I had taken off early from work to go get my children from school. It had been a fairly hectic day and I was frazzled and the traffic was the usual Austin stop and go parking lot all the way across town to pick up my daughter from her school. Then I drove back across town through the same traffic to pick up my son from his day care.
We had all just gotten back in the car. I had strapped my son in the child seat, made sure my daughter was buckled into the passenger seat and gotten in the car myself. Visions of which kind of food we’d get on the way home were being discussed when the world came unstuck and started to spin around my head.
I had nothing to alleviate the rotational vertigo with me in the car. I really had no idea how to treat it other than to hug the toilet and throw up until it passed. I couldn’t do either of those things because we were miles away from home. I didn’t have a cellphone at the time because we couldn’t afford one. The school was closed and the teachers had all gone home.
So we waited. It was summer in Texas so we sat there with the engine running in the car and the air conditioner blowing full blast on my face while I stared fixedly at a screw head in the interior finish of my car. This went on for about two hours.
After that time, with little let up in the vertigo and no convenient police cars to flag down, I got my daughter to play lookout for me. I would creep forward to an intersection and wait for her to tell me it was clear. Luckily there was little traffic on the side roads between where we were and where the house was, so I just went block by block until we got back to the house, where I promptly went to the bathroom and started throwing up.
A friend bought a cellphone for me the next day and demanded I allow her to pay for it. I started carrying meclizine around with me. When that proved to not be enough I got valium and promethazine and had to use them and the cellphone pretty regularly to keep the nausea to a minimum and to call people to get me home. Get my children home. Then I stopped working and things got a lot easier to deal with even if paying for them got quite a bit harder.
I’ll never forget that day, though. How helpless I felt. How dreadfully wrong everything could have gone. It is probably one of those scarring events that keeps me from doing things to this day, and that day was about twenty years ago.
This is one of the things that we need to be going to polls for, restoring the Child Tax Credit. If you want to reduce the impact of inflation on the people most devastated by inflation, then you want to ease the burdens of the parents of young children. Their children are the real victims of this economic turmoil.
…and it’s much more than that. If you want to reduce the number of abortions you have to visibly provide support for mothers. If you are going to force the end of abortion in the United States (as we seem hell bent on doing, even though it is impossible to achieve) then you must provide support for the children that you are now directly bringing into the world by your interference. There will be a bill due from all of this turmoil, and if we don’t pay it to the children they will take it from those who live long enough to see them come of age.
The common denominator between these two stories is economics; the inability of the mother-to-be to afford the child that they are aborting. If you really want to reduce the reliance on abortion then the thing you need to do is give these women money to raise their children with. If they are expected to work or give birth they will generally not pick give birth and it is stupid to expect them to.
Democracies cannot persist with the kind of income inequalities that we have, and the lack of economic mobility that we have, forever. It is true that children have no lobbyists in Washington D.C. and that may be one of the reasons why; you know, I’ve been there on the floor late at night when people are breaking their back at the end of the year before they go home for the holidays, to make sure rich people’s tax cuts are extended, to make sure that tax cuts for the largest corporations are extended.
When it came to children living in this country, Washington just went home.
LAST YEAR it looked like America had found the solution to child poverty: spend more. The expanded child tax credit is thought to have lifted around 3.7m children out of poverty. But the legislation expired and rates shot back up. How did America find the answer to a long-running problem, only to abandon it?
The Economist (still looking for a gift subscription)
We are 38th out of the 41 industrialized countries in the world when it comes to child poverty. Parents cannot work and raise children, they have to either work or raise children. I know because I lived in a single parent household from the age of 14 until I found a decent job and moved out of my mother’s house. I raised her children because she was at work all the time. That was 1977-1983, the longest six years of my life.
We treat children like an afterthought here in the US. We certainly don’t spend the time or money to make sure that they are fed, housed, clothed and given access to the educations that they need to thrive. Children are the future and the future is everyone’s problem, not just the parent’s problem. If we had half a brain in this country, we’d be spending far more than what the child tax credit gave to the poor children of America.
The child separation policy is still going on, over a year and a half after I posted this article the first time (August 26th, 2018) So I’m revising it and moving it up to today, December 22, 2019. We have since learned that the Trump administration has been separating children from their families from the very beginning. So, the crime against humanity that this policy is has gone on in our name for almost three years now.
No one who’s read this damned and damnable executive order, has read it and isn’t a Stormtrumper, seems to think that anything will change tomorrow. Frankly, I don’t see how anything can change tomorrow, which means that the outrage and lawsuits have to continue until we #ImpeachTrump, because the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) doesn’t know what the truth is. If there is one thing we can say for certain about the OHM, it is that he does not have a personalized conception of the truth beyond whatever the words coming out of his mouth at that very moment are. Some people would call that stupid, some people would call that moronic. I simply refer to it as Real Estate Developer’s syndrome, something that everyone of them I’ve ever met seems to have in common.
For days I’ve been reading and posting news stories about the Trump administration’s policy of family separation. This policy is the most inhumane and unAmerican thing that the OHM has done to date, but I don’t think he’s done with the outrageous behavior on the subject of immigration yet. Not by half, even. He can’t stop. This is exactly what he campaigned on. This is why people voted for him. This is what his base wants him to do, punish immigrants to whatever level it takes in order to make the immigrants leave. To make asylum seekers go elsewhere. This is what his cabinet officers and advisors who have spoken on this subject have been saying for weeks now, that punishment is the goal and self-deportation is the desired outcome.
So he can’t be done and this practice will continue in some form, possibly in exactly the same way it has been going on for months. Going on in our name. Rachel Maddow broke down in tears on national television (Tuesday June 19, 2018) just reading about the tender age shelters, the Trump administration’s euphemism for places where they put babies they’ve torn from their parent’s grasp, or tricked them into surrendering voluntarily. So we’ve gotten to a place where talking heads, people trained in the art of maintaining calm in the face of anything the news throws at you, talking heads breaking down in tears at the news that babies have internment camps that they are being sent to. Babies. In internment camps. Let that idea sink in for a few.
The defenders of these policies have a few valid points. The first one is that the parents in question are breaking a law, it is a misdemeanor to cross into the United States except at border crossings. A misdemeanor that would not even get you arrested were it not involving the convoluted subject of immigration in the United States. This law has almost never been subject to prosecution until now, but the OHM is correct that he can have these people prosecuted, and does want these people prosecuted. That is the job of the executive branch of the federal government, 100% his policy in spite of every protestation he has made to the contrary.
The second point is that there are many American children who go to sleep each night in worse conditions than these children in internment camps on the Southern border. This is also demonstrably true. I myself had days when three hots and a cot were more an aspiration than a reality when I was a child. However, the fact that many children face worse treatment and housing conditions in the US is not a justification for treating the children of asylum seekers as badly as we treat our own citizens; rather, it is an observation of just how far the poor in the US need to be elevated in order for them to meet the standards set by governing bodies all around the world for treatment of refugees, let alone what the citizens of the wealthiest nation on the face of this planet should be able to expect from being among the chozen few who get to live here.
There should be a backlash by Americans over the treatment of children who had the misfortune to be born outside the US in a time of global unrest. People who are no different than we would be if we were forced out of our homes and made to seek charity from the tender mercies of the more fortunate. Let us hope that the people we are faced with, should such a misfortune befall any of us, are more forgiving than we have been. We need to send a clear signal to the rest of the world, and we need to do it now. #ImpeachTrump. Do it now. Do it before more horrors are committed in our names.
The OHM’s administration failed to meet family reunification deadlines set by the courts today (July 10, 2018) So the torment of children and their parents at the hands of the US government continues. These are our dollars at work here. This is our government. If you voted for Trump, you voted for this to happen. Understand the horror you have created here. Child abduction is not a political issue. Abducting children and imprisoning their parents for crimes they were given no alternative but to commit can’t be a political issue because there’s nobody out there aside from slavers that think that stealing children is a good idea. I will go so far as to say that I don’t even think immigration should be a political issue.
You live here, you work here, you pay taxes here? Welcome, citizen. I don’t know what other requirements for citizenship there should be aside from saying I want to be a citizen and proving your upstanding status (again, live, work, pay taxes) I’m singularly uninterested in there being an underclass that can be subjected to lower wages and fewer rights so that I can get my tomatoes a few dollars cheaper. I’ll pay more for produce. Institute a guest worker program with a path to citizenship, screen everybody and then let them get to work. It certainly isn’t rocket science to make the immigration system function, we just have to admit that we need the workers and that we want to do right by them.
Asylum seekers are being stripped of rights under the current regime. It was bad enough when Obama allowed ICE to house children in detention centers when they were coming over the border unaccompanied (and with parents) back in 2014 seeking asylum. But at least those kids got asylum hearings and were dealt with in a legal fashion. This travesty has to end, and it isn’t just Trump to blame. Every Republican in congress could have stood up and fixed this problem back in 2010 and every year since. They haven’t. They haven’t even tried, aside from Rubio, who backpedaled from his own bill so fast you’d swear someone else had written it. Shame on them, is all I have to say. Shame on them and everyone who voted for them.
Like the article on Puerto Rico, this article and the other open-ended #ImpeachTrump articles will be updated as I run across more substantial stories that alter or strengthen their core arguments. The hashtag that should be trending if you think this is the election issue to motivate voters? How about #TrumpInternment2018? That has a nice double-entendre to it.
In testimony given in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, it was revealed that the kinds of trauma we are witnessing in the children seperated and now reunited with their parents, was detailed to the Trump administration officials who wanted to carry out these policies, before they put the policies into force,
“There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”
This is 100% on Trump. Nobody else. His administration, his policies, his fault. Not to mention the hundreds of other children not reunited, that the US will now be sued over because of Trump’s ham-handed policies that violated international and US law. Grounds for impeachment, yet again.
At the Nogales pedestrian port of entry in Arizona, some families with small children waited for up to two weeks before a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer allowed them to come through and ask for asylum, according to the Kino Border Initiative, a binational organization that gives aid to migrants along the border.
On a recent visit to Nogales, four families were waiting. Two had spent the night on the makeshift camp at the port of entry. All of them waited for at least two days to be seen by a CBP officer. And on that day, agents processed only two families.
This inaction is what is forcing asylum seekers to cross the border illegally.
This summer, in a project designed by ProPublica, 10 news organizations are sharing information to flesh out the hidden details of families separated by the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy. Bob speaks with Selymar Colón, digital managing editor at Univision News, one of the organizations involved in the collaboration, about how the consortium has investigated and reported on some of the 200 tips it has received —and about the four families that were reunited after their stories were published.
Perhaps this was what the Trump administration was thinking they would rely on when they tried to fob off the chore of reuniting these poor people with their children. As usual, when it comes to the OHM’s lack of thought on a subject, they mistook this effort for the efforts of the ACLU. Perhaps if he read things instead of relying on visualizations, he would look less ignorant to the outside observer.
After U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Trump administration’s new “zero-tolerance” policy in April, the U.S. government faced a national outcry. This new policy meant all adults crossing the border illegally would be criminally prosecuted. A consequence of that shift has meant that thousands of immigrant children have been torn apart from their parents.
Since then, and under a judge’s mandate, the federal government has been scrambling to reunify families. In part one of a two-part episode, Latino USA breaks down the aftermath of the family separation crisis and explores what happens to the hundreds of kids who still aren’t reunited with their families because their parents have been deported.
Juan Sanchez first gained national notoriety back in June of 2018 when Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley flew to Texas to try and tour a shelter that he believed was housing children who had been separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s new “zero-tolerance” policy. Senator Merkley was denied access to the shelter and was even questioned by police who were called by the shelter’s staffers.There seem to be two opposing narratives when it comes to Juan Sanchez. So host Maria Hinojosa and producer Antonia Cereijido travel to Austin, Texas, to see which one was the correct one.
Some five hundred and sixty children are still separated from their parents, including twenty-four who are five years old or younger, and the parents of more than three hundred and sixty of them have already been deported. Between seven hundred and eight hundred other children were reunited with their parents in detention, where their situation is especially confounding. About half of the reunited parents have final orders of deportation—in many instances, because they’d been pressured to sign papers waiving their rights to pursue their immigration cases. As a result, families face a choice: either a parent and child can agree to be deported together, or the child can stay in this country alone while her own case is decided. Last Thursday night, Sabraw issued an order temporarily blocking the deportation of reunited parents so that they could have more time to weigh their legal options with immigration lawyers. As Dara Lind wrote, at Vox, “The question right now is when they will actually be deported, not whether they will be.”
To date (as the article details) no one in the administration has been held to account for their administration’s policy of kidnapping the children of asylum seekers with the intent to profit off of keeping these children in the US illegally. Someone must answer for the Trump administrations crimes.
Children these days don’t know what child abuse is.
That’s what she said. After having child protective services show up at her house because her child called them after a spanking. After attempting to send the child away with child protective services for their temerity at attempting to tell her how to raise her children. After the door of the narrative was closed in the face of intervention by others in her desire to raise her own children the way she wanted, she said “children these days don’t know what child abuse is.”
I wish that were true. I want that to be true.
I was beaten every day as a child. Through almost two years of school, I received daily licks for refusing to participate in class with the other children. Autism or dysgraphia, take your pick. My father used a belt on us at least weekly if not more often. My stepfather, offended at something or other I said, or perhaps outraged at my attempts to deflect his anger at my mother away from her, knocked me to the floor and kicked me in the stomach.
I know what child abuse is.
There is a quiet, calculating place in my mind. I know it well. It is where I go when I feel that the pressure outside myself is more than I can handle. I hide there while the tumult goes on around me. I go there when people talk about punishing children, talk as if children deserve punishment just for being children. When they talk about how guns aren’t a manifestation of physical violence solidified (they are) I went there while I was being beaten as a child. While I was on the living room floor being kicked in the stomach. While I was on the laundry room floor of my apartment building after being punched in the face by a neighbor. It is my hiding place.
In that place I contemplate revenge. I contemplate what justice would look like, if there were a thing called justice in the world. Would the children be given permission to beat their parents? Could you make neighbors who assault their wives and other people around them disappear, without having to face justice for your actions in making them disappear?
Gun owners statistically face justice for owning physical manifestations of violence since a significant portion of them will end up taking their own lives with their treasured possessions. But what about the victims who never know the peace of a wrong made right? Where is justice for them?
I tried never to exact corporal punishment on my children. I have tried never to physically lash out at anyone all my life. I cannot trust myself. There is too much rage in there for me to ever be capable of measured violence. My children begged for spankings, because a spanking would be easy and that would get the punishment over with in their minds. They had to come up with the punishment for their own transgressions. Frequently the punishments they devised were harsher than what the wife and I had agreed on as a proper punishment for whatever it was they did.
That is what children are, just like most people are. Harder on themselves than any outside observer has the right to believe based on the behavior in question. Only sociopaths and psychopaths (and other extremely mentally challenged types) lack those self-monitoring default behaviors. Adult supervision just means watching the children. It doesn’t mean you have to punish them.
Fomenting a love of reading in the next generation should be one of a parent’s highest goals. With a love of reading an intelligent child can learn almost anything needed to cope in life. Without it even the brightest cannot fend for themselves.
Student debt is reaching worrisome heights ($1.2 trillion and counting) — soaring 231 percent over the last decade, far more than mortgage or auto loan debt. Meanwhile, the real wages of recent college graduates are dropping. As a result, young people are living with their parents, delaying marriage, and unable to pursue careers they want but that don’t pay well.
What’s the answer? The best solution would be to make higher education free, as it was in many public universities as late as the 1960s — when we understood that college wasn’t just a private investment but also a public good.
After we started living together back in 1987, the Wife quit working for the tire testing company where we met and decided to do more with her life than just keep driving the same tire testing route every day of the week. So she went back to college to finish her bachelor’s degree, switching her major to English because a degree in English could be completed quickly and she could put the fact that she completed college on her resume. With her not working it became too expensive to maintain the household without resorting to taking out student loans. We didn’t think much of it at the time. She finished her classwork as quickly as possible and was back out of college and back to work before we knew it. However, the student loans lingered on for decades. They were a shadow that loomed over all our plans for the future and hampered our ability to get credit when we needed it, costing us money that we could have used for other things that we could have bought outright had they not been a drain on our funds.
We finally settled with the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corporation for a lump sum, washing our hands of the whole business. When she went back to college to get her master’s degree, we were both in agreement that we would not make the same mistake a second time. It was tough going, getting her through college and raising a daughter at the same time, but we got through it. We got through it mostly because I worked my ass off drafting for a couple of different architecture firms. Luckily my health held out long enough to pull that off.
The experience of both taking on debt and trying to get an education without accruing debt soured us both on the subject of student loans and higher education from that point forward. I was adamant that the daughter not take out student loans when she went to college and I will do my best to keep the son from doing so as well. Student loans are bad. Just bad, don’t take them. Don’t take them, unless these conditions are met:
IF it was possible to have those loans forgiven at some point in the future, or
IF they weren’t subject to any interest at all,
THEN I might admit that they weren’t an active harm on our children’s future.
Until that time, student loans are one of the worst ideas ever conceived. They cost you money at the time in your young life where money is hard to come by. They influence you to take the first job you are offered rather than shop around for better prospects; because if you don’t take that job, you will have to default/postpone your student loan payments. Most of the time the loan company conveniently loses your requests to postpone and charges you extra for missed payments.
The education system as a whole needs to be restructured. There really isn’t a good reason for tuition to cost what it does now aside from the fact that student loans are easy to get and backed by the government. State universities all across the nation frequently had low or no tuition when they were founded. It’s only been a recent development that tuitions are set where they are, because states have cut funding to their universities.
This is why president Obama was talking about making community college free. Because expecting people to pay for an education discourages them from getting one. We should be making college education free for every in-demand profession. This will encourage people to become doctors or engineers, education paths that are long and currently very expensive.
I attempted to continue the task I had set for myself earlier in the year. The task of leveling one of each class of character for World of Warcraft, and running them all through the different parts of the game. This event proved to me that I could not do everything with all my toons. Coming so close on the end of the Noblegarden event, I was simply not prepared to spend every single waking hour of every single day farming for the Children’s Weekevent.
This event really made me question what it was I was doing in the game in the first place. Here I am taking the orphans of the war between the Orcs and Humans out on to battlefields and into deadly danger, supposedly oblivious to the harm that befalls everyone who ventures onto a battlefield.
The disquiet this event caused me echoed the disbelief that I felt when I heard that Blizzard was creating World of Warcraft in the first place. The lesson taught in Warcraft III was that we had to cease the war between Orcs and Humans and join together to destroy the Undead, whose very existence threatened the continuation of life itself. World of Warcraft as a strictly PVP experience goes against that lesson since it is specifically two factions at war, one of which included the undead in their forces. It just didn’t make any sense to play World of Warcraft if I accepted the moral lesson behind Warcraft III.
Here I am though, making more orphans and then trying to console the orphans that I’m shepherding around the World of Warcraft. I understood why Blizzard put the event in the game, to bring this reality tickling back into the mind of the player and do it humorously; but as a survivor of violence as a child, the event does not work for me. I finished it on a few toons, but I doubt I will ever get this done on every toon.
facebook (there were dozens of links to chose from)
Postscript
…and I never have. This is one of the world events that I just gave up on after getting it done for one or two toons. Once I had the toys and pets I pretended it wasn’t even part of the game. I was surprised that it showed up in game this week. As you can see, I’m writing and not playing the game at the moment.
Profit motive is the problem behind all entertainment ventures that go sideways. They go sideways as their makers try to continue to come up with ways to make money off of the fans of their existing work. Warcraft III remains the pinnacle of the Blizzard gaming empire, in my estimation. They came to the right conclusion, but that conclusion didn’t make them money beyond the end of that game and there is always the need to make one more game. They’ve got to keep making money, after all.
One more game and a finite number of fresh ideas held within any single human mind. There is bound to be repetition. More than 30 years of it, now.
I woke up at 9:00am this morning. Woke up at 9:00am on a morning that I had to get the children to school. On a morning that I had to have them at school by 8:30am. When we finally came rolling into the classroom, I had to apologize at school.
Writing 20 times on the chalkboard I will not oversleep on school mornings. Can you be Bart Simpson and be 40 at the same time?
Facebook status. This post is illustrative of what short status notifications are good for. You can zip them off and then forget about them only to be reminded of that time when eleven years later.No, I didn’t actually have to write on the chalkboard. But the teacher made me apologize to the class.
