Thanks to Annie

So, thanks to Annie, I must confess and submit. For I have promised in public and I have tried and failed and I have not written in so long that the last thing up here is Spain, which I haven't been to in over a year.

Now that we didn't visit, of course, as Karma or Dogma or Momma would have it, J's dad ended up hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism. The pure hell of that week and half after he found out--because his family didn't tell him; he found out by accident when he called his dad's cell--is only one of the many scars I bear this spring.

Xrays tomorrow or the next for the Left Knee and the Right Foot will show "If this is a disease process or degenerative" because my sed rate is below normal and if you didn't need any vowels to read that, you know too much about pain. Of course she said degenerative as though it were a throw-away word; as though then it wouldn't hurt as much. She had to. Because if it is degenerative she can't do as much.

In the meantime I should be proud of myself for getting the Rx Companies to help pay the $2000+ per month I would otherwise spend on my meds (like I have that kind of money). I was let down by the woman on the other end of the phone who while activating my card asked, "Do you have your medications delivered to your home?" And clearly didn't even break a smile when I replied, "No, I actually drive down to the street corner." She asked which pharmacy I used. I refrained from correcting her; the proper term, of course, being discopharmacologist. I answered her questions. I was polite. It was a near relief to only deal with a machine when activating the second Rx help card. My insurance has improved this year. Just enough that I can't get the really expensive shit I put in my body for free and can't afford the co-pay. And believe me, I put some expensive poison in this body.

Meanwhile I've been promising myself I'd keep a daily journal this year of magical parenting so I could write about it and I would be honest and a real writer. And I haven't. I can't. I don't have the time. I don't have the energy. I am not entirely sure I will ever have the honesty.

Instead I read for exams--which would be a noble excuse if it were true nearly as often as it should be or if I had done nearly as much of it as I need to have done by now. I take the kid to school. I pick her up. I watch trashy and fun TV with her. I go shopping, I cook, I take the dogs to the vet, I work at BAM, I teach Hebrew School, I worry. I nap. I nap a lot. I cannot but nap. And I do read. But not enough.

And so here I am posting to all the world, sadly knowing it will not read and still fearing it might. I might even manage some more. Soon.

Just a "drunk injun" issue...

You're not likely to have seen this show; we miss a lot by having several thousand channels and none of them international. But if you're curious about an interesting case of a native man in Canada (it's a neighbor country), and the sentence he got of "spiritual work" after he let his children die--while on an alcohol bender--start looking: RightGirl's Blog, and the original story.

I'm sending you to RightGirl for two reasons. First, she seems to have sounded off rather loudly on this, and second, she's how I learned about it. She even got into an interesting fight on Canadian TV (Yes, they even have TV) with a talking head over her use of the terms "drunken injun" and "sweatlodge justice."

Check it out; it's a fun fight.

But it's problematic. Deeply so.

First, Wendy Sullivan, AKA RightGirl, and Micheal Coren, AKA the talking head, are fighting over the same side. He thinks its terrible, but she shouldn't be allowed to use words like "injun," and she thinks it's terrible and that she should be allowed to use any words in the lexicon. They're the perfect picture of the right and left of modern Western politics. The right is mad about intellectual language (and with it intellect, though they have plenty) and the left is mad over the intelligent use of language (which is what got them beat up from 1994-2009, and what got them the election in 2008).

Both sides are wrong.

What's really at stake here? The story is simple. A native man got drunk and "lost" his daughters in a snowstorm. They died. He was sentenced by a judge, but his tribe wanted to use a sentencing circle to sentence him apart from the criminal system. Sullivan and Coren both think it's abominable that tribal justice might rule over the judicial system, but Coren thinks we should say that without making fun of a system our forefathers helped ruin.

Heaven forbid we should have satire and learn to laugh at our problems--or learn to fix them.

My first issue with the argument is that it was entertaining mindlessness under the guise of debate. I don't mind entertaining mindlessness; I watch plenty of it. But it pisses me off when we pretend it's anything but mindless.

Sullivan, rightly, says that any person who wishes to be part of the system, must live by the laws and justice of that system. What she's not saying is what lies under that. The "Indian affairs" systems at work in the US and Canada are not viable. They are a form of oppression in the guise of emancipation. "Do whatever you like on the Res. But the Res is where we get to keep you infantile in our minds and social order."

Whereas the rest of our society is based on the mutual agreement that laws rule, and that all citizens, to hold that title, must live under that rule. We pretend that "the nations" have autonomy on the tiny, shrinking, tracts of land we "gave" them, but once we've marginalized them to those tracts, we get frustrated when they don't want to live under our rule.

Hell, I wouldn't either.

The reservation system is flawed and damaged and damaging, and it's time we faced it--as adults. That is what Sullivan should have been saying.

As for Coren, he's pissed that Sullivan went for the punchline instead of the argument. But he is stuck in the same TV, soundbite, three seconds to say it, format she's in, and he seems to not know what it is that's really pissing him off.

Let me help: Coren is peeved that the system we set up to make up for our forebears' mistakes has instead broken things further, and he doesn't know how to suggest we fix it, because he's afraid to say it's broken. So, because of misguided and misplaced guilt, Coren is afraid that we'd only break it more if we tried to fix it.

But what about the negligent-drunken-murderous-"injun"-father?

By now, you've read the story. Pauchay's tribe wants to sentence him to do "spiritual work" for three years, rather than jail for three years. Sullivan is angered because to her this is not punishment.

But is she sure?

I'm intrigued that a person speaking for the political right would find "spiritual work" not to be punishment. My father, a rabbi, likes to say that the truest hell of the atheist is to find his soul returned to G-d. Seems to me, the truest punishment for what Pauchay did, is to force him to soberly face the heinous nature of his own act. "Spiritual Work," one might say, would be the toughest sentence in this equation.

Three years in a cell block with felons who make an art of denial of their crimes, who will teach this man new and more interesting ways to waste his life, who are more likely to cause him physical damage and harden his mind against his own guilt than to help him see and feel it in full, will leave him an ex-con, not a better man.

Time to face yet another truth; our justice system is just as broken as our system for natives (or aboriginals, as I believe every other culture in the world calls them). Instead of dealing with the problems caused by criminals in our society, we lock them away and hope that years of socializing with each other will not make them recidivists. Might as well kill them all to begin with, since we're sentencing them to life without parole from felony. And sentencing ourselves to a more criminal and violent, recidivist filled, society. Maybe we could learn a thing or two and reconsider the Bentham Panopticon model of "justice."

Let me make this simple: Western "justice" and the "reservation" systems both suck! It's time to stop fearing fault and start finding solutions. It's time to leave off the childish blame game and start earning all our places at the adults' table. We are all (and I do mean all) complicit.

Done.

Now let's do some spiritual work and find a solution.

Here's an idea...

We should sell BO memorabilia to raise the $ Trillions it'll take to get us out of this mess.

One thing that seems to not get mentioned by ANYONE on either side is that this is NOT BO's mess! If you're going to blame the top uns, and the Right certainly seems hell bent on it--because there's little else they can do, other than grab as much for themselves as possible--at least blame the right one; the one who's been supporting a $10 million/mo. war, off the books, for the last, oh, 6 years. You got it; Bushy! More likely his #2, also known as puppetmaster, Cheney. Doesn't really matter, does it? What's important is ow to fix it.

And that's the sticker, isn't it? Economists are yelling spend more, and all at once, or spend nothing and cut more rich people's taxes so they can let it piddle down to the poor (am I sounding biased?). Politicians are yelling--mostly mindless sound and fury on BOTH sides, signifying nothing. And the media is looking for the worst case scenarios to make it all look wonderfully dramatic. Is anyone doing anything "constructive"? BO, just might be. Though I'm not sure I believe it's as bad as it looks.

I know people all over this country. I don't know folks who have to go to soup kitchens. I know folks who are tightening their belts, but even the folks I know who own businesses--those entrepreneurs in the most trouble--who are doing okay. The restaurants in my town are still crowded on Saturday nights. None of us are happy about our grocery bills, but none of us are dying of starvation in dust bowl huts, either. Can anyone put a reality check on this? It seems to me, the only folks who have the chance of doing that (the media, the politicians, the economists) have the most to gain; they're keeping their jobs by telling us how bad it is.

Is ANYONE interested in the truth?

Seems to me the truth is the economy sucks, but fear-mongering sucks worse! It sucks the little left of the economy down the drain! It sucks the energy out of people who would otherwise be motivated to change things. It sucks the life out of us all. Can we just stop it? We can, and then we can sell BO memorabilia AND "I survived the depression" buttons.