Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Badass Of The Week
With a headline like " Man jumps in, punches shark, gets his dog back "....how can you not admire that....? Wow.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
About that scarf...
I haven't done a political post in a while, probably because so much of it seems like the sort of hysterical doomsday predictions one might expect from a classroom of third graders. That goes for both sides, of course....anyway, about that scarf kerfuffle that some of the hard-core right-wing blogs started having a fit about, well, when even Kate had something to say about it, I kinda felt I had to put in my two cents.
First off, my take on it is much like the Jawa Report's. I don't think it's obviously a kaffiyeh...frankly, it looks like exactly what Ray and Dunkin Donuts said it was, which is a simple scarf purchased for the purpose of the shoot, covered in a paisley pattern, and saying it's a kaffiyeh is silly at best.
Kate is also right to point out that the kaffiyeh, by any of its multiple names, is a functional and traditional part of Arab dress, and some variant of it can be found all over the world in any place where it's hot. She's right that simply wearing one doesn't make one a terrorist, or even a sympathizer with one. I disagree with her on the rest of her post, though, largely because a kaffiyeh with the pattern on it popularized by Arafat and others is not just a piece of cloth, and it's not just a headdress. It's a symbol, and saying otherwise is dangerously simplistic.
When a similar mode of dress, and here I'm talking specifically about the version of the kaffiyeh worn by Arafat, is explicitly worn to identify affiliation with a particular movement, political philosophy, racial identity, etc. the act of doing so creates that connection, whether it was there to begin with or not, as long as one is aware of that connection. The PLO's stated goal since its inception has been to destroy Israel, Arafat's repudiation of that in 1998 notwithstanding; there is an inescapable and very real connection between the violence between the various Arabic and Islamic groups and Israel, and the symbols that the two sides rally around every time things heat up. The kaffiyeh is one of those symbols; Arafat wore one every single time he was in public and became associated with it.
One might just as well say the same of lots of other things, though. In certain parts of Los Angeles, wearing either a blue or a red shirt during the mid-80's was tantamount to a death sentence. Schools these days restrict students from wearing clothing closely associated with gangs as a way of keeping their rivalry off school property - it doesn't always work, but one has to start somewhere. Seventy years ago, one group of people in Europe was forced to wear armbands with a yellow six-pointed star on them shortly before six million of them were hauled off and slaughtered. The color red in Russia, China, and most of Eastern Europe has a particular connotation that the rest of the world doesn't. Take some white stars, and thirteen alternating stripes of red and white, put it on a rectangular piece of cloth, and refuse to take it off the pole it's on because some people are shooting at you, and you have the inspiration for the USA's national anthem. A vehicle with two perpendicular intersecting red bars on a white background on a battlefield has come to be connected with medical attention. The list goes on and on and on, endlessly.
People look for meaning where there might not otherwise be any. We associate shapes, colors, patterns, and textures with particular concepts, it's just how we're wired. Take a kaffiyeh of plain white, hold it in place with a simple black agal, and put it on a blue-eyed Caucasian man, and you evoke Lawrence of Arabia. Take one of white with a black spiderweb pattern on it, or a red and white, and you're possibly associating yourself with the Palestinian intifada. Granted, it's not that simplistic....but the connection is there and either ignoring it or ridiculing those that do make that connection is also simplistic. Granted, there are other associations than the ones we're talking about, but meanings change. Context changes. People change.
As a good example of this kind of connection, let's take it out of the realm of Rachael Ray, Dunkin Donuts, or even Yasser Arafat. Zombietime has done a number of photo essays on this subject, so go have a look at two from this month (and read the comments, which in my opinion are the best part):
Nakba-60 - 4th, 6th, 8th, 11th, and particularly the 17th photo of the banner, masked boys shooting rocks with slingshots, a Merkava tank, et al. There's way more, but you'll get my point, just keep scrolling.
UC Berkely's Palestinian Checkpoint - the one of the students in line, about 5 photos down.
San Francisco isn't arid or that hot. The predominant population there is not Arabic. QED, there is another connotation in mind. Is it as simple as "fashionable scarves"? Maybe. Americans have a tendency to do that sort of thing, else there would be no market at all for Che Guevara or Chairman Mao merchandise (15 seconds with Google found those latter two....you don't have to go far), both of which show a deeply distressing lack of historical knowledge about what those two were all about...or else an equally distressing amount of apathy.
I agree with Kate that the whole thing is a hysterical overreaction on the part of both Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson. I disagree, however, that it's as simple as "kaffiyehs have been around for thousands of years, way before Arafat or the Palestinians, so wearing one doesn't mean diddly." One might say the same of the swastika.
Edit: Kate rightly points out in the comments that I paraphrased her post inaccurately. The part of her post that I read that way was this one:
First off, my take on it is much like the Jawa Report's. I don't think it's obviously a kaffiyeh...frankly, it looks like exactly what Ray and Dunkin Donuts said it was, which is a simple scarf purchased for the purpose of the shoot, covered in a paisley pattern, and saying it's a kaffiyeh is silly at best.
Kate is also right to point out that the kaffiyeh, by any of its multiple names, is a functional and traditional part of Arab dress, and some variant of it can be found all over the world in any place where it's hot. She's right that simply wearing one doesn't make one a terrorist, or even a sympathizer with one. I disagree with her on the rest of her post, though, largely because a kaffiyeh with the pattern on it popularized by Arafat and others is not just a piece of cloth, and it's not just a headdress. It's a symbol, and saying otherwise is dangerously simplistic.
When a similar mode of dress, and here I'm talking specifically about the version of the kaffiyeh worn by Arafat, is explicitly worn to identify affiliation with a particular movement, political philosophy, racial identity, etc. the act of doing so creates that connection, whether it was there to begin with or not, as long as one is aware of that connection. The PLO's stated goal since its inception has been to destroy Israel, Arafat's repudiation of that in 1998 notwithstanding; there is an inescapable and very real connection between the violence between the various Arabic and Islamic groups and Israel, and the symbols that the two sides rally around every time things heat up. The kaffiyeh is one of those symbols; Arafat wore one every single time he was in public and became associated with it.
One might just as well say the same of lots of other things, though. In certain parts of Los Angeles, wearing either a blue or a red shirt during the mid-80's was tantamount to a death sentence. Schools these days restrict students from wearing clothing closely associated with gangs as a way of keeping their rivalry off school property - it doesn't always work, but one has to start somewhere. Seventy years ago, one group of people in Europe was forced to wear armbands with a yellow six-pointed star on them shortly before six million of them were hauled off and slaughtered. The color red in Russia, China, and most of Eastern Europe has a particular connotation that the rest of the world doesn't. Take some white stars, and thirteen alternating stripes of red and white, put it on a rectangular piece of cloth, and refuse to take it off the pole it's on because some people are shooting at you, and you have the inspiration for the USA's national anthem. A vehicle with two perpendicular intersecting red bars on a white background on a battlefield has come to be connected with medical attention. The list goes on and on and on, endlessly.
People look for meaning where there might not otherwise be any. We associate shapes, colors, patterns, and textures with particular concepts, it's just how we're wired. Take a kaffiyeh of plain white, hold it in place with a simple black agal, and put it on a blue-eyed Caucasian man, and you evoke Lawrence of Arabia. Take one of white with a black spiderweb pattern on it, or a red and white, and you're possibly associating yourself with the Palestinian intifada. Granted, it's not that simplistic....but the connection is there and either ignoring it or ridiculing those that do make that connection is also simplistic. Granted, there are other associations than the ones we're talking about, but meanings change. Context changes. People change.
As a good example of this kind of connection, let's take it out of the realm of Rachael Ray, Dunkin Donuts, or even Yasser Arafat. Zombietime has done a number of photo essays on this subject, so go have a look at two from this month (and read the comments, which in my opinion are the best part):
Nakba-60 - 4th, 6th, 8th, 11th, and particularly the 17th photo of the banner, masked boys shooting rocks with slingshots, a Merkava tank, et al. There's way more, but you'll get my point, just keep scrolling.
UC Berkely's Palestinian Checkpoint - the one of the students in line, about 5 photos down.
San Francisco isn't arid or that hot. The predominant population there is not Arabic. QED, there is another connotation in mind. Is it as simple as "fashionable scarves"? Maybe. Americans have a tendency to do that sort of thing, else there would be no market at all for Che Guevara or Chairman Mao merchandise (15 seconds with Google found those latter two....you don't have to go far), both of which show a deeply distressing lack of historical knowledge about what those two were all about...or else an equally distressing amount of apathy.
I agree with Kate that the whole thing is a hysterical overreaction on the part of both Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson. I disagree, however, that it's as simple as "kaffiyehs have been around for thousands of years, way before Arafat or the Palestinians, so wearing one doesn't mean diddly." One might say the same of the swastika.
Edit: Kate rightly points out in the comments that I paraphrased her post inaccurately. The part of her post that I read that way was this one:
What hole do Malkin and Johnson live in that they’re convinced the keffiyeh is, in and of itself, a symbol of terrorism? Or that a woman’s wearing of it means, well, anything?
The keffiyeh (also known as the shmagh, shemagh, ghutra, hatta or mashada), is a traditional Arabic men’s headdress. It’s a functional piece of clothing designed to protect the head and neck from the arid, blistering heat of the Middle East. As such, it’s been around for thousands of years — long before Yasser Arafat, the Taliban or any other Islamic extremists.
To argue that, because terrorists have been seen wearing such clothing, anyone who wears similar items must also be a terrorist is laughable.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Yes....we do care.
Instapundit links to a story from Advertiser's Age highlighting something that's bugged me for a long time; the increasingly negative portrayal of men in general, and fathers specifically, in the popular media from the news to sitcoms. Like the two readers that Glenn cites in the updated post, I've also changed brands and refused to use both services and products because of offensive advertising.
When the hell did it become okay to default to portraying fathers as buffoons or the clueless straight man to a wise cracking wife? Even the Cosby Show used this gimmick, although I'll admit that Bill Cosby's version wasn't anywhere near as offensive as, say, the George Lopez Show or Everybody Loves Raymond (I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than have either of those inflicted on me).
The worst part about this kind of emasculation - and that's precisely what it is - is that somehow it's seen as okay. The article I linked to above makes mention of this phenomenon - journalists doing a story on male-bashing ads and entertainment are "astounded" at men being offended by this sort of thing. Why is that?
The only thing I can figure is that somehow, gently poking fun at the stereotype lost its humor along the way and became simple mean-spirited bashing. You don't have to go far online to find whole websites devoted to this radical sort of feminism, which I think is pathetic and sad. Remember Amanda Marcotte? No? Do a Google search on her, or look at the Wikipedia page....and she's by no means the most frothing-at-the-mouth type out there. She simply had a bigger megaphone. It's a simple and straightforward case of women-as-eternal-victims that has come full circle to the man being the target of what is, if one were to turn it around and make a woman or a minority the target of it, obviously offensive pandering to our worst natures.
When the hell did it become okay to default to portraying fathers as buffoons or the clueless straight man to a wise cracking wife? Even the Cosby Show used this gimmick, although I'll admit that Bill Cosby's version wasn't anywhere near as offensive as, say, the George Lopez Show or Everybody Loves Raymond (I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than have either of those inflicted on me).
The worst part about this kind of emasculation - and that's precisely what it is - is that somehow it's seen as okay. The article I linked to above makes mention of this phenomenon - journalists doing a story on male-bashing ads and entertainment are "astounded" at men being offended by this sort of thing. Why is that?
The only thing I can figure is that somehow, gently poking fun at the stereotype lost its humor along the way and became simple mean-spirited bashing. You don't have to go far online to find whole websites devoted to this radical sort of feminism, which I think is pathetic and sad. Remember Amanda Marcotte? No? Do a Google search on her, or look at the Wikipedia page....and she's by no means the most frothing-at-the-mouth type out there. She simply had a bigger megaphone. It's a simple and straightforward case of women-as-eternal-victims that has come full circle to the man being the target of what is, if one were to turn it around and make a woman or a minority the target of it, obviously offensive pandering to our worst natures.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Fun with Liberals
There's a joke where I work, told only in certain company, that if you're a) white, b) male, and c) straight, then you don't get to be diverse...diversity only refers to people that aren't one of those, see? I got a graphic illustration of that earlier today, and I had to share, since I'm not one, not two, but (you guessed it) all three.
I got a link to this news story via my official email. It wasn't a press release, or anything from the Director's Office stating that it was to be distributed. It came, in fact, from somebody with a gmail address, via somebody with a Comcast address, and is the sort of thing I ignore as spam. The subject line, though, was "Fwd: US Violates International Human Rights of People of Color" (there's that term again - see people without color don't have those rights...got it?), which was different enough from the usual glurge that I made the mistake of opening it. Mind you, passing along chain letters is a no-no to begin with, but that's a whole separate issue.
If you're a bit conservative, as I am, you might find that article a bit bad for your blood pressure. The "UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination", huh? I didn't hear any outrage from them during any of the half-dozen "ethnic cleansing" purges in various parts of the world, probably because the countries doing the purging and/or in charge of the Human Rights Commission are the self-same countries that have state-sponsored ways of dealing with pesky minorities....Libya, Syria, China....you know. Them.
Anyway, it struck me as amusing that the guy pushing this article is the "diversity" guy for our office, which given the person in question is much like putting lipstick on a pig. I'll call him Clueless Multiculturalist, or CM for the purposes of the rest of this post. I sent him a polite email:
WG: I'd really prefer not to receive this sort of thing. I find it highly offensive; please don't forward me this kind of garbage in the future. Thanks.
Not suprisingly, I got a short reply a bit later:
CM: Not everything in this world is fair, just like I will not take you off any staff list. In the future if you get something from me that you find offensive please just delete it. Any info that is send out to staff is for informatino only so you are empowered to not read it or delete it.
Isn't that sweet? Passing along offensive forwards is okay because the world isn't fair. Mind you, I never asked for him to alter the distribution list (which by the way is the "official" one) - I asked that he not send it to me. But I'm empowered to not read it. This blew my mind. Here's the guy in charge of diversity telling me that if I'm offended by something he says or passes along that he's not supposed to to begin with, then I'm empowered to not be offended by virtue of the fact that I don't have to open his email.
Rather than explain this to him, I wrote him back and attempted to point out one small flaw in his cunning plan.
WG: The fact that you're using a staff list distribution group to distribute content you've been informed is offensive should be a cue of your own; you're empowered to create your own distribution lists.
I'll refer you back to this conversation the next time you ask me why I didn't get the memo.
What the hell, a little Office Space humor never hurt anybody. His reply:
CM Again, WG, do whatever you need to do with the information you get, but I will not take you off ay of my list since you are part of this branch/agency. What ever you do with your email is up to you and it's not my concern. I will not play this silly game with you so drop it.
I love the sound of righteous indignation in the morning. Now he's offended that I was offended! Not only that, my expressing (twice) that I simply didn't want to be included any longer in the distribution of offensive content went sailing right past him - he doesn't have the administrator rights to our email system to make the changes he's insisting he won't make anyway. I suppose I could have continued pummeling him with the clue bat, but he was getting all huffy and indignant on me, and we can't have that. Red refers to him as the "Mayor of Munchkin-land", because he looks like the guy in the Wizard of Oz, and when he gets upset he tends to swell up a bit, huff and puff, and make general unpleasantness for all around him.
I did, however, create an email-handling rule just for him. Now everything he sends that reaches me goes directly to the trash - I'd have set up one to auto-deny everything, thus preventing delivery, but in order to do that I'd have to have set up an auto-reply function, whish is a major no-no. I asked an IT friend of mine what would have happened if I'd forwarded it to the list of known spam addresses from senders, and he said that although he wasn't sure, it might have auto-blacklisted the entire department's email system.
Good thing I didn't do that. >:)
I got a link to this news story via my official email. It wasn't a press release, or anything from the Director's Office stating that it was to be distributed. It came, in fact, from somebody with a gmail address, via somebody with a Comcast address, and is the sort of thing I ignore as spam. The subject line, though, was "Fwd: US Violates International Human Rights of People of Color" (there's that term again - see people without color don't have those rights...got it?), which was different enough from the usual glurge that I made the mistake of opening it. Mind you, passing along chain letters is a no-no to begin with, but that's a whole separate issue.
If you're a bit conservative, as I am, you might find that article a bit bad for your blood pressure. The "UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination", huh? I didn't hear any outrage from them during any of the half-dozen "ethnic cleansing" purges in various parts of the world, probably because the countries doing the purging and/or in charge of the Human Rights Commission are the self-same countries that have state-sponsored ways of dealing with pesky minorities....Libya, Syria, China....you know. Them.
Anyway, it struck me as amusing that the guy pushing this article is the "diversity" guy for our office, which given the person in question is much like putting lipstick on a pig. I'll call him Clueless Multiculturalist, or CM for the purposes of the rest of this post. I sent him a polite email:
WG: I'd really prefer not to receive this sort of thing. I find it highly offensive; please don't forward me this kind of garbage in the future. Thanks.
Not suprisingly, I got a short reply a bit later:
CM: Not everything in this world is fair, just like I will not take you off any staff list. In the future if you get something from me that you find offensive please just delete it. Any info that is send out to staff is for informatino only so you are empowered to not read it or delete it.
Isn't that sweet? Passing along offensive forwards is okay because the world isn't fair. Mind you, I never asked for him to alter the distribution list (which by the way is the "official" one) - I asked that he not send it to me. But I'm empowered to not read it. This blew my mind. Here's the guy in charge of diversity telling me that if I'm offended by something he says or passes along that he's not supposed to to begin with, then I'm empowered to not be offended by virtue of the fact that I don't have to open his email.
Rather than explain this to him, I wrote him back and attempted to point out one small flaw in his cunning plan.
WG: The fact that you're using a staff list distribution group to distribute content you've been informed is offensive should be a cue of your own; you're empowered to create your own distribution lists.
I'll refer you back to this conversation the next time you ask me why I didn't get the memo.
What the hell, a little Office Space humor never hurt anybody. His reply:
CM Again, WG, do whatever you need to do with the information you get, but I will not take you off ay of my list since you are part of this branch/agency. What ever you do with your email is up to you and it's not my concern. I will not play this silly game with you so drop it.
I love the sound of righteous indignation in the morning. Now he's offended that I was offended! Not only that, my expressing (twice) that I simply didn't want to be included any longer in the distribution of offensive content went sailing right past him - he doesn't have the administrator rights to our email system to make the changes he's insisting he won't make anyway. I suppose I could have continued pummeling him with the clue bat, but he was getting all huffy and indignant on me, and we can't have that. Red refers to him as the "Mayor of Munchkin-land", because he looks like the guy in the Wizard of Oz, and when he gets upset he tends to swell up a bit, huff and puff, and make general unpleasantness for all around him.
I did, however, create an email-handling rule just for him. Now everything he sends that reaches me goes directly to the trash - I'd have set up one to auto-deny everything, thus preventing delivery, but in order to do that I'd have to have set up an auto-reply function, whish is a major no-no. I asked an IT friend of mine what would have happened if I'd forwarded it to the list of known spam addresses from senders, and he said that although he wasn't sure, it might have auto-blacklisted the entire department's email system.
Good thing I didn't do that. >:)
Saturday, March 15, 2008
No wonder she's a bit nuts
I would be too, if the people that were supposed to be gatekeepers kept doing this kind of thing. Firing them isn't enough - criminal prosecution could and should follow under the provisions of HIPAA.
Horrifying, and sad.
Horrifying, and sad.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Followup on the Jacks case...
I did some online exploring, and I thought I'd share some of what I found pertaining to what was or should have been available to Banita Jacks. Again, everything posted here is strictly my opinion and doesn't represent anyone or anything other than myself.
First off, it's important to understand a couple of things about public assistance in general, and Medicaid in particular. Bear with me, because while this is dry going, it'll have some relevance.
Medicaid has had a long and torturous history, undergoing revision after revision, change after change, and every state has some of their own variant on it. A major part of the reason for this is that while it is largely a federally-funded program through three of the different Titles under the umbrella of Social Security, the underlying idea is the same; matching federal dollars. States are expected to divvy up a portion of their own money in order to get matching money from our federal government, under a you-spend-this-much, and I'll-give-you-this-much-more-per-dollar-you-spend arrangement. All of that is dependent on meeting certain federal benchmarks and performance measures. When you hear about this in the MSM, this is what they're talking about. Different programs, obviously, have different expectations, but nearly every single form of public assistance available follows this general arrangement in some way. Read through the link to Wikipedia at the start of this paragraph, and count to yourself how many times you encounter the word "Optional".
Oregon has been, for the last approximate decade, a leader in this field. Governor Kitzhaber, a former (and possibly still practicing, I have no idea) physician from Portland, came up with the idea of the Oregon Health Plan, which extended the federally funded classes of disabled, elderly, pregnant, or child groups into the mainstream population under certain income levels tied to the Federal Poverty level. OHP was a revolutionary idea, and initially, it was supposed to be a pairing between private and public-sector healthcare. The private part fell through, naturally, and the public part came very close to bankrupting Oregon about six years ago - the money to pay for about 130,000 adults to have inexpensive healthcare was coming out of the general fund, which is entirely supplied by state income taxes and also covers Transportation, Emergency Services, and Education. In other words, it became as much a part of the infrastructure of this state as the roads, the police, and the school system. The problem is, when the economy takes a nose dive and people are out of work, there goes the state's funds. Oregon doesn't have a sales tax.
OHP had to be scaled back to a mere shadow of its former self in the 2001-2002 biennium, if I remember correctly. The state simply quit paying for all of those extra services that had started to get well and truly intertwined with the social fabric. The homeless population and crime rates in crowded urban areas soared. The mental health sector essentially dried up and the counselors moved on, because the people that really needed it no longer had health insurance. Chemical Dependency classes for diversions on DUIIs went away. Parents who had lost their children to Child Welfare due to Oregon's soaring methamphetamine problem couldn't get medical coverage to get clean and get their kids back. Jail populations rocketed upwards. Police became overburdened default healthcare services in the absence of preventative medicine.
None of that is an exaggeration. I lost count years ago of the number of times I had to tell adults, "Sorry. You didn't pay your $6 premium for one month of your Medicaid, and since you have arrearages now, I have to cut your medical off. Get it back? I'm sorry, you don't understand....the program doesn't exist anymore. You can't get it back." It was heartbreaking.
The District of Columbia is unique in this country, in that by dint of its inclusion in the Constitution, not only is it not a state, but it can't be a state. Guess what that means for the concept of matching dollars, as I outlined above? You got it....the amount of money that DC has to spend on ANY kind of discretionary funding simply isn't there. How often have you seen news reports about the problems keeping the roads paved in DC? If they can't keep roads paved and cops paid for, they won't be paying for extra healthcare for the poor.
I took a look through the Human Services website for DC earlier today and found what I had expected - Medicaid services are the bare-bones minimum of what federal dollars are allowed to pay for. There aren't any additional services. I would also hazard a guess that my own counterparts in DC, on both the family programs and the protective services sides of things, aren't nearly as well paid as I am, and probably have a bigger and more difficult caseload problem than I do. By saying that, mind you, I'm not downplaying my own job - I'm just saying as hard as I've got it, their job is harder by a whole order of magnitude. Consequently, the boom of time that Oregon got where nearly everybody under 100% of the Federal Poverty Level was eligible for affordable healthcare really hasn't ever existed in DC. It's bad there, it never got better during the 90's like most of the rest of this country, and as hard as the rest of us have it, it's worse there.
The CPS worker mentioned in this story was very likely in an impossible position. Expected to maintain contact with an impossible number of families and work 1:1 with all of them on an ongoing basis, she very likely did what any of us would have done - if one encounters an absolute refusal to cooperate on the part of the client, even to answer the door, then at some point one has to quit paying attention to that family and move on to the next, just as or more urgent need. Every day, there are news stories about horrifying things that happen to kids, wives, husbands, elders, or immigrants in this country. Those stories aren't unusual - to the CPS workers out there, those stories are every day reality. In medicine, we call it triage and it's understandable. In social work, the public refers to it as laziness, and yet decries the expense of maintaining more trained and willing staff to handle the workload.
In a nutshell - Banita Jacks did not have adequate mental health care because there wasn't enough money to pay for an undiagnosed disabled adult with children to have such care, unless she fell under about 10% of the Federal Poverty Level and qualified for some variant of TANF. Banita Jacks didn't ask for help because she was disturbed and probably couldn't. Banita Jacks didn't get the help she needed from the social agencies that are tasked with it because the schools, the social workers, the police, and her neighbors did not have the resources to pay attention to the little things - they are in a position where the big problems are as much as they can deal with.
It comes down to money, and that's the worst tragedy of all. You know 1% of each of the 50 states' budget would be enough to make DC one of the most beautiful and sought-after capitol cities in the world? And yet we depend on stingy federal money, Congress that has other things to argue about, and lobbyists from other parts of the country squeezing the federal teat for all they're worth. Banita Jacks' family died because she was sick, and because nobody could help her.
First off, it's important to understand a couple of things about public assistance in general, and Medicaid in particular. Bear with me, because while this is dry going, it'll have some relevance.
Medicaid has had a long and torturous history, undergoing revision after revision, change after change, and every state has some of their own variant on it. A major part of the reason for this is that while it is largely a federally-funded program through three of the different Titles under the umbrella of Social Security, the underlying idea is the same; matching federal dollars. States are expected to divvy up a portion of their own money in order to get matching money from our federal government, under a you-spend-this-much, and I'll-give-you-this-much-more-per-dollar-you-spend arrangement. All of that is dependent on meeting certain federal benchmarks and performance measures. When you hear about this in the MSM, this is what they're talking about. Different programs, obviously, have different expectations, but nearly every single form of public assistance available follows this general arrangement in some way. Read through the link to Wikipedia at the start of this paragraph, and count to yourself how many times you encounter the word "Optional".
Oregon has been, for the last approximate decade, a leader in this field. Governor Kitzhaber, a former (and possibly still practicing, I have no idea) physician from Portland, came up with the idea of the Oregon Health Plan, which extended the federally funded classes of disabled, elderly, pregnant, or child groups into the mainstream population under certain income levels tied to the Federal Poverty level. OHP was a revolutionary idea, and initially, it was supposed to be a pairing between private and public-sector healthcare. The private part fell through, naturally, and the public part came very close to bankrupting Oregon about six years ago - the money to pay for about 130,000 adults to have inexpensive healthcare was coming out of the general fund, which is entirely supplied by state income taxes and also covers Transportation, Emergency Services, and Education. In other words, it became as much a part of the infrastructure of this state as the roads, the police, and the school system. The problem is, when the economy takes a nose dive and people are out of work, there goes the state's funds. Oregon doesn't have a sales tax.
OHP had to be scaled back to a mere shadow of its former self in the 2001-2002 biennium, if I remember correctly. The state simply quit paying for all of those extra services that had started to get well and truly intertwined with the social fabric. The homeless population and crime rates in crowded urban areas soared. The mental health sector essentially dried up and the counselors moved on, because the people that really needed it no longer had health insurance. Chemical Dependency classes for diversions on DUIIs went away. Parents who had lost their children to Child Welfare due to Oregon's soaring methamphetamine problem couldn't get medical coverage to get clean and get their kids back. Jail populations rocketed upwards. Police became overburdened default healthcare services in the absence of preventative medicine.
None of that is an exaggeration. I lost count years ago of the number of times I had to tell adults, "Sorry. You didn't pay your $6 premium for one month of your Medicaid, and since you have arrearages now, I have to cut your medical off. Get it back? I'm sorry, you don't understand....the program doesn't exist anymore. You can't get it back." It was heartbreaking.
The District of Columbia is unique in this country, in that by dint of its inclusion in the Constitution, not only is it not a state, but it can't be a state. Guess what that means for the concept of matching dollars, as I outlined above? You got it....the amount of money that DC has to spend on ANY kind of discretionary funding simply isn't there. How often have you seen news reports about the problems keeping the roads paved in DC? If they can't keep roads paved and cops paid for, they won't be paying for extra healthcare for the poor.
I took a look through the Human Services website for DC earlier today and found what I had expected - Medicaid services are the bare-bones minimum of what federal dollars are allowed to pay for. There aren't any additional services. I would also hazard a guess that my own counterparts in DC, on both the family programs and the protective services sides of things, aren't nearly as well paid as I am, and probably have a bigger and more difficult caseload problem than I do. By saying that, mind you, I'm not downplaying my own job - I'm just saying as hard as I've got it, their job is harder by a whole order of magnitude. Consequently, the boom of time that Oregon got where nearly everybody under 100% of the Federal Poverty Level was eligible for affordable healthcare really hasn't ever existed in DC. It's bad there, it never got better during the 90's like most of the rest of this country, and as hard as the rest of us have it, it's worse there.
The CPS worker mentioned in this story was very likely in an impossible position. Expected to maintain contact with an impossible number of families and work 1:1 with all of them on an ongoing basis, she very likely did what any of us would have done - if one encounters an absolute refusal to cooperate on the part of the client, even to answer the door, then at some point one has to quit paying attention to that family and move on to the next, just as or more urgent need. Every day, there are news stories about horrifying things that happen to kids, wives, husbands, elders, or immigrants in this country. Those stories aren't unusual - to the CPS workers out there, those stories are every day reality. In medicine, we call it triage and it's understandable. In social work, the public refers to it as laziness, and yet decries the expense of maintaining more trained and willing staff to handle the workload.
In a nutshell - Banita Jacks did not have adequate mental health care because there wasn't enough money to pay for an undiagnosed disabled adult with children to have such care, unless she fell under about 10% of the Federal Poverty Level and qualified for some variant of TANF. Banita Jacks didn't ask for help because she was disturbed and probably couldn't. Banita Jacks didn't get the help she needed from the social agencies that are tasked with it because the schools, the social workers, the police, and her neighbors did not have the resources to pay attention to the little things - they are in a position where the big problems are as much as they can deal with.
It comes down to money, and that's the worst tragedy of all. You know 1% of each of the 50 states' budget would be enough to make DC one of the most beautiful and sought-after capitol cities in the world? And yet we depend on stingy federal money, Congress that has other things to argue about, and lobbyists from other parts of the country squeezing the federal teat for all they're worth. Banita Jacks' family died because she was sick, and because nobody could help her.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Thoughts on the Banita Jacks case
I haven't posted on the Banita Jacks case yet, partially because I do strive to keep my "professional" identity separate from my personal, and from my blogger pseudonym. Before I get any further into this, let me stress the statement over there to your right and down a bit...the opinions posted here are my opinions and don't represent the opinion or position of any other person, agency, company, etc. This goes double, maybe even triple for my specific employer. My opinions here are no more valid than anybody else's; I simply have relevant experience that colors my opinion.
I've been a social worker for about eight years now. In that time, I've seen a lot of things, including tragedies that were picked up by the national media. I've seen the "inside" side of things like this....the reactions from within the social agencies that from the outside seem so monolithic. Let me tell you, in the case of Banita Jacks, heads will roll. Depend on it.
The thing is, the really sad thing is, that this needn't have happened. Kate has posted a couple of times on this, including an excellent roundup that got me to thinking, even before I got an email from her asking about my thoughts. She closes with the question, Who failed Banita Jacks?
Ultimately, I think nearly every jurisdiction in this country restricts forcible mental health treatment to those that are an imminent danger to themself or others. While Ms. Jacks fits this criteria for obvious reasons, the difference here is that it was somebody's duty to have noticed it, reported it to people that could do something about it, and taken appropriate action. On behalf of the children, that much, again, is obvious.
What's not so obvious, though, is that one person noticing something when nobody else wants to say anything doesn't accomplish much. Much like the horrifying story of Kitty Genovese in New York, there is a vast difference between "everybody knowing something" and everybody actually knowing that everybody knows it. If that doesn't make much sense, consider this. Kate counts five separate agencies with, individually, duty to see what was happening to those children and say or do something about it. I count far more than that...because the Jacks had neighbors. The children had friends, and those friends had parents. For god's sake, the place they lived was an apartment in southeastern DC.
It is impossible that none of the neighbors knew or suspected that something had happened to those children, or that Banita Jacks was a danger to those children or herself.
Impossible.
Whether or not they'll ever be willing to admit it to someone other than a psychiatrist, lawyer, or priest, all of whom have the luxury of an official pass on having to tell somebody about it, well, that's another story.
So who failed Banita Jacks? The answer is pretty simple. We all did. I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton, but the premise of her book is a pretty simple, and accurate one. Children and families do not exist in a vacuum, and we as a society have said that we feel it's important to protect the innocent from those who would harm them. The innocent in this case includes Banita Jacks, in part at least because help for her mental illness should have been available and wasn't. I don't know if this is because Medicaid's coverage for mental health services, and for adults in general, has been largely gutted by tax shortfalls the way it happened in Oregon about six years ago, or if those services were actually available to Banita Jacks and she was unable or unwilling to access them. I have no idea.
Honestly, though....help should have been available. Help should have been forthcoming. It wasn't, and it's a tragedy that will breed a lot of public embarassment for elected officials, which will translate into downhill-flowing wrath, all the way to the hapless and probably horrifyingly overworked CPS worker that failed to make contact with the family before the worst happened. People will get fired, rules will be changed, officials will vow in public that it will never happen again, and politicians will exploit and manipulate it in the media for personal gain. In the end, it may change things, a little. It may help another family, or inspire another CPS worker to go the extra mile just one more time. Who knows?
The only thing I know is that Banita Jacks was sick, and her children paid the ultimate price because nobody around her was willing or able to do something about it.
I've been a social worker for about eight years now. In that time, I've seen a lot of things, including tragedies that were picked up by the national media. I've seen the "inside" side of things like this....the reactions from within the social agencies that from the outside seem so monolithic. Let me tell you, in the case of Banita Jacks, heads will roll. Depend on it.
The thing is, the really sad thing is, that this needn't have happened. Kate has posted a couple of times on this, including an excellent roundup that got me to thinking, even before I got an email from her asking about my thoughts. She closes with the question, Who failed Banita Jacks?
Ultimately, I think nearly every jurisdiction in this country restricts forcible mental health treatment to those that are an imminent danger to themself or others. While Ms. Jacks fits this criteria for obvious reasons, the difference here is that it was somebody's duty to have noticed it, reported it to people that could do something about it, and taken appropriate action. On behalf of the children, that much, again, is obvious.
What's not so obvious, though, is that one person noticing something when nobody else wants to say anything doesn't accomplish much. Much like the horrifying story of Kitty Genovese in New York, there is a vast difference between "everybody knowing something" and everybody actually knowing that everybody knows it. If that doesn't make much sense, consider this. Kate counts five separate agencies with, individually, duty to see what was happening to those children and say or do something about it. I count far more than that...because the Jacks had neighbors. The children had friends, and those friends had parents. For god's sake, the place they lived was an apartment in southeastern DC.
It is impossible that none of the neighbors knew or suspected that something had happened to those children, or that Banita Jacks was a danger to those children or herself.
Impossible.
Whether or not they'll ever be willing to admit it to someone other than a psychiatrist, lawyer, or priest, all of whom have the luxury of an official pass on having to tell somebody about it, well, that's another story.
So who failed Banita Jacks? The answer is pretty simple. We all did. I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton, but the premise of her book is a pretty simple, and accurate one. Children and families do not exist in a vacuum, and we as a society have said that we feel it's important to protect the innocent from those who would harm them. The innocent in this case includes Banita Jacks, in part at least because help for her mental illness should have been available and wasn't. I don't know if this is because Medicaid's coverage for mental health services, and for adults in general, has been largely gutted by tax shortfalls the way it happened in Oregon about six years ago, or if those services were actually available to Banita Jacks and she was unable or unwilling to access them. I have no idea.
Honestly, though....help should have been available. Help should have been forthcoming. It wasn't, and it's a tragedy that will breed a lot of public embarassment for elected officials, which will translate into downhill-flowing wrath, all the way to the hapless and probably horrifyingly overworked CPS worker that failed to make contact with the family before the worst happened. People will get fired, rules will be changed, officials will vow in public that it will never happen again, and politicians will exploit and manipulate it in the media for personal gain. In the end, it may change things, a little. It may help another family, or inspire another CPS worker to go the extra mile just one more time. Who knows?
The only thing I know is that Banita Jacks was sick, and her children paid the ultimate price because nobody around her was willing or able to do something about it.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Sad news
Kevin Dubrow, the lead singer for Quiet Riot, was found dead today. This really sucks.
My biggest memories of Quiet Riot are much like my memories of Twisted Sister....fond ones, of a group of guys with really big hair having fun poking fun at the more serious metal bands in the 80's. I'm sure there were lots of drugs involved, I never really looked past the music to be honest.
Still, it's sad. :(
My biggest memories of Quiet Riot are much like my memories of Twisted Sister....fond ones, of a group of guys with really big hair having fun poking fun at the more serious metal bands in the 80's. I'm sure there were lots of drugs involved, I never really looked past the music to be honest.
Still, it's sad. :(
Sunday, November 4, 2007
An interesting point
The Advice Goddess raises a good point:
It doesn’t take much for domestic violence against men to be taken seriously…usually, just a chalk outline where a man’s body used to be. The rest of the time, people tend to shrug it off or even find it cute: “Well, well, well, she’s quite the firecracker!” Granted, male abusers can do much more damage with their fists, but put a heavy object in a woman’s hands, and good morning brain damage! (Just wondering…has your husband gotten the ashtray out of his skull, or does he have to hang around smoking areas with his head bent down so people have someplace to flick their ash?)
I've been mulling over whether or not to get into the debate about feminism since I started writing this blog (yes, all three months of it....lol). I couldn't ignore this one.
My ex-wife is, or at least was, a staunch feminist of the "women are oppressed and always have been" stripe. I want to be clear about this: she is entitled to her opinion, and I am not going to say it doesn't have any merit. I do, however, happen to disagree with that viewpoint; this is largely because there are abundant examples of women who have chosen, for whatever reason, to stand out from the crowd and take some kind of action on their own behalf.
Therein lies the problem. Men, as a rule, have a strong tendency to see productive action as validating. Be successful, do something important, take action.....don't just sit and talk about it, for God's sakes....you'll never get anywhere that way. The problem with this point of view, and again, it has merit, but I'm not necessarily agreeing with it, is that it discounts all of the things that women seem to be naturally wired to do, which is networking and social interaction.
The feminist movement is, largely, exactly such a network. If men have a valid point that the cards are stacked against them in a domestic dispute with a woman, then one has to think a bit about why the deck is on the table that way and who's doing the dealing. This didn't happen by accident; the feminist movement going back to Sappho has focused its attention on changing the world to reflect its own agenda.
This, in concept, is not a bad idea. The problem is, things have gone too far.
How have we gotten in this country to a point where police responding to a domestic dispute immediately assume that the typical picture of woman = victim exists? Not all cops think that way, to be fair, but a great deal of them do based on experience. Presupposing the situation's details aside, in my opinion that's much like assuming that dice have a memory or that the stock market is always predictable - there are simply too many variables at work in peoples' interactions to assume that because a) has happened before, and often, that a) is also automatically true unless proven otherwise.
Dr. Helen had an article at Pajamas Media not too long ago that I found thought provoking, asking whether marriage is a winning propositon for men. The answer from her commenters was overwhelmingly no, that a man getting married is giving up far more than his freedom, he's opening the door willingly for a woman to take advantage of him in every way imaginable. Is this true? Have we really reached a point where the prospect of marriage's drawbacks outweigh its benefits?
Feminists have a point that there's a glass ceiling in a male-dominated workplace. I happen to work in an environment that is nearly the exact opposite, however - there are virtually no men at all in lower to middle management of the agency I work for, except if you go looking into IT. Other than that, one has to go further up into the upper echelons to find men. At my level, it's even more lopsided - my workplace numbers something like 40 women and 7 men. It's not quite 10:1, but it's close. Is this evidence of a glass ceiling, then, or it something much more pedestrian? The industry I work in doesn't attact a lot of men, and since the ranks of management are largely drawn from the pool of talent already in the agency, it would tend to make more sense.
Going back to the question of domestic violence, though, brings me to my last point (at least, as far as this post goes...). Men are encouraged, generally, to be emotionally repressed; thinking a problem through, reacting logically, taking whatever action is appropriate, these are all what men are "supposed" to do. For men to actually put the drive to "do" aside, and spend time networking, talking, and thinking the problem out, is hard, in part I think because it isn't generally encouraged (ie. not "masculine"), and in part because generally we have so little experience at it. Men - and I'm speaking largely for myself here - generally fear ridicule or mockery of their failures more than just about anything else, and not taking the somewhat more usual path of problem --> solution --> action --> resolution leaves one open to precisely that kind of shame.
In other words, expecting the person that's supposed to be "strong" to open up and discuss gooshy feelings is on a very basic level very counterintuitive. Personally, I think it takes a lot more strength to talk about one's problems than pretend they don't exist, but not everybody sees it that way.
It doesn’t take much for domestic violence against men to be taken seriously…usually, just a chalk outline where a man’s body used to be. The rest of the time, people tend to shrug it off or even find it cute: “Well, well, well, she’s quite the firecracker!” Granted, male abusers can do much more damage with their fists, but put a heavy object in a woman’s hands, and good morning brain damage! (Just wondering…has your husband gotten the ashtray out of his skull, or does he have to hang around smoking areas with his head bent down so people have someplace to flick their ash?)
I've been mulling over whether or not to get into the debate about feminism since I started writing this blog (yes, all three months of it....lol). I couldn't ignore this one.
My ex-wife is, or at least was, a staunch feminist of the "women are oppressed and always have been" stripe. I want to be clear about this: she is entitled to her opinion, and I am not going to say it doesn't have any merit. I do, however, happen to disagree with that viewpoint; this is largely because there are abundant examples of women who have chosen, for whatever reason, to stand out from the crowd and take some kind of action on their own behalf.
Therein lies the problem. Men, as a rule, have a strong tendency to see productive action as validating. Be successful, do something important, take action.....don't just sit and talk about it, for God's sakes....you'll never get anywhere that way. The problem with this point of view, and again, it has merit, but I'm not necessarily agreeing with it, is that it discounts all of the things that women seem to be naturally wired to do, which is networking and social interaction.
The feminist movement is, largely, exactly such a network. If men have a valid point that the cards are stacked against them in a domestic dispute with a woman, then one has to think a bit about why the deck is on the table that way and who's doing the dealing. This didn't happen by accident; the feminist movement going back to Sappho has focused its attention on changing the world to reflect its own agenda.
This, in concept, is not a bad idea. The problem is, things have gone too far.
How have we gotten in this country to a point where police responding to a domestic dispute immediately assume that the typical picture of woman = victim exists? Not all cops think that way, to be fair, but a great deal of them do based on experience. Presupposing the situation's details aside, in my opinion that's much like assuming that dice have a memory or that the stock market is always predictable - there are simply too many variables at work in peoples' interactions to assume that because a) has happened before, and often, that a) is also automatically true unless proven otherwise.
Dr. Helen had an article at Pajamas Media not too long ago that I found thought provoking, asking whether marriage is a winning propositon for men. The answer from her commenters was overwhelmingly no, that a man getting married is giving up far more than his freedom, he's opening the door willingly for a woman to take advantage of him in every way imaginable. Is this true? Have we really reached a point where the prospect of marriage's drawbacks outweigh its benefits?
Feminists have a point that there's a glass ceiling in a male-dominated workplace. I happen to work in an environment that is nearly the exact opposite, however - there are virtually no men at all in lower to middle management of the agency I work for, except if you go looking into IT. Other than that, one has to go further up into the upper echelons to find men. At my level, it's even more lopsided - my workplace numbers something like 40 women and 7 men. It's not quite 10:1, but it's close. Is this evidence of a glass ceiling, then, or it something much more pedestrian? The industry I work in doesn't attact a lot of men, and since the ranks of management are largely drawn from the pool of talent already in the agency, it would tend to make more sense.
Going back to the question of domestic violence, though, brings me to my last point (at least, as far as this post goes...). Men are encouraged, generally, to be emotionally repressed; thinking a problem through, reacting logically, taking whatever action is appropriate, these are all what men are "supposed" to do. For men to actually put the drive to "do" aside, and spend time networking, talking, and thinking the problem out, is hard, in part I think because it isn't generally encouraged (ie. not "masculine"), and in part because generally we have so little experience at it. Men - and I'm speaking largely for myself here - generally fear ridicule or mockery of their failures more than just about anything else, and not taking the somewhat more usual path of problem --> solution --> action --> resolution leaves one open to precisely that kind of shame.
In other words, expecting the person that's supposed to be "strong" to open up and discuss gooshy feelings is on a very basic level very counterintuitive. Personally, I think it takes a lot more strength to talk about one's problems than pretend they don't exist, but not everybody sees it that way.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Pubic Service Announcement
I'm only going to post once about this spoiled brat - this blog is officially a Paris-Free Zone.
The "travesty of justice" and the "raw deal" that Paris mentioned on Larry King...? Yeah, that'd be on our part. She should have gotten more time; 20-something days in a jail cell isn't enough to have Found Jesus and become a Reformed Member Of Society. Anybody wanting to debate that needs a serious read of county jail recidivism rates. She's contrite because her business deals depend on a public show of remorse, not because she's changed her ways.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled whatever.
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