Category Archives: Adoption

Breaking Our Hearts

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This week, it seemed as if the world was determined to break my heart. I am sure I am not the only one who felt that way, but I may be the one who puts two seemingly unrelated events together and wonders how we come to such a pass. I often write about how we can minimize losses from natural disasters, but today’s topic is tragedy wrought by humans upon others.

Illinois

Let me start closer to home. In Crystal Lake, an outer-ring Chicago suburb, a five-year-old boy, “AJ” Freund, was found in a shallow grave in an isolated site near his home. Police found him during an investigation triggered by the boy’s father, who called 911 to report that he was missing. Police dogs tracing his scent at home found no evidence that he had walked out the door. Interrogation of the father, a 60-year-old attorney engaged to a former client in a divorce case, the boy’s 36-year-old mother, caused the police to become suspicious of the couple themselves.

It turned out that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had been involved with the family since the boy was born with opiates in his system, clearly indicating a drug problem for the mother. One police report a few months ago indicated that the home was filthy with pet feces and utilities were shut off, but DCFS apparently found concerns about neglect “unfounded.”

So, how did AJ wind up in his shallow grave? According to the police, the couple kept him in a cold shower before beating him, resulting in his death from head trauma. Needless to say, the couple are now in jail, facing murder charges, and are separately secluded from the rest of the McHenry County jail population for their own safety.

I don’t wish here to focus on the court case. Judge, jury, and prosecutors will make their own determinations as the case proceeds, and like anyone else, the parents are entitled to a defense. What concerns me is what needs to happen at DCFS to prevent many more children from being similarly harmed. This is an agency with serious problems that must be solved.

In the past four years, we had a governor with a serious empathy deficit, who preferred to engineer a stalemate with the Democratic legislature over the state budget while bills went unpaid and progress at agencies like DCFS sputtered, and numerous nonprofit social service providers went unpaid for months on end. But Republican Bruce Rauner did not initiate the crisis at DCFS, which is a product of neglect and malfeasance by several prior administrations, not to mention the frequent unwillingness of the legislature to prioritize funding for social services. But funding is not the only issue.

How bad has it been? According to today’s Chicago Tribune, “DCFS has churned through 14 previous leaders since 2003 and has seen its budget and staffing dwindle.” This turnover implicates two previous Democratic administrations as well as that of Rauner, who had his own revolving door for DCFS executives in the last four years. No one can establish stability and quality of services in such an environment. We can only hope that Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who took office three months ago, can make this a priority and turn the situation around. He has brought in Marc Smith, previously the head of a suburban social service organization, and more importantly, has requested a $75 million increase in funding for the agency. He is taking heat for proposing to amend Illinois’s constitution to allow a progressive income tax in order to gain new revenue from high-income residents, but the money must come from somewhere and the state needs to balance its wobbly budget.

But let me get more personal here. And I do take this personally.

My wife and I have been foster parents since 1991. Two daughters we adopted are now grown, and there are grandchildren. We also have guardianship for one grandson at the moment, so we have a long history of interaction with DCFS. Like many other foster and adoptive parents in Illinois, we have long had reason to question the managerial culture of the agency, which has tended to emphasize restoring or maintaining the custody of natural parents whenever possible. I understand that generally, but not when there is obvious abuse or neglect and caseworkers either fail to take notice or fail to act to protect the children. As headlines have often suggested, that happens more than we may want to know.  AJ has become the latest case in point.

Long ago, two children from a large family reached out to connect with us, and we often let them visit and share their story. We relayed some concerns to DCFS. As a teacher, my wife fell into the category of mandated reporters under state law. Doctors, school officials, and others who may suspect or witness abuse or neglect are legally obligated to report it to the DCFS hotline. In this case, nothing happened until one child died of starvation. Then the remaining children were placed in foster care.

On another unrelated occasion, I became concerned about belt marks on a three-year-old child. I called the hotline, where an imperious responder told me that “under Illinois law, parents are allowed to use corporal punishment to discipline their children.” Appalled by her disinterest, I raised my voice: “We are talking about belt marks on a three-year-old!”

“Mr. Schwab,” she responded sternly, “it is not illegal for parents to use corporal punishment.” Stunned by this indifference, I faced the same dilemma I am sure has confronted others in the same position: Where do we go from here?

Such responses, to be sure, are not always the case. They simply happen too often. Sometimes, an overburdened caseworker takes shortcuts or fails to investigate. The point is that something must change.

Some Illinois legislators—from both parties—were seeking answers from DCFS officials at a hearing in Springfield yesterday. I hope they are all, finally, serious as hell about fostering positive change and not just grabbing headlines in a dramatic case. Too many children’s lives and welfare are at stake.

Sri Lanka

By now, I don’t imagine there is a need to rehash the details of recent bombings in Sri Lanka. It would have been hard to escape the news: suicide bombings by apparent Muslim extremists in three hotels in Colombo as well as several Christian churches on Easter Sunday, killing well over 250 people. The body count has varied, in part because it is difficult to count bodies that have been so badly burned and blown apart. Exactly who planned what is not entirely clear yet, although authorities have blamed a homegrown Muslim militant organization, National Towheed Jamaat. Whether there are ties to Islamic State is a subject of investigation. The precise motive is something that remains unclear.

This comes just a month after the attack by an Australian white supremacist on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, which I discussed last month. I noted that I had spent time in New Zealand in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow for a research center in Christchurch. Thus, I found it disturbing in part because of a personal connection.

It so happens that I spent 10 days in Sri Lanka in 2005 as part of an eight-member interdisciplinary team of Americans invited by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects to assess damage from the Indian Ocean tsunami and recommend options for rebuilding. In the weeks before the trip, I made a brief, stumbling attempt to acquire some familiarity with the dominant national language, Sinhala, but found it daunting. But I find such efforts allow me to breathe in a little more of the ethos of the nation I am visiting. And from further reading and from talking to our hosts, I learned some very interesting facts about Sri Lanka.

The civil war that once raged is now over, but that was not the case then. We traveled from the capital, Colombo, on the western coast of this island, along the coast to Batticaloa, halfway up the eastern coast, before we were forced to turn west through the Central Highlands of Kandy back to Colombo. The Northeast and the Jaffna Peninsula were under the control of the rebel Tamil Tigers. Along the way back, we encountered some military checkpoints. Caught in the middle of this long-running tragedy were the people of many rural villages and smaller cities. As one architect on our team from New Mexico, who was a Vietnam veteran, commented, “The rural people are the ones who always take it in the shorts.”

But this struggle had little to do with Muslims or Christians, except coincidentally. They were largely bystanders. The battle was between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, which wanted rights to sustain its own Tamil language and culture in a multicultural nation. That sounds fair enough, but the Tamil Tigers became an incredibly vicious movement that had few compunctions about sending suicide bombers to blow up public buses. They demanded a Tamil homeland in the regions they controlled. Thousands of Sri Lankans died during decades of armed insurgency. Finally, the rebellion was suppressed by the government about ten years ago.

When we arrived, a cease-fire negotiated by Norwegian diplomats was in effect, but 35,000 Sri Lankans had died as a result of the tsunami—drowned in a wall of water, washed out to sea, crushed beneath shattered buildings. The southern and eastern coasts were devastated. A nation that had suffered so much needless death suffered even more at the hands of the forces of nature, reinforced by a noticeable lack of preparation for such an event.

Even before I left for Sri Lanka, I experienced a personal connection to it all. The Rev. Eardley Mendis, a Sri Lankan-American pastor, had worked as the custodian for Augustana Lutheran Church, of which my wife and I are members, while studying at the nearby Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. By 2005, he was the pastor of a local Lutheran church largely supported by Asian Americans. But his wife and daughter had returned to visit family in Sri Lanka over Christmas in 2004. When the tsunami struck on December 26, they were aboard the coastal passenger train that was destroyed by the second major tsunami wave, largely due to lack of warning of the impending danger. Eardley’s daughter survived; his wife did not. I interviewed him over lunch before I left Chicago. Later, during the trip, a villager in Peraliya took me to see the demolished train, stored on a side track as a memorial. For me, it was one of the most emotionally powerful moments of the entire tour.

The ghostly memorial of the train after the tsunami, May 2005

This man then showed all of us what was left of his home by the sea, including his makeshift oven, where he cooked meals that he sold to travelers along the road. That was his now fragile livelihood.

David Downey, Alan Fujimori, and others visit with my new acquaintance and his makeshift, post-tsumani home.

Sri Lanka has had a measure of peace for most of this decade since the end of the Tamil Tigers insurrection.

A note on Sri Lankan demographics is in order at this point. About two-thirds of the nation is Buddhist, mostly of Sinhalese ethnicity. About 15 percent are Tamil and largely Hindu. The remainder of the nation mostly consists of two religious minorities, half Muslim and half Christian. The Muslims are mostly descended from traders who occupied the coastal cities since medieval times, with Sri Lanka about midway between the predominantly Muslim Arabian peninsula and predominantly Muslim Indonesia. While a very small number of Christians are descended from European colonial settlers of centuries past, most are converts of native Sri Lankan ancestry. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are part of the fabric of modern Sri Lanka.

And so it may seem curious that one minority might attack another, but it is far more important to know that the vast majority of Sri Lankans of all faiths have had more than enough of war and bombings and sectarian violence. The perpetrators of the Easter bombings appear to include some children of a wealthy spice dealer in Colombo. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe apparently has expressed doubt that the father knew what the children were up to, but the police rightly seem determined to find out. Muslims, like other people across the planet, sometimes experience the pain of children who choose an evil path. The Bible is replete with such stories.

So, for the moment, Christian bishops are warning worshipers to stay home and avoid danger. Churches and other houses of worship no longer appear to be sanctuaries, but targets. Here, it is probably worth quoting the words of the chairman of one Colombo mosque, Akurana Muhandramlage Jamaldeen Mohamed Jayfer, in an Associated Press story today, describing the attackers as:

“not Muslims. This is not Islam. This is an animal. We don’t have a word (strong enough) to curse them.”

My only comment would be that he may have inadvertently insulted the animals, who merely hunt for food. Only humans harbor hatred powerful enough to motivate such heartless mass murder.

Jim Schwab

Subdivide and Conquer the Flood

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Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

Floods generally result from regional storm systems producing intense precipitation, from fast melting of winter snows, and occasionally from the failure of protective infrastructure such as dams and levees, often as a result of pressure from such events. We tend to think of the resulting flood damages as the inevitable consequences of these events, but they are not. Flood damages are the result of development decisions that place the built environment—and humans—in harm’s way. Most of those decisions, at least in the U.S., are made at the local level. In city halls and in planning commission and city council meetings across the nation, we have met the enemy of flood hazard reduction. It is usually us.

Tucked away from most public attention, the little decisions a community makes in approving new subdivisions are among those with the biggest influence in exacerbating or minimizing flood hazards to residential development. Cities, towns, and counties often assume that, if they simply comply with the fundamental requirements of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), they are home free. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which runs the program, while it can establish minimum requirements for local participation in the program, will never be in a position to substitute for local judgment on flood risk. There are too many important decisions that local government alone can make that FEMA cannot.

Less well understood by many is that there are significant practical limitations to the capabilities of the NFIP. NFIP regulations apply to mapped floodplains, but mapping floodplains for insurance rating purposes costs money, and that means higher priorities for mapping urbanized and developed areas where flood insurance will be sold. With more than 3.5 million miles of coast and river and stream frontage in the U.S., the NFIP has mapped about 1.2 million miles for Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs). Much of the rest is in rural and undeveloped areas, along smaller tributaries, such as streams and creeks, where development has yet to occur. Subdivision, of course, is a process of dividing and developing plots of land precisely where development has not yet happened. The possibility of a new subdivision proposal including land with unmapped floodplains is a constant reality. The stream corridors involved may seem small, but when flooding occurs they can often pose serious problems. Moreover, their floodplains may well expand as a result of the creation of new impervious surface in small watersheds—that is, hard surfaces such as building footprints, driveways, and roads. These impacts expand the floodplain because such hard surfaces do not absorb stormwater, unlike open space with trees and grass, thus increasing the volume of storm runoff.

pas-report-584-cover-revised

Cover of report reprinted with permission from APA.

To address these sorts of issues, the American Planning Association in 2014 FEMA to fund the production of a report for planners that has just been released: Subdivision Design and Flood Hazard Areas (Planning Advisory Service Report 584). It actually builds on prior work by APA two decades ago in a similar report, Subdivision Design in Flood Hazard Areas; both are being made available online as free PDF downloads and companion documents. The new report, however, goes far in bringing the subject forward and addressing contemporary realities, including the need to get ahead of climate change by anticipating potentially more extreme events and, in coastal areas, sea level rise. To amplify the outreach of the report, APA is scheduling its next Planning Information Exchange webinar in early December to address this topic.

The panel will include California attorney Tyler Berding, of the Walnut Creek law firm Berding & Weil, which has specialized in working with homeowner associations and developed an acute awareness of the problems raised when these associations inherit responsibilities for funding and maintaining flood protection infrastructure such as levees and small dams. As Berding notes, developers often sell local planners and elected officials on the idea that such arrangements, approved during plat reviews, free the municipality or county of the burden of such infrastructure. The problem arises many years later, when it becomes clear that these volunteer-managed organizations lack the expertise and also suffer from predictable downward pressure from property owners on maintenance fees, resulting in steadily deteriorating flood infrastructure that can result in disaster. Also on the panel will be Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers and a major contributor to the report, for which I served as general editor, and Jerry Brems, now a retired planning director of Licking County, Ohio, who lent his experience in advising the project, who has dealt with these issues. I will moderate.

Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

The overall point of the report is to highlight the fact that there is typically much more a local government can do to exercise vigilance in this respect than typically happens. The report outlines a number of standards communities can adopt with regard to the protection of natural and man-made features on a subdivision site, the layout and design of the site, its infrastructure, platting requirements, and watershed management. It also discusses how all this can be integrated effectively into the larger planning process of the jurisdiction. For instance, it discusses and provides a case study on the use of conservation subdivision design, which allows the clustering of structures on a site to locate them on higher, safer ground while maintaining more vulnerable, low-lying sections in common open space, which in turn allows the creation of such amenities as riverside walking paths, habitat protection for wildlife, and preservation of forested buffer areas along stream corridors. These and many other steps help reduce flood losses while creating a more resilient, safer, and environmentally sustainable community.

In short, the entire project invites communities to explore ways to become more forward-looking and creative in their approaches to flood hazards. The world is improved more often incrementally than radically. We hope we’ve brought planners’ and public officials’ attention to one more such increment.

 

Jim Schwab

We Are the Cure, We Are the People

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Our nation is suffering from a terrible social disease. It is not a sexually transmitted disease, though it can be spread orally, through the things we say to each other and over the Internet and the air waves. Since everything seems to need a name, I will call it BJ Disease, which stands for blanket judgment. It has been with us for a long, long time, latent in our political system and society, but it has gone viral, it seems, and become an epidemic in a very bad political year.

If there is one thing I personally learned long ago, it was to view people as individuals rather than as monolithic groups. In part, that is because I learned as a Christian that this is the way in which God values us, and it saddens me when I see people use religion as a weapon or a tool of exclusion rather than an opportunity for moral and spiritual growth. It has paved the way for my wife and me adopting two girls of varied backgrounds and becoming grandparents of a passel of children of racially mixed backgrounds, each with their own unique characteristics.

Adopting such an outlook has allowed me to see many more shades of meaning and value in the ways people speak and behave than if I were to see them simply as blacks, whites, Hispanics, or adherents of one faith or another, or of particular ethnic groups or sexual identities. Yes, many people in all these groupings have limited things in common, but there are far more that differentiate them as individuals and many more that we share in common as human beings across all those lines. But far too often, we refuse to see them. It is costing us lives and endleDSCF1345ss heartache, and that is a very sad thing.

Amid the uproar over black lives taken by police officers, most often though not always white officers, there is among a vocal minority of protesters an unfortunate tendency to paint all police as racially biased and prone to violence against minorities. There is, no doubt, a small segment of many of our police departments with such tendencies, though I am inclined to think it is a much smaller segment than it used to be. It is, however, far more visible today as a result of technology. Certain members of police departments have not yet adapted to an era in which the ubiquity of cell phone cameras virtually ensures that bad judgment in handling suspects, often in minor incidents such as traffic stops, will end up on the evening news. But lest I be accused of BJ disease myself, let me note that there are instances in which traffic stops have resulted in the deaths of police who did not soon enough realize that someone had a gun and intended to use it. Traffic stops can escalate, and there are reasons why police may be wary of the drivers they have pulled over.

At the same time, it is also perfectly clear that the shooter in Dallas made statements to the police, as they were trying to negotiate with him, that he hated white people and police. His indiscriminate shooting of officers at the end of what had been a peaceful protest not only bloodied and sullied the message of the protest but made clear that, in his mind, the people he was shooting were not individuals with families and unique perspectives and experiences but a single mass of people not deserving of such differentiation. It is hard to see the difference between that outlook and the views of a white racist who sees blacks as an undifferentiated force for evil. Both perspectives simply deepen the propensity for violence in our society.

At a time when it would be extremely helpful to have political leaders who can help us to escape the bonds of blanket judgment disease, which can become contagious through peer pressure and the desire to conform in the condemnation of outsiders, however they may be defined, it is disappointing in the extreme to have instead candidates for the presidency who engage in spreading the disease through inflammatory rhetoric. Take, for instance, Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country. Trump may well understand that many Muslims condemn the violence of terrorists, and that many are fleeing their countries in search of safety, but the careless lumping of all Muslims into a suspect category that must be denied admission to the United States does nothing to further that understanding. It does nothing to foster our awareness of Muslims as distinct individuals, any more than racial fears of American Indians or Mexicans or Asians fostered such understanding in the past. But let’s be clear. While he emerged as the winner of the Republican nomination by dominating debates with such reckless proposals, Trump was hardly the only candidate to offer such blanket condemnations or stoke such fears. In fact, his ascendancy within the Republican party was made possible precisely by years of such pathetic pandering before he chose to take it to another level.

So—I have said my piece for this week in an effort to make peace. There are no links in this particular blog post because the links that matter are not on the Internet but between all of us as Americans and as fellow human beings. We need to foster those connections across racial and political and ethnic and religious lines. We need to reach out even when it takes courage to do so. We need to spend more time understanding each other and less time criticizing each other en masse. We need to focus on the eradication of BJ disease. I will pray for that tonight and every night until we can achieve a more civil and respectful dialogue. Is it too much to ask? Or, as Rodney King once famously asked, “Can’t we all just get along?”

 

Jim Schwab

 

Resolve to Get Your Hands Dirty

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DSCF1169More often than not, New Year’s resolutions involve aspirations for some type of self-improvement: eating a better diet; exercising more; getting better grades in school; or achieving something in one’s profession. I am no stranger to such resolutions. I am still living with the decision two years ago to start working with a personal trainer. Having slogged through a year following Hurricane Sandy with 23 business trips, three others to Iowa in connection with my adjunct professorship at the University of Iowa, and some personal trips, I finally decided that, if I were to sustain the stamina to continue at such a pace, something needed to change. I signed up at X Sports Fitness, but then was delayed in implementing my plan when I injured myself with a pinched nerve on New Year’s Eve by carelessly tossing a heavy laptop on my shoulder at Barnes & Noble. I started 2014 with a few weeks of therapy to ease the pinched nerve before finally launching my plan. But I have never looked back and recently became my trainer’s first client to do a two-minute plank, just before my 66th birthday.

So I understand and applaud the best intentions if they become real. But I am going to suggest something much riskier and more profound if you are ready to follow me into the deep water. Oh, yes, learning to swim is also a legitimate resolution.

I suggest that you at least consider resolving to get your hands dirty this year. Metaphorically, that is. On behalf of creating a better society, if not changing the world in some small way.

By getting your hands dirty, I do not necessarily mean protesting in the streets, but what I mean may include some vocal advocacy. It does not mean simply charitable work, such as Toys for Tots, as helpful as that may be. What I mean is getting involved in some way that entails some risk of learning to see the world in a new way because you must be open to new perspectives in order to be effective at what you choose to do. It may involve some reputational risk if others do not immediately see the benefit of what you are trying to accomplish. Some of the greatest leaders in the world had to endure significant opprobrium in order to produce fundamental changes in society that have benefited us all. But the change you initiate most likely will not be so grand and may even be invisible to most people. Let me share our own example.

A quarter-century ago, my wife and I began to explore options for adoption through foster care. One can talk all day long about what may need to change in improving the lives of our most vulnerable children, but until you actually get down in the trenches, accepting one or much children into your home, learning of the life circumstances that brought them there, and really committing to better outcomes, you can never learn what obstacles exist to producing real change. It is deep one-on-one commitment, a leap of faith into generally unknown and sometimes unknowable backgrounds that power deeply engrained reactions by children to the world around them. This blog does not begin to offer sufficient space to explore this topic—I actually started a memoir about 12 years ago that I have never finished—but it does allow me to use this as an object lesson in, first, making some kind of a difference, and second, in how easily you can underestimate how difficult that is.

Children who have suffered some type of abuse or neglect at the hands of natural parents are among the most prolonged sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome precisely because they have usually suffered at a time when they were too young to make sense of their surroundings or to understand that what was happening to them was not normal or acceptable. Their supple young minds are simply programmed to react to stimuli that, when they cease to exist in real life, still haunt them in ways they cannot articulate and can only begin to understand with the help of sustained therapy. Sometimes, an overloaded child welfare system compounds the problem by placing them in new abusive circumstances that only add to a child’s confusion, depression, and withdrawal.

Jean with two of our grandchildren, Angel and EJ.

Jean with two of our grandchildren, Angel and EJ.

And then, as a foster parent with intent to adopt, you step in with the objective of trying to help fix all that. If you are like us, you step in with a modest amount of training before certification, but you quickly learn that what you know is a tiny fragment of what you will come to know. Our two daughters are now grown and have their own children, and we and they are all still learning. Yet many people see the system as one in which children are emancipated at age 18, and these new adults who never had a proper childhood are now expected to act and proceed as if they have all the tools to succeed in life, and some foster parents operate on the same assumptions. Our society can be incredibly naïve at times.

Or incredibly judgmental. Unfortunately, one daughter’s penchant for running away, both literally and figuratively, from her problems led to a few encounters with police. It is seldom possible for police to understand even a small portion of the background that leads to such encounters, and most understand that, but that does not prevent some from harshly assuming that the problems were created by your bad parenting, especially when they do not know they are dealing with adoptive parents. There may even be some truth to their judgment at some times, but it is also true, and I know this as deeply as I know anything, that you can make errors of parental judgment simply because you do not know what emotional triggers lie deep within someone’s early childhood experience. It may take years, which is why we try to remain close and supportive but also instructive. Making a positive difference can take a long, long time.

Granddaughter Lashauna engages at the Chicago Public Library.

Granddaughter Lashauna engages at the Chicago Public Library.

I will not elaborate further because it is not my intent to highlight foster care and adoption as the only ways to get your hands dirty. You can undertake many other initiatives, and many of them may involve direct attempts to influence public policy. What I am suggesting is that, if you want truly to make a lasting difference, choose something that challenges your preconceptions, that liberates you from simplistic assumptions, and makes you rethink, over and over again, exactly what difference you are making, why you want to make it, and the best way to achieve it. The most important risk you can take is to be open to challenging your own assumptions about how that change is going to occur and what it may ultimately mean. It means getting close enough to people to get hurt once in a while.

The world is not a simple place, and there is, as some have said, a world of hurt out there. Resolve to change some of that, and in the process, to put as much of your ego aside as possible. Resolve to get your hands dirty. God will appreciate what you do even if no one else does.

 

Jim Schwab