We have become so accustomed to a certain Homeland Security
phrase since the events of September 11, 2001, that we have never seriously
contemplated its larger meaning. “If you see something,
say something,” for most people simply means that, if you notice something
strange, someone leaving a package on a train platform and walking away, for
instance, you need to call 911 or point it out to a nearby security official.
Having done our civic duty, we can go on about our lives and hope for the best.
We may save someone’s life, or we may simply be exercising caution. Check it
out.
But suppose we interpreted that phrase in the context of our
duties as citizens of an endangered, or even potentially endangered, democracy.
Suppose the threat were to our democratic institutions and not just to the
lives of those in a single public place. Suppose the threat involved policies
that affected thousands of people threatened by racism, ignorance, or hatred?
Ought we not to speak up? How different would the history of the world have
been if millions of Germans had spoken up about what they saw even in 1933? How
many Russians in the past two decades have risked their lives and their careers
to speak up about the threats they see to a democracy being strangled in its
cradle? In the past year, the people of Sudan have arisen against a brutal
military dictatorship and forced remarkable changes. Are we Americans somehow
so special as to be free from such obligations? Do we not eventually lose our
moral authority to speak for democracy in the world if we fail to speak for it
at home?
If you see something, say something. Let me tell you
what I see:
I see children
housed in filthy cages at the southern border by the U.S. government, separated
from their parents, their eyes full of fear and bewilderment, when their only
alleged crime was to be brought here by parents from Central America who sought
to remove them from gang warfare, violence, crime, and corruption in
desperately poor countries. I see a U.S. President, as a form of retribution, cutting
aid to those countries that was meant to promote reform and economic
opportunity to reduce people’s need to flee such chaos in the first place.
I see Temporary Protective Status (TPS) denied to survivors
of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, a neighboring country with deep ties to the
U.S., even as that nation struggles to rescue and house its own people in the face
of mind-numbing devastation. The rationale from the President was that “very
bad people” would harm our country if this were allowed, although TPS has
been standard practice in the past in the very same circumstances. It is
unclear, other than being people of color, what makes the Bahamians especially
dangerous in his eyes.
I see neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan
members marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us” through the campus of
the University of Virginia and the streets
of Charlottesville, defended ardently by a President who sees “very fine
people” on both sides while an innocent young woman is run over and killed by a
young Nazi sympathizer with his car. I see this rhetoric emboldening an ever-widening
circle of mass shooters who sow terror in American cities with unlimited access
to weapons of war, but I also see a widening
circle of brave citizens rising to demand effective action against such
terror.
I see America losing the moral courage of the Emma Lazarus
poem at the Statue of Liberty,
pleading for the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,” and nearly mocking Lady Liberty as she seeks to lift
her lamp beside the golden door. The Golden Door is becoming instead the Great Border
Wall built with money never legitimately appropriated by Congress, and members
of the President’s own party unable and unwilling to stop him or even raise the
weakest of objections lest they be expelled from the halls of power—or are they
becoming halls of obeisance, like the Roman Senate in Nero’s time?
I am telling you what I see because I understand the moral
and civic obligation to say something. We must all be whistleblowers for the
future of democracy. What do you see? Are you prepared to say something as well?
And what shall we do once we have spoken?
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.
While I was in New Orleans April 19-24 for the American Planning Association’s 2018 National Planning Conference, my wife, Jean, was also there. A retired Chicago Public Schools teacher and retiree delegate for the Chicago Teachers Union, she has remained active on educational issues and in 2014, on a prior trip to New Orleans, interviewed Ashana Bigard, an advocate for students’ rights and leader in the Education Justice Project of New Orleans. Jean decided to interview Bigard again, producing the somewhat condensed interview below. At a time when Paul Vallas, former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and the post-Katrina architect of school reform in New Orleans, has recently declared his candidacy for mayor of Chicago, the consequences of that reform take on new importance—not that schools in New Orleans were great before Katrina (they were not), but one hopes that reform is a step forward, and Bigard’s critique suggests serious and troubling issues of racial and social equity remain unaddressed.
I wish here to add a personal mea culpa. Readers may have noticed a more than one-month gap since my last posting at the end of March. Part of that was due to travel. In addition to six days in New Orleans, I spent three days immediately prior to that at a Federal Emergency Management Agency meeting in Richburg, South Carolina. Life was also full of some other turbulence, and this blog is essentially a one-man show. Since launching “Home of the Brave” five years ago, I have always preferred, as a professionally trained researcher and journalist, to put quality ahead of speed, to produce thoughtful commentary and to dig deeper. Sometimes, time does not permit this, in which case I prefer to write nothing than to write hastily for the mere sake of publishing something. There will be much new material coming in May. I guarantee it.
Jim Schwab
Interview with Ashana Bigard
What is better and worse about New Orleans since 2014?
Bigard: It depends on from whose perspective. So, I think better for young white people in the city of New Orleans, absolutely. But if we are talking families and communities of native black New Orleans, no, they are much, much worse because the voices of the community, parents, and students continue to be unheard. We have been erased. Our mayor talks about how much better New Orleans is doing, how it has recovered, meanwhile child poverty is at 39%, mostly black poor children. The wage gap between white and black families has widened since Katrina. Of course, we had $76 billion come to the city after the storm, and the native black population has 18% less wealth. We’ve had a gigantic land grab. Things are worse in education because our city, just the Parish of New Orleans, has been experimented on. What is the problem with experimenting? First, no one has been taking data to see what works and doesn’t work. Second, the experiment was done in the only black parish. That would be a red flag to anyone. We are almost at 100% charter schools except for McDonogh 35. Parents have less choice. Parents apply for pre-school only to find that there are no pre-school spots available. One parent reported that she made eight selections and did not get any of the eight selections. Parents want a school near their homes, so they can catch one or two buses to reach the school, but the schools are not close to students’ homes. Parents with children with asthma, [who] need epi pens, or [with] special problems are literally afraid because charter schools do not have full-time nurses, or full-time counselors. Nurses are in the schools twice a week. The schools are not near their homes, so parents can’t get to them. We’ve had an epidemic of children traumatized, partly because of the storm. We had problems before the storm, but there were full-time nurses and counselors at the schools. We had children who had nervous breakdowns, and the schools were close to their homes so parents or someone could come and pick them up.
Now with the schools far away from students’ homes, no full-time nurses or counselors, there’s been an epidemic of students’ nervous breakdowns for two reasons. First, our kids have had a lot of trauma which was not addressed after the storm. Some of this is [former] Governor Bobby Jindal’s fault because, after the storm, he gutted our mental health budget and closed our Adolescent Hospital [a psychiatric facility]. Jindal gutted the mental health budget when people needed it so much. Our new Governor John Edwards is trying to repair that by opening the Adolescent Mental Hospital again. The second reason is that schools are operating like mini prisons as if they could discipline trauma out of kids. A lot of schools have no recess and quiet lunches. During quiet lunch students are not allowed to talk. So, we do the opposite of what children need after being traumatized. These children need a lot more social interaction, talking, touching, art, and music to really deal with their emotions and express themselves. Our school system is the opposite of what children need, which leads to children that are on the edge, we have mini bombs (explosive), and we continue to reinforce that. Students are in pre-school and not allowed to sing, talk, dance, play and nap. A lot of our children suffer from sleep deprivation because, if you need to be on the bus at 6:00 a.m. and you need to be out there 30 minutes in advance, then you must be outside at 5:30, and if you must be on the bus at 5:05 a.m., [that] means you must be up by 4:30 a.m. That is exactly what happened to a five-year-old girl in kindergarten that we advocated for. She arrived at school at 8:30 a.m. and was back home at 6:00 p.m. Her school had no recess, quiet lunch, and no nap. I bring this up to point out how insane the schools are. We know that children that are in kindergarten need more sleep for brain development. We know that children need from 13 to 14 hours of sleep. However, apparently schools have decided that they can go against brain development because apparently poor black children do not have human brains. The little girl got suspended off the bus for three days because she ate three crackers on the bus on her way home. We advocated for her by going to the school to discuss the suspension. At first, the school said it was a bus policy, but later admitted that the suspension was a school policy, and they offered to reduce the suspension to one day. We felt like one day was too much for eating three crackers. How about no-day suspension because a five-year-old girl ate lunch at 10:00 a.m. and was hungry on the bus home? They expect our children to be non-human. This correct behavior is not correct behavior for human beings. I asked, “Should you be running a school? Who do you want to make them into? A person who ignores their personal needs for bathroom and food like that is not healthy. If a person does not take care of their own needs, how can they have compassion for others?”
(Bigard described going to Science and Math High School to talk to the principal about bathroom privileges. “The students could go to the bathroom during lunch period every day and were given three bathroom passes each month for emergencies. We asked the principal if he had any teenage girls at that school and he answered, yes they did, and that is why the three passes were given.” I told him that three passes a month was not enough for the girls or any of the other students.”)
Why do they feel the need to be so strict?
Bigard: Conditioning and control. If you go into a school district and you believe that the people you are working with are out of control, and that they are savage and animals, the first thing you do is get them into control and compliance.
If a student has a brown belt instead of black, then that student may get a detention or after-school suspension if they have too many violations. If they lose the belt, they can’t just go out and buy another. Kids [in] k-1-2-3 grades don’t buy their own clothes. So, when you hold them responsible for what their parents put out for them, they don’t have any control. You are punishing them for being poor. The response from the school is that they are teaching them to be responsible. How many colleges have uniforms? Are students put out of college for not having a tie or black belt?
We have all these schools where they have 60% suspension rates, and when you start to dig, you come up with things like an A-B student who during tests needed to chew on a straw because he was so nervous and could concentrate better when chewing on a straw. It didn’t bother anyone else, but we had to put him on the 504 program (accommodations for lesser learning disabilities), so he could chew on a straw during tests. Or the girl that twists her hair or the student that did not track the teacher with his eyes. Many of the administrators want to greet each child with a handshake every morning. A child that was uncomfortable with touch–one-third of our children have been inappropriately touched, and others fear germs and did not want to shake the school administrator’s hand.
(The interview then shifted to the question of how schools handle students who cannot provide money for school lunches, a subject covered by The Louisiana Weekly in a very recent article by reporter Kaylee Poche about state legislation to resolve the issue of “shaming” regarding inability to pay.)
The Senate Education Committee on Thursday (April 19) voted 4-2 to reject a bill that would have prevented schools from punishing students with lunch debt even though the bill had easily passed the House earlier this month. Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, authored the so-called “lunch-shaming bill,” which also was supported by Gov. John Edwards. It would have prevented students with unpaid lunch bills from being publicly identified, required to do additional chores, or excluded from any school privileges. “I’m just trying to make the change to the law so that we can continue to feed our children in our schools and make sure that the person who is actually responsible for the debt pays the debt,” Smith said. Students who owe money currently eat cheese sandwiches for lunch at school. (Bigard explained that middle school and high school students with a school debt do not receive lunch.)
The bill also would have allowed schools to notify parents that they would have to contact the Department of Children and Family Services if they failed to pay for 10 or more school meals. Also, lunch money could be collected through income taxes and the Louisiana Department of Revenue. The bill would cover only families that do not receive reduced or free lunches. Smith’s bill failed.
More 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.
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.
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.
