Maeve Maddox

Some people feel so strongly about the abortion of unborn infants that they are willing to murder adults in a gesture of protest.

I’ve often wondered why the decent people who are so troubled by the practice of abortion don’t turn their deeply felt love of the unborn to helping the children who were not aborted, but who may have been better off if they had been.

My morning paper today features a story about a couple who adopted a special needs child, knowing that his expected life-expectancy was 12 years or less. The child, born in Hawaii, had been shaken as an infant. The experience left him blinded, permanently brain-damaged, and suffering from seizures and cerebral palsy. He was six when he died.

According to the story, from 1,200 to 1,400 infants are killed or injured every year by being shaken. Twenty-five per cent of shaken babies die from the abuse. Those that survive suffer side-effects of varying degrees.

In addition to shaken babies are the huge numbers of chldren who suffer other types of abuse.

According to the Darkness to Light site,

1 in 4 girls is sexually abused before the age of 18. (96)

1 in 6 boys is sexually abused before the age of 18. (96)

1 in 5 children are solicited sexually while on the internet. (30, 87)

Nearly 70% of all reported sexual assaults (including assaults on adults) occur to children ages 17 and under. (76)

An estimated 39 million survivors of childhood sexual abuse exist in America today.

More than 500,000 children are in the overburdened foster care system.

Thousands of children live in the homes of meth manufacturers, contracting physical disabilities that will plague them all of their lives.  For example,

a husband and father of five children manufactured and stored chemicals associated with the manufacture of methamphetamine in and under his home for years.  As a result, the five children all suffered severe liver damage.

Children exposed to the chemicals used to make meth develop learning disabilities and long-term health problems. Many die as a result of fires and explosions in home meth labs. Many others, whose parents are wholly innocent of criminal activity, end up living in houses or apartments that have been contaminated by meth manufacturing and can still cause harm.

Millions of American children go hungry much of the year.

According to the FRAC (Food Research and Action Center) site,

Of the 49.1 million people living in food insecure households (up from 36.2 million in 2007), 32.4 million are adults (14.4 percent of all adults) and 16.7 million are children (22.5 percent of all children).

17.3 million people lived in households that were considered to have “very low food security,” . . . that means one or more people in the household were hungry over the course of the year because of the inability to afford enough food. This was up from 11.9 million in 2007 and 8.5 million in 2000.

Millions of children lack adequate health care because their parents cannot pay for insurance. According to a story on the ScienceDaily site,

[l]ack of health insurance might have led or contributed to nearly 17,000 deaths among hospitalized children in the United States in the span of less than two decades, according to research led by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

Of the thousands of children in the criminal justice system, “as many as 65 to 75 percent of juvenile offenders have one or more psychiatric disorders.”

I understand that people feel strongly that abortion for any reason is unacceptable. Women who feel this way should not have abortions.

All others who claim to oppose abortion because of a love of children, would do well to direct their efforts to the rescue of the suffering children already living in their midst.

Abortion is not the worst thing that can happen to a child.

Darkness to Light (child abuse)

Institute for Intergovernmental Research (The Methamphetamine Problem)

Food Research and Action Center (FRAC)

ScienceDaily (lack of insurance)

February 7, 2010 | Tags: abortion, child abuse, hungry children, neglected children, uninsured children | Category: Popular Culture | Leave a comment

Last night I watched the President’s State of the Union address.  I’ll admit to having hesitated to watch. I voted for Obama, but I haven’t been particularly happy with the way things have been going in Washington. But when I heard on the radio that it was time, I dutifully turned off the radio and turned on the TV.

I kept the sound down until the President was actually ready to begin. I hate being told what he’s going to say and then, afterwards, what he said.  What kind of morons do the commentators think we are?  Or are they afraid that we’ll listen to the speech and hear the words that are said and how they are said?

It was a while before the President smiled, but when he did, it lit up the room. It recalled the enthusiasm I’d had for his candidacy. It was genuine. It was humanizing. It was a dramatic contrast to what the camera showed in the audience, panning the faces of his opposition.

Republican lawmakers

Those stony faces exuded resentment, dislike, perhaps even hatred. Those were the faces of not just political opposition, but belligerent refusal to cooperate.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a President speak directly to the lawmakers who are screwing up the government in specific and certain terms. This one did it.

The Supreme Court was sitting together down front, robes of office showing their special and exalted status. The President told them what he thought of the outrageous decision they made the other day concerning turning American elections over to the richest corporate entities in the world.

He told the uncooperative members of congress and the senate that it was time to forget their personal agendas and work for the people who sent them to Washington.

He reminded them that the national deficit was already in the trillions when he walked in the door a year ago.

He reminded them that the previous administration had taken office with a large surplus, the legacy of the administration before them.

He stood there, David smiling at Goliath, reiterating the goals he had for the government. His enemies stared back, chewing the insides of their lips, biting back the insults they were longing to shout, closing their minds to reason, common sense, and the needs of their constituents.

I turned off the TV before the commentators could make me forget my impressions. I was reassured in only one thing: we have a capable President.  I remained discouraged, however, because I saw, on those grim faces in the crowd, the petty, powerful determination to obstruct his efforts to govern this country as a democracy.

Graham and Sessions

January 28, 2010 | Tags: Obama, Republican opposition, State of the Union | Category: Politics | Leave a comment

One manifestation of the separatist movement in the United States is the objection to the traditional image of the American Melting Pot, in which people from all parts of the world fuse their customs to become Americans.

Play poster from 1916

The new, politically-correct image is that of  the American Mosaic in which the separate ethnic and cultural ingredients remain separate, attached to one another by some sort of undefined cement that connects them, but prevents them from fusing.

I believe that the Melting Pot is the preferable concept.

In a mosaic, the only binder is the cement; weaken that and the whole crumbles, leaving separate bits with nothing in common except physical location; consider Bosnia, Rwanda, Pakistan.

In the melting pot, the disparate elements become an alloy.  The African contribution joins with the Irish, the Chinese, the Jewish, the Mexican, the American Indian, etc., to become something new, something distinctly “American” as opposed to European or Indian, African, or Asian.

In the Melting Pot the original elements are not lost. They are transformed so that the alloy is the stuff of which all Americans are formed.

Like a member of the Starship Enterprise, the Melting Pot-American may choose to wear a dashiki or a sari or a serape during leisure hours.  He can identify with his family’s origins and personal values without setting up an adversarial relationship to Americans who choose to identify with some other element in the national alloy.

The Melting Pot-American values ethnic difference without losing sight of the importance of the national interest and public good. Because all Americans share in the mix, all Americans, if they are sane and even nominally educated in the nation’s history, are able to understand multiple viewpoints and find ways to work with one another.

The Mosaic-American says

I’m different, you don’t understand me.

You can’t understand me.

I don’t want you to understand me.

I don’t want to talk like you.

Stay on your side of the grout and I’ll stay on mine.

I’ll teach my children what I want them to believe about history and I don’t want the public schools to contradict what I have taught them.

and don’t try to make them say the Pledge because they’re not “American,” they’re * * * (insert the ethnic, racial, or religious designation of your choice.)

History is lies.

You can’t trust books.

You can’t trust teachers.

You can’t trust anybody who doesn’t look, think, and talk like us.

The Melting Pot image says

We are all Americans with the same stake in the country.

Our ancestors shared certain experiences in the past and we share certain experiences in the present.

We are a mixture of all the races, religions, and cultures  of the world which are themselves a mixture of all that is best and worst in human belief and practice.

We can choose to include the best of this world heritage in our national identity and refuse to preserve the evil.”

The image of the Mosaic seeks to deny the historical fact that as cultures collide they merge and fuse.

The image of the Melting Pot recognizes the historical truth that children are different from their parents because they occupy a different niche in historical time, and because their minds are exposed to different thoughts, ideas, and world conditions.

The Mosaic image promotes intolerance and is shored up by keeping children ignorant. The Melting Pot image promotes the idea of a national identity and stakes everything on educating children to think for themselves.

It is no accident that the popularity of the Mosaic image coincides with a decline in the quality of public education.

From the Mosaic point of view, the ungrammatical memoir of an uneducated criminal is equal in value to the works of George Orwell.  Books for “literature” classes are not selected for a content of the best writing of the best writers, but for the uncritical inclusion of a politically-correct mix of writers according to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and economic status.

The concept of educating children in the genius of their native language so that they can not only appreciate it but use it to clarify and strengthen their own thinking, has been lost.  A new generation of Americans is growing up ignorant of shades of meaning, standard pronunciation, grammatical construction, and the pleasures of reading.

Adamantly “mosaic” Americans who refuse to speak a standard form of English will find little advantage in their chosen dialect if the English they speak is incomprehensible to non-native speakers who have learned standard English.

The question of which image to adopt as a metaphor for the American experience is not trivial. The act of naturalization should be seen as a ritual that confers a new ethnicity and not just a new mailing address.

Becoming “an American” does not have to mean relinquishing one’s childhood customs, clothing, or religion.  It should, however, entail a shift of national loyalties and the acceptance of specific civic responsibilties.

The American ethnicity should recognize national values not shared by some other countries.   For example,

tolerance of diverse religious beliefs–as long as the citizens who hold them don’t try to impose them on the citizens who don’t.

equal protection under the law--not special rules according to wealth, celebrity, or gender

responsible capitalism–freedom to pursue wealth without license to grind the poor

Values and ideals are not the same as realities.

The realities of life in the United States are often in contradiction to the ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence and the the Pledge of Allegiance.

The disconnects that exist, however, should not be used as excuses to abandon the vision of a nation unlike any that has existed before: a nation in which people are truly free and equal, socially,

economically, and intellectually.

To achieve such ideals a people and its government must work together. Special interest groups with conflicting goals tend to lose sight of a national vision.

Melting Pot or Mosaic? It’s nothing less than the choice between a unified national purpose and an internecine battleground.

December 15, 2009 | Category: Popular Culture | Leave a comment

A headline in the Dallas News proclaims with apparent disapproval:

Inequities found in area Advanced Placement course choices

The gist of the story is that high school students in high income school districts are offered a greater selection of Advanced Placement college courses than students in less advantaged neighborhoods.

Surprise, surprise!

How is that different from any other aspect of life in the United States? Parents with large incomes are able to provide their children with more advantages than parents who earn barely enough to cover basic necessities.

Schools reflect the communities they are in.

According to the article, only 19% of the students in the schools with the most AP courses are low-income, compared to 62% low-income students in the schools with the fewest AP courses.

The article also quotes these facts:

Fifty-four per cent of the Texas students who took AP exams in 2009 failed them.

At a predominantly low-income school, 89% of the students who took AP exams failed them.

Getting worked up about the lack of advanced placement courses in low-income schools is ridiculous. It’s like complaining that a school for paraplegics doesn’t offer courses in ballroom dancing.

Instead of attempting to turn every U.S. high school into a college prep tank, reformers would do well to look at the actual needs of the school population.

AP courses are not a high priority in most U. S. schools.  Basic literacy is.

Although all the political hype is about sending students to college, how many U.S. high school graduates actually go to college?

Statistics vary, according to the agenda of whoever is providing them, but from what I can determine, only about 33% of high school graduates go to college.

It would be nice to assume that those who go to college represent the most able of the graduates.  However, according to various reports, 60-70% of college freshmen require remediation in basic subjects.

If the “cream of the crop” is so lacking in basic educational attainments, what must that say about the nearly 70% who don’t go to college?

I say stop worrying about providing a huge menu of AP courses until more students are brought to a level of literacy that will enable them to benefit from them.

And stop pretending that college should be the ultimate goal of every high school graduate.

Make high school graduation in itself mean something.  Stop wasting time in the early grades.

In eight years of formal instruction, a young person is capable of mastering such basic skills as standard English and basic arithmetic.  By the end of the tenth grade a student of average or better intelligence can be ready to benefit from what are called AP courses.

The last two years of high school should be a period of intense academic study for the students who are suited to it, and a period of practical training for those who want to pursue a non-academic course of learning.

A college-bound high school graduate should know how to speak, think, and write at a college level of literacy.  Non-college-bound high school graduates should be able to enter a chosen occupation having mastered its basic skills. They should also be able to read well enough to continue their education on their own.

Inequities found in area Advanced Placement course choices

Schools Can’t Do It All

December 7, 2009 | Category: Education | Leave a comment

Note ding in door

A few weeks ago I decided that it was time for me to buy a new car. Not that there was anything terribly wrong with the car I was driving, but because the car had been in the family since 2002 and I was tired of it.

My elderly mother bought it as a “program car” with under 10,000 miles on it.  She drove it to the grocery store and to the Bridge House (place where little old ladies play bridge). When she could no longer drive, she gave the car to my son.  He drove it until he decided he wanted a pickup.  That’s when it became my car.

I justified a change by saying I needed a car that would let me sit up higher, something like a RAV4.  My son took me from dealershp to dealership and I sat in various vehicles, all more or less the same size and type.  I admired the cool dashboards, the iPhone outlets, the heated seats, the electric everythings.  And the colors.

My mother loved the color of her car. I hated it, a boring beige.  I wanted something bright blue. Or red.

So it went for several weeks, visiting dealerships, jerking my head around to follow a pretty SUV, lusting after a new car as my perfectly adequate old one took me where I needed to go.

Finally I took a shiny red RAV4 home over night. I admired it in my driveway. I drove it into my garage, but couldn’t open the door to get out. Never mind. Lots of people leave their cars in their driveways.  I really had the new car bug.  I decided to find out how much they’d give me on my Corolla. Sure, it was old, but it had been well taken care of and not driven to death. It had only 42,000 miles on it.  I figured I should get at least $5,000.

The dealer said he’d give me $2,500 for my old car. Yes, it was low mileage, but hey, there’s a dented place on the driver’s side. And some hail damage.  And, he reminded me sadly, it is old. I said I’d think about it and drove home.

Hail damage

I walked around my 2001 beige Corolla. The dent on the driver’s side isn’t all that big. As for the hail damage, you really have to search to find it.

I looked at the printout from the dealership. Less trade-in, the total came to $20,607.95. And that didn’t include sales tax.

With the new car smell out of my nostrils, my brain began to function. To the dealer my 2001 Corolla is worth $2,500.  But to me, if I don’t buy a new car, it’s worth at least $20,000.

As for the color, maybe I’ll like it better if I stop thinking of it as beige and start calling it Desert Sand.

November 30, 2009 | Tags: $20000 car, 2001 Corolla, Add new tag, new car fever | Category: Popular Culture | Leave a comment

A story rocking my part of the world is that of a police officer tasering a ten-year-old girl.

I’d love to see a picture of this girl.  She must be pretty fearsome to have prompted her mother to call the police in the first place.

Seems the mother wanted the girl to take a shower before going to bed. The girl did not want to.  As we say in these parts, she threw a fit.  Mother phoned the police.  The policeman told the girl to settle down and mind her mother.

The girl continued to resist. The adults decided she needed to go to jail. When the policeman proceeded to handcuff her, the girl kicked him in the groin. That’s when he tasered her.  But, he says he asked the mother first and that she gave her permission.

The story has a lot to say about U.S. culture:

Parents who let their children reach the age of ten without socializing them.

Parents who expect the civil authorities to socialize their children long past the window of opportunity.

Parents who have so little feeling for their own children that they would give permission for them to be tasered.

I have no doubt that the girl’s behavior was abominable. I spent many years as a classroom teacher. I’ve seen what kind of violence is possible in children who are allowed to grow up without being socialized by their parents. I can even understand the urge to taser some of them.

This is a story that deserves everyone’s attention. Not because of the tasering, but because of the mother who felt she had to call the police because she was being terrorized by her own ten year old.

Be assured that there are plenty of other parents and children like this in every town and city in the U.S. This kind of terrorism needs to be addressed as well as the kind that comes from abroad.

November 20, 2009 | Tags: tazer, tazering, ten year old, unsocialized children | Category: Popular Culture | Comments (1)

NPR reporter Richard Gonzales filed a story on November 4, 2009  about the conflict between San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors.

The conflict is over a sanctuary law that has protected undocumented immigrants in San Francisco since 1980. At the center of the conflict is the case of Edwin Ramos, who  entered the United States illegally at the age of 13, committed two felonies at the age of 17 and, at the age of 21, murdered three people.

As horrible as all this is, the criminal case is not the topic of this post. Richard Gonzales’s choice of words is.

I can’t fault him for quoting the mayor who uses the word “kids” inappropriately:

These are kids that committed felonies.”

But a professional journalist ought to know better.

The following uses of “kid” to denote juveniles who practice criminal behavior belong entirely to Gonzales:

But immigration advocates say kids who are merely accused of a crime but are ultimately found innocent are being deported.

[City Supervisor David Campos] says undocumented kids accused of a crime should be reported to federal authorities but only after a felony conviction — not before.

Still, Newsom insists he’ll ignore the Board of Supervisors, and he has ordered city employees to continue reporting to the feds any undocumented kids arrested for a felony.

Let’s keep kid and kids as pleasant, informal words for child and children. Let’s find more appropriate words for referring to young punks, robbers, thieves, drug pushers, terrorists and murderers.

More of my views on the use of kid

More about Edwin Ramos:

Time.com

San Francisco Chronicle

November 9, 2009 | Tags: Add new tag, child, children, Edwin Ramos, kid, kids, Language, San Francisco, sanctuary law, youthful offenders | Category: Language | Leave a comment

The title of an opinion piece by Peggy Noonan in the November 2, 2009 Wall Street Journal says it all:

We’re Governed by Callous Children

Noonan argues that there’s a new mood of despair in the country and that Washington leaders are too stupid and unimaginative to see it.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

She goes on to say that these “sons and daughters of abundance” think of themselves as optimists, but they aren’t:

They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

Noonan calls Washington lawmakers “children” because  they are self-centered and unreflective.

I think the comparison of our Washington legislators to children can be expanded to include not just their thought processes, but their behavior and their attitude that ordinary standards of civility and morality don’t apply to them.

Eighth-graders who commit crimes or shout insults at the principal in a school assembly defend their actions by arguing that they are “just kids.”  Teenagers don’t expect to suffer consequences for anything they do. They expect to be given an unlimited number of “second” chances. Apparently, so do senators and representatives.

When teenagers behave badly, the repercussions are generally confined to family, friends and local community.

Bad behavior among Washington political leaders can bring down the country

Read the Noonan article.

November 6, 2009 | Tags: Add new tag, Peggy Noonan, Politics, spoil brat legislators | Category: Politics | Leave a comment

While wealthy legislators in Washington haggle over how to protect the profits of private insurance providers, men and women trying to live in the United States on less than $30,000 a year are standing in line for two and a half hours to get flu shots for themselves and their children.

And they stand in line gladly because at the end of the wait their children are protected from the flu.

If not for free flu clinics, millions of Americans could not pay to immunize their children at $25 a pop.

We don’t need an all-purpose, all or nothing bill thousands of pages long dedicated to safe-guarding the financial interests of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

We need a few practical measures dealing with health and how people who earn less than a senator can stay well.

Something as simple as free flu shots can be a life saver for low income families.

Compared to the senators and congressmen, at least three-quarters of the population is low income.

Congressmen and senators are paid $174,000 a year. Someone working for the minimum wage is lucky to earn $14,000 a year. As a teacher, I was earning $35,000 after 25 years of teaching.

Even without all the extras they manage to pile onto that princely sum, congressmen and senators live higher on the hog than millions of the rest of us.

I cannot understand what prompts all the bile being spewed by politicians and others over efforts to bring about a change in the way health care is administered in this country.

I’m just now becoming aware of venomous media personalities who dedicate themselves to expounding a selfish, mean-spirited view of human existence.

Come on, people!  Turn off the talk shows and look around the community you live in. Let real people shape your views, not  anti-social bullies like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Cunningham and Glen Beck.

When it comes down to it, those flickering noisy shadows don’t even exist. But your neighbors do.

November 1, 2009 | Category: Politics | Leave a comment