"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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The "news" is not news at all
Well, come the inevitable collapse of the world's economy, as it succumbs to the ravages of parasites, the only news that will matter is what is happening in your neighborhood as you struggle to survive. In many ways that will be a healthier cognitive environment. Nothing undermines health like a steady diet of lies. The logical thing would be to change the system so that it would be welcoming to honest leadership. Meanwhile the system becomes more corrupt at an exponential rate. Fasten your seat belts, folks. We are headed toward a very hard landing on the surface of reality. Hopefully enough people will walk away from the crash with an understanding that finding a better pilot for a non-airworthy aircraft makes no sense. My cousin from Texas sent me the same article about this child's needless death. Here is my response to him as it seems suitable for UnknownNews as well: "Unfortunately, I have had to deal with this sort of thing several times during my work in child abuse. I don't see this as a religious issue. Uniformly the parents involved in this sort of medical neglect are not in their right minds, and haven't been for a long time. Delusional belief systems are a feature of mental illness, as is religiosity. An efficient child protective service would be aware of the danger presented by delusional parents in time to ameliorate the situation.
My cousin Don replied, "And, it seems as though religious groups, even radical ones, are immune from prosecution in incidents like this." "As I think I said, prosecution serves little purpose, although many prosecutions do occur, but maybe not in Texas. What should be on trial is the ineffective child protection service, or more exactly, the elected officials charged with supervising these services. There is virtually always (always in my experience) adequate reason to watch over at risk children and all child abuse laws permit this to happen. A few jurisdictions, King County, Washington and the US Air Force, for instance, do put their resources toward prevention of abuse, and there is no question that it works. "Basically, in the US there is no political will to do anything but provide window dressing on the issue of prevention of child abuse and a tremendous will to do any crazy thing to protect individual adult rights, especially when those rights conflict with the rights of children. And many worse things than dying of a preventable disease happen, much, much worse. Trust me, you don't want to know the details. That is why a story like this ends up in the paper and the massive number of much worse cases do not. The press is just playing with your head. "With a change of attitude toward the rights of children many things would be possible. As a nation we seem to always value appearances and false pride over actual action on our professed beliefs."
Actually the emphasis on "saving the family" is a good one. While it is true that sometimes the best solution to a child's problem is separation, it should be a rare rather than, as now, a common option. The problem in the system is that some families need more supervision than governments are willing to pay for. Neglected families, often struggling with poverty and crime soaked neighborhoods, tend to spiral into such a state that separation is the only rational alternative, but it is never a good one. Kids love even neglectful and harsh parents. Losing one's family, as I did as a very young person, is never in the interests of the child. As an analogous matter consider the "follow along" programs that some schools use to help keep troubled kids in school. Same idea. When King County instituted a "family friend" program to prevent abuse by having minimally trained lay people assigned to at risk families to simply stay connected with them (don't know if they still do it or not) it was highly successful. Visiting nurses can also fill this role but it is needlessly expensive to use them and their training is more needed in medically "at risk" families and the essence of this sort of program is to have a "case load" restricted to just one family. Underlying a lot of the aggressive feelings toward the stereotype of the abusive parent (it is a stereotype that is virtually never reflected in actual families) are the roiling, culturally inspired antagonistic feelings toward the racially and class status "other." When I participated in large gatherings of child abuse professionals I could always be sure to cause a lot of them to lose it by gradually working up from the position that "at risk" families needed "no knock" sorts of intrusive supervision to the position that the only non-discriminating way to do this would be for all families with children to be afforded unannounced visits by child protective workers on some kind of random basis. The lawyers always went postal at this idea. Very entertaining. In this case it may not just be our toxic culture that leads us to indulge in this kind of scapegoating of the lowest status members of society. It might be a primate thing. That said, truly civilized societies need to get beyond giving in to the urge to trash those on the bottom. I am particularly sensitive, or perhaps enlightened, by the fact that I grew up on this bottom tier. I still have trouble dealing with social workers. Even when they are fine people, which they often are, I am nudged by unpleasant memories of dealing with unpleasant social workers as a child. I have always maintained that the best, most direct way to address the manifold problems of this society would be to put on a full court press to prevent child abuse and ensure that ALL children have access to the minimal resources that they need to grow and develop mentally and physically. Just forget the grown-ups and leave them alone. One or two generations of such a commitment, which would cost a tiny sliver of the amount we spend on "defense" (actually war making), and would cure us of most of our self-destructive ways and create the possibility of real social transformation. There I am again, someone who is closer in his thinking to the paleoconservatives sounding like a damn Communist!
By the way, things have become much worse than when I was young. I was quite eager to be taken away from my family. In fact my odyssey began at the age of seven, when I refused to return to the care of my mother and insisted on staying with my father after a visit. My poor dad was simply incapable of parenting or providing and I had to seek other means of survival. I have always seen this background as an enormous advantage. What didn't kill me made me stronger.
On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend my path to anyone else. Accident of fate.
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