For severals weeks now Michele has been complaining about a sharp pain in her left shin. Sometimes it would be worse, and sometimes not even there. In the past few days however the pain has become debilitating. Elevating her leg, applying heat or cold provided just a little respite, but no real relief.
Today we went to the nearby Urgent Care to see about an x-ray. The Doctor return with news far worse than we could have imagined. The is an actual hole in the bone, and some growth or disturbance around it. Because of her past history with breast cancer Dr. Ham’s assessment is that it has returned and metastasized to her shin. They immediately setup an appointment for Michele to have a bone scan performed Tuesday morning, with an appointment to see the orthopedist that afternoon.
Alternating between shock and tears we managed to get home. The nurse from Urgent Care called to inform us that they had upgraded her lower extremity scan to a full body scan. Obviously after further consideration Dr. Ham feels we need to search her whole body for more hot spots.
We spent the rest of the day moving in slow motion, barely comprehending what is happening. A part of me wants to pinch myself hard so I’ll wake up from this nightmare. Another part knows that I am already awake, and that the nightmare is real.
Our weekend will be spent quietly consoling each other and trying to put into words the enormity of our emotions.
The Posse Comitatus act prevents the United State government from using US troops for domestic law enforcement duties. Local or state militias, e.g., the National Guard, can and are used to restore order and assist in emergencies.
However a minor coup has occurred in Washington D. C. recently, and el presidente Bush has found a way around having federally sponsored and directed armies at his disposal here on American soil.
Mercenaries
Yes, mercenaries are now patrolling the streets and wards of New Orleans. Outfits like Blackwater (think of of them as a Kelley service for armed to the teeth thugs) are being paid by your tax dollars to interfere, er, help in Louisiana. Stories like this one are too frightening to take in all at once. Do we as Americans really want our military to outsource their responsibilities to some company whose owner’s just happened to give tens of thousands of dollars to the current ruling junta?
It is time to wake up and smell the toxic coffee my friends. The neo-cons through their puppet George Bush have stolen our country, and they are having a fire sale as we sit idly by fixated on the outcome of next Sunday’s “big game.”
What he said.
As members of a society we all agree to an unwritten contract that defines our conduct with others. Break some of the contracts clauses and you’ll be considered eccentric. Break major clauses and you run afoul of the law and go to jail. (Unless you happen to be “corporate citizen.”) Who is the judge and jury that enforces this social contract? You and I, of course.
At present my wife and I live underneath and apartment rented by a immature couple. He is in his mid-twenties and sells cars for his family’s business. She has admitted to only being twenty-one and works for (not as) a local realty firm. Since we looked at that particular apartment when we moved in here, I know that it rents for nearly 1500 dollars a month. He drives a sports car, and they recent bought a Oldsmobile Bravada for her to drive. In the two months since they’ve moved in there has been a steady stream of high-end purchases delivered: a large screen TV, new furniture, and a $400 purebred miniature dachshund.
There has also been a steady stream of beer and wine. Every time we see either of them they are carrying a glass or a bottle. The ground outside our common area is frequently littered with empty beer bottles or cans, and they seem to think that the lawn makes a fine ashtray for their cigarette butts. While the trash and toxic waste are irksome we haven’t really said anything to them or the apartment management figuring that it was too small a thing to get all worked up about.
Unfortunately there is a large problem and has interfered with our lives, and one that has caused us to take action. Domestic violence. (Which is an entirely too passive and demure term for the rage and anger happening more and more frequently above our heads.) The first incident that we were aware of happened around midnight on a Saturday six weeks ago. Yelling, screaming, slamming of doors. It ended with the girl sitting on the concrete stoop outside their front door. My wife, a former domestic abuse counselor, ventured just outside our door to talk to this woman for about an hour that night.
Two nights ago it happened again. This time we could plainly hear verbal threats, and several loud crashes through the floor. Just when we were ready to call the police the fight stopped, and she left. Minutes later he stormed out and left in his car. As he rocketed back past the building on the main road you could hear that he was driving well in excess of any safe speed. He was back in twenty minutes; we figure he had gone to get more alcohol.
The sticky part of this mess for us is what to do. As responsible citizens do we have an obligation to intervene, if only to call the police? If you were to see a fight on a street corner or at work, you’d call the authorities right away. But when it happens behind closed doors in a home, we all pretend that it isn’t our business. Do the rules of society stop at the threshold?
In the end we approached the apartment management to inform them about the situation. They were aware that something had happened as he had called them to say he was replacing an interior door that had been broken. The management said that should this happen again during business hours to call the office, and they would in turn inform the police. Michele and I are resolved to call the police should it happen after hours too.
I cannot, and Michele cannot, sit by and allow a dangerous situation to spiral further out of control. The rage we heard through the ceiling two nights ago isn’t going to go away on its own, and left unchecked will escalate into physical violence. One or both of the people upstairs is going to end up hurt, in the hospital, or dead. Already we have noted that the woman always wears long pants and long sleeved shirts. On one occasion when we knocked on their door to have the television turned down, she was wearing dark glasses.
The most important words in our Constitution are, “We the people…”, meaning that you and I are the power in our society. Government is there to manage and control the commons, but ordinary citizens have to stand up for and defend the social mores and standards. Otherwise we’ll all slowly sink into lawlessness and social anarchy.
For the past couple of weeks I have been struggling with an issue that has been moving just under the surface of my life for many years now. Over the Labor Day holiday it came boiling to the surface and rather then force it under water again I have decided to rid myself of it once and for all. In short I have come to the realization that the relationship I have with my immediate family is toxic to me, that I have no mechanism for moving the relationship towards anything that would be less toxic, and that I need to distance myself from them literally and figuratively so that I can heal myself.
From the time I completed college until now, I tried every thing I could think of to gain the approval and acceptance of my parents and brother. I, incorrectly, assumed that the difficulties I was experiencing were (a) shared by them and (b) entirely my fault. I see now that they have an entirely different view of our relationship than I, and I know from what they have told me directly, that they have no intention of changing. A part of me grieves all the years I put into being the “perfect” son or the “best” brother as I know now that it was for naught. The plain truth is that I could be anyone and their reaction to me would still be highly conditional and not take into account who I am at all.
Every interaction with them results in pain for me. Therefore the only course of action I see as viable is to not have interaction with them. My fear is that I’ve reached a point where I am ready to lash back at them for a lifetime of hurts, real and imagined. While that would feel good in the short term, saying things that would be hurtful or permanently damaging in the heat of the moment would go against my sense of integrity and character. Removing myself from contact with them gives me time to collect myself, to heal my wounds, to come back to a place where I can be civil.
Separating myself from my family come at a very difficult time as my mother is battling lung cancer. While she appears to be in a state of recovery, she is not asking the doctor for any prognosis, so I have no way to know if she will live another week, another month, or years yet. By taking the course of action I feel is necessary to save my sanity, and my mental health, I am risking never seeing my mother alive again. I cannot imagine higher stakes, and yet I cannot follow any other path.
My hope is that with time and distance the heated anger I feel towards them will cool; and that the steps I am taking now to reaffirm who I am in my own eyes, by my own standards, will heal the wounds I’ve had for so long. Once I feel strong in my own opinion of myself I will be ready to interact with my family once again. Until then I must keep myself separated from them and accept the risks that separation represents.
In the past year my little web site has seen approximately 53,500 visitors. I’m currently averaging about 145 visits per day, or 4,350 per month. Pretty amazing for a site that focuses on my mental state, obscure software, and left leaning politics.
For the the three of you who venture all the way to the bottom of the home page, I have updated the counter there to show what I feel is the lifetime visits for zanshin.net. The traffic to my site has effectively doubled each of the past six years, and I have a fair idea of what my visit total was for the first four years. (Yes, zanshin.net will be ten years old in February 2006. Celebration details will be forthcoming.)
I’ve crossed the 100,000 visit mark, and should see something like 135,000 in time for the ten year anniversary. W00t!
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Seemingly, no one at Sky News Wire has read Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Om Malik has started a new meme, this time about freeware or shareware Mac applications “that have helped you get the most out of your Mac.”
Here’s my list:
X-Pad: A notepad with state. No files to save or open, just type and it is saved for you. As an incorrigible note taker this gem has saved my desk from being awash in little, yellow, slightly sticky bits of paper.
Comictastic: The best way to read comics online. Think of it as a Tivo for the funny papers.
Adium: My only chat client. With support for all the major protocols, as well as themes and skins, Adium is simply the best.
Fuzzy Clock: This menu bar add-on displays the time as you would say it out loud (“twenty past eight”). And with numerous dialects (Elmer Fudd any one?) it has permanently replaced the digital and analog clock on my menu.
Palm Reader: As an avid reader of books I have learned to appreciate electronic books. With Palm Reader I can take a book with me anywhere I can take my palm with me.
VLC: For those video formats QuickTime won’t play.
TransLucy: An alternative DVD viewer that turns the movie into a transparent overlay allowing you to watch the movie through your desktop, or your desktop through the movie.
Growl: A notification framework that interacts will any number of other applications. Adium, iTunes, even cron tasks now inform me of their activities in a manner I find pleasing.
SideTrack: This trackpad driver allows me to have outer- and center- button click functionality without a mouse. Scrolling (horizontal and vertical) is also provided.
Witch: An alternative to CMD-TAB, Witch allows you to see all the minimized windows on your machine at once so you can select the one you want. Between CMD-TAB, Quicksilver, and Witch I am able to interact my way with my Mac.
After reading about ClamXav I thought I’d download it and give it a try.
Like most “Switchers I brought with me a whole host of documents, images, music, and zip files. Turns out that there were some parasites in and among the collection.
While my machine maybe safe from the viruses of the Windows world (unless I run one while inside of VirtualPC), I can still pass them on to my friends. Sort of a Typhoid Macintosh situation.
After nearly three years on Mac OS X, with no anti-virus software of any sort running, I am pleased that the newest virus found was on a file in a zip archive from 1998.
Over at “The Intellectual Activist” there’s this story: Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Manmade Disaster of the Welfare State, purporting to explain the “real” reason behind the disaster that has become the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Here is my response:
One of the great problems with welfare as it is carried out in this country is the aspect of learned helplessness. Michele has worked more than once in her career in ‘welfare delivery’ roles. She no longer does this kind of work because she has a fundamental issue with how the welfare agencies deliver their product.
While working for the Oregon Services for Children and Families agency as a foster care case worker she repeatedly ran into issues when she wanted to hold her client responsible for taking care of themselves, rather than doing the work for them. For example: Clients who needed to appear in court or attend counseling would call her for a ride. She provided them with bus passes and a schedule and told them they were responsible for making their commitments. Her bosses actually called her on the carpet for not going and picking them up and ferrying them around. And these were people trying to meet court ordered conditions to regain custody of their biologic children!
Are there people in the world today who need a leg up? Most certainly.
Should we as a society help them? Yes.
Should that help come in the form it currently does? No way.
The agencies have an entirely different goal than emancipating their wards. The agency wants head-count so they can get increased funding and ensure their survival. Michele’s approach, which taught self-reliance and personal responsibility, would ultimately result in lowered head-count and thereby reduced budgets. As long as the agency dispensing aid is measured by head-count, the goal of actually helping people and removing them from the welfare rolls, will never happen.
Michele was part of a team who drafted into law in Florida, requirements that forced domestic violence treatment programs to treat both the victim and the abuser. Treating only one aspect of the problem only prolongs it, and it adds to the victimization of the untreated party. Our welfare systems currently throws money at a problem that can’t be solved solely by money. Until we establish programs that truly teach self-reliance and responsibility, we will have “welfare moms” who are twice victimized. Once by the tipping-point incident that led them to welfare initially, and again by a system that ensures its survival by promoting learned helplessness.
Are all the problems in New Orleans the result of bad planning on the governments part? Of course not. But neither is the situation entirely the fault of people who are already down and out. Blaming them as a group for the troubles in the aftermath is much like blaming the rape victim for getting raped. Like any stress filled situation, Katrina has exposed the weak underbelly of our society. A frightening number of people in this country are only one paycheck away from homelessness. Those who have already sipped beneath the water line of minimum survival are desperate, and, as the hurricane aftermath has shown us, willing to take desperate measures. I would hate to see the resources available to assist people in true need be curtailed because there are some problems with the overall system. I would like to see change happen, fundamental change that forces people to grow. For if we continue to ignore the growing problems created by the increasing gap between those that have and those that have not, there will be revolution and class warfare the likes of which will make New Orleans seem like a walk in the park