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Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media. |
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WELCOME TO MY BLOG! I comment on things I am reading, thinking about, encountering in media, and spiritual issues. I hope you will find something interesting. PS. I love feedback... |
| On CBS News at 6:00 PM today, August 27, 2015, they said: 90 people die each day by gunshot wounds in the USA The US has 4% of the Earth population, and 42% of privately owned guns. I figured this out. Americans are killing 33,850 people every year in the privacy of their lives. That is close to the entire population of the county in which I live. I told my friend in England I was planning on traveling by car to Arizona. Her response: “aren’t you afraid?” I asked why I would be afraid. She said “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get shot?” It had not occurred to me to be afraid because the way I handle fear is to ignore it. I wonder how many of us, if we look inside would find quite a collection of fears related to the armed public? There is a lot of discussion about fear of foreign terrorists. I don’t fear foreigners. I fear my neighbors. I don’t know who is angry, who has guns, who hates people like me or when they will blow up. I do know that the people with the guns are running things and tell those of us who don’t want guns in our neighborhood we are not truly American if we prefer to live unarmed. When did it become a trait of the American public to value killing each other? Are those of us who want this to stop keeping our mouths shut because we fear those with the guns? I wonder. |
| The last time I went to the book store, I bought three books written for young people and I have finished reading two of them. It seemed like they would be perfect for lying in bed keeping myself awake coughing and sneezing, but feeling too badly to take on anything weighty. And so it was with Ransom Riggs’ Library of Souls, the Third Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children. This has a gold seal on the front cover saying “Exclusive sneak Preview.” It appears to be the first ninety pages of the third novel due to be published in October. It also mentions a movie is being made about these stories. It looks like a good marketing strategy. I am enjoying this series because it is so “peculiar.” The tale includes moving from one time “loop” to another, and the beings in each “loop” are often unfamiliar, unpredictable, and you never know until the last minute if they are going to help or harm the heroes and heroines. Each new adventure leads to the characters discovering things about themselves and feeling surprised by their discoveries. I think these stories would be most enjoyed by middle school readers, and maybe 4th grade too. The other book is totally different. It is non-fiction. Linda Sue Park has written a “creative non-fiction” biography of Salva Dut, one of the “lost boys” of southern Sudan during the war starting in 1985. It is the story of his experiences as a refugee written in opposition to the story of a young girl, the same age, about 11, living in South Sudan in 2008. The book title, A Long Walk to Water is a clear introduction to the focus on scarce water and the effects of war and scarcity on young people. It is a story of courage, family loyalty, determination, and the importance of taking life one step at a time. It too seems about right for readers in middle school. Both books are very well written, include suspense, and children facing grave danger without the support of parents. They also illustrate the positive impact of strong healthy attachment. I hope that those of you who know young people might consider sharing either book, after you read them, of course, and, I hope you don’t have to get sick to find time to read them. |
| After my brief blog about German prisons, I double checked my information and every source said the same things. In addition to Germany, all Scandinavian countries have vastly different prison systems than the US. The following is a rather thorough look at those northern European systems of managing incidences of anti-social behavior: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why-scandinavian-prison... There are several articles by The International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation explaining the changes in the past 50 years in these prison systems and the effects on the prisoners and the communities. One writer comments that one of the motivations for changing the systems was to reduce the negative health impact on guards and other prison workers. I learned that the average lifespan for a prison guard is 59 years in the US. There is a major difference in how decisions are made. Planning is based on scholarly research rather than political whims and popular opinion. I am amazed at the difference in outcomes between the European prisons and US prisons. The Atlantic article delineates social forces that brought about the differences: racism, and withdrawal of social supports for the mentally ill. In addition, we Americans seem to think justice and punishment both require hurting the person who has broken the law. This, I believe, as a Social Worker, is deeply rooted in punitive child rearing practices and authoritarian educational institutions. In Europe, as in the US, law breakers are very likely to report very sad and abusive experiences during childhood. In Europe, people with symptoms are treated for their symptoms. In the US, people are punished for their symptoms. The impression that strikes me hardest is the US refusal to listen to scholarship and research. There seems to be an increasing race to the bottom educationally. We hear that we are winning the race to the bottom on TV, but refuse to use what social scientists know to help solve the problem. I may have a couple of biases here: I happen to think of myself as a social scientist and I have been paid all my adult life for my services. I respect social science research and want to know what it can teach me. I can testify that I personally do a lot better when I am supported, encouraged and appropriately confronted about my mistakes, then given a chance to correct my direction. I assume I am pretty much like everyone else. In paying attention to the news, I have seen a dramatic shift in US values in my lifetime. When I was a child, education was highly valued and respected. People wanted to know how to speak their own language appropriately and wanted to learn. Currently, I no longer hear the same respect for education. In fact, I hear people degrading education as if it is some sort of pathology. People built our educational system from nothing to the best in the world, then, let it slowly rot away. People talk about our education system as if it is the source of all of our problems and then undermine it instead of helping it get better. The thing that astounds me most is the cheering for people who say and do stupid things. Those doing the cheering say the things are stupid and say that is why they are cheering. This would be fine, but when they get hurt by the same stupidity, they shoot, or throw someone in jail in an arbitrary, unpredictable way, and erase any previous awareness of the good in the person from their minds. I don’t mean to suggest these are universally true tendencies. I mean to say we are sliding down-hill because we make poorly reasoned and poorly informed choices. When they don’t work well, instead of doing something that research predicts might work better, we intensify the wrong thing as if that would fix the problem. I encourage everyone to spend an hour or two reading about European Prisons and then writing to get the word out. There are many people with power to help. They need to hear from informed people; not just the angry and stupid. We need to change. |
This morning, Thom Hartman (Free Speech TV, a national public TV station) read an article written by someone who visited the German correctional system. What he read from this report was phenomenal! I can’t quote because I heard it only once and wasn’t taking notes but I can summarize pretty accurately. He reported that the number of people incarcerated is 10% of the US. The incarcerated live in small apartments, cook their own food and grow some of it, pay rent from fair earnings from vocational activities, and are expected to take responsibility for their behavior. They have phones with free access to calling their families. “Guards” are carefully trained. Only a small percentage of applicants are accepted into the two year training program. There has been no incident of prisoner or guard assault in the last two years. Sentences are rarely more than two or three years. Solitary confinement is also used rarely and then only for a day or two and never more than a month. Most people convicted of a crime are not sentenced to prison, but instead are fined an amount based on ability to pay. As most of you probably already know, violence begets violence. Violence interferes with attachment. Attachment builds respect. Respect builds attachment. Respect and attachment breed cooperation. Violence breeds resistance and oppositional behavior. It appears the German’s understand and apply these basic ideas effectively. I am tempted to preach. I am attempted to rant. I don’t think that will be effective here. Just let this roll around in your minds. Talk it over with others. Enjoy knowing there really is a better way and we don’t have to be stuck in this mess we have created of mental health and prisons. Love works far better than revenge. The Germans apply this: So can we. I would like to add, the Norway system is very similar to the German penal system. |
| “M Owais Sajjad feeling happy independence day Pakistan Dear All, I would like to say #Happ_Independence_Day to you all. On August 14, 1947 the announcement was made of an independent land named #Pakistan. Can all of you ask a question from yourself that since that how much we have worked for independence of the people of Pakistan? I am searching for the freedom of thought & action, equal opportunities & justice, polite attitude & humble behavior, peace, love & care….” #Pakistan_Zindabad I received the Facebook post above from someone I never met but who asked to “friend” me and I accepted. The entire sequence of events seems rather magical to me. Mr. Sajjad is young and about to set out on the grand adventure of higher education. I don’t know his religion or his politics, but I do see he is an optimistic person, and one with great love for his country. I have decided to use his post in my blog today because of the optimism and the universality of his message. I cannot imagine that every person on this earth would not want these things in their life. Here in my little corner of the world, Missouri, USA, I have not always felt that I had these things. There was the time, many years ago now, the next door neighbor viciously attacked and beat a member of my family, and when she discovered the law had been called and she was facing charges, she began to harass us. Law enforcement said they could only do something if she came on our property. Talk about feeling helpless and not free! That was a miserable experience. Once the woman was convicted, she disappeared from our vicinity. We bought the house and tore it down. Thank goodness there can be resolution at least some of the time. Unfortunately, things don’t always work out so well for everyone. We have so many people who have died in interactions between law enforcement and citizens. I wonder what that situation would have looked like if we had been black and she white, or, the other way around? Would someone have ended up dead? What if, instead of her fists, her weapon of choice had been a gun? Fortunately, she worked at hard physical labor and had the confidence in her own physical prowess that she didn’t get a gun. What if the police had shot her, or she the police, or she us, or we her? We kept a baseball bat by the front door for a long time after that, but never considered acquiring a firearm. Thank whatever positive powers there are in the universe for that! I am aware that communicating with someone in a predominantly Muslim country and blogging about it could catch the attention of our national snoopers and that for the rest of my life, they could track what I write and publish. It could be they already do that. Back in my active anti-war days, my friends tried to convince me I was being followed by the CIA. I didn’t believe them. However, now that electronic media is so easy to monitor, perhaps they are. To them I say: “ask a question from yourself that since that how much we have worked for independence of the people of” the United States of America? “I am searching for the freedom of thought & action, equal opportunities & justice, polite attitude & humble behavior, peace, love & care . Can we make a commitment today to make and not break the unity, faith and discipline?...Can we my dear friends?????” |
| This morning, I watched Fareed Zakaria interview President Obama. Afterward, he shared his article, to be found at, http://fareedzakaria.com/ about pessimism in post WWII US politics. The main topic of conversation with the President was the Iran peace agreement which can be found at http://www.us-iran.org/news/2015/7/14/full-text-of-the-Iran-nuclear-deal . Two statements stuck in my mind: Fareed Zakaria said we have had 5 major periods of pessimism in the past 70 years and named them including Sputnik, and our fear that the Soviet Union would dominate us technologically; the Vietnam war; the influence of the Soviet Union in Latin America and Afghanistan; the rise of the Japanese economy; and the Middle East Oil Crisis. He discussed these issues and concluded that the optimists have consistently seen things more realistically. My experience is congruent with this. The optimists to whom I have paid most attention turned out to be right about how things would turn out much more often than the pessimists. The Soviet Union is gone. Russia is still doing what Russia has always done, but they are containable. The domino theory about the spread of Communism was way wrong. The Middle East oil interests and Japan have not dominated world interactions and decisions. The other: President Obama said that he does not plan for failure; and he stated that he sees America’s power as much more rooted in many negotiated agreements than in military strength. I imagine he has said these things before, but I didn’t notice them until today. I was delighted to hear him articulate what appears to be truth to me. The many treaties and economic agreements that have been made in my lifetime seem to have been very powerful and important. This has always been true, when the US honored our own agreements. Taking our agreements seriously was not the hallmark of our first 125 years as a nation as you can see in the many broken treaties with the Native Americans. We do that better now, but not always. Witness the history of our behavior in the UN, and our flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention during the George W. Bush administration which continues in the form of Guantanamo prison. But generally, I think we have exerted influence much more effectively through negotiation than military power throughout my lifetime. As for planning or not planning for failure, I see people who plan for success succeed more often, and handle failure much more effectively than people who already have, and publish, their plan for failure of their primary plan. If they see something that could lead to failure, optimists solve it in their primary plan and continue to work for success without giving up. In my mind, going to war is giving up on negotiation. It is plan B implemented before plan A has been tried. This is consistent with social science research that aversives have more negative than positive outcomes. It isn’t the destruction of Japanese power with the A bomb that led to a strong, peaceful Japan. It is the effectiveness of the recovery plan that made this happen. The same is true with post WWII Germany. This is one more experience that clarifies and reinforces my basic idea that negotiation is the best approach to problem solving on all levels of human interaction. The President does not make a habit of planning for failure and I know this works. I have respect for people saying specifically what they see as weakness in any potential agreement. I disrespect people saying it won’t work before they read it. I disrespect people talking only about their fears without mentioning the strengths of a situation. I disrespect all-or-nothing thinking. I wish the Republican Party would find some optimism in their midst. {image # 1445398} |
| Growing up, we had neighbors with large families who received public assistance. Other neighbors gossiped “they had all those kids so they could get more welfare money.” I knew those families were not profiting from welfare. I had been in their overcrowded homes and had seen the sparse furnishings, lack of decoration, and lack of privacy. I had way too much information to believe the gossip. In 1970, I moved to Connecticut. There, I noticed that the youngest child in my public welfare caseload was age 6, no matter how many children there were in the family. One day I asked one of those mothers how that could be. Her reply: “Birth control wasn’t legal here until 1964. Do you think I would have had all these children if I could have stopped it?” I have been a member of Planned Parenthood since they provided health care that I could not otherwise afford in my early twenties. Later, they provided education about STD that my gynecologist did not provide: Unfortunately, too late to preserve my fertility. They provided unbiased counseling about my reproductive health choices about surgery because they wouldn’t profit from unnecessary surgery. Their medical care has made a significant contribution to bringing the AIDS epidemic under control. I have no idea how many pregnancies they have prevented. I have no way of knowing how many unplanned pregnancies I prevented in my life with their help. I am greatly troubled by the attack on Planned Parenthood. They work to prevent abortion by preventing pregnancy. The largest number of requests for abortion come from peri-menopausal women whose families are grown, who are worried about the many challenges presented by a late pregnancy including much increased risk of birth defect and miscarriage. This is a difficult problem for a family, for a woman to face. They provide healthy support, help women think it through without pushing them one way or another, and continue to provide the care no matter what choice the woman makes. This attack on Planned Parenthood is an attack on birth control, on prevention and treatment of Sexually Transmitted Disease, on appropriate reproductive health education for teens, and on other prevention and health care activities. The complaint is thinly cloaked as a problem with abortion. If people really cared about abortion, they would strengthen supports to families who experience unplanned pregnancy. No. There is a billboard I often pass that says “babies: God’s economic growth package.” This is the consumer economy gone wrong. Think about this: your support of the attack on Planned Parenthood supports the kind of spying and twisted editing that results in creation of, and dissemination of inaccurate political “information” (propaganda). This could happen to you, to your interest groups. Is this how you want your Democracy to function? Finally, Planned Parenthood is a private, not-for-profit organization. The effort to “de-fund” simply restricts options for health care of people who use Medicare and/or Medicaid. We pay lots more for pregnancy and raising of a child than for prevention of the pregnancy in the first place. We will spend much more for the care and treatment of each case of STD than to prevent it. Please, everyone who agrees, make a donation to Planned Parenthood today. www.plannedparenthood.org Please write to your Congressional representative against de-funding of Planned Parenthood. |
| Today, I have been exploring my 6 volume Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley, a very popular 19th century poet from Indiana who wrote in the vernacular of his community. The collection is copyright 1913, is leather bound, and has gold page edges, inherited from my grandmother’s generation. It is poetry of the sort she loved and memorized. In fact, it is much easier to memorize than modern verse as it filled a place in society similar to the role popular music has today. I remember my parents reading his work to us as young children. Some of it is funny, some honoring this or that, and though much is very idealistic, some has almost an element of social criticism. I read about a person confronting his Congressman in the barber shop about silver vs. paper currency. It was making fun of political arguments as neither side actually said anything of substance. Seems like how things are in the world today. I ran across a poem that is so familiar I can almost type it from memory: Little Orphant Annie To all the little children;- the happy ones and sad ones; The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones; The good ones, yes the good ones too; and All the lovely bad ones. Little Orphant Annie has come to our house to stay, An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up an’ brush the crumbs away. An’ shoo the chickens off the porch an’ dust the hearth an’ sweep’ An’ make the fire and bake the bread, an’ earn her board an’ keep; An’ all us other children, when the supper-things is done’ We sit around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun A-lis’nin to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about, An’ the Gobbel-uns ‘at gits you ef you Don’t Watch Out! Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,-- An when he went to bed at night; away up-stairs, His Mommy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl, An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wazn’t there at all! An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press; An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue an’ ever’-wheres, I guess; But all they ever found wuz thist his pants an’ roundabout;- An’ the Gobbel-uns ‘ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin, An’ make fun of ever’one, an’ all her blood an’ –kin; An’ wunst, when they wuz “company,” an’ ole folks wuz there, She mocked ‘em an’ shocked ‘em an’ said she didn’t care! An’ thist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide, They wuz two big Black Things a-standin’ by her side, An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowd what she’s about! An’ the Gobbel-uns ‘ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! An’ Little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue, An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo! An’ you hear the crickets quIt, an’ the moon goes grey, An’ the light-nin’ bugs in dew is all squenched away,- You better mind your parents, an’ yer teachurs fond an’ dear, An’ churish them ‘at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear, An’ help the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about, Or the Gobbel-uns ‘ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! As a child, like the child in the poem, I was more interested in the “Gobble-uns” than in the content of the poem. It seems that a child, because she was orphaned, had to “earn her keep” by doing household tasks for a family with whom she lived. The children identified with her as another child, but also related to her as someone with different knowledge and gave her an elder sister status. There is no way to know if she was older. It is clear her life was different from theirs, and I suspect that, although they were in school, she was not. We have a lot of politicians saying they want to revert to a time when welfare was handled by the church. This is a very clear, contemporary description of the life of the person left without a source of support. The child became the servant with no chance to learn reading and writing and arithmetic skills. This would doom her to a life of poverty, unless by some odd luck, she married well. She had no protection from exploitation. If she was raped and pregnant, she was shunned and left to starve. If she was of African descent, it was even worse. I do not comprehend why anyone would prefer to go back to this. What more can I say? |
| Cecil, so easy to catch, you had to put an arrow in him to make him resist. Dr. Walter J. Palmer, why does a Dentist have $50,000 to blow on a trip to Africa to poach a Grandfather, an Elder within an endangered species? How does someone with your level of “education” claim that level of ignorance? Don’t dentists have ethics? You have smeared your entire profession. You have smeared the schools where you were educated. You have smeared your family and community. You have smeared your nation. The news has spread world-wide. Your level of disrespect enrages humanity. Unfortunately, you are not endangered. You are a member of a species of people who are disengaged from the world that provides your basic sustenance. The earth and its inhabitants are strangers to your heart. Yours is the worst kind of insanity. The lion takes care of his family. He just lives his life the way lions live their lives. He did nothing to you or your family. He is not food. I see on the inter-net lots of evidence of humanity loading their proverbial bows getting ready to make your life hell for a long time. My value system tells me to love my enemies. At this moment I am having a lot of trouble thinking of a way to do that. There are doctors replacing children’s hands. There are dentists helping people with many kinds of problems. There are dentists who are naturalists, who spend their time and wealth to support the well-being of their communities. There are little children who know better than to mistreat an animal. I have no idea how to understand who you are or what you have done. I have heard no apology from you. I wonder, are you defending your behavior in your mind, or are you constructing a meaningful apology with a meaningful plan to make amends? Your responsibility right now is to look to the well-being of your soul. You cannot return Cecil to the living. You cannot save the cubs that will lose their lives because of what you have done. You are still capable of becoming healthy and compassionate. I hope this happens in you, for the well-being of us all. Signed on behalf of Cecil, Elizabeth Hykes |
| Shooters form like tornados we can’t stop; there is no warning system. Heat and cold, un-mixed erupt; “welcome to you, but not to you.” Warm hand, cold gun, raging bullet. “He alone bares the blame” says the Times. “It’s the situation” says the social scientist. “It’s the Devil” says the preacher. "We need sensible gun laws" says the politician. "Protect the right to bear arms" says the gun fancier. “He did this to me” says the victim. Alone he has lived and alone he has died. “Atone alone, young shooter. You are not one of us.” Shooter says: “That’s right. I am not one of you. I cannot atone for what you have not done.” |
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