When injustice becomes law… Resistance becomes a duty

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Resistance

Marie-Therese Connolly: “I was shocked that the problem is so invisible”

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elder abuse

MacArthur ‘genius’ grant goes to D.C. activist who fights elder abuse

“THERESE CONNOLLY: Elder abuse can be physical, sexual, or psychological abuse. It can be neglect. It can happen at homes, in communities, in facilities. So last year there was research indicating that about one in ten people over 60 are abused, neglected, or exploited, and that’s folks who are healthier. Among people who have dementia, the resent research is that about 47 percent are abused or neglected.

GREENE: And might not be reporting their struggles.

THERESE CONNOLLY: That’s exactly right. Of every one case that comes to light, another 24 never see the light of day and no one ever knows. So the numbers are very stark.

“I was shocked that the problem is so invisible,” said Connolly in a recent interview. “There is so much opportunity for change, and I can’t think of another issue that affects so many people and where less is being done.”
http://www.aarp.org/relationships/caregiving/news-09-2011/marie-therese-connolly-elder-abuse.html

“I see her as one of the major leading figures in the development of a broader social movement to address elder abuse,” said Kathy Greenlee, the assistant secretary for aging at the Department of Health and Human Services. “People who work in the field of elder abuse feel like we’re two or three decades behind the work we did in this country to address domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse.

She founded a nonprofit organization called Life Long Justice, dedicated to helping fight elder abuse, and is writing a book about the subject.

In testimony this year before a special Senate committee on aging, she cited the case of Ruby Wise and noted that neighbors closed their windows and that Wise’s son had worn earplugs to mute his mother’s cries.

“We as a nation also have been wearing earplugs,” she said. “It’s time that we remove them.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/llifestyle/style/macarthur-genius-grant-goes-to-dc-activist-who-fights-elder-abuse/2011/09/19/gIQANERzgK_story.html?hpid=z9

Facing west from California’s shores…

Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wandered since, round the earth having wandered,
Now I face home again, very pleased and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

Walt Whitman. “Facing West from California’s Shores”
1890

John Callahan

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John Callahan

John Callahan, “a quadriplegic, alcoholic cartoonist”, explored some dark areas of human existence, and thus justified his existence on this planet. Good job, and rest in peace, man.

“Interview with John Callahan by Ballantine Books

BB: do you think you would have become a cartoonist if not for the 1972 accident that left you a quadriplegic?

JC: I probably would have, because I’d been doing it as a kid.

BB: Did your experience of the accident and life as a quadriplegic lend your sense of humor its dark and ironic edge, or were those qualities always there? And do they help you to survive mentally?

JC: Those qualities were always there. I had some strange knocks as a child, some traumatic experiences as a very little kid, and I think that’s what twisted me in that this fashion. But the wheelchair didn’t exactly help.. or hurt, I guess I should say.

BB: Were those characteristics or qualities of mind, which come out so strongly in your cartoons, helpful in coming to terms with your paralysis?

JC: I’ve used humor as a buffer and a kind of lubricant to myself to help me sort of skid my way along tough spots many times in my life, and I think it’s the humor that’s allowed me to reduce the trauma of things and put them into perspective, It’s just a natural response for me. I think it’s amusing when people think that dain a sense of humor through some trauma. It’s inborn.”
Levels of Insanity

“With drawing I can convey the nobility of the human animal caught in an oppressive world. My characters look round-shouldered, often abused. There is shock and disillusionment in their eyes. They could be Kurtz, In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, whispering, “The horror. The Horror.” 

Comedy is the main weapon we have against “The Horror.” With it we can strike a blow at death itself. Or, at least, poke a hole in the pretentious notion that there is something dignified about it.

… I don’t know about all that. I view my career as having passed through three periods. First came my “black” period. Then as a I developed, I entered a “black” period. Now my horizons have widened, and I feel myself to have passed through through to a third, or “black,” period. God knows what comes next.

That some 1989 issue of Topic included a lengthy profile of John Callahan, chronicling the artist’s life and discussing his quadriplegia, the result of a car accident. “I am happiest when I’m offensive,” reads one of Callahan quote from the piece. “I have a desire to tear people in half. I want move people out of the suburbs of their mind. I want them to suffer, to feel something real. I have a lot of anger. I want to hurt people. At least a little.”
Will the Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?: A Quasi Memoir

Homeless go home

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John Callahan

A cartoon by John Callahan, “a quadriplegic, alcoholic cartoonist” as NYT called him in its obituary. I read his books when I lived in Portland, OR. Just learned that he died in 2010.

It Is Expensive to Be Poor by Barbara Ehrenreich

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“nouveau” poor, criminalization of poverty

Today’s must-read:

Barbara Ehrenreich: “It Is Expensive to Be Poor”

Picking up on this theory, pundits and politicians have bemoaned the character failings and bad habits of the poor for at least the past 50 years. In their view, the poor are shiftless, irresponsible, and prone to addiction. They have too many children and fail to get married. So if they suffer from grievous material deprivation, if they run out of money between paychecks, if they do not always have food on their tables—then they have no one to blame but themselves.

The Great Recession should have put the victim-blaming theory of poverty to rest. In the space of only a few months, millions of people entered the ranks of the officially poor—not only laid-off blue-collar workers, but also downsized tech workers, managers, lawyers, and other once-comfortable professionals. No one could accuse these “nouveau poor” Americans of having made bad choices or bad lifestyle decisions. They were educated, hardworking, and ambitious, and now they were also poor—applying for food stamps, showing up in shelters, lining up for entry-level jobs in retail. This would have been the moment for the pundits to finally admit the truth: Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

And in many of these jobs, even young women soon begin to experience the physical deterioration—especially knee and back problems—that can bring a painful end to their work life.

No amount of training in financial literacy can prepare someone for such exigencies—or make up for an income that is impossibly low to start with. Instead of treating low-wage mothers as the struggling heroines they are, our political culture still tends to view them as miscreants and contributors to the “cycle of poverty.”

If anything, the criminalization of poverty has accelerated since the recession, with growing numbers of states drug testing applicants for temporary assistance, imposing steep fines for school truancy, and imprisoning people for debt. Such measures constitute a cruel inversion of the Johnson-era principle that it is the responsibility of government to extend a helping hand to the poor. Sadly, this has become the means by which the wealthiest country in the world manages to remain complacent in the face of alarmingly high levels of poverty: by continuing to blame poverty not on the economy or inadequate social supports, but on the poor themselves.

It’s time to revive the notion of a collective national responsibility to the poorest among us, who are disproportionately women and especially women of color. Until that happens, we need to wake up to the fact that the underpaid women who clean our homes and offices, prepare and serve our meals, and care for our elderly—earning wages that do not provide enough to live on—are the true philanthropists of our society.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-expensive-to-be-poor/282979/

Another Requiem for American Dream

Ouch. Some deep shit here…

In the end, the American Dream did not last very long. The modern version, the version with the two point five kids and the house in the suburbs, a nice modest house with a good lawn and a white picket fence (it was always a white picket fence, for some reason, white pickets being the go-to designator of middle class status) had its heyday in the post-war 1950s, and had suffered serious blows when the designated underclasses made themselves too visible in the 1960s, and survived the too-vapid 1970s and wealth-obsessed 1980s in tattered form, but by the 1990s the whole thing was looking a bit sketchy, and by the turn of the millennium it was dodgy, and before the next 10 years were out you were looked at as a bit of a rube if you still believed in it at all.

Fifty years then, more or less? A few generations, and then only if you count certain folks and not count the other folks, the rough span of time between post-Depression America finally finishing up the much-needed kicking of the Gilded Age’s ass and the time it took for the Reaganites to argue that maybe being a robber or a baron or an outright horse-thief was not so bad after all, since they were such damn fine American things to be. It was the span between the first gleaming suburbs and those very same suburbs beginning to look worn out; it was the span between being able to build those rows of cookie-cutter houses anywhere and having to build them too far out to really count as suburbs anymore; it was the span between one post-war generation being able to find jobs and that same single generation retiring from those jobs. It was the span between the first rocket launches and the last limping shuttle flights. It came and went with the cathode ray tube, and what replaced it in the American mind was a great, heavy nothing.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/12/1267838/-The-nation-sleeps-a-dreamless-sleep

Dear patients: My skill set no longer matches your needs

“Dear patients,

It has been a hard week. I wanted to take a moment to personally apologize for all that you have endured. As one who has witnessed your pains and struggles, I can only wince with each new passing hurdle you are forced to leap over. This business of disease and illness is not for the weak of heart (metaphorically, that is).
…
I guess I can only imagine the unendurable suffering to all of you caused by such indiscriminate shows of brute force by our medical system. I too suffer. Not, of course, like you. I ache from the depths of my being when the product of my life’s work is sour and impotent. I spent all those years learning how to become a healer, a secretary and insurance negotiator I am not.

My skill set no longer matches your needs.

Perhaps a lawyer would get you farther.”

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/08/dear-patients-skill-set-longer-matches.html

You are not powerless!

The U.S. Health Care System Is Terrible, In 1 Enraging Chart

“What bothers me most is not that we’re all the way on the right, or even that we are lower than we should be,” Aaron Carroll, professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine wrote on his blog of the chart. “It’s that we are all alone. We are spending so, so, so much more than everyone else.”

Why is our system so terrible? Largely because it is built for profit. Unlike many other countries, the government has no role in either providing care or setting prices, and so prices skyrocket. It’s also too complex, which is one reason the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature reform law, has gotten off to such a bad start.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/american-health-care-terrible_n_4324967.html