Beacon Broadside

Danielle Ofri: Humanizing Medicine: The Small Details

2009-11-20T06:06:27-08:00

Today's post is from Danielle Ofri, writer and practicing internist at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients. This post originally appeared at her Medicine in Translation blog at Psychology Today.

"Angelina Gomez," the medical assistant hollers out to the crowded waiting room. As always, I cringe when I hear this. It sounds so harsh, so cattle-like. I know that the assistant is actually a gentle and caring person, and I understand that he uses a loud voice so that he can be heard over the general din of a large waiting room.

Nevertheless it feels horrible to me, so demeaning, like we're in the DMV instead of a medical clinic. I want the environment to be more humane, more civilized, and so when I go out to call a patient, I use a much softer voice, with a tone that I hope conveys more respect.

Of course, no one can hear me. Heads turn, ears strain, faces contort as people try to figure out who I am calling. The medical assistant usually gets the right person on the first try. I, on the other hand, end up pacing up and down the waiting room repeating the name. Am I making the environment any better?

There is so much wrong about medicine today. The list is endless and contains so many high-profile items like lack of universal coverage, inequitable distribution of resources, higher reimbursement for procedures than for primary care. But sometimes it's the tiniest details that seem to affect us the most strongly, and certainly these are the only ones we can possibly control.

I've been in other clinics where an overhead announcement is used to call the patients. It certainly offers clarity and volume, and achieves the goal of locating the patients. But it feels even more factory-like to me.

I often try to figure out what a patient will look like, based on their age, sex, and name. There's a tinge of guilt because I suppose there's undoubtedly an amount of stereotype involved, but it does allow me to direct my calls to the reasonably appropriate demographic.

There are other small things that can contribute grains of humanity to the doctor-patient encounter, such as how we address patients. Our entire society has shifted toward familiarity and use of first names. Nevertheless, a conscious effort to use patients' proper names and titles respectful titles is worthwhile. It conveys that the medical profession is here at the patient's service, not the other way around.

In my particular clinic, much of the care is conducted in Spanish. I am by no means fluent, and my mistakes are legion. (They are often the primary sources of humor in otherwise serious encounters). I've tried my best to learn the more formal usages in Spanish--usted vs tu, for example. I get constant ribbing on this from bilingual staff members who insist that I sound archaic, but I persist because I think it contributes a modicum of respect in an environment where patients often feel powerless.

Lastly, how doctors dress and comport themselves has a distinct impact on the environment. Obviously, the most nattily dressed physician who doesn't know her medicine is worthless, but whenever I see interns dressed overly casually, or in old scrubs, or in clothes better suited to a club, I try to point out the incongruity. I feel a little silly since I am no fashion maven, but it's important for doctors-in-training to understand how their appearance contributes to the sense of respect their patients glean from them.

I often buttress this conversation with a mention of an older gentleman I took care of in the hospital a few years back. Mr. B--as I'll call him--was found in his squalid apartment, having fallen in the bathroom, unable to get up. He had the look of someone who was homeless, or nearly so--disheveled, unkempt, emaciated--and I could sense the interns and students unconsciously recoiling from him.

But he was an intelligent man, and we found ourselves in long--often long-winded--conversations. He had many opinions about the medical profession, and I finally asked him what would be the one thing he'd want to teach the upcoming generation of doctors. "Respect," he said. "Respect for the patients in the little things." He told me that he felt the doctors were giving him good medical care, but he sensed their mild disparagement toward him. "And half of them don't even look like doctors," he added, "running around in ratty clothes and sneakers."

Up until that point, I hadn't thought much about how we doctors dressed, but he had a good point. Unfortunately there was a complication in his care-a respiratory arrest in the CT scanner suite thanks to a sedative dose that was too high. He recovered from that, but his case was presented at the monthly departmental conference. After the medical issues regarding cautious sedation of the elderly were reviewed, I stood up and said that this patient had a message for the medical staff. I recounted his observations about how the doctors dressed and treated him, reminding us that patients do notice and do care.

(Mr. B eventually taught us another lesson-about assumptions based on appearance. I saw him several months later, after he had spent time doing intensive physical rehabilitation. He wore a smart blue blazer over a white-button shirt, walking confidently with an elegant silver-tipped cane. His hair was neatly trimmed, and his smile was beaming. The condition we'd seen him in was a temporary one, not a defining one.)

Many of us want to solve the big issues in medicine right now. Unfortunately, we can't do a whole lot on most of these fronts. But there are a host of small things we can do right now that can improve the environment of medicine. If readers have other suggestions of small do-able things, please post them.

Nancy Polikoff: Why Should Anyone Have to Adopt Their Own Child?

2009-11-18T08:14:12-08:00

Today's post is from Nancy D. Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law. Polikoff is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches Sexuality and the Law and has taught Family Law for more than 20 years. For more, read her Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage blog.

Second-parent adoption has proved a powerful legal device for gay and lesbian families. It is modeled on step-parent adoption, a statutory scheme that allows a biological (or adoptive) parent's spouse to adopt a child without terminating that parent’s rights, thereby leaving the child with two parents. However critical this method of securing the family’s legal protection remains-- and will remain for the foreseeable future-- there is a conceptual flaw in analogizing same-sex couples to a step-family.

A step-family forms after a child already exists. The child lives with one parent. That person marries or remarries. If the child has no second parent, the step-parent adoption is relatively simple. If there is a second parent, that person must consent to a termination of his parental rights, or the termination must be obtained through a judicial proceeding, and only then can the adoption take place.

A lesbian couple, on the other hand, plans for a child together. From before birth, the child-to-be has two parents. The nonbiological mother is not a step-parent. The closest analogy to her situation is that of an infertile husband whose wife, with his consent, conceives using donor semen. That husband does not have to adopt his child.

This year, the District of Columbia enacted a statute that responds to the question lawyers frequently hear from nonbiological mothers: “Why should I have to adopt my own child?” Under the new DC law, if a child is conceived using donor semen, and the partner of the birth mother consents to the insemination with the intent to parent the child, then both women are the child’s parents immediately. The child’s original birth certificate will contain the names of both women as parents. There’s no lag time between birth and adoption during which no legal relationship exists between the nonbio mom and the child. There’s no expensive and/or time-consuming home study and legal process. The child has two legal parents.

Because this is not the law everywhere, we lawyers in DC urge our clients to nonetheless get a court order establishing parentage. They should not have to do this, but only court “judgments” are entitled to respect in every state, and so a danger remains that with only a birth certificate another state might try to say that only the birth mother is a legal parent. In fact, this area of law is so complex, and varies so much state by state, that I tell every lesbian couple having a child to consult a knowledgeable lawyer in their jurisdiction. But for those who don’t, our new statute provides a legal status that never existed before.

I look forward to the day when no mother has to adopt her own child. We’ve moved a step closer to that day in the District of Columbia.

Amie Klempnauer Miller: A Non-Bio Lesbian Mom's Adoption Story

2009-11-17T10:27:20-08:00

November is National Adoption Month. One variety of adoption story that is often overlooked during November is the second-parent adoption, a legal proceeding that safeguards the rights of non-biological parents, which is available by statute or precedent in only a handful of states and on a case-by-case basis in several others. Today's post is from Amie Klempnauer Miller, author of She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood, from which this essay is adapted.

Despite the fact that I always forget it, overshadowed as it is by Mother's Day, which has to do double duty in our family, May 16 is our Adoption Day. It's the day when, more than six years ago now, I stood in a courtroom in Minneapolis and adopted my own daughter. It's an odd thing, really, to stand before a judge and be given official permission to care for the child whom you helped call into being, when she is already yours, and you are already hers.

At the time of the adoption, my partner, Jane, and I had already been together nineteen years. I began the adoption paperwork while Jane was pregnant, but I could not adopt Hannah until there actually was a Hannah, an out-in-the-world Hannah, to be adopted. When we went to the hospital for the birth, I carried a manila folder containing two forms designating me as Standby Custodian-- one that would allow me to make medical decisions should Jane become incapacitated before Hannah’s birth and another allowing me to make decisions should something happen to Jane afterward. Upon our return from the hospital, however, I became the legal equivalent of a live-in guest in our home.

Our lawyer, Ann, had diligently navigated us through the various required forms and procedures. She petitioned the Minnesota Department of Human Services, requesting an Order and Decree of Adoption. She requested a waiver of the home study, based on the facts that Jane and I had lived together since 1987 and Hannah had lived with us since she popped out into the world. Jane and I filed an affidavit spelling out our reasons for wanting the adoption. Jane is the birth parent, it noted. Amie was present when Hannah was born. (I was in the hallway, but close enough.) The decision to have Hannah was mutual. Amie is equally involved in the care and nurture of Hannah "including feeding, bathing, grooming, and dressing; purchasing, cleaning, and caring for her clothes; arranging for medical care, arranging for child care as needed, putting her to bed at night, attending to her during the night, waking her in the morning, and teaching elementary skills."

The affidavit pointed out that "Hannah needs and deserves the legal protection resulting from adoption" including not having to go through guardianship and custodianship proceedings in the event of Jane's death. The adoption would ensure my capacity to make decisions about medical care or carry Hannah on an insurance policy. It would enable Hannah to claim survivor benefits from Social Security and to claim continuing financial support should I decide to become a deadbeat mom. The affidavit further noted that the Court might decide that Jane's parental rights must be terminated in order for me to adopt Hannah, meaning that Jane would then have to adopt her as well. We filed a formal request asking the Court not to require this.

We paid the fee to search the Minnesota Fathers' Adoption Registry, which seemed ridiculous since we had used the sperm of an anonymous donor. But it was required by law, and we now had a form in our possession verifying that "No putative father is registered." Ann's assistant took affidavits from my mother, my father, and from Jane's parents stating their support of my adoption of Hannah. All of the paperwork was in order, one form after another that would allow me to become what I already was.

On the big day, we drove to the Hennepin County Juvenile Justice Center where Ann gave us the happy news that we were assigned to a judge she knew well. "This will be easy," she said pleasantly. In fact, the process itself is simple. Adoptions by same-sex partners in Hennepin County follow the protocol used for stepparent adoptions. Minnesota is not one of the states that officially permit second-parent adoptions by same-sex partners, but judges in some of the counties here had a track record of approving them. Hennepin County, home of Minneapolis, was the most reliable of all, so we felt pretty secure.

A few minutes before our appointed time, Ann reported that we had been reassigned to a new judge. "I haven't worked with him before," she said. "But he’ll probably be fine." Probably. My feelings of security buckled. Even in mostly liberal Hennepin County, approval of second-parent adoptions is entirely contingent on the judge. The fate of my legal relationship to Hannah suddenly hung on probably.

I carried Hannah into the courtroom, trying my best to look emotionally fit and bursting with maternal instinct. We stood as the judge entered the room. I tried to suss out his political and religious leanings by watching him walk to the bench. He confirmed why we were all there. Then, God bless him, he said, "I like these kinds of cases because everyone leaves a winner."

I answered a few basic questions, mainly aimed at confirming that I understood that legal adoption means legal responsibility. Should Jane and I break up, I would still be legally responsible for Hannah’s support. After running through the rote questions and admonitions, the judge approved the adoption, and then passed out lollipops and posed for pictures. Weirdly, even now, the legal ties between Jane and me run most tightly through Hannah. Jane is legally her mother, as am I, but Jane and I still have no enforceable connection to each other beyond the paper trail we have forged through wills and powers of attorney.

I carefully folded a copy of the adoption order and placed it in my wallet, where it remains six years later. It declares that Jane and I are both, equally, the official parents of Hannah Elisabeth Klempnauer Miller. We are a fact. We are a family.

Link Roundup: Claude Levi-Strauss, Abbas Steps Down, Discussing Jesus with Hasidim

2009-11-12T09:07:07-08:00

The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss died last week, a few weeks shy of his 101st birthday. Levi-Strauss was considered "the father of modern anthropology." Beacon Press published English-language translations of two of his books: The Elementary Structures of Kinship (from Les Structures elementaires de la parente, translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham) and Totemism (from Le Totemisme aujourdhui, translated by Rodney Needham), which remains in print today.

At the New York Times Room for Debate, Rashid Khalidi weighs in on the decision of Mahmoud Abbas to step down as leader of the Palestinian authority. "Mahmoud Abbas realized that he could not achieve even minimal Palestinian aspirations in negotiations with Israel after having the rug pulled out from under him twice by his patrons in Washington."

Monday night, Susan Campbell discussed Christian fundamentalism with some Hasidim in New York. "On Sunday, I wold have said we share very little, me and these Jews. Walking to the subway last night... I knew differently."

Newsweek interviews the authors ofHollowing Out the Middle about rural brain drain and revitalizing small towns.

How many doctors write theater reviews? Check out Danielle Ofri's blog post on the new Anna Deveare Smith play, Let Me Down Easy.

Susan Campbell: Maine Revokes Rights, Connecticut's LGBT Families Secure

2009-11-09T10:13:57-08:00

Today's post is from Susan Campbell, author of Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl. Campbell's writing has been recognized by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors; National Women's Political Caucus; the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, and the Connecticut chapter of Society of Professional Journalists. She was also a member of the Hartford Courant's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news. Be sure to check out her Dating Jesus blog.

While Maine's marriage equality supporters regroup after last Tuesday's defeat, the staff at Connecticut's marriage equality advocacy group Love Makes a Family prepares to douse their lights forever.

In May, Maine legislators voted in favor of same-sex marriage and the governor quickly signed the bill into law, but voters executed a people's veto and rescinded marriage equality. The vote-- pushed onto the ballot in no small part by our old friends at the National Organization for Marriage-- gives Maine the dubious honor of being the second state in the union to recently play now-you-have-it, now-you-don't with gay and lesbian rights. California pulled back on its promise of equality with Proposition 8 last year.

In both states, the battles were emotional and heartfelt-- and fraught with misinformation. Opponents of same-sex marriage on both coasts trotted out that tired canard that marriage equality would include lessons about homosexuality in schools, thereby turning into homosexuals a sea of children just waiting for their teachers' permission.

Just five states-- Massachusetts, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut-- recognize same-sex marriage. Here in Connecticut, a 2008 state Supreme Court decision stands without any serious threat-- so much so that Love Makes a Family is closing its doors. A volunteer-run (and separate) political action committee will remain, and Carol Buckheit, executive director since the founder stepped down in June, will stay a while longer to clean up a few last details. Other staff members have moved on to other endeavors.

One is working in AIDS policy.

Another-- note to those who fear a gay agenda in schools!-- left to be a teacher.

Buckheit enrolled in a language immersion course in Costa Rica. She wants to learn Spanish.

The organization's records will go to Yale University so that subsequent generations can see how the battle was won.

And it was won. In April, Connecticut legislators codified the court decision, and Gov. M. Jodi Rell-- who said all along she opposed same-sex marriage-- signed it. The question of a constitutional convention that was a not-so-veiled attempt to overthrow the court's decision was decisively shot down by Connecticut voters last November.

Meanwhile, Buckheit has the state's most recent figures for same-sex marriages-- 1,746 from Nov. 12 of last year through June. The state's still counting all those summer weddings, said Buckheit, but that's 3,492 adults who plighted their troth while the rest of us stopped a moment, threw some rice, and then went about our business.

And that's part of the point, isn't it? That life has gone on?

Ah, but so does the battle. It goes on until we don't have to argue this about any more, anywhere. Maine's vote was disappointing, but we are on the march to inevitability. One day, marriage equality will be the law of our land. We'll look back on Maine's decision the way we look back on every other stumble along the road to equality: Remember when gays and lesbians couldn't get married? Those were the bad old days, indeed.

Eboo Patel: The Murderer at Fort Hood

2009-11-06T13:09:54-08:00

Today's post is from Eboo Patel, the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. Patel is the founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based institution building the global interfaith youth movement, and is a member of the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Initiatives, where he is working to realize President Obama’s priority of interfaith cooperation. He writes "The Faith Divide", a featured blog on religion for the Washington Post, where this post originally appeared.

I'm writing from Toronto, where last night I gave a plenary address on Muslim-Jewish cooperation to the Biennial conference of the Union for Reform Judaism. Backstage after the address, my friend Rabbi David Saperstein gave me a grim look and said, "The shooter had a Muslim name."

He called his wife who works for NPR, and his face got more grim as I heard him say:

"Are you sure he was a Muslim? Are you sure he was a Muslim?"

He hung up the phone and turned to me. "This is our worst nightmare."

Rabbi Saperstein knows there will be a thousand voices broadcasting the news that a Muslim opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas yesterday - the implication being, of course, that this act represents Islam. He knows how distorting that perception is for Muslims, and how dangerous that distortion is for America.

Last night, I told the two thousand Jews in the audience at the Biennial about my friendships with Jews throughout my life. I told them about the Muslim theology of interfaith cooperation, from the story of God giving Adam the knowledge of the world's diversity, to the Sura which says that God made people in different nations and tribes so we could come to know one another, to how Prophet Muhammad was sent to earth to be a mercy upon all the worlds.

I spoke of how the central theme of the 21st century will be the faith line, and the vital importance of getting the definition of the faith line right - that it does not separate Jews from Muslims, or Christians from Hindus. It separates those who believe in pluralism from extremists.

You won't see my speech on the evening news, though I believe that it was a far more accurate reflection of the tradition of Islam than the story that you saw looped on every channel, and headlined in print this morning.

Muslim groups jumped to condemn last night's actions. The All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) sent out a releaseimmediately after the shooting, stating "Islam holds the human soul in high esteem, and considers the attack against innocent human beings a grave sin. ADAMS states clearly that those who commit acts murder and cruelty in the name of Islam are not only destroying innocent lives, but are also betraying the values of the faith they claim to represent." The Islamic society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)expressed similar statements.

Of course these condemnations are important. What is even more important is to state clearly what Islam stands for. In Islam, as in other faiths, it is said that to take a single life is like taking all life. In Islam, mercy is a deeply cherished value - the most senior Muslim scholar in the West says it is actually the central value of the tradition.

As Rabbi Saperstein - and you and I - know, there are a thousand voices saying a Muslim committed this heinous act.

But a Muslim did not do this. Killers do not deserve the honor of a religious label. The man who killed a group of brave American soldiers deserves one name and one name only: murderer.

All Souls Day in the Boston Schools

2009-11-06T08:12:40-08:00

We received this note from Michael Patrick MacDonald about how he spent this past Monday, All Souls Day. MacDonald is the author of the critically acclaimed All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, a bestselling memoir of growing up in a poverty and violence stricken Boston neighborhood.

Spent today, All Souls Day, visiting students at four Boston Public Schools which use All Souls (and usually Easter Rising) in the classroom... I launched the entire Boston Public School marathon last week with an appearance at assembly for 150 Charlestown High School students who'd all been assigned All Souls. At Codman Academy today, students read passages of All Souls to me and talked about their personal connections to each passage, e.g. one young woman related to my outrage at the injustices in my brother Steven's case, telling me -- and the assembly of students and faculty -- that she experienced similar rage at her sisters imprisonment on murder charges. I was so moved by the experience at Codman Academy that I announced that this would become an annual institution, making pro bono appearances in the Boston Public Schools every year on All Souls Day (and the following days), thus bringing the intentions of the All Souls Day vigils we once held in South Boston, into the schools (where they are as relevant as ever).

Here's a picture from the Codman Academy website of MacDonald with students who participated in the event:

MacDonald visited several Boston schools: Charlestown High, Codman Academy, Fenway High School, Boston Day and Evening Academy, East Boston High School, and Boston Arts Academy, which is, incidentally, the setting for another Beacon Pres book: Linda Nathan's The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School. Here he's with students from Boston Arts Academy and with Linda Nathan: the two authors are holding each others' books in the picture.

It's been ten years since Beacon first published All Souls (which the Boston Globe named one of 100 Essential New England Books, and which readers currently have ranked #1 on that list), and in honor of that milestone, ads are running on the Red Line T trains, which pass under Beacon's offices in downtown Boston as well as through Southie.

David Chura: Life Terms for Minors are “Cruel and Unusual Punishment”

2009-11-03T09:58:33-08:00

Today's post is from David Chura, author of I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth.

There are 109 inmates serving life sentences without parole for non-homicide crimes they committed when they were 18 or younger. Some, put behind bars when they were 13 or 14, have been locked up for twenty or thirty years.

Those 109-- minors then, adults now in their prime, or at least they should be, if they weren't facing a slow, cruel death in jail-- are a part of something that is uniquely American. According to Amnesty International, the United States is the only country that imprisons children for life (the same country, the PEW Charitable Trust reported in 2008, that now incarcerates one out of every one hundred of its citizens).

This year the United States Supreme Court has agreed to consider two of those 109 cases. One involves a man who, at the age of 13, robbed and raped an elderly woman in 1989; the other was 16 when he took part in two break-ins in 2005. Each was sentenced by a Florida court to life without parole. The high court must decide whether such life imprisonment is "cruel and unusual punishment."

There are over 50 groups filing in support of these two inmates. It's a roll call of religious, legal, correctional, educational, medical and psychological professionals. As varied as the groups are, there's not much difference in their reasoning. All the briefs, whether based on spiritual belief or scientific research, come down to the same thing, to something that seems obvious to me: children change, develop, are redeemable; children are vulnerable to immense forces in their lives, forces that they can't control but sometimes act out of.

It seems like a lot of effort for two people (or 109, depending upon how you look at it) who, when they were young, did some pretty terrible things. But those hundreds of professionals and concerned citizens know that if we don't stop it now, there'll be a lot more than 109 kids facing the same fate, given the country's mood when it comes to kids and crime. It is a mood that was set into motion in the mid-1990s when some political scientists warned the public of the impending threat of young "super-predators," and so the jihad on juvenile crime began.

Despite the juvenile justice system's earlier, fundamental belief that youthful offenders can and should be rehabilitated, today's laws are more about retribution and revenge. These draconian laws seem written for monsters, and it's not surprising, when you consider the hype surrounding youth culture today and the media-fed images of teenagers as ruthless street thugs.

I don't know any of the 109 inmates living out their own death penalties, but over my ten years of teaching high school kids serving time in an adult lockup I've met my own 109+ young men and women. The teens I worked with weren't serving life sentences without parole, but they very well could have been if, as they would say, they "were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

These locked up youngsters had been a part of the system-- family court, foster care, group homes-- for most of their short lives. They didn't sign up for it; they got put there one way or another, by the actions of a neglectful mother, an alcoholic father, a teenage girl who didn't find it fun anymore to take care of a baby. Kids like Donald, a student of mine, whose mother sent him out to the streets at 11 years old to sell drugs to support her crack habit, and where he eventually found his own habit; or Warren, whose 16 year old mother practically pickled him in alcohol while she was pregnant, and who was walking proof of the damage done.

These kids didn't volunteer for a life spent among strangers in every variety of state childcare institution. They were there until they got tired of it, as many battered and abused kids eventually will, and started making their own choices-- the wrong choices, but when I heard what limited resources they had to work with I wondered, "How could it be otherwise?" Choices that led them to juvenile detention, maybe drug rehab or a psych hospital, then back on the streets to set the whole cycle spinning again. Until finally the cops got involved. Suddenly, they weren't seen as kids anymore (although they were), and they landed in the county lockup.

The kids I taught weren't locked up for life like the 109, but they might just as well have been, because no matter how long a kid spends in prison, it's a life sentence. Get put in jail and the door shuts on your life, on Life, and, just so you don't forget it, all day long you hear cell doors, hallway doors, bullpen doors slamming, clanking, shuttering shut. No child (take a long, hard look sometime at a 15 year old boy you know and tell me he's not a child) should be sentenced to live in the squalor only a prison can manufacture: the constant noise; the rancid smells; the aimless violence; the fear of always watching your back; the boredom of endless hours of Jerry Springer.

It's almost commonplace these days to say that if you lock kids up all they learn is more ways to do crime. But I don't think that's the worst of it. Lock kids up and they come out of prison carrying things even I, with my ten years of daily jail life, can't imagine. I'm not so much worried about what new criminal activity they might learn. What I worry about is all the new reasons they garner for doing more crime-- the renewed rage at themselves for being what they are and what they failed to be; at the families, communities, schools, churches, the country for letting them down and reinforcing their sense of worthlessness.

But shouldn't those 109 be held accountable? Shouldn't any criminal be made to take responsibility? Indeed. Ask any of my jailhouse students the same question and most would agree. But accountability doesn't mean punishment; it never has, except in the parlance of today's criminal justice system. It means not turning away from what you did and the consequences of your actions, but looking at it square on and learning a better way of living.

There are many ways to do this in jail. Restorative justice programs are one very effective approach, tough love so tough that not many adults I know outside of prison could stand up against that personal scrutiny. Sunny Schwartz shows that in her spunky, powerful book, Dreams from the Monster Factory, which describes her restorative justice work with long-term California inmates. In the county jail where I worked some of my students went through a similar victims' awareness program, and even the most hard-edged guys who swore nothing would ever or could ever touch them were moved.

Because accountability is based on the premise that people can and do evolve. One of the most moving of the legal briefs in support of the petitioners in the upcoming Supreme Court hearing was filed by eight "former juvenile offenders" whose life stories argue for not shutting off the possibility of such transformation.

Some had been convicted of very serious crimes that could have resulted in sentencings similar to the 109 had circumstances been different. Instead, they were given the opportunity to amend their lives and consequently made "significant contributions to their communities." The eight include a Broadway actor; a former United States senator; a Latino poet and community activist; a defense attorney; a software executive; and a UNICEF children's advocate.

The changes made by the young men I worked with might not seem as noteworthy, but to them they were seismic. Anthony, while serving time for a robbery, got his GED. When he was released he started slowly to turn his life around with the help of our school social worker. He got a menial job, then went to college part time. Eventually, supporting himself the whole time, living in SROs in the Bronx, he received his social work degree and now works with "at-risk" kids.

For Alex, the process was more difficult. After multiple arrests he knew he had to do something different or he would end up a lifer or dead on the street. He made the toughest decision of his 17 years: to leave the only neighborhood he'd ever known for a lonely, anonymous life (or so he felt) on the West Coast with an uncle he barely knew. He made the move, got a hospital custodial job and then started to work towards his dream of being a marine biologist. For many of my other students the changes were smaller-- the decision to join Job Corps; to get into rehab; to contact a father not spoken to for years. Nevertheless they were still positive steps.

Each of these stories is a rebuke to laws that would lock kids up for life without parole. It's vital that accounts like these be heard so that the American people realize that the "super-predators" they've been taught to fear are first and foremost children; and so that the nine justices see to it that no more children are denied the right to change and are protected against the "cruel and unusual punishment" of a slow death in prison.

Nancy Gift: Weed Fight Lands Me in the Principal’s Office

2009-10-27T12:30:05-07:00

Nancy Gift is the author of A Weed by Any Other Name: The Virtues of a Messy Lawn, or Learning to Love the Plants We Don't Plant. Gift is an assistant professor of environmental studies and acting director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a lawn full of weeds.

October 14, 2009

Next Friday, I'm meeting with my daughters' principal. The meeting isn't directly about my kids, though if not for them I wouldn't be going. This time, my daughters didn't do anything wrong, nor anything particularly wonderful, nor even cause trouble on the playground, but I'm nervous about the meeting, anyway. I've rallied the troops and called in reinforcements, making waves at school, in advocacy for the schoolyard weeds.

For the last several years, I have received notices from school, supposedly telling me when and where a pesticide would be applied to the school grounds. I've looked at them for all this time, and so far, have read and ignored them, because the pesticides have been aimed at mulched areas in front. Some ofthe herbicides bother me more than others, but since all have involved spaces that my children didn't directly contact, and which I didn't really want to hand-weed as a volunteer, I ignored the notices.

Last week's notice, which I got on a Wednesday afternoon, was different. On the space where it told "where," the answer in bold was "lawns," and that single answer made me look twice. Lawns are where my kids play. School yard lawns are supposed to have flowers and weeds, because those provide entertainment for children. Plantain, dandelion, clover: these are schoolyard weeds which every kid should know, even if no one at school knows the Latin for them.

I then looked up the EPA registration on the herbicide, MEC something or other -- herbicide trade names are always changing, with new combinations and ratios so variable that no one could expect to follow the market, any more than we expect to recognize companies on a 2-bit stock exchange. I looked at the active ingredient, just as anyone in a drug store knows to look for acetaminophen on the generic Tylenol. And I looked again, in shock: the ingredient was 2,4-D.

I could describe 2,4-D in shocking terms -- giving its history alone would be enough to make most parents wonder what on earth that product is doing on a schoolyard. But the truth is more subtle than the shocking history, and the truth about 2,4-D shocks in whispers, not shouts. 2,4-D is one of the most commonly used lawn herbicides, as it has the convenient property of killing dandelions and not grass. Clover is killed too, and while initially, when 2,4-D was introduced, it would have been considered a civilian casualty in the war on weeds, an advertising campaign later made it seem a co-conspirator with the evil dandelion. Children and pets who live on lawns which are treated have higher rates of cancer, including leukemia. Women whose lawns are treated have higher rates of breast cancer. We don't always know which product is to blame, but it wouldn't be ethical to do a study which proved guilt beyond a shadow of doubt. Many people, including me, suspect 2,4-D is one of the culprits in these statistics.

First, I called the school secretary and asked if I could speak to the principal. While I waited for him to call back, I called the landscaper to express my concerns about the application, and we had a really collegial discussion about it. He referred me to the district grounds manager, who wasn't in, but I left a message. Meanwhile the principal called back, who clearly knew nothing about it all, but I warned him that I was unhappy about the application and planning to "raise a stink." I then emailed a handful of moms I know -- no more than 10 -- and emailed two reporters in the city paper who've been supportive of my ideas about weeds. I tried to calm myself down at this point, to wait and see what happened.

The district grounds manager called back the next morning, Thursday. He told me that he understood it to be "as toxic as table salt." He also told me he gets pressure to make the athletic fields look good. A school board member told one mom that the application is to address the problem of children with bee sting allergies. Among these answers, only the bee sting allergy looks really reasonable, as that is the only issue which addresses the fundamental question of interest to all of us: child safety. I, in turn, was clear about my fears, clear about the fact that I don't react this way about all herbicides, clear about the fact that I've used herbicides myself and respect them. I reiterated, though, that I was really unhappy about this application, that I had alerted other parents, and that I planned to try to stop it from happening. Both the grounds person and the landscaper told me I sounded "reasonable" -- as if they were surprised? -- which I was trying desperately to be, and to sound, but not sure I was feeling it at all.

I believe the allergy issue is a red herring, but still, bee sting allergies are a problem I can discuss with assumption of common values. My husband is a survivor of an anaphylactic reaction to yellow jacket stings, and I have sat with him in ER, waiting after a more minor bee sting to see if he would react strongly enough to be admitted (he didn't). My heart wrenched when I read Barbara Kingsolver's short story "Covered Bridges," about a couple who decides not to bear children because of the wife's life-threatening reaction to a bee sting incurred while sipping a can of soda. I am not a parent of an allergic child, but I know this: I would never want to have to ask myself if I were responsible for a child dying of a bee sting reaction at school.

Still, 2,4-D scares me more than bee stings. Honey bees, the primary stinging insects which would be interested in schoolyard weeds, are relatively docile, as the act of stinging kills the bee -- she will sting only for the defense of her hive or sisters. Wasps are the far more dangerous stingers, because they can sting repeatedly (and therefore take little provocation to try it), but they don't pay much attention to clover. They'd be more interested in smears of grape jelly left on a kids' face after lunch, but herbicides can't protect children against wasps (or grape jelly, for that matter).

By Thursday afternoon I started getting back other emails -- but now, from parents. My email had been forwarded to the right people, apparently, and some were calling the district as well. At least one, maybe more, called school board members. Up until 4:00 pm, when I left work on Thursday, the district was holding out. I went home to soccer practice and to build a chicken coop. The reporter called, and at that point I felt calm, and a bit despondent. I discussed with my daughters that I didn't want them playing in the grass at school the next week, and they agreed -- Hazel told me she would warn her best friend, too. I had brief visions of a child-led playground boycott.

By Friday morning, though, the boulder had budged from its spot on the mountain. I awoke to an email that the application was being canceled, or at least postponed for further discussion. The news traveled that day, and the next morning traveled further with the headline "Local moms...". I started hearing congratulations, and am still getting more correspondence from allies, active and passive both, who are glad to see the spray halted.

Garden club friends, active on the township grounds committee, have offered to share tips on pesticide-free lawn maintenance with the school district. Other parents continue to step forward, and one neighbor, a former consultant turned power mom, has set up our meeting with the principal. Another friend went the district forum this morning (Tuesday) and reported that the school board still thinks the application important for "allergies and asthma" (!?) and believes that 2,4-D is "as toxic as table salt." The battle isn't over, and I'll be saying my piece again, I have no doubt. I may even have to remind the school board that most allergies and asthma are from grass pollen, so if that is the trigger, then the less grass in the schoolyard, the better.

But the boulder moved, and I think it is rolling downhill now. I'm hopeful that momentum is growing, and that by the end of this it will not be about me and my troublemaking emails and phone calls at all, but about our kids, and the fact that schoolyard weeds are better for them than herbicides. I'm hopeful that by next fall, my meetings with the principal can once again be about my daughters and their lives, their education, and their health. And maybe, even, what kinds of trouble they cause on the playground.

October 25, 2009

The principal, in retrospect, was the least of my worries, for his boss, an assistant superintendent, was so bullishly insistent on herbicide application -- "for aesthetics," no less! -- that the principal actually spoke not a word. We, the parents of the meeting, continued to lobby the one school board member who seemed to be listening, via email. Today, we just heard back: our elementary school will have herbicide-free lawns for one year, as a pilot project.

I'd like to think that I'm noble enough to fight for any child's right to an herbicide-free schoolyard, not just my own. And no question, I would; all children should be able to roll down hillsides or wrestle with their sisters on pesticide-free turf, even children of rival elementary schools. My hope, then, is that this pilot site succeeds, and that it is the beginning of a larger victory, the kind of slow but thorough victory that leaves people with minds changed, not just bullied into submission. In that best-case scenario, environmental change would begin with "thinking locally," even if the particular "local" is a bit smaller than I hoped.

And if the pilot fails, too much clover grows, and they decide to treat with a differently toxic lawn herbicide, well, they won't have heard the last from me about it. According to what I've seen, boulders and children both will keep rolling downhill.

Link Roundup: Rural Youths, A Picnic in North Korea, Sexual Assault in the Military

2009-10-26T12:47:49-07:00

Review of Hollowing Out the Middle on the Daily Yonder blog:

Most impressively, the authors keyed into what concerns rural youths about their adult lives and how these quandaries fuel the exodus of young people from rural places. Their dilemma, in short, is between remaining as adults in rural communities where they sacrifice educational or economic opportunities or leaving beloved rural places for expanded options in urban areas. Rural kids find that they must negotiate between their commitment to place and their commitment to the American ideal of individualist achievement, an ideal increasingly difficult to reach as the economic foundations of many rural communities continue to crumble. “When moving up implies moving out,” what should young people do?

In this weekend's New York Times, Marie Myung-Ok Lee (author of the novel Somebody's Daughter) discussed a recent trip to North Korea with her mother.

We sweltered through customs at the hands of men in gray Mao suits and women in neutral “Mad-Men”-era outfits, every heart topped by a pin of Kim Il-sung. Then over the next few days we were shown carefully presented slices of Pyongyang: the subway, for example, which we rode for a single stop, where elaborate murals of a workers’ paradise were lighted by chandeliers. We went to endless museums and parks but were sternly instructed not to speak to any locals. We took meals at restaurants where we were the only customers, and the food seemed to come from the same Western-facsimile kitchen: bread with swirls, bland fried flounder, mayonnaise-based salad served in a martini glass. Finally my mother, weary of the utter weirdness of the place, told our tour guide in Korean that we needed to try some real North Korean food.

Penny Coleman poses a difficult question: does military service condition men to commit sexual assault?

Yet for decades, in spite of the terrible numbers, the military has managed with astonishing success to get away with responding to grievances like Krause's with silence, or denial, or by blaming "a few bad apples." But when individual soldiers take the blame, the system gets off the hook.
And it can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread -- for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators.

Interfaith Youth Core founder and Obama faith advisor Eboo Patel was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News and World Report; documentary photographer and journalist David Bacon was named an Utne Reader Visionary. Beacon Press sends out its congratulations to both of them for these much-deserved accolades.