he wasn't really living with the person he said he was anymore, why he didn't mention the lack of electricity and water there as part of why he left, why, why, why? Keyoncé told he me didn't want anybody else "in his business" and now he's mad that I got him to admit it to her, even though I do think he knows how worried about him I am. But why did he tell me? "You know me. You know all about me. I can tell you that stuff."

Would you tell a veritable stranger your life story for the umpteenth time? What if it was a really sordid and ugly story filled with drugs, prostitution, and things people who are supposed to be helping you might want to judge you for? I mean, really, if you were prostituting yourself, would you talk about it easily to the nice lady you just met who doesn't know a damn thing about you, not even that you have a sister you barely know who is the same agency's client? Would you talk about the things that you had done that got you in trouble? About all your ugly truths?

Well, whether you or I would is not the point.

Without continuity and stability, they don't.

Happy Returns

2011-08-29T19:38:00.000-04:00

Ouroboros Design by Good Winter

The Ouroboros is a symbol that, as Carl Jung said, has great significance in the human psyche. It originated in Ancient Egypt, in the Books of the Netherworld and the Dead but has found resonance in many cultures from the Greeks and Romans to the Celts to the Vikings. Clearly, the Egyptians had that scoping problem (taking the wide view versus the narrow view) down pat. Ouroboros represents the endless cycle. You know, something starting anew as soon as it is complete? As I begin my fifth decade, I'm seriously thinking of getting this thing tattooed on myself, somewhere I can easily see it, as a reminder of what this reality is all about. Only, I like the one above, rather than the regular Ouroboros, which is just a serpent in a circle. See, the one above is more realistic. It's in knots and it will regenerate or renew in more knots. That's so perfect, isn't it? Not. Sorry. That's almost a pun or something. Let me begin again. Maybe I'm just out of practice...

Last week, in between convincing some family of part of my family, who is now like family to me, that she really needed to high-tail it out of the Bahamas well in advance of Hurricane Irene, and taking my Mom to four hour doctor's appointments starting at 8 am on my birthday, I had to get my driver's license renewed. I had actually tried to get my license renewed two weeks before but fell short of the documentation I needed to do so in my state, my wonderful, wonderful state. Yeah, I had my old license, my passport, my social security card. I had my two copies of two different utility company bills bearing my residential address and my name (because if it wasn't in my name, I'd have to get my husband to certify that I resided at that billing address, of course). Nope, I was missing a certified copy of my marriage license, to prove I was really married. This, in spite of the fact that my driver's license, passport and social security card all bore my hyphenated legal married name. Nope, they needed that certified copy. I had to make a new appointment all over again, and because my license would expire on my birthday, I had to make one at an office way, way down south from me. Like 30 miles away, almost at the other end of the county. Down in [Redacted to Protect the Disaffected], where migrant workers stand by the roadside hoping for the day's backbreaking, pesticide-filled work in sweltering hot fields cooled only by thunderstorms, picking my locally grown organic fruits and vegetables. So a scant 24 hours before my license expired I drove down there, promptly got lost, got misdirected by both Google Maps and a well-intended gas station attendant. I finally got there but not before pulling into the wrong parking lot and when trying to exit the parking lot getting smacked broadside by a young woman who backed, really hard, into my 2006 Prius. Dented two panels of the car- driver's door and left front fender onto the wheel well area. She was promptly hysterical and started imploring me in Spanish not to call the police over the sobbing screams of her toddler in the back seat of her mid-1980's Honda Civic. I waived her off, not wanting to be the cause of her cheerful deportation experience with her possibly or not American-born baby. I just couldn't face the idea of calling the police and worrying about what might happen to her. Besides, I had my appointment for my license to keep.

Inside the license agency I saw the most disaffected public servant I have met in years. When I replied to her "How are you today?" with a simple, "Fine, and how are you?", I got an earful. She replied, "This job is killing me..." and from there told me about her less than $26,000 USD job and trying to manage raising two teenage girls on that salary, that she can't even use her state government-provided health insurance because she can't afford her co-pays, that the Courts won't go after her ex-husband for support effectively because she won't do stuff like apply for Section 8 housing and food stamps because she doesn't want her daughters to think in the future that the government (any- state, federal, whatever) are going to be offering them a helping hand. Why should she have to apply for federal or state aid in order to get enforced what the state decreed in her divorce judgment, she wondered? She talked briskly about the fact that all this documentation ("Why did they tell you that you needed the certified marriage license if your license, passport and social security card are already in your married name?") was needed because it was a money making racket for local government and clerk's offices to make you get all these certified copies of this, that and the other thing and ("Oh, the utilities are still in your maiden name? Gimme that marriage license after all...") that she is so tired of her long hours sitting on her butt, watching people go nuts because they don't have all the newly required documents and that in general she is tired of the entire State of Florida, and its hoodlum governor who costs tax payers dollars defending his arbitrary but obviously unconstitutional decisions on things like not allowing any state organizations to make new rules without His Royal Governorship's permission. She went on about how she knows only one person that voted for him and wondered how on earth he even got into office in the first place and will the recall movement eventually gain traction? All the while, she dutifully and efficiently scanned all my documents, tested my vision, verified my contact lens usage, confirmed I was still an organ donor (does anyone really want these things? Sheesh!) and wham, bam, thank you mam, I had my shiny new license so I could legally take Mom to the hours long appointment in which we learned about the chronic and badass viral syndromes affecting her (our?) immune systems and making them crazy, stupid bad.

Oh My Quantum Field it's a license and I didn't need my husband's permission to get it!

Seriously, last week was... well if there is a better word-fit than draining or enervating, I hope to find the energy later to look for it. Still, it was made better by sweet friends, and friends of the blog like Uzza.

But I got my license, the not quite but sorta family was safe and went back to Vegas, I had a quiet belated birthday dinner on Saturday with my friend who shares my birthday and was finally having my outrage/anger/plot to destroy the world just in order to no longer have to deal with some of my GAL case problems return to mere fury. But then there was yesterday into today.

Yesterday, Keyoncé, whom readers will remember from a previous blog post, turned 21. I had made some progress by contacting his Independent Living Case Manager about his reported problems with his SSI Disability Check and his Medicaid. We got that all worked out, but Keyoncé missed three successive appointments with me to go to the Public Health Department to test for his problem that keeps on giving, which is now in its secondary stage and therefore much harder to explain to him as to its seriousness. He finally didn't answer his phone for two weeks and then he called me late last week saying he'd lost his phone and had to "earn enough money to get a new one". So here he was calling me a few scant days before his 21st birthday and he said he was depressed and didn't want to live. I calmed him down and told him he forgot my birthday and got him all distracted about the hurricane and had he heard from the little girl he called his cousin, who wasn't but who was one of my other GAL kids, and who went back to Jamaica to live with her mom. Then I talked to him yesterday, on his birthday, and we had this loose plan to meet at Dadeland, a big mall here in Miami, and that I'd give him some money for his birthday and he could buy some clothes. He ended up not being able to do it, for a variety of reasons some of which appeared to involve being very hung over or something. He called me about 20 minutes before he was supposed to meet me and said he hadn't left his North Miami living area, and it's at least a 40 minute ride on a bus and Metrorail from there. So we did it today.

We met in a far less posh location, not too far away from his North Miami "room". There was a flea market and a bunch of low cost shops where he can likely get more clothes for the money. Even a Rainbow in case he wanted to get something girly and shiny. (He does like such finery.) Keyoncé was, in childlike fashion, almost as delighted that I gave him a birthday card with a photo of a polar bear on it as he was with the cash. He hugged me and told me yesterday he just stayed in the house he was living in and felt sad. I don't know if it's true or not but he did seem sad and seemed lonely. He then proceeded to ask me about going to Citrus Health Network to go back on medication (a conversation we have had no less than a million times, I swear it, I do) and would I take him. All I wanted to talk about was his not showing up when I was supposed to take him somewhere, like to that appointment to get him treated for his now likely secondary syphilis infection and omigosh would you PLEASE go with me to the Little Haiti Health Department Clinic tomorrow I beg of you... and of course, yeah, if you make a morning appointment to go to Citrus to see your psychiatrist, I will attempt, yet again, to take you.

Then came the part of the conversation that blew my mind and left me feeling like I should just come home and lie in fetal position rocking myself, as my head explodes. After talking at the end of last month to Keyoncé's IL Case Manager and getting things all straightened out, he's supposed to start getting his SSI check again on Sept 1. Yay! It's only for about $350 USD, but hey, that's $350 he isn't earning doing 'you know what' while potentially spreading 'you know what'! I asked him where he's going to cash it, or deposit it (been through two checking accounts now and can't do the balancing if he tried, what with the limited reading and paucity of math he can do...).

Quoth Keyoncé, "The lady is my payee."

"What Lady?" I ask, worriedly.

"The lady who lets me stay in her house."

"What do you get for giving her that money?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the room and what else? Does she give you food?"

"No."

"So it's just for rent for the room?"

"No, she uses it to pay for my hotel room."

[Marzie does double take thinking to herself, no, no, NO, NO]

"Um, your hotel room where you see your johns?"

He looks away and says shyly,

"Yeah, at the [Redacted] on Biscayne Boulevard."

"Keyoncé, is she prostituting you?" I gasp.

"What that mean?"

"If you do something with a john, do you have to give her some of the money?"

"Well, I'm staying in her house."

"So she's a pimp?"

"No, she sells marijauna and that stuff like Mrs. Reed did. You know, those rock things. Crack. She sells that stuff. She was a friend of Mrs. Reed's."

Well SHIT! Say I, internally, having long thought these past 6 years that about the only reason I can think of that it would be a good thing if there really was a hell was that surely I could beat the heck out of Mrs. Reed in it, when I land there for not believing in anything other than a quantum field filled with a happy little sea of swirling quarks and gluons. (You remember I'm damned right? I'm a damned non-believer.)

"She's a friend of Mrs. Reed's? Why did you make a friend of Mrs. Reed's your payee on your SSI check?"

"She let me stay in my room."

And there you have it.

Your writer has successfully restored $350+ USD a month to a pimp and drug dealer payee of a mentally disabled aged-out foster youth who is making his primary living as a cross-dressing prostitute and who also, btw, has untreated secondary syphilis. [curtsies]

Pacific Prime Blog

Keyoncé asked me if I could be his payee instead when he heard about how things work for Marina and Stacy (Stacy is my other aged out youth of whom I'm becoming permanent legal guardian).

"You might need to leave that lady's house if you do that Keyoncé," I said. "And really, I think you need to go back to being in an Agency for Persons with Disabilities home. You can't live with that lady. She's a drug dealer! What if the house is raided? Remember what happened to you at Mrs. Reed's house when they raided it? It was really scary and they put a gun to your head?"

"If I went to an APD home, would they let me have my own room and go out at night whenever I wanted? I didn't like those other homes. They wouldn't let me go out when I needed to. But I'd trust you to keep my money. Maybe I could just work more and the lady would let me stay, and then you could give me all my Disability money and I could buy stuff?"

Sigh. Crack. Ugh! goes my heart yet again.

Fix a problem, Look! It's a problem!!!

I just love my State. Love it! We have prepared this foster youth for his aging out and have protected him from his disabilities so very, very well.*

Anybody know a good tattoo artist in Miami?

*Might I mention that at several points in time that the State of Florida placed Keyoncé in the lovely Mrs. Reed's custody? After doing homestudies!!!!!

A Special Kind of Hell

2011-08-02T14:18:00.000-04:00

If there is a hell, there must be a special one for the members of the Shabab Islamist insurgency, who are keeping people, keeping children, like the one above, from fleeing Southern Somalia or receiving aid outside the Shabab territory. That's terrorism, in that picture. Just the slow motion kind. From the Times:

"People from those areas who were interviewed in Mogadishu say Shabab fighters are blocking rivers to steal water from impoverished villagers and divert it to commercial farmers who pay them taxes. The Shabab are intercepting displaced people who are trying to reach Mogadishu and forcing them to stay in a Shabab-run camp about 25 miles outside the city. The camp now holds several thousand people and receives only a trickle of food...

A few years ago, the Shabab began banning immunizations, deeming them a Western plot to kill Somali children. Now countless unvaccinated children are dying from measles and cholera as tens of thousands of malnourished, immunity-suppressed people flee the drought areas and pack into filthy, crowded camps."

Shabab leaders counter the claims of locals who've escaped and NGO/aid organizations: the people in the internment camps are attracted to them! Because of “this sense of serenity and security.” Yeah, right. Sure they are. They're attracted to your guns and violence, too, I bet.

Somehow, seeing this article at lunch distracted me from the possibility of the US credit rating dipping to AA or from the truly miraculous recovery of Gabrielle Giffords. It totally distracted me from eating, too.

“This is worse than 1992,” said Dr. Lul Mohamed, Banadir’s head of pediatrics, referring to Somalia’s last famine. “Back then, at least we had some help.” ~ from the New York Times

Giving lie to the phrase 'the more things change, the more they stay the same...', as my stepmom and I were noting just yesterday, the world is getting to be an even uglier place.

How can half a million children be on the brink of starvation in one small country?

I was looking at the total population as of 2010 on Wikipedia. The irony of the Somali national anthem is simply breathtaking. Could serve the whole world, with equal irony, of course.

from Wikipedia

I don't know when I'm ever going to get that image of that poor child above out of my head.

Maybe I shouldn't?

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Palate Cleanser #153

2011-07-31T19:35:00.000-04:00

The Happy.

Koala, Australia

Photograph by Gary Brown, Your Shot

This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures

This little miracle was saved from its dead mother. Taken at The Australian Reptile Park in Australia NSW. The amazing staff hand raised this little fella and against all the odds he is surviving and is just immensely cute!!!