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Posts Tagged ‘law’

It’s About the Guns Stupid

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on August 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »

This will be a short post. Here is today’s news in guns: Today the man who took a bullet for Ronald Reagan died. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/politics/james-s-brady-symbol-of-fight-for-gun-control-dies-at-73.html?_r=0  I’m glad Bob didn’t work last night. This is what happened in his hospital’s community http://www.nbc29.com/story/26189153/5-dead-after-murder-suicide-in-culpeper

Every comment about this in the paper and on Facebook is all about praying for the family; but believe me, I don’t think praying at this point will do much good. It might help you to pray. But the grandmother who found her daughter and her grand daughters lying in pools of their own blood, blood that her son-in-law shed because he decided to pick up a gun, will never be the same again. The coward even shot himself, so this grandmother is deprived of a trial, of swift judgement, or even forgiveness if she were so inclined. I just don’t get it.

If you haven’t joined Everytown for Gun Safety yet, please think about it. I know there are more of us out there, more moms and grandmothers who know it’s about the guns. This happened in Maine a week ago http://www.pressherald.com/2014/07/28/deaths-of-5-in-saco-could-rank-among-maines-deadliest-crimes/ Another family of 5 dead.

We need to keep guns out of the hands of abusers, stalkers and the mentally ill…it’s as simple as that. It’s about the guns.

 

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Common Courtesy

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2014| 1 Comment »

It’s finally happening in the previous Capital of the Confederacy, ex-Gov Bob McDonnell’s trial is underway. Lawyers are picking a “jury of their peers” and charging him with accepting bribes loans and lavish gifts from a health/supplement company CEO/supporter. It’s rumored that much of the blame on the defense side will be placed on Maureen, who needed the pretense of a certain lifestyle in order to marry off her daughter. It seems misogyny is still rearing its ugly head in Dixie, particularly among Republicans. They are also contending that the ex-first couple of VA were simply extending “common political courtesies” like hosting and arranging meetings for his supporter…while also accepting loans of $165,000.

I’ve never served on a jury, but believe me this would be ripe material for a writer. I’ve heard that many have simply sat in the public section of a courtroom just to listen, to pick up the cadence of a jury trial, to spark an idea that might lead to a plot twist. I wonder if this Richmond trial will be televised? I’ve only watched two trials on TV, OJ and Anita Hill. But this is my kind of reality TV. Gentlemen get out the clapperboard – “Roll Cameras!”

The Bride sent me a video of the Love Bug reading a book at the airport last night. I love that it’s her favorite of the moment, and it used to amuse my daughter too, “Caps for Sale” by Esphyr Slobodkina. She was born in Siberia, Russia and immigrated to the US in 1929. A talented artist, this book became a children’s classic instantly. Probably taken from a Yiddish tale, the peddler is trying to sell his caps, while monkeys are doing what they do best. It is a cautionary story for parents and children alike, a kind of “monkey see, monkey do” parable play.

When I would laugh out loud in the car, I’d hear the Bug laughing behind me in her car seat. When I would say, “Thank you Mama for making us pancakes this morning,” she would repeat, “Thank you Mama.” When I would point out a lizard on the deck, she would repeat, “Lizard!” We hiked to the river, we looked for deer every morning, and she would repeat whatever we said, but more importantly, she picked up our feelings, like a tiny toddler empath. It was not just baby see, baby do, but baby feel.

And so, as I was aware of the constant push and pull of parenting once again, of the need to civilize our smallest citizens, and as I was modeling “Please” and “Thank you” and “Excuse me” a gazillion times – because not getting what you want when you want it is tough for anybody, especially a toddler – I thought about our poor ex-Govenor.

In a system that has become corrupt, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between ethical and unethical behavior. If everybody is doing it, trading favors, on Wall Street or in the hallways of political power in our state capital, well then one might understand how a loan might be perceived as a common courtesy. But in a democracy, someone has to play the role of the parent, and put a stop to all that monkey business.   IMG_0927

 

 

 

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Abnormally Normal

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 2, 2014| 4 Comments »

Did you feel normal growing up? The Rocker’s friend back in Jersey, a guy from his early high school heavy metal band years, asked me this question the other day. He was writing a paper for his college upper-level Psych course and had to interview someone from another generation. By that I think he meant a “senior!” Why he picked the mom who served bagel dogs and root beer after school is beyond me. Needless to say, I was flattered.

“When you were growing up, did you ever think you were abnormal in any way?”

Doesn’t everybody? But that’s not what I said. I said “Yes,” and went on to try and explain how this could be a good thing. I knew I was abnormal because my name didn’t match my foster parents. First of all, I was the only kid I knew with foster parents. My last name belonged to a father who had died in Scranton and a mother who had been crippled in a head-on car crash. Having two moms in two different states wasn’t normal then. No matter how hard I tried, I could never really be their child.

I said that I also felt different because I had strawberry blond hair. But that’s not the same as saying that my signature mane turned almost white in the summer and got redder as the winter sun faded. That I felt like a too tall, skinny, scrawny kid. That my real (biologic) mom, the Flapper, said she could always find me in a crowd. That I made myself a bowl of spaghetti at night before bed to put on some weight. That I dreamed of having jet black hair just so I could fit in and not stand out. Later I would thank my Nana’s mahogany red hair and the Flapper’s platinum blond bob for bestowing their unique recessive genes on me; but as a kid, I was mortified.

“How have your own attitudes toward what’s normal and what’s abnormal changed over the course of your lifetime?”

Now that is a loaded question. First of all, what constitutes a “family” is very different. My hodge-podge of half/step/foster and biologic siblings is pretty tame, or normal today. Marriage equality has leveled the playing field. Growing up with a Jewish step-father in my teen years, with college educated brothers, I stepped out of the cocoon my foster parents had made for me. That little Catholic school girl became a child of the universe, with a rather striking liberal, progressive bent. Except for one thing, I’m pretty much in agreement with most of my current family’s attitudes.

That one thing is the death penalty. My step-father, who was a town judge, must have had some effect on me since even the Flapper was against the death penalty. For years I differed with the rest of my loved ones, like a lone wolf cast adrift whenever the subject came up. My reasoning was subjective; if somebody ever killed one of mine, I’d be the first to retaliate. There were, in my mind, circumstances that should relieve the taxpayer from paying for a monster’s life in prison…like killing a child, a police officer, or planning to ram planes into tall buildings etc.

But my philosophy about government-induced-death has been slowly changing. After reading about “false confessions” and mistaken convictions once DNA evidence was introduced. And knowing how the justice system is rigged toward the wealthy. After seeing how most of the civilized world has stopped killing its prisoners – so much so that the needed chemicals are hard to come by for a lethal injection. And this week, after hearing about the botched execution in Oklahoma, it became harder for me to justify my pro-death penalty stance. I could rant about pro-lifers not caring about the children born into poverty, and yet I found myself in their camp, a double paradox, when it came to the death sentence.

Then I read why those two prisoners were on death row. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/04/30/why-were-the-two-inmates-in-oklahoma-on-death-row-in-the-first-place/?tid=pm_national_pop And now I wonder why the gun lobby doesn’t try to bring back the firing squad. And I’m only half kidding.

The lone Conservative, surrounded by his Liberal sisters

The lone Conservative, surrounded by his Liberal sisters

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A Cautionary Tale for American Parents

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 4, 2014| 1 Comment »

What would you do if you came home and your front door was ajar? You went into your bathroom and noticed some drops of caked blood on the sink and the rug? Would you take a shower? Then, let’s say you did take a shower, and you noticed another toilet in the house hadn’t been flushed.

And let’s just say you are 19, and studying abroad where your knowledge of your host’s culture and language is limited.

It took the poopy toilet for panic mode to set in for Amanda Knox. The year was 2009. In her mind, she’d been explaining away all the other little things: a broken latch; recently pierced ears or maybe menstrual difficulties. But the toilet was another problem entirely. Just days earlier her roommate, Miranda Kircher a British student, had mentioned in passing that Amanda needed to clean the toilet after every use, this was the European way.

Hailing from Seattle, Amanda was more of a water conservationist, but she understood  – when in Peugina, Italy, you abide by their customs. And when she couldn’t open Miranda’s locked bedroom door, she did what every other red-blooded American girl would do, she called her mother!

You may have heard that last week, Italy’s highest court decided that Amanda and her ex-boyfriend, Raffaela Sollecheti, have been convicted again, found guilty again, in the murder of her roommate Miranda.

And I remember at first back in 2009 thinking, oh sure enough, they did it. Amanda sounds like a compulsive liar. I rarely gave it another thought – then after serving 4 years in prison, they were found innocent by an appeals court. It had been a comedy of errors. A provincial police department ignored and/or contaminated evidence, they held back key pathology reports. There was a prosecutor who was being investigated for improper conduct around a “satanic serial killer.”

So when I heard the Italians had changed their minds again, found the pair guilty of murder again, the Agatha Christie in me just had to come out. I read Amanda’s memoir, “Waiting to be Heard.” I devoured every news article I could Google. And it turns out Amanda was guilty of a few things – her demeanor and facial expressions were inappropriate – she had demonstrated some yoga moves in a police hallway at the urging of a cop, she had been filmed chastely kissing her boyfriend in the driveway at the scene. To her detriment, she waited 4 days for her mom to arrive and to help the police who were framing her for murder. And sleep-deprived and naive, she was forced into a “false confession” that implicated her boss at a café in the murder. The real murderer would be arrested in Germany after his DNA was found all over the murder scene.

The theory of a sex game gone horribly wrong was more or less a fantasy of the prosecutor. And all it needed was a willing Italian press to spread its discrepancies and lies. And sell newspapers.

And I remembered sending the Bride off to Paris for her Junior year abroad. And sending the 15 year old Rocker to visit her along with her roommate’s brothers for Thanksgiving, 1999.

On top of the Eiffel Tower

On top of the Eiffel Tower

And even with some anti-Semitic graffiti in the 16th Arrondissement, I felt sure that they would be fine. They lived in an apartment above a French family, it was probably once the servant’s attic atelier. The girls ate with them weekly.

Now if I were Amanda’s mother, I’d be getting our passports in order.

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Apologies Accepted

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2013| 2 Comments »

I’d like to apologize in advance for flooding your mailbox with 2 holiday cards this year. But since I’ve never been one to check my emails constantly and reply immediately to anyone, I received this message from Shutterfly a day late and a dollar short: “We are writing to inform you of an error we have discovered with your recent Shutterfly card order.  When you placed your order, you selected Rounded Corners, Pearl Shimmer Cardstock, or both.  Unfortunately your order has shipped without those options.  Our print facilities are working around the clock to ship your corrected order as quickly as possible.”

I’d also like to apologize to the world for the news out of Texas this week. It seems that Judge Jean Boyd, an elected official who has said she will not seek another term on the bench, ordered a 16 year old drunk driver to a posh rehab facility in California for 6 months, followed by serving 10 years on parole. Well that’s it for him right? College dreams dashed, having to attend AA meetings and be randomly tested for drugs and alcohol until he turns 26. Poor thing. All for killing 4 people and paralyzing one friend, and leaving another in a coma.

I get the outrage about his sentence, but really people is this news? Maybe the term “affluenza” is new, although I’ve heard of it before. Every time a parent runs in to rescue a child from some disaster or another, that parent is saying, “Don’t worry Johnny, We’ve got your back.” Which translates to, “Anything you do, anything at all, has no consequences whatsoever.” A parent from the Country Day School on our peninsula in NJ (called a “tony” suburb by many where brokers, bankers and hedge funders live in Stanford White clapboard mansions by the sea) once told me a story.

Her friend’s child was about to attend a pricey boarding school. The Day School stopped at 8th grade, so many students were shipped off like the British system to fend for themselves at exclusive places like St Andrews or Miss Porters. The mom with lots of time on her hands decided to purchase a condo in the same town in order to “help” that child cope with things… affluenza is when helicopter, or severe attachment parenting goes ballistic.

Extreme wealth is like adding steroids to a cocktail of adolescent rebellion. Let’s see, how can we upset our perfect parents? Shall we dress in black and cut ourselves? Maybe driving drunk will get their attention? Who knew that rehabilitating rich kids is a billion dollar industry, and unfortunately growing? When your kid can’t make it at a regular old boarding school, there’s always Rocky Mountain Academy , a therapeutic boarding school in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. The rules are strict, and the punishment is old-school hippie-based tough emotional love. Boot camps, where troubled teens face harsh treatment in the desert, and sometimes die, are for the middle-class I guess.  http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/1014/140.html

And jail time for a juvenile offender is for the poor.

Let’s save our holiday outrage for the real crime – for the children living in poverty who make one mistake and end up in the revolving door of foster care and prison because their parents or guardians cannot afford the lawyers with a “poorfluenza” defense. For the 200,00 children, some as young as 13, who have been charged as adults in our American justice system. http://www.eji.org/childrenprison I have no sympathy at all for drunk drivers, my own foster care was a direct result of someone’s carelessness. But I cannot deny a child of any race or economic circumstance a second chance.

At our Richmond Christmas party last night, I met a rescue border collie. Lexey was starting a new life with a loving family after spending years as a service dog. While petting her, I listened to some of our Big Chill group reminisce about their close calls with the law. I’ll spare you the details, but we all grew up to be tax-paying citizens. photo

 

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Feminista

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2013| 4 Comments »

Something a journalist said on Twitter caught my attention a few days ago. I even had the pleasure of this person “favoriting” my response to the situation – while everyone else in the BIG media company the journalist worked for  received 10 weeks of parental leave after the birth of a baby, this particular parent was eligible for only 2 weeks. Why?

Because he is the biological father!                                                                   http://joshlevs.tumblr.com/post/65567442495/why-ive-filed-an-eeoc-charge-against-time-warner

It’s strange that the parental leave policy at Time Warner does not discriminate against same-sex couples having a baby, they get 10 weeks of paid leave, each person.  Adoption, surrogacy, no problem. The 10 week policy applies to any new adoptive or surrogate parent, man or woman. But this is their third child, and Josh just couldn’t get the company to budge. So he had to sue, because sometimes a challenge in court is what it takes to right an obvious wrong. Here is what one of his lawyer’s said:

Time Warner’s excuse for treating biological fathers differently than mothers is that women experience a period of medical disability associated with child birth.  While this sounds reasonable at first blush, the rationale does not square with the 10 weeks given to adoptive parents who require no medical recovery time.  Moreover, biological mothers receive the 10 weeks of maternity leave IN ADDITION to their full short-term disability benefits.

Then I just happened to bump into this guy, Joss Whedon, who starts ranting about feminists and comparing the word to the word taliban. Oh you know I was interested. “I hate feminists,” he says, and he begins dissecting the word; a wordsmith who actually made me rethink my relationship with Gloria Steinem and NOW. http://www.upworthy.com/a-room-full-of-feminists-just-applauded-a-guy-who-attacked-feminists-wait-for-it-re2-7a?c=ucfb1  Thank you Rebecca Eisenberg for bringing this discussion to light!

It seems that even rich, white guys can be discriminated against. In this post-feminist, “genderist” world I hope that Josh Levs rallies men and women and transgenders to his cause equally. Because our newborn babies deserve as much time and love as our corporations can deliver under the law. Because we old “feminists” taught our sons well; now it’s high time Madame Justice took off her blindfold.

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It’s About Rape (again) and Football

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 17, 2013| 4 Comments »

Extra extra, read all about it! I’ve been reading about the comparisons to Steubenville for awhile. So it comes as no surprise that A) Anonymous has taken up the plight of two young girls in Maryville, Missouri and 2) the alleged rapists are football players. What is surprising, besides our government being open for business this morning, is that the Nodaway County Prosecutor who dismissed the case, has now asked the court for a special prosecutor to review the facts.http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/16/us/missouri-rape-case/

Nodaway County, nod.away, could the name get any more Shakespearian?

I won’t bore you with the facts as we know them so far. Except for the fact that the encounter was filmed, in a similar vein to Steubenville, but the video was erased that same evening and evidently cannot be retrieved. Maybe these football players are smarter than their Ohio counterparts…maybe the detectives at “Law and Order, SVU” should be called in? I’m not going to reiterate my previous opinions – that “NO” means “no” and  “…a rape is a rape is a rape, no matter who you are or where you live.” https://mountainmornings.net/2013/01/04/a-rape-is-a-rape/

What I do want to focus on here is the Holy Grail of high school, football. Because it’s usually not the captain of the chess club who finds himself hauled into court over a sex crime is it. I was reading a fascinating article about our American obsession with sports on the bike the other day, I know, the irony. Still, Amanda Ripley of the Atlantic makes an excellent argument against school sports in her article “The Case Against High School Sports.” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/

Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education…When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.

This is required reading for everybody since Ripley dares to expose the tax money we Americans spend on athletics, which includes coaches, buses to away games etc (instead of say, math) and the culture that goes along with an adoration of the body and not the mind. She shows us what happens when administrators  in failing schools actually suspend sports – surprise, discipline reports go way down, while teachers’ salaries went up along with their students’ academic scores.

And here is my last lesson. As the budget talks are stalled on the Hill in a Hail Mary pass from a team of women Senators, and before we start slashing music and art budgets in public schools around the country, I think every single school board member from Albemarle to Marin County should find out exactly how much their district is spending on sports. Subs usually are hired for the days a teacher travels to a game, finding and maintaining playing fields can be costly. There are insurance costs and athletic supplies and trainers, a sports budget can also hide under other line items, you’ll have to dig deep.

Schools have been known to spend a quarter of a million dollars to install and maintain a running track around a football field. I know.

Because at the end of the day, if we want to compete on a global level and we want our daughters to feel valued, we may have to revisit a creeping patriarchy that began with private schools at the turn of the last century. The fear of new immigrants led Teddy Roosevelt to say about the American Boy – “Hit the line hard; don’t foul out; don’t shirk.” He should have added, don’t rape.

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Have a Heart

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 16, 2013| 4 Comments »

I admit it. I love Bonnie Raitt, she of the slide guitar and flaming red hair. Last summer we saw her at the Pavillion on the Historic Downtown Mall. Her voice is just as good, if not better and her lyrics always hit the right heart string. I’ll share with you the song that’s been stuck in my head all morning.

http://www.artistdirect.com/video/bonnie-raitt-have-a-heart/46413

And the reason I’ve been humming “Have a heart please, why don’t you have a heart…” is because I caught a snippet of the interview my guy Anderson Cooper is broadcasting tonight on CNN with the first juror to talk about George Zimmerman. I’ve been telling Bob all weekend that the judge didn’t answer the jury’s question about manslaughter, that’s why they voted to acquit. Judge Debra Nelson  asked them for specific questions, but the jury never followed up on the manslaughter questions with specifics. This juror, who prefers to remain in the shadows, said that they found the evidence and the legal charges “confusing.” Now this Judge is questioning whether the charges should have been filed at all.

And we find out that the first vote in the jury room had 3 jurors in the manslaughter slot. A verdict of manslaughter, which I think was probably the right call if all the facts had been presented (like Zimmerman’s pattern of calling the police about “suspicious” looking black men more than 40 times in the past year). The murder charge was overreaching maybe, since that presumes Zimmerman intended to kill – he set off that evening with a loaded gun hunting young black men. A manslaughter conviction would have meant that he didn’t intend to kill Trayvon…this actually seems to have been the more likely scenario. I think he wanted to stop him, but I realize I don’t really know.

Let’s think about this, in Florida if someone looks “suspicious” you can hunt them down and kill them if THEY stand their ground and try to fight back! Is suspicious a gay kid, is it a Latino or a mentally disabled homeless person? What about a woman in a short skirt, hanging out on a street corner? I’ve had 2 separate instances recently when I thought someone looked “suspicious” – they were white guys in a pickup truck, both times they had parked under a tree in the shade, in the middle of the day where they could watch kids at a 1)park and 2)sports club but were looking at maps or a newspaper when they saw me approach my car. In both instances I was close enough for them to say something to me like, “Hey.” I thought about calling the police BUT they were not committing a crime. I did jot down a license plate number! Check out this video from Howard University: http://boingboing.net/2013/07/15/howard-university-students-v.html#.UeRx1MJ-hgI.facebook Do they look suspicious?

Back to The Anonymous Juror, and what got me humming. She said she didn’t think that killing was what was in Zimmerman’s heart; That his heart was “…in the right place.”

” JUROR: I think George Zimmerman is a man whose heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhoods, and wanting to catch these people so badly, that he went above and beyond what he really should have done. But I think his heart was in the right place. It just went terribly wrong.” http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/15/3502047_p3/zimmerman-juror-speaks-out-transcript.html#storylink=cpy

In other words, she gave this murderer a pass because she didn’t think he intended to kill Trayvon – which is like saying he’s guilty of manslaughter since he actually DID kill him! In my mind, once Zimmerman disobeyed the police and got out of his car, he set into motion the tragedy that unfolded. Is there a sliver lining? Will gun laws and stand your ground laws be reformed? After Newtown, I’m not hopeful. Let the jurors begin the talk show rounds, it will only get curiouser and curiouser. Because they presume Zimmerman has a heart, and just from watching his affect in court, and listening to his 911 call, I wonder.

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