Look at how I mess people's feeds up. Land sakes.
"Ok, cool. Thank you for the Magpul background, I had none of the Colorado information.
So, I'll try to keep my response thoughts orderly but I will be long winded and I apologize...
Weaponry: I gotta go back to flashbangs. Or for hyperbole myself - I am not taking a ride in Air Force One any time soon, but in a literal sense you and I both own it. Sure, I could drop insane money and buy my own fancy plane, crew, and bodyguards, but not unrestricted secure communication, prioritized air space clearance, military fighter pilot escort, unrestricted landing clearance... the president is The President, but he's a citizen too. I'm not put off by any of that. His function and role is different than mine.
So to scale it back down to police - I am not doing what they are doing. I am not kicking in crack-house doors, or serving warrants to child prostitution ringleaders, or detaining a bank robber in LA wearing body armor. I don't have that beef. The only time I would legitimately need the muscle (because let's face it, MS13 don't give a crap about me and if enough of them did that I would need a full AR15 mag to balance the issue I would already have bigger problems than a rifle would be solving) is if my beef were with the police/feds. Besides "I enjoy having them" which is a fine consideration in a free society, I don't honestly see another driving reason for mass sale beyond the argument that is often brought up about keeping fascism back.
History: we have 200 years of that type of fascism pretty much not being how things are done here. I mean we brutalized the African and Island population we brought over, we cheated and murdered the Native Americans, Mexico? I mean hello. We wage financial and cultural fascism all over the place, but actual dictatorship? The Civil War was initiated by the states - not really citizen soldiers, but actual government against itself - essentially Sequestration with cannon fire by the people who liked living off free labor. I have said before but will again that if that type of dictatorship/fascism which proponents claim amassing guns would solve were to start, no number of private citizens would do anything here but get themselves killed in tank/jet/howitzer/drone blasts. Our culture is not the fragile banana republic type of culture in which the results of armed conflict would ever be in doubt. If there were division in the military, well, they'd already all have guns and I promise there would be an unequal access to firepower there too.
Now, I am passingly familiar with what a d-bag Castro, Raul, Ernesto and their buddies were/are. My real historical base is the internet trope of the Nazis, because I've studied it and have family members who lost staggering numbers of ancestors in camps.
I would never say it can't happen here.
In fact, it's very easy to happen (or something functionally identical as far as political control goes) here if there were any kind of gain by doing it, but it would be with the frog slowly brought to boil by changes in legal process, like extraordinary rendition, harsh legal penalties for whistle-blowers and cognitive dissidents, obfuscation and marginalization of political protest free speech, removal of habeas corpus, military strikes on US citizens, censorship and anonymous monitoring of communication...
Note that ALL of this has already happened and continues to at this moment. For me, lefty idealistic rationalist that I am, it's about corporate control. The occupy movement illustrated what many born of a certain color already knew from experience - that the police are not here to protect us in terms of life or liberty (court cases have ruled that explicitly, actually) - they are here to protect the societal norms and to protect industry and property.
So yes, Virginia, we're a nation that's owned, but the fascism comes in terms of capitalistic trade-off. Eli Lilly keeps my diabetic butt alive at the retail cost of $300 a month just in insulin, and that's criminal, but mostly because of how our political system is paid for by people working for Eli Lilly.
From my position the NRA is very similar, in that it's their paycheck to sell guns and to make gun sales more common. The only difference for me between the two is that Pharma pays dollars to keep their costs high because they're not able to increase market by convincing people to become diabetic (ambien/adderall different story), which causes people to die from financial hardship and lack of medication or care. The gun lobby pays dollars to keep their volume of transactions high and as unfettered as possible because hey - government might take you in the night, buy more guns.
I might think that the astoundingly high gun death rate the US enjoys compared to other industrialized nations is reason enough to do something (new law or just changes in existing practice) to curb that pattern. You should check out that slate.com crowd-sourced running tabulation of gun deaths in the US since sandyhook. The numbers are fantastic and the data is hard to compile by design.
To bottom line my position - if the reason for arguing equality in all gun type access is sport and a general argument for Constitution, I would not dismiss that out of hand, but I would strongly weigh the totality of gun violence which no other sport enjoys against specific subsections of the hobby if any strides could be made in curbing the death toll.
If the reason is tactical from a law and order position, I think the position is worse, perhaps more damaging than redundant.. I strongly believe that just as knowledge of language structurally changes our brains and modifies the way we literally think, there is a demonstrable effect of culture on a society's expression and even our understanding of possibilities. If we earnestly look at gun ownerships and accept increasing militarization as our option for political voice, then guns will ultimately become the only option we can imagine... and I think that if that were to happen, we'd have nothing left to fight for but real estate and empty slogan, because our sense of political, and cultural identity would already be forfeit. "
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Good Intentions Gone Wrong
My third grader was assigned a black history month project. Kids were instructed to write six letters as though they were friends with a major historical figure, who did not have to be black but had to be of some general cultural importance. Whitesplaining and bootstrapping follows. It is hardly Z's fault that at eight years of age she still has cultural baggage to unpack. It's a big culture and she's a little girl. Let's check this thing out without her.
Dearest Zee,
Life on the plantation has been very unusually hard this time, but I'm hoping it will stop. All the fuzz and lint in the air is making me cough. I can't concentrate, so I keep getting whipped. Tomorrow I hope I get to work with Mrs. Cook's husband and not her.
Sincerely, Harriet.
Here I give Z a few points. It's not Harriet's fault she's being whipped, it's a result of external forces. Harriet is not defined as lazy. Z can't be expected to realize a young female slave might avoid the master.
Dearest Harriet,
I am so sorry that you have to deal with that. I hope that you get to work with her husband instead also. Please have some good news next time!!!!
Sincerely, Zee
Here things start to go, um, South. While Z is appropriately sorry she doesn't really get what whipping is. Harriet is encouraged to be less of a downer. After all, mail should be happier.
Dearest Zee,
Well I can tell you that I have some good news. I got to go back to my family, but I have to work in the field. I just helped a runaway slave but got hit in the head with a weight. It left a scar, but I'm ok now.
Sincerely, Harriet
Whew, at least Harriet isn't always going on about her problems. Because Z is not here for that. I give her points for bringing in family separation and the risk involved in helping a fugitive.
Dearest Harriet,
I hope you don't have an aching head too much. I hope you get treated with respect by not just other slaves, but by slave owners too. I would also like to find a way to help you keep your hope that you will find a way to be a free person.
Sincerely, Zee
At the beginning of this letter I thought we were headed up. Z shows compassion for Harriet and a desire to improve her life. Unfortunately, while acknowledging her own helplessness she accepts the reality of slave owners. Z stops short of wishing slavery would end, because that's radical. Z wishes for her friend's freedom, but not an end to slavery. This is an interesting bit because it falls into Having A Black Friend. Z has inadvertently shown the typical response of a white friend to injustice suffered by a person of color; a desire for the specific person to be well treated rather than an end to the system that mistreats.
Dearest Zee,
You are the best friend ever! And thanks to you, I am finally free! There was a man who worked on the same plantation as I did named John. He was a free slave so he wanted to stay but I didn't want to keep being a slave. I used the skills my father taught me and got help from a Quaker woman. Now I am free! I have money! Thanks!
Sincerely, Harriet
Where do we start? Z has given a few encouraging words and some empty wishes to Harriet and in return Harriet has ceded all the credit for her escape. Without that lightbulb moment, our fictional version of Harriet might have stayed under the whip. Instead she bootstrapped her way over to the Quakers and increased her economic standing. This is where I realized how deeply ingrained cultural fictions are in historical lessons at the grade school level. Because dude. Z wrote this. With sincere intent.
Dearest Harriet,
That's great! I hope you can get your family and friends to freedom too. I'll try to meet up with you sometime soon! Hey, you know, you should help other slaves too!
Sincerely, Zee
This is just so brilliantly dominant culture that it could be satire. Z blithely accepts the credit then offers to party. As an afterthought, she creates the Underground Railroad. The fictional version of Z doesn't offer to help the fictional version of Harriet Tubman because anti-racism work is hard and it's something that should be done by people of color. I'm not sure how Z sees the fictional version of herself or what she considers her obligations to be in this relationship. I'm going to ask her when she's ten.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Bad Guys And Their Guns
I haven't blogged about Newtown because what do you say?
No, this shouldn't have happened. This should never happen. It feels wrong to minimize what this community has gone through by discussing the communities that go through this every day. A 7 year old child sitting in their classroom on a bright winter morning should not be murdered. Neither should a chid peacefully sleeping in her home. Or sitting in a car. Or walking down the street. Or playing on the swings. Thousands of our children have been senselessly murdered in the name of our second amendment rights. These rights are themselves a fictional construct of powerful special interest groups on both sides of the idealogical aisle.
Every year, every moment, we place a fairytale above a child's life. I want to believe Newtown is a tipping point. I don't want to be disrespectful by asking why it would be. Is it because the children are mostly white? Is it because they are mostly wealthy? Is it because they were killed together? The last time I thought a child's death was going to be a tipping point was when 7 year old Aiyana Jones was murdered for sleeping on her sofa. I don't know why I thought Aiyana would change us. She wasn't different from all the other children needlessly killed by the culture of violence we celebrate. In fact, she wasn't killed by a random criminal at all, Aiyana was shot to death in her Disney Princess sheets by a police officer. A few months before that I thought it was going to be the death of 6 year old Makayla Sitton. She was murdered in her bed by a cousin brought to her home for a holiday. By 2011 when Christina Taylor-Green was assassinated for attending a speech by someone she admired I'd given up on America and mass violence.
These are three children out of hundreds and thousands. Children have been killed since Sandy Hook. Newtown was not an aberration in any fashion unless you consider being forced to face the deaths of our children is an aberration. It doesn't hit home. What does hitting home even mean? We want to see the faces of the children, we want to hear their stories. By this we mean pictures of them happy and healthy and whole. Stories of the love their family shared and the shock they leave behind. We want to whistle past the graveyard they lie in. Long after we've moved on, long after we've turned to the next mass shooting and ignored the bodies piling up in single or double or triple numbers around us, the first responders will still see the faces of those children when they close their eyes. Their images won't be happy or healthy and they certainly won't be whole. The damage done by the weapons used at Sandy Hook is the sort that stays with you for a lifetime. These men and women will be dealing with this for the rest of their lives, just as the families of the children will.
America, I think we will deal with this for about five minutes. Then we will turn away, as we always do. There is a fairy tale in our country that video games kill people. Movies kill people. Films kill people. Mental illness kills people. Anything but guns. It's never guns. It's never our easy access to weapons of war, weapons designed to kill each other as quickly as possible. This morning in a good neighborhood where this sort of thing doesn't happen (and what does that mean, really, except that lives are not equally important) a woman went for a bike ride. A man she knew stopped her. They had an exchange of words. He shot her to death and escaped. What if he'd punched her? Knifed her? What if he'd not had the power of the gun in his pocket, the secret knowledge that her life belonged to him just on the basis of his own whim. Would she be alive? Would Jordan Davis? Would Trayvon Martin?
I don't know whose cold dead hands will finally make America drop their weapons. For my kids, for your kids, for all the kids, let's go ahead and drop them now. We can't stop evil but we can disarm it. That's what fairytales are supposed to teach us. To want more. To expect better. To turn away from evil and embrace good. Let's open a different book. Please.
No, this shouldn't have happened. This should never happen. It feels wrong to minimize what this community has gone through by discussing the communities that go through this every day. A 7 year old child sitting in their classroom on a bright winter morning should not be murdered. Neither should a chid peacefully sleeping in her home. Or sitting in a car. Or walking down the street. Or playing on the swings. Thousands of our children have been senselessly murdered in the name of our second amendment rights. These rights are themselves a fictional construct of powerful special interest groups on both sides of the idealogical aisle.
Every year, every moment, we place a fairytale above a child's life. I want to believe Newtown is a tipping point. I don't want to be disrespectful by asking why it would be. Is it because the children are mostly white? Is it because they are mostly wealthy? Is it because they were killed together? The last time I thought a child's death was going to be a tipping point was when 7 year old Aiyana Jones was murdered for sleeping on her sofa. I don't know why I thought Aiyana would change us. She wasn't different from all the other children needlessly killed by the culture of violence we celebrate. In fact, she wasn't killed by a random criminal at all, Aiyana was shot to death in her Disney Princess sheets by a police officer. A few months before that I thought it was going to be the death of 6 year old Makayla Sitton. She was murdered in her bed by a cousin brought to her home for a holiday. By 2011 when Christina Taylor-Green was assassinated for attending a speech by someone she admired I'd given up on America and mass violence.
These are three children out of hundreds and thousands. Children have been killed since Sandy Hook. Newtown was not an aberration in any fashion unless you consider being forced to face the deaths of our children is an aberration. It doesn't hit home. What does hitting home even mean? We want to see the faces of the children, we want to hear their stories. By this we mean pictures of them happy and healthy and whole. Stories of the love their family shared and the shock they leave behind. We want to whistle past the graveyard they lie in. Long after we've moved on, long after we've turned to the next mass shooting and ignored the bodies piling up in single or double or triple numbers around us, the first responders will still see the faces of those children when they close their eyes. Their images won't be happy or healthy and they certainly won't be whole. The damage done by the weapons used at Sandy Hook is the sort that stays with you for a lifetime. These men and women will be dealing with this for the rest of their lives, just as the families of the children will.
America, I think we will deal with this for about five minutes. Then we will turn away, as we always do. There is a fairy tale in our country that video games kill people. Movies kill people. Films kill people. Mental illness kills people. Anything but guns. It's never guns. It's never our easy access to weapons of war, weapons designed to kill each other as quickly as possible. This morning in a good neighborhood where this sort of thing doesn't happen (and what does that mean, really, except that lives are not equally important) a woman went for a bike ride. A man she knew stopped her. They had an exchange of words. He shot her to death and escaped. What if he'd punched her? Knifed her? What if he'd not had the power of the gun in his pocket, the secret knowledge that her life belonged to him just on the basis of his own whim. Would she be alive? Would Jordan Davis? Would Trayvon Martin?
I don't know whose cold dead hands will finally make America drop their weapons. For my kids, for your kids, for all the kids, let's go ahead and drop them now. We can't stop evil but we can disarm it. That's what fairytales are supposed to teach us. To want more. To expect better. To turn away from evil and embrace good. Let's open a different book. Please.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Yes, Virginia, this is about guns.
Some person somewhere, who is claimed by many of our species to be a member of our species, genuinely argued today that we should
train children to tackle gunmen, and that that would solve everything.
Also, as in the wake of just about any mass shooting I care to recall, there has been a knee-jerk freak-out from gun enthusiasts explaining that the answer is more guns. Talking points have been hit, as they are want to do. Switzerland, and their world leader percentile of households containing guns (which are there due to their being issued for mandatory military service by citizens as Switzerland has no standing army...) and low gun crime was brought up. Just don't mention that all bullets are strictly controlled by the state and only available for purchase and use at approved shooting ranges, or that bullets issued to service personnel (in case of invasion while traveling to military installations) are given in sealed packets which are checked to ensure no unauthorized use, or that a national inventory is taken to confirm the whereabouts of each bullet... Shockingly the NRA fell silent until today - lord knows how they'll tackle this one.
But look, squirrel, moar guns in schools comes the tweety-bloggy cry - because if someone had been there with an ankle piece in a sock or a fanny pack holding their Saturday night special, then somehow none of this would have happened.
It's that school yard fuzzy logic in motion for the particular Death Wish Gun Enthusiast - in which a gunman comes into a school and shoots no one - because someone reading his mind shoots him instead though they never go to jail for it because it was proactive self-defense. Everyone gets puppies, and free ice-cream, and if you really want to know the truth of it they're holding out for a quick handy from a grateful teacher or two. Oh and also they're taller than in real life. Maybe an inch or two. Except the gunman's mother is still back home dead, but just push that under a rug. Good. Now. Everyone neat and pretty?
When I was younger and the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air, I had an acquaintance my age who was very upset by it. Christie McAuliffe, (a teacher we might note) quite publicly died in the explosion with the rest of the crew. This kid was traumatized by her death in particular, I think because he didn't know any astronauts, but he saw teachers every day at school. Perhaps it may have been a little Everyman at play as well. I'm sure from his test scores he held no illusions about his space camp potential, but hey if the woman who grades vocab drills could make it - maybe he had a shot too. He watched all the news whenever he could leading up to the launch, and made McAuliffe his own. Then. Well. Shock, denial, most of the stages completely out of order.
For hours and hours he'd argue with me about basic physics (which were still too advanced for our age set), demanding that if only she had waited and then jumped up in the capsule right before impact she would have survived!
I said no - she was probably already dead before impact, but even so, even if she somehow amazingly was alive, awake, unhurt, and able to time a jump with superhuman precision, she'd still be going really, really fast because of kinetic energy and she'd be just as dead when she "landed," because that's how the world works.
My brother-in-law did engineering work in jet propulsion, and was often engaged in or somehow otherwise consulted on NASA projects. A Floridian, he had made a habit of watching every space shuttle launch possible on live broadcast (if he couldn't be in the state I suppose). I'm not even sure he'd missed a launch before that one.
As I understand it from the time, he'd refused to watch that particular launch on the grounds there would be a high probability of catastrophic failure. There had been problems with sealant rings, with earlier launches postponed, but it was evidently clear to him that the conditions causing the malfunctions would not have been adequately fixed by the steps that they had taken. Other engineers would have undoubtedly had similar concerns, and no doubt warnings were given, but this is a highly specialized field - and it's possible the greater majority of people on the team were not even aware how one subset of problems might affect things. Unfortunately it was also a period in NASA's history in which the actual scientists had been pushed out of any higher management or decision making roles in favor of project leaders with significantly lower technical understanding but a good sense of organization skill. Part of the mission management may even have been political appointees. Why am I reminded of all this?
First because telling me that the answer is more guns in school shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works on par with a third grade understanding of physics. Second because this situation may be completely avoidable if the right steps are taken - namely sensible gun law based on practicality (instead of trauma or NRA lobby dollars) and as or even more importantly, reliable mental health care.
We all know there is a problem with the system. The people who have been trained in this field tell us there is a problem with the system. We continue hitting the launch button anyway.
Fill schools with guns. Go ahead. What then? Grenades when someone throws a grenade in a school? Improvised Explosive Devices in the lunchroom? Dirty bombs in every class? What about buses? Grocery stores? The movie theater? Restaurants? Build-A-Bear? Gymboree? Is Chuck E. Cheese packing? Is Ronald? Guns everywhere? Every waking moment? In every hand?
The heart of the matter:
26 people were murdered in under three minutes, many of them - let's be frank - with multiple shots to the head. There's no sensible reason that ammunition clips of that capacity should be sold to the public. Anyone with a gun would likely not have even gotten it out in time before it was all over. There's no sensible reason it should be easier to purchase a gun than to identify and help treat a mental disorder that would cause someone to want to use a gun in this way. Setting aside that the person sitting around daydreaming about the opportunity to "take out" a would be shooter is, I daresay, one bad afternoon's distance from being the person sitting around daydreaming about being would-be shooter.
The solution to a horrible misuse of guns (if we are to presume the position that they have necessary uses) is not to inundate and drown our culture with more, more, and more guns.
What are you teaching the children in this school? In every school? That the answer to someone being mentally unstable is not to have bothered to restrict a gun purchase, not to have bothered to find the reason for their instability before selling them a sidearm, nor have bothered putting in place a system to address it... To have just not frankly bothered. Instead teaching every child in our country that the fix is learning to kill faster, kill quicker than anyone else can, world without end.
I cannot imagine a more dehumanizing, wholesale race to the bottom of human endeavor.
Also, as in the wake of just about any mass shooting I care to recall, there has been a knee-jerk freak-out from gun enthusiasts explaining that the answer is more guns. Talking points have been hit, as they are want to do. Switzerland, and their world leader percentile of households containing guns (which are there due to their being issued for mandatory military service by citizens as Switzerland has no standing army...) and low gun crime was brought up. Just don't mention that all bullets are strictly controlled by the state and only available for purchase and use at approved shooting ranges, or that bullets issued to service personnel (in case of invasion while traveling to military installations) are given in sealed packets which are checked to ensure no unauthorized use, or that a national inventory is taken to confirm the whereabouts of each bullet... Shockingly the NRA fell silent until today - lord knows how they'll tackle this one.
But look, squirrel, moar guns in schools comes the tweety-bloggy cry - because if someone had been there with an ankle piece in a sock or a fanny pack holding their Saturday night special, then somehow none of this would have happened.
It's that school yard fuzzy logic in motion for the particular Death Wish Gun Enthusiast - in which a gunman comes into a school and shoots no one - because someone reading his mind shoots him instead though they never go to jail for it because it was proactive self-defense. Everyone gets puppies, and free ice-cream, and if you really want to know the truth of it they're holding out for a quick handy from a grateful teacher or two. Oh and also they're taller than in real life. Maybe an inch or two. Except the gunman's mother is still back home dead, but just push that under a rug. Good. Now. Everyone neat and pretty?
When I was younger and the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air, I had an acquaintance my age who was very upset by it. Christie McAuliffe, (a teacher we might note) quite publicly died in the explosion with the rest of the crew. This kid was traumatized by her death in particular, I think because he didn't know any astronauts, but he saw teachers every day at school. Perhaps it may have been a little Everyman at play as well. I'm sure from his test scores he held no illusions about his space camp potential, but hey if the woman who grades vocab drills could make it - maybe he had a shot too. He watched all the news whenever he could leading up to the launch, and made McAuliffe his own. Then. Well. Shock, denial, most of the stages completely out of order.
For hours and hours he'd argue with me about basic physics (which were still too advanced for our age set), demanding that if only she had waited and then jumped up in the capsule right before impact she would have survived!
I said no - she was probably already dead before impact, but even so, even if she somehow amazingly was alive, awake, unhurt, and able to time a jump with superhuman precision, she'd still be going really, really fast because of kinetic energy and she'd be just as dead when she "landed," because that's how the world works.
My brother-in-law did engineering work in jet propulsion, and was often engaged in or somehow otherwise consulted on NASA projects. A Floridian, he had made a habit of watching every space shuttle launch possible on live broadcast (if he couldn't be in the state I suppose). I'm not even sure he'd missed a launch before that one.
As I understand it from the time, he'd refused to watch that particular launch on the grounds there would be a high probability of catastrophic failure. There had been problems with sealant rings, with earlier launches postponed, but it was evidently clear to him that the conditions causing the malfunctions would not have been adequately fixed by the steps that they had taken. Other engineers would have undoubtedly had similar concerns, and no doubt warnings were given, but this is a highly specialized field - and it's possible the greater majority of people on the team were not even aware how one subset of problems might affect things. Unfortunately it was also a period in NASA's history in which the actual scientists had been pushed out of any higher management or decision making roles in favor of project leaders with significantly lower technical understanding but a good sense of organization skill. Part of the mission management may even have been political appointees. Why am I reminded of all this?
First because telling me that the answer is more guns in school shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works on par with a third grade understanding of physics. Second because this situation may be completely avoidable if the right steps are taken - namely sensible gun law based on practicality (instead of trauma or NRA lobby dollars) and as or even more importantly, reliable mental health care.
We all know there is a problem with the system. The people who have been trained in this field tell us there is a problem with the system. We continue hitting the launch button anyway.
Fill schools with guns. Go ahead. What then? Grenades when someone throws a grenade in a school? Improvised Explosive Devices in the lunchroom? Dirty bombs in every class? What about buses? Grocery stores? The movie theater? Restaurants? Build-A-Bear? Gymboree? Is Chuck E. Cheese packing? Is Ronald? Guns everywhere? Every waking moment? In every hand?
The heart of the matter:
26 people were murdered in under three minutes, many of them - let's be frank - with multiple shots to the head. There's no sensible reason that ammunition clips of that capacity should be sold to the public. Anyone with a gun would likely not have even gotten it out in time before it was all over. There's no sensible reason it should be easier to purchase a gun than to identify and help treat a mental disorder that would cause someone to want to use a gun in this way. Setting aside that the person sitting around daydreaming about the opportunity to "take out" a would be shooter is, I daresay, one bad afternoon's distance from being the person sitting around daydreaming about being would-be shooter.
The solution to a horrible misuse of guns (if we are to presume the position that they have necessary uses) is not to inundate and drown our culture with more, more, and more guns.
What are you teaching the children in this school? In every school? That the answer to someone being mentally unstable is not to have bothered to restrict a gun purchase, not to have bothered to find the reason for their instability before selling them a sidearm, nor have bothered putting in place a system to address it... To have just not frankly bothered. Instead teaching every child in our country that the fix is learning to kill faster, kill quicker than anyone else can, world without end.
I cannot imagine a more dehumanizing, wholesale race to the bottom of human endeavor.
Friday, November 30, 2012
How Much Is That Baby In The Window?
When is stealing a child socially acceptable? In America, the answer is tied up in issues of class and race. Adoption has many faces. When we think of it we prefer to think of children saved from abusive homes. We embrace the celebrity model of Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie while trying not to look too closely at the more common Madonna model. In my own life I know several adoptees who are thriving. I've also taken part in too many conversations where the potential adoptive parents frame their desires in understandable but problematic ways. With an international adoption, I've been told, there is no chance of having to give the child back. I can't ignore the underpinnings of race and wealth in these discussions of the 'good' countries from which to obtain this desired item, this child. The discussions don't center around the countries with the cleanest records. If the child is actually available for adoption is obscured under the cover of giving them a better life.
What happens when you adopt an older child? One who reveals that the story told by the adoption agency isn't true? We'd like to think that a child who, upon learning English, asks after her parents and siblings is quickly returned to them. Sadly, that's quite rare. While I've read a few stories where the child is returned I've read far more where the adoptive parents justify retaining the child. How many stories go untold? In the case of a child adopted as an infant the truth may never arise. This is where our complicated feelings about race and wealth lead us. Frame a potential abduction as an adoption and all the sympathy reverts to the adoptive parents. It is nearly impossible for parents from the country of origin to reclaim a child adopted into America. In some cases it may seem cruel of the parents to even try.
While we import these lighter skinned children, we export adoptable babies and children of darker skin. The myth that America has a shortage of children needing homes, that adopting a child in America is too difficult, is disproven by our own standing as a source of children on the international stage. While adoption in America can be a long and frustrating process, the alternative is potentially being complicit in a child's abduction. I can't read about a Chinese father tirelessly searching for his missing daughter without wondering if she's taking a dance class in my town. The desire for a child, the complicated myth of saving a child, the text of a better life changes from county to country and from household to household. Is the African American child in Chicago likely to live longer in Ireland? Is that a better life? Is the Guatemalan mother working here illegally automatically unfit to raise her child? Who decides what better means?
There's a case working it's way to SCOTUS right now that illustrates the conflicts of color, wealth, and truth in a way that motivated me to discuss them. While the facts are in dispute, a few things seem clear. A child of the Cherokee Nation was offered by it's non Native American mother for adoption. The father, serving in the Iraq War, disputed the adoption when the child was four months old. For two years the adoptive parents fought to retain the child. She was recently returned to the father under the ICWA. The birth mother did not disclose the child's Native American status during the adoption process, claims the father did not support her and that he signed away his rights. The birth father claims that he did not understand the papers and that the birth mother refused contact with him during her pregnancy. Regardless of the legal truth of the case most of the reporting focuses on the ICWA law, it's intentions and the percent of the child that is Indian. On one side, the case is that the child will have a better life surrounded by her heritage and her birth relatives. On the other, that the child will have a better life in an open adoption with parents chosen by the birth mother. Whatever the ultimate result the child is going to pay.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
When The Dogs Whistle
Twitter is an interesting place to watch people express themselves. It all feels ephemeral. While some are obviously playing roles, far more comments are made by average people revealing themselves. Recently I was following one of the many tags aimed at the election. I think it was the convergence of #Romnesia and #ThingsObamaVotersSay. What struck me about the latter tag was the number of times the tweeters invoked food stamps. In their view, being on food stamps is a vile thing done by vile people. It's a terrible program symbolizing a lack of moral character. In short, those who oppose the President also oppose feeding hungry children. I'm not really sure how you open a conversation with someone whose core belief involves citizens starving in the street.
If these figures can be believed (and I think they can) your average food stamp family is (white) employed and raising children. The family is given about $70 a week. Yet the conversation in the tags is not about people with jobs. It's not about children. It's not about trying to feed a family on $70 a week or why so many jobs in America pay poverty wages. It's about those lazy (often black) people that feel entitled. American residents, thinking food is something due them. Thinking their kids should sleep with full bellies, or even simply not on empty ones.
Of course this is classism and racism converging. When faced with a specific person on food stamps most of these folks will say they don't mean that person, they mean the other persons. The underserving persons. You know, the food stamp people. Not this particular food stamp person. The mythical food stamp person they've created in their head. The one their unexamined biases would prefer to see turned away from food, shelter, and medical care. The grasshopper to their ant.
To me when you say food stamps, I think of myself as a hungry kid. I think of the child my brother told me about a year or so ago. The child who spilled their Salvation Army Thanksgiving dinner and burst into frantic tears at the loss of a meal. The child who kept crying when the meal was replaced, because getting two chances at hot food was so hard to believe. I heard that story at a table with more than my kids could possibly eat. I remembered being the kid who would have sobbed at the ruined turkey. When you say food stamps to me, I'm not thinking about a mythical person I made up in my head. I'm thinking about my life, the lives of my peers, the life of that child in that shelter sobbing over a ten cent roll.
Recently our area began offering free breakfast to all the children at all the schools. The hungry kids were hesitant to claim the free meal because of the scorn from the full kids. The hope is that with the principals taking their meals there, with the staff encouraging everyone to get a good start to their day, that the hungry kids will stop being afraid of someone knowing who they are. The idea has it's opposition. A number of parents are concerned that people will come to rely on the free breakfast. They might expect it. Kids who can eat at home may choose to eat at school. What kind of country would this be if people knew they could always have a meal waiting? How could we ever succeed if hunger didn't drive us? These are the thoughts of people who have always eaten. As Jacques Prevert wrote in La Grasse Matinee "que de barricades pour six malheureuses sardines..."
If these figures can be believed (and I think they can) your average food stamp family is (white) employed and raising children. The family is given about $70 a week. Yet the conversation in the tags is not about people with jobs. It's not about children. It's not about trying to feed a family on $70 a week or why so many jobs in America pay poverty wages. It's about those lazy (often black) people that feel entitled. American residents, thinking food is something due them. Thinking their kids should sleep with full bellies, or even simply not on empty ones.
Of course this is classism and racism converging. When faced with a specific person on food stamps most of these folks will say they don't mean that person, they mean the other persons. The underserving persons. You know, the food stamp people. Not this particular food stamp person. The mythical food stamp person they've created in their head. The one their unexamined biases would prefer to see turned away from food, shelter, and medical care. The grasshopper to their ant.
To me when you say food stamps, I think of myself as a hungry kid. I think of the child my brother told me about a year or so ago. The child who spilled their Salvation Army Thanksgiving dinner and burst into frantic tears at the loss of a meal. The child who kept crying when the meal was replaced, because getting two chances at hot food was so hard to believe. I heard that story at a table with more than my kids could possibly eat. I remembered being the kid who would have sobbed at the ruined turkey. When you say food stamps to me, I'm not thinking about a mythical person I made up in my head. I'm thinking about my life, the lives of my peers, the life of that child in that shelter sobbing over a ten cent roll.
Recently our area began offering free breakfast to all the children at all the schools. The hungry kids were hesitant to claim the free meal because of the scorn from the full kids. The hope is that with the principals taking their meals there, with the staff encouraging everyone to get a good start to their day, that the hungry kids will stop being afraid of someone knowing who they are. The idea has it's opposition. A number of parents are concerned that people will come to rely on the free breakfast. They might expect it. Kids who can eat at home may choose to eat at school. What kind of country would this be if people knew they could always have a meal waiting? How could we ever succeed if hunger didn't drive us? These are the thoughts of people who have always eaten. As Jacques Prevert wrote in La Grasse Matinee "que de barricades pour six malheureuses sardines..."
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