I’ve written here now and then about hopes of the coming of an Age of Transparency, and then the dawn burst upon us and one of its names was Wikileaks.  And like other dawns, it was even accompanied by a chorus, even a symphony, of tweets, and other social networking sites buzzing.

And like other beginnings, it became messy and sometimes violent.  Very violent, as the revolutions and protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and Iran demonstrate.

I doubt anyone will ever be  able to draw a direct line from any Wikileaks document, specific FB post or tweet, to any resignation or deposing of any official anywhere, but that’s not necessary.   There’s an atmosphere, a field of influence, a spirit, to which they all contribute and in which they reside.

I’m glad to see it. I feel somewhat vindicated by it, and feel certain Dad, parked in some celestial recliner somewhere, feels vindicated, too.  If you’re so inclined, check out the latest addition to the library of his columns.  There’s a subhead in that column that reads, “Visionaries Are Scoffed At.”

Dad was certainly a visionary, and I have inherited that particular gene, or curse, or blessing, depending on your perspective.  At times it’s all three.  It’s a wonderful thing because visionaries can see a beauty that isn’t yet, and be driven by that beauty, and try to make it real.  It’s a horrible thing because there can be few or no others who can see anything similar, and when others pay any attention at all, it’s likely to scoff or worse.

When Dad left the newspaper and wrote that column, he was given a copy of it engraved in metal and framed.  I’ve seen it nearly every morning since he died in 1997.  It hangs in what may seem an odd place: in the kitchen, next to my coffee bar.  I like it there because seeing it at the start of the day reminds me that I came by this visionary propensity honestly, and his column is proof that there are other people in the world who get it.  It also reminds me that when scoffs and worse come, the appropriate response is, “So what?”

Twenty five or so years ago I set out on a path having to do with a particular vision of people being treated well, with respect, especially dis-empowered people, and how people in power treat them.

My attention focused first on child protective services, and how it can become better by treating everyone involved, including the workers, with respect.  That focus of attention was by choice, and I gave it my all, even to making that the center of my doctoral research. Next, I became intimately familiar with the maltreatment of another state agency, this time not by choice. Bureaucrats who were more concerned with preserving their power than serving the populace did what they could to silence me through a different arm of bureaucracy.  I gave my all once again because it was either fight or give up my credibility, and without my credibility, I would have no way to advance the vision I had about people being treated better, with honesty and respect.  The fight took pretty much everything, literally, but I came out with my credibility.

I also came out with a sharpened vision, about how much bureaucratic maltreatment there is and how to reduce it.  I’ve studied and researched and at times wondered if all this vision does is present a distorted image of a windmill on the horizon, and what a fool I’ll find myself to have been.

I’ll know better about that pretty soon.  If it turns out I’m a fool for thinking I can do anything to make things better, so be it.  I’d rather be a fool reaching for something beautiful than a cynic congratulating myself on rendering an accurate description of the mud on the ground.

But maybe I haven’t been tilting at a windmill.  Maybe there is a way my experience and knowledge can be put to use to make a substantive difference.  When the gubernatorial campaign started up last year, Peter Shumlin struck me as also being a visionary, and therefore someone who might be able to understand this vision that I see.  I put in time on his campaign, and at a couple of campaign events buttonholed him about meeting with him after he was elected.  Given the field of Dem candidates and their favorability ratings, he wasn’t “supposed” to win, but he did, and now I get to lay out the vision, along with the nuts and bolts of how to make it real.

Windmill, or something else?  I have two meetings scheduled in the Governor’s office–this Friday, March 18, and Thursday, March 24.  I’ll update here after those meetings.

Far from it.

I put in some time both pre- and post-primary on Peter Shumlin’s campaign for governor, and thanks be to all who voted him in.  I’m certain we’re on the cusp of happier political days in Vermont.

I had intended an official launch of a State Ombudsman Campaign to be a few months ago, but circumstances, including the passing of one of the dearest and most significant people in my life, resulted in its delay.  If you’re new to this blog, the short story is that after having encountered and witnessed much in the way of Kafkaesque machinations and injustice in state bureaucracies, I planted this little seed of creating a State Ombudsman in Vermont.  I’ve watered and tended it to become a healthy growing thing, but now it needs the attention of many more people to become the thing that will bear good fruit for the citizens of this fine state.

Though delayed, the timing is good,  because now the election has come and gone and all Vermonters know (or can easily find out) who their state legislators are for the session starting January 2011.  The focus now is on people contacting their legislators to say they think creating a State Ombudsman is a good idea.  The idea has bipartisan support, e.g. Rep. Anne Donohue (R) and Sen. Harold Giard (D). The legislators I’ve talked with so far have identified additional reasons for having a State Ombudsman that I hadn’t thought of–such as its dovetailing well with Challenges for Change–so it seems an idea whose time has come.

The one-page State Ombudsman Proposal is here.  Right click to download it. Distribute it, talk it up, email your pals, post on Facebook and Twitter.  We’ll be seeing transparency and justice increasing in Vermont when the legislature makes it so!  We can do this in 20012, yes?  Maybe even 2011??

Peace.

Deborah Alicen

This post is going to be about two articles I came across today.  The first one I came across, about Roman gladiators, was also posted today, and the second one was posted two days ago, but I found it after having read the gladiator story.

In Britain, archeologists have discovered what appears to be a Roman gladiator graveyard.  The discovery consists of skeletons, most of which were decapitated and the bodies apparently buried with respect.  Indications that the skeletons belonged to gladiators include almost all being male, their having been taller than average height for the time, and one arm having been stronger than the other, as happens when someone routinely wields weapons such as swords and clubs.  One of the skeletons also bears bite marks from a large carnivore, like a lion or bear.

The article offers a little education about gladiators, including that sometimes they started training for the profession in their teens.

Such a profession to choose.

That got me to thinking about gladiatorial events and the people who went to be “entertained” by them.  Yes, we now have the likes of UFC and WWE, and yes, I do wonder about those who find that entertaining, but at least it’s meant to stop short of someone dying.  It’s not that the minds of people who are entertained by violence and gore are unfathomable–having practiced psychology I know they can be fathomed.  But for all the understanding of the factors that lead people in that direction, there’s still and always the question of why they choose that direction.  There are enough other people coming from similar circumstances who made a different choice–enough to confirm that other choices are possible.

So there I am, wondering about the hearts and minds of people who, once upon a time, went to watch other people fight and die a violent death, for entertainment.  And then I came upon the second story, about children in a residential treatment facility in Texas.

It’s a story that reveals hearts and minds more depraved, I think, than those who went to gladiatorial contests.  In the latter case, they were watching trained, adult, professional warriors, and the contests were further sanctioned by the state and deemed a normal part of the culture.

The story involving the Texas children, however, is very different.

A joint report by the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Tribune, revealed hundreds of violations in residential treatment facilities serving the most vulnerable Texas children.  The incident among the hundreds that gets the most attention in the news report is when staff forced seven developmentally delayed girls to fight each other while the staff cheered and laughed.

Whatever the developmental debilitation of any of those girls, they come nowhere close to matching the moral debilitation of the staff involved.

There is one thing about the report itself that bothers me, though, and it bothers me a lot.  That’s the fact that findings of sexual abuse by staff received not much more than passing mention.   Granted, there are many, and many types, of abuse covered in the article, including punching, choking, and illegal drugs, in addition to forced fighting and sexual abuse.  And the story also cites an earlier forced fighting atrocity at an adult care facility, which has become infamous as “the Corpus Christi Fight Club,” and one of its aims is to question why there wasn’t the same level of outrage over what happened at the facility for children. But to give the forced fighting center stage while short-shrifting the seriousness of sexual abuse of children can send a dangerous message, especially to perpetrators of child sexual abuse, who are always looking for validation that what they are doing “isn’t so bad.”

All of it, all of it, is so bad.

And WWE and UFC ratings just keep going up.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen

Last night I landed on a right-wing Catholic program, Life on the Rock, on a right-wing Catholic cable channel, EWTN. The program is geared toward young people, high school through college age. The guest on the show was Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action, a student-run anti-abortion organization. Ms. Rose started her anti-abortion work when she was 15 years old. She’s now a student at UCLA and is 20 years old.

Having the capacity to look much younger, Rose has visited a number of Planned Parenthood locations around the country and presented herself as an underage pregnant teen for the purpose of securing undercover video. She has turned up several examples of Planned Parenthood nurses and counselors not adhering to their legal responsibilities when it comes to underage girls who were impregnated by much older men–an unquestionably abusive relationship whether or not a girl feels she’s been abused.

My heart sank watching her undercover video. Having been a trauma therapist for 20 years working with hundreds of victims of childhood sexual abuse, there’s no way to condone or justify the actions of PP personnel who bend, break, or skate around mandatory reporting laws.

Mandatory reporting laws require people in certain capacities, such as teachers, clergy, and medical people (exact requirements vary by state) to report any child sexual abuse of which they become aware to the state’s child protective services (CPS) system. Rose’s undercover videos clearly show PP personnel engaged in sidestepping those laws. In one case after hearing the “boyfriend” is 31, a PP worker says “I didn’t hear the age. I don’t want to know the age.” In more than one case, PP workers coach the purported underage teen on how and to whom to lie, or not mention at all, the fact that the “boyfriend” is a lot older.

I agree with Rose and the hosts of the program that Planned Parenthood’s failure to be clear with the girl and make known—and then follow through on—their obligation to report to CPS was itself abusive toward the girl, allowing a sexual predator to continue his preying upon her.  Beyond that is the fact that PP had a chance to stop a sexual predator who almost certainly has had multiple victims and will have many more besides this girl in the future.  To not act on that is to me unconscionable.

However, I do not agree with Rose and her program hosts when they leap from the wrong PP did in those cases to their assertions that, “They don’t care about women at all,” and “they do it for the money.”

Please.

No one working in a Planned Parenthood clinic is getting rich off it.

I belong to a category that the anti-choice group tries not to recognize: I am not for abortion, but I am for choice.  Reasons why I’m not for abortion include no fewer than five of the most influential people in my life who could have been or nearly were aborted.  Two were born of mothers who were told they weren’t pregnant and needed a D&C, but who refused the procedure because they felt sure they were pregnant.  Two others were born of mothers who tried to self-abort early in their gestation.  And one would likely have been aborted on the basis of the number, and presumed severity, of congenital defects, had they been detected when she was in utero.

I am not for abortion.

I am for choice. I don’t think a twelve year old girl, raped by her father who is also her grandfather, should be forced to bear a child who will be her daughter, her sister, and her aunt.  I don’t think anyone has the right, or should have the right, to force a woman who was raped to bear a child resulting from that rape.  I don’t think anyone has the right, or should have the right, to force a woman who can barely keep the bodies and souls of her already breathing children together to add one more.  I don’t think anyone has the right, or should have the right, to force a woman who has never had any support for her own development as a respected human being to give birth to another, for whom she has no way to imagine anything better.

Nor should any girls or women be forced to terminate any such pregnancies against their will.

At rock bottom,  I don’t think anyone has the right, or should have the right, to force any woman, regardless of her reasons, to either bear, or forgo bearing (as in China), children. Force is what rape and tyranny have in common. That is the dimension of trying to outlaw abortion, that it would force women and girls to complete pregnancies against their will, that the anti-choice folks steer sharply away from.

If, as Rose and those who hosted Life on the Rock maintain, the actions of the videotaped Planned Parenthood workers were evil, then so too is their demonizing of those workers as not caring at all about women and doing abortions only for the money.  They know nothing about about the motivation of those workers, haven’t tried to find out, and leap to judgment conveniently forgetting about Matthew 7:1.

Example: at about 22:30 into the show one of the show’s hosts mentions the segment in the undercover video in which the PP worker seemed to be struggling within herself to decide what to do, and he asks Rose, “What do you think she’s doing right there?”  Her response:

She’s consciously knowing and Planned Parenthood consciously knows the law.  They know that this little girl’s in danger, she knew that, you saw that, this is rape, she’s saying. This is statutory rape, and yet she consciously makes the decision, for the sake of abortion [her verbal emphasis], getting that little girl’s baby aborted, she consciously makes the decision to violate the law…

That is an incredible, judgmental, and untenable stretch to assert that accomplishing an abortion was the primary factor in the PP worker’s decision.  During the course of the show, Rose appealed several times to logic.  She should try using a little here.  If the PP worker had only accomplishing an abortion as her goal, why would she have hesitated at all?  Why would she have appeared to have struggled with herself before taking the course she took?  There would have been no logical reason for her doing so.  There would have been no hesitation on her part, no struggle.

As a practicing psychologist I was a mandatory reporter.  I reported every case of child abuse and suspected child abuse that I encountered, and would have done so even had I not been required to do so by law.  That said, I also know (as anyone who’s read my posts about CPS is aware) that CPS agencies can sometimes make things far worse for a child.

FAR WORSE THAN SENDING HER BACK TO A PEDOPHILE WHO WILL CONTINUE TO RAPE HER?!?!” some people will scream at this point.

Yes.

Sometimes—not always, likely not most of the time, and perhaps not even a lot of the time—but sometimes CPS will place that child in a foster home where she is raped nightly, and when she complains to her social worker (i.e. quite possibly someone who hasn’t had a minute of formal social work training but has the job title of “social worker”), the CPS worker doesn’t believe her and says “she’s just trying to get attention.”  And the child is forced by the state to stay in a home where she is abused more often and with greater severity and with less chance of receiving help than before CPS entered the picture.  So yes, sometimes reporting a case to CPS can result in making an abusive situation worse for a child.  CPS in some states—and in some locales within a state—is a lot worse than CPS in other places, and I will not presume to know what experiences with CPS any of those workers may have had that might have influenced them to try to sidestep mandatory reporting.

Yet still they should report, and then work to improve CPS.

But for anyone to assert that any of the videoed PP workers acted without caring about the girl-woman in front of them, and were motivated by the money—that is absurd beyond all reason. It is also calumny.

I get why President Obama is trying to get pro-choice and anti-abortion people to talk and listen to each other.  Between them they could pretty well eradicate the need (or, if you will, the felt need) for abortion in this country. There’s a terrific lot of room available for all sides to learn from each other and stop demonizing each other.  I would wish for Planned Parenthood workers to have the same or similar training about child sexual abuse that CPS workers should have.  And I would wish for the Lila Roses of the world to sit down with the Planned Parenthood workers of the world and not leave the room until they started actually hearing each other.

I would also wish for peace between India and Pakistan.

We can look to Northern Ireland.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen

There are no dire consequences in the situation I learned about today, thank heaven.  But this kind of thing has the potential for serious harm.

I was catching up on the phone with a friend today who has recently changed jobs.  Part of that change has been her application to Catamount, especially since Cobra is absurdly expensive for her.  Early in the application process, she asked if she should send a particular document along with the rest of her application materials.  The answer was no, they’d just make note of the thing that the document relates to.

And you, my astute readers, have already gotten to the end of the story in your minds.  She’s now going through the application process again, this time including the document that they first said they didn’t need, but now say they do. If they had just taken the dang thing the first time around, she’d have had health insurance weeks ago. Luckily she didn’t need it–wasn’t hit by a car, didn’t even sprain an ankle, didn’t get swine flu.  Again, thank heaven, because any of those things, and many others, could have happened during the extra weeks she wasn’t covered.

All in all not a great humongous bureaucratic slip, because there were no dire results.  Let’s hope Catamount finds its way to minimizing the possibilities for dire consequences.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen

Peace.

Deborah Alicen

None of that is much of a surprise, people being people.  And as much of a progressive/liberal as I am, and however much I would personally prefer a more progressive/liberal solution to a particular problem, I know that’s not an effective way to go about change.  That’s the way to go only if one wants to generate backlash.  So, even though I wish, on the one hand, to see more progressive and liberal moves coming out of the White House, I accept, on the other, the necessity for proceeding a little less bombastically.

Having been clear, I hope, in presenting my progressive/liberal credentials, I’ll say that for some things there simply is no middle road.  Transparency and accountability are among those things. 

President Obama has so far signaled, if not outright opposition, at least considerable foot-dragging when it comes to undoing some of what can be undone of Bush’s legacy, and pursuing accountability for Bushies who may have committed crimes.

We’ve been here before, and the failure to pursue accountability in the past was very much a part of opening us up to the abuses of Bush et al.  I’ll refer again to another old column of Dad’s (aka Kays Gary), written after President Ford pardoned President Nixon.  Read the whole column to see just how prophetic Dad was.  Indeed, I dare say Papa came in a little short on just how bad the next round would be.   He worried that there would be “a resurrection of the politics of pious infidels,”  and sure enough, that’s just what we got.  But I don’t think he would ever have imagined the scope and sheer volume of high crimes and misdemeanors that the Bush years would bury us under.

Some articles currently on Huffington Post are germane to this issue. It will be important to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, and Congressional Democrats’ as well.

First is the matter of Karl Rove having been subpoenaed to testify before Congress.  There is talk of offering him immunity if he testifies.

In the first place, this puts me at odds with my good senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy.  Senator Leahy has proposed a Congressional truth commission that would grant immunity from prosecution to anyone from the Bush administration who testifies freely to Congress.  I agree with most of the points the Senator makes; and while I see the benefits of setting up a structure that will elicit truth rather than blanket non-cooperation, there are some higher-level people whom I think should not have an opportunity to slip-slide their way out of accountability. Karl Rove is one of them.

In the second place, people who have been substantively injured by Rove’s actions deserve to see him held to account.  Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman is one of those people (HuffPo article here).  I feel some kinship with Gov. Siegelman, given my experience with Vermont bureaucracy (road map here), but he had the far worse of it, going to prison.  If, as Gov. Siegelman maintains (and I believe), he went to prison for things he never did, why then should the man who put him there get immunity from prosecution?  And how can Obama claim to be reinstituting the rule of law if that happens?

If we do not solidly ground ourselves in the rule of law now, after Bush, the next time the “pious infidels” take over, in another couple of generations or so, I doubt we could hold a long reign of fascism at bay.

Peace.  And accountability.

Deborah Alicen

It is immensely heartening to read the stance taken by the News & Observer’s Executive Editor, John Drescher. This is a journalist doing what journalists are supposed to do. He’s writing here about the problems the N&O has had gaining access to public information under the administration of out-going Governor Mike Easley:

This isn’t just a snit between us and Easley’s people. It matters to you.

Look, you might not like us. We’re too liberal. Or we’re too conservative. We all went to Carolina. Or we loved State’s Philip Rivers and Chuck Amato.

You hate Mallard Fillmore. Or you love Mallard Fillmore. We’re pro-Israel — except to those who insist we’re pro-Palestinian.

Fine by me. You read the paper; you’re entitled to your opinion.

But remember this: We dig like nobody else. We do the dirty work that no one else can do. It’s expensive. It’s monotonous. It often leads to unpleasant confrontation. Not many journalists enjoy it.

But it makes government better. It makes North Carolina better. To dig, we need public information — information that belongs to you and me.

For people who care about open government, this is the worst administration in decades.

Jim Hunt and Jim Martin were governor for 24 years before Easley. Their staffs had plenty of fights with reporters.

But most of the time, their public information officers respected the law and the public’s right to know about their government.

Read the complete column here.

Thank you, John Drescher. I hope to see your face in the Journalism Hall of Fame in that little burg down the road from you someday. You belong there.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen

The Vermont State Employees Association, the state workers’ union, had requested from the Department of Human Resources emails and other documents relating to Gov. Douglas‘ plan to cut 400 jobs from the state’s payrolls. DHR responded with a demand for $1700 to pay for the time DHR staff would have to spend gathering the documents in order to deliver them by the deadline specified in the public records law. (See the Times Argus story here.)

Administration Secretary Michael Smith suggested that VSEA request the information under an article of the union contract, which doesn’t state any deadlines and which wouldn’t, therefore, require some DHR staff to drop everything else they’re doing to meet the deadline.

Sounds reasonable, perhaps, to the very naive. But VSEA isn’t very naive. They have countered with the suggestion that DHR request an extension of time to produce the records, which is allowed under the public records law. But VSEA is not open to abandoning their public records law request and issuing the request under the union contract, since that would deprive them of timelines entirely, as well as the possibility of suing DHR in Superior court if it fails to produce the records. In other words, the alternative proposed by the administration is one that would render them unaccountable.

VSEA makes the point that both it and legislative committees have been asking for months about the impact of the loss of the 400 jobs on state services. Given that, it’s rather disingenuous of the administration to complain about being caught short on time to produce the records such that they can’t comply with the law without charging VSEA $1700.

There are elements of this situation that closely resemble what I experienced with the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office as well, which show themselves to be standard tricks and strategies of bureaucracies doing all they can to stall, at least, and avoid accountability entirely, at most.

For instance, in order to pursue an appeal of the Secretary of State’s due-process violating procedures that deprived me of my livelihood, I first had to order a hard copy transcript of the OPR hearing in my case, which came with a $1000 price tag. The state also had an alternative for me, as well, much as they suggested one to VSEA: save the cost what we will charge you to proceed, and just accept what we say the way we say it.

My thanks to VSEA to persisting in its efforts to attain the information it’s entitled to by law, without having to pay expenses that should fall to the state. As for the matter of who should bear the expense of providing records, that’s one of the details that legislators should develop a habit of addressing in all such legislation. It is absolutely one of the details that bureaucracies use to deter people from availing themselves of all the procedures (e.g. my appeal) and information (e.g. DHR records) to which they are entitled; details that in effect constitute loopholes for the bureaucracy. It’s up to legislators to close those loopholes by clearly stating who pays for what. And it’s up to us rank and file citizens to see to it that legislators close those loopholes and define clear accountability mechanisms for bureaucracies.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen

Officials from the Mississippi Development Authority paint a picture of vital Hurricane Katrina-relief projects still snared in federal bureaucracy almost three years after the storm.

But members of the MDA Disaster Recovery Division met with the Sun Herald on Thursday and they said much progress has been made in recent months.

The story goes on to report that each project must meet with the approval of up to fifteen (15) different agencies–and many of those agencies require several appointments each.

I wonder if anyone has crunched the numbers on what the cost is of all the time that goes into those multiple approval processes? And what about looking at how much duplication there is in all those processes and consolidating them across bureaucracies? How many more housing units could be built with the money saved by eliminating duplications?

Oh, I know–that’s hoping for a lot of reasoning power to be brought to bear on the situation, but I have faith in the human capacity for change. And also the wisdom to not hold my breath waiting.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen