Soul Autopsy and China Adoption Disruption

It looks like most of the posts at CHEW have been taken down. Thank goodness. Maybe that woman understood the harm she was doing.

So I won't go into full detail describing the nastiness of the blog's tone.

The basics are that a woman starts the China adoption process. Halfway through she gives up and gets a child from Guatemala instead. Three weeks after bringing her child home from Guatemala, she changes her mind and decides to go through with a last-minute China adoption. After picking up her 18-month-old child, "M" she decides "M" is not healthy enough and returns her. By the way, I am not sure if I remember the age correctly but it was definitely between 1 and 2. The Chinese officials are understandably irritated and tell her she won't get a new child. On top of that, since she returned "M", due to the way the bureaucracy works, the little girl almost certainly won't be deemed adoptable again and is going to age out in an orphanage. Now, this woman has given up on getting a new child but she wants her money back.

Reading her account, two really wrong things jumped out at me.

1) A US pediatrician who makes a diagnosis of PDD autism over the phone. The woman calls him up, describes symptoms her child is exhibiting a few days after being taken into a strange environment, and he tells her to give the child back. Either she's lying or exaggerating to make herself feel better, or this doctor needs to be brought up on ethics charges.

I'd like to quote, with permission, sarahs_mom, a mother who adopted from China I know from another forum, who made some even-tempered but hard-hitting comments on the original blog posts.

Sarah was just like this woman describes M. We just came home from spending a wonderful morning at the beach where Sarah played in the sand... a major first for her. Sarah does not have autism. She has some behaviors that were pretty severe that have gone away and she has some we are working on. We have a generalist, a speech therapist and an occupational therapist and all of them think Sarah will be fine. If not, we will deal with it.

My heart breaks for M. It's clear she wasn't as bad as Sarah because Sarah did not make much progress at all in China. It wasn't until after 3 months that I started to have hope. By that lady's own account, this girl made progress.

[...]

This story should not be about her or her agency. It needs to be about M. It needs to be about people getting educated and trying to get the US off the list of families with the greatest number of disruptions in China.

[...]

I can tell you that Costa Rica closed its adoptions to US Citizens because of the antics of people like this woman. I wanted to adopt from there because that is where I was born and I called and spoke to PANI (their version of the CCAA) and was told that the corrupt agencies in the US and the unreasonable demands by the US citizens led them to stop adopting to the US. Until the US implements the Hague they will not allow a US citizen to adopt.

2) She kept making excuses for the fact that she didn't take the child back to America and disrupt there.

Now, this second one is the part I'm qualified to comment on. I have no problem sitting in judgment on this woman and telling her what she should have done. She should have taken "M" back to America. Maybe "M" really had special needs that were beyond the ability of this woman to care for. In that case, as so many others have been sadly forced to do, she could have made an adoption plan. She could have found another family that wanted to adopt "M" and legally relinquished her to them. She could have even left her at a damn fire station and run off, and it would have been better. I'm not saying she should have done something that extreme, since it probably would have been legally easier to do private relinquishment than go through the foster care system. Anyway, there would be many families (and I bet quite a few lower-income Chinese-American families) who would leap at the chance to adopt a baby like "M".

If you've been to photolisting sites before and are ready for the emotional sledgehammer effect, go to adoptuskids.org and do a search on 2-year-olds legally available for adoption in the foster care system. The tiny few you will find have needs that are so severe. Many will never walk or speak or feed themselves. Most of them will mention "lifetime" care, which means that if you adopt the child and they live longer than you, you need to figure out who else will take care of them. The reason there are so few very young children on these sites is that they are so quickly adopted that they don't need to be photolisted.

From what I've heard of other people with more knowledge of the subject, the fate of "M" if left in the orphanage is not very bright. But since this story has affected so many people, hopefully someone will find a way to get her out of the orphanage system and into a good foster or adoptive home in China.

I believe that when you have set out to adopt a child and have made that commitment and take them in your arms, you are responsible for them for the rest of their life. Even if you can't be a family for them, you are duty-bound to look out for their best interests. Both "M" and the first mother who gave her up are owed more than this.

Duty, honor, obligation: these are universal values.

Anyone who adopts from China should educate themselves to the fullest extent and think about what they would do in their worst-case scenario.

China adoptions: the good, the bad and the ugly

American Family just gave me a Thinking Blogger award! Thanks so much!

AmFam is one of the few China adoption blogs I regularly read, and I love the supportive but critical perspective found there. And this is an interesting coincidence, because I've just been thinking about China adoption a lot lately.

One thing that bothers me about China adoption is that so many of the parents don't seem to involve themselves in Asian-American issues. Asian-American culture isn't easy. It's deeply fragmented and often swirling with repressed anger and self-loathing. But forming a healthy Asian-American or Chinese-American identity strikes me as more important than "keeping a cultural connection" to China. I could be wrong on this, but it's definitely a criticism I've seen before.

There are parents out there (the good) like AmFam (or other non-Asian adoptive parents) that don't ignore that kind of stuff (the ugly).

And then there's the bad. The really, really, really bad.

I got caught up reading the mess over at cHEW. For those who haven't read it, it's the story of a woman who recently disrupted a Chinese adoption. The story points out a lot of things that are wrong with the system.

I'm going to do a long post really soon expressing what I think about the blog. As a semi-informed outsider to China adoptions, I don't come to it with an agenda, or anything at stake. I've also read a fair amount on the topic of disruption because it happens a LOT in the foster care system.

I believe that blog should be taken down, because it has some pretty horrible misinformation.

Stay tuned for more, in a much longer post...

Thanks again for the award, AmFam! I'd give it back to you if you didn't have it already. Also, I hate to become the blog where memes go to die, but I can't even begin to think about picking five of my thinkingest blogs.

Searches of Note

When I started off blogging I swore I would never do one of those "list the keywords people are typing to find my blog" posts. I now understand their sick appeal. I checked my keywords for the last week and found all kinds of neat stuff. Most of it was fairly self-explanatory, but here are some keywords of note, eached link to the part of the blog they uncover.

how can i distinguish people of chinese, japanese and koreans descent from each other
I answer this question quite clearly!

dinner of heroes
This sounds like a great Hong Kong movie.

get human tall by hanging upside down
Holy crap...

should families be allowed to adopt outside of their race
I hope so, or I'm in big trouble.

totally crap.com
Excuse me!

adopting traditions in japan
I answer this question tentatively.

are geisha hoes?
I answer this question exhaustively!

obama sounding like he's from the hood
How dare he.

Conference on Fathers and Men in the Foster Care System

Last week my husband and I went to an all-day conference to catch up on our hours.

We need ten training hours this year to maintain the foster license we'll be getting. Although we're not actually doing foster-to-adopt, we're still under similar rules during any pre-finalization placement. The nice thing about living in such a big city as Atlanta is that there are huge numbers of training opportunities and we can really pick and choose which ones sound most useful.

The conference was all about fatherhood and men. As is usual for these inside-perimeter training events, it was about 75% African-American. All the presenters were African-American men with experience in dual or triple roles: regular fathers, foster/adoptive fathers, child psychologists, social workers. The conference was just incredible and inspiring. It was also inclusive enough that anyone could benefit. Even if you were a white atheist lesbian couple with a daughter, you would go home with a lot of useful, positive ideas.

I did get a little nervous when an audience member happened to bring up the inerrancy of the King James version of the Bible within the first 15 minutes of the conference start. The presenter skipped around that, and from then on all mentions of God, Jesus and biblical values were placed in a context of personalized spiritual foundations.

How often do you see a discussion of fatherhood on a high level, coming from theory and daily living at the same time, that …

• treats nuclear heterosexual couples as the majority of families, but not the norm that everyone has to follow?
• includes religion, church life and spirituality without, again, invoking a norm everyone has to follow?
• spent part of the time exploring social problems specific to the African-American community without engaging in the deeply unproductive self-flagellation so often demanded by black uber-traditionalists?
• does not blame single mothers or women in general?
• praises men for good parenting, but demands higher expectations for them?

The main theme of the conference: the role of men is crucial in all aspects of parenting. Sadly, it's so crucial because so many children in the system have already been let down by men in their lives.

I'll try and summarize the information using my notes. This is not quite a summary from A to Z, but more of a highlighting of certain points that really connected for me.

1. A brief introduction was given by an Adoption Unit Manager with the state of Georgia. She introduced herself as a birth mother, who placed when she was 16 and was reunited in 2005, and had a lot of positive things to say about adoption. (I'm reporting this very neutrally).
2. The first presenter talks about baggage that we carry with us as parents. What are our expectations of fathers? How were we raised? We can't turn our children into versions of ourselves, even if they're biological.
3. Many kids in the system think dysfunction is function. However, even "regular" members of society have a tendency to think that way. An example of dysfunction as function… is male infidelity! Why is it so often excused or even praised?
4. An example of an older child who was adopted by a single father. The single father was caring but very strict. The adoption disrupted at the age of 14 when the teenage hormones started spiking up. Very difficult to hold on to a child that age who is 100% determined they'd be better off outside your home. Now in therapy, the child talks about missing the former adoptive father all the time; the boundaries were good for him. Sad story, but on the plus side, at least the child has around five years of positive "functional living" to draw strength from as he enters adulthood.
5. My husband notices some of the elderly foster mothers don't seem to really engage. I imagine they are thinking: "I've been doing this for decades and I'm not going to change a damn thing because some whippersnapper with a bunch of fancy letters after their name tells me to, I'm just going to tune out, get my training certificate and go home". On the other hand, some of them were very engaged and had great things to say. One elderly woman talked about spanking and how she stopped spanking (this is a huge hot-button topic for African-American foster parents) and forcefully said "when you KNOW better, you DO better". Great approach to education and an attitude I totally agree with.
6. Presenter notices sadly there are not a lot of foster fathers in the audience. Many single adoptive fathers and a few gay couples. Single pre-adoptive fathers all know they have to hustle when it comes to training. They are at the bottom of the barrel for placements, so they really need to shine. Overall, not that many pre-adoptives though.
7. During break I chat with the gay couple next to me. We're both liberal religionists and we trade some horror stories about not-so-liberal churches. In one church one of them went to as a child, any unmarried woman who got pregnant had to get up in front of church and apologize to the whole congregation. No such penalty for the father, of course.
8. A lot of talk about education and how crucial men are. A foster dad shares that he is the only male teacher at his school; he also serves as an informal counselor as other teachers send him their discipline cases. When men go to schools, teachers often assume something is wrong, someone got in trouble, but this should be a normal, everyday occurrence! Often janitors are the only males in early education; children often confide their problems to the janitor. If a father eats lunch in the cafeteria, children crowd around him in wonder. Our society does not value education and childcare enough, especially as a male pursuit. I'll give a very feminist "amen" to that!
9. Presenter talks about all the men that have mattered in his life, and all the things he does for his son. He gets a lot of praise for his fathering activities, but points out that what he is doing is not superhuman, and he's only getting a lot of that praise because of the general low expectations for men.
10. Idea of a "safe place" to encourage communication. Make sure they know, whatever the child says in that safe place, whatever bad names they use or emotions they express, they can't be punished for or yelled at in any way.
11. Talk about child custody battles; the practice of some women to deny visitation unless support is paid. Another hot-button topic touched on successfully. The focus is on cooperative parenting. Warns adoptive and foster parents that their relationship might "terminate" and if it does they really have to think about how they will approach cooperative parenting.
12. If children don't get positive male attention growing up, they often seek it later from unhealthy sources. Gangs. Pimps.
13. Sports are great but not a cure-all. The goal should be "structured extracurricular activity involving contact with males". Sport works great for some kids, but if they are not good in teams or physically adept, there are plenty of other options.
14. "it takes a village to raise a child… are you in that village?" What have you done to promote fatherhood/male parenting? If you have a male friend or family member who is not stepping up, if they're given low expectations or no expectations, exert some peer pressure on them.
15. Know what your values are and how you will communicate those values. Be consistent.
16. The second unit I went to was on grief and loss. My husband attended a different one, which was more of a rousing pep talk to our quiet meditation. We could hear them laughing it up next door.
17. Loss in the foster care system is usually "complicated loss". Family members are not dead, but "lost" or inaccessible.
18. Example: foster son who was 7 when his mother went to prison for a long time. Grieved her loss. Reunited when he was 23 and she came out of prison. Currently in jail for something that she did (he took the fall for her). Not a happy story or one with any clear lesson.
19. Men are taught from an early age not to verbalize grief. "Boys don't cry". We should instead give them the message to express their grief and loss. They should express it any way they want as long as it's not inappropriate (e.g. violence against property or people). Some examples: creating art to express loss, breaking up bricks in the backyard with a hammer.
20. Sometimes boys are told "you're the man of the family now" at age 3 or 4! That's too much to handle. You have to help them to be boys.
21. When children are moved from a home, they lose uncountable things. One example: every child has a "secret stash" of small objects that are highly meaningful, maybe under the floorboards or in a stuffed animal. When the social workers come to move the child, guess what gets left behind.
22. Make sure children are allowed to grieve. We kept returning to this vital point.

I met some people from our initial classes again, and had several interesting discussions with other people at the conference. Due to privacy concerns I don't want to get too in-depth about those, even though this blog is anonymous. I'll just say, even though we could fulfill training hours doing online courses and book reports, as some other people from our classes have chosen, I think these in-person events are invaluable. Learning about the foster care system always seems to involve a mix of shining inspiration and horrible despair.

This was such a fantastic event that I wish the material could be made mandatory for a wider variety of people.

My husband told me that the conference gave him a great confidence boost about his impending fatherhood.

Someone who makes me ashamed to be an Atlantan (more victim blaming)

Boortz is an extremely popular radio talk show host based in Atlanta.

Atlanta blogs today: Boortz berates Virginia Tech shooting victims

How far have we advanced in the wussification of America? I am now under attack by the left for wondering aloud why these students did so little to defend themselves. It seems that standing in terror waiting for your turn to be executed was the right thing to do, and any questions as to why 25 students didn’t try to rush and overpower Cho Seung-Hui are just examples of right wing maniacal bias. Surrender — comply — adjust. The doctrine of the left.

– Neal Boortz, explaining that unarmed college students who don’t team up to rush armed attackers are, in practice, spineless leftists. Silly me, I just thought they were innocent victims.

Goddamn that scum Neal Boortz. This is the kind of horrible thing I've heard before. I know what's going to happen: many of the families and friends of the victims are going to consume media obsessively even though they don't want to. They'll want to absorb as much as they can to try and make sense of it somehow... it's the natural human thing. They will never fully make sense of it but the pursuit itself offers some kind of solace. And they'll stumble across poison like Boortz is vomiting up and it will make them fall apart all over again.

Third Mom and Baggage have more direct, productive posts on things that can help. The Republic of T also offers a good calm reflection. I'm too upset right now to post anything positive and helpful so I should just stay off it for a while.

Interview Meme

Yondalla at the excellent blog Thoughts From a Fostering Family gave me five interview questions, and homework to come back in a year and answer numbers three through five again after we've been matched and placed.

1. How did you meet your husband?

He worked at a neighborhood store. I always thought he was cute and wondered if there was some way I could get to know him better. I'm not shy, but I am kind of geeky.

I ran into him at a book sale, and noticed he was reading a book by Jean Baudrillard. I thought to myself, "Great! A way to start a conversation!" so I walked up to him and said "So I noticed you're reading Baudrillard. I hate his writing." To me, that was an icebreaker, but he was crushed... he didn't care about the book one way or the other, but he thought I was attacking him! He didn't really engage.

Months later, my then-roommate told me that he'd been hanging out with my future husband at the local bar. He said "that guy has a serious crush on you". I started going to the bar, even though I don't drink, and we socialized and developed a romance very quickly. A few months after that, we were living together, and then five years later we got married.

I believe strongly in same-sex marriage rights, so I was holding out to get married in Canada or somewhere that gay marriage is legal. But we realized we needed to get married right away in order to file an adoption application, so we went down to the basement of the Dekalb county courthouse, looked around, followed the "Pistol and Marriage Licenses" sign to the right desk and got hitched.

2. How should race issues be addressed in foster parent training?

That's a huge question. I feel like I'm still in the early stages of learning. One of my pet peeves is that racial issues are often turned into "white parents with black children" issues, when the landscape is really much more complicated. Our curriculum was standardized, and it was focused more on transcultural issues. After all, most of the parents in class were black and all of them said they would be adopting intraracially. So another question that stems from the first question would be... is it necessary, or advisable, to separate training curricula by the race of the foster or adoptive parent? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I tend to think "no".

I do know that white parents are often resistant to discussing race and racial identity. Many become overly defensive when asked to think in racial terms. Training has to start with their identity first, not that of the children. A good classroom environment would have 1) a safe space to talk about racial identity 2) a space that challenges parents to think about their own race and how they would relate to the racial identity of their children. There's a lot of possible conflict there.

Another question: in the training, should black parents be challenged to be more open to transracial placements? On a national level, that seems like a crazy question, because there's a greater need to find families for children of color. But it's very much dependent on local demographics. For example, there are many older white children with severe problems that desperately want and need homes due to the meth epidemic. And there's a rapidly growing number of Latino children entering the foster care system in Georgia leading to a crisis because there are hardly any Spanish-speaking foster parents. Some black people who have lived in homogenous black neighborhoods all their lives have hesitancy and unhelpful stereotypes about communicating with certain members of other races, so in that area transracial training would be very important and beneficial.

Perhaps there should be separate curricula for transracial and intraracial adoptions. Every parent would get general transcultural training... but then a special transracial qualification would have to be earned. It's such a crucial area that I see the need for extra training. Then again, sometimes transcultural differences can be greater than transracial differences.

I also think foster children and in fact all children should get special classes about race and teaching tolerance. It's such a hard subject and it will affect their lives in so many ways! How can you explain "this is something integral to who you are, you have almost no choice in it, it deeply affects the way you think about yourself and the way you relate to other people, it's connected to your culture but not the same thing as culture, and it doesn't really exist (in a biological sense)?" I feel like I've been studying it for decades and I barely understand it. If children start learning about it as early as possible, there would be less uncomfortable silence and less racist bullying. It would not solve all our social problems by any means, but it would definitely improve things.

"And how about some risky questions. You haven't started parenting yet, so:"
3. What do you predict will be the most challenging for you personally?

I'm the breadwinner right now, and my husband is going to the work-at-home dad. I know it's going to drive me nuts sometimes being at work and thinking "well he should be doing X, Y and Z with the kids so let me make sure he is doing it EXACTLY the right way". I'll need to quash that urge to micromanage!

4. What strength or skill do you have that will be most valuable to you as you parent?

I'm also worried about not saying the right things when the children are hurt and crying. I'm not good at that. When crises happen, I like to step up and get things done and make sure everyone is fed and be the strong, quiet one. That's an important strength, on the flip side. I have confidence in myself that no matter what happens, no matter what problem we face, I can cope with it and be the person everyone else in the family leans on.

5. How do you imagine you and your husband working together as parents?

I like to be very thorough; I come up with big ideas and plan them all out. I'm not good at following through on those plans! That's where my husband steps in. He's great at staying focused and on track. This pattern should help when we're doing things like tutoring the children or working out a behavior modification plan.

I'm not good at talking about other people's emotions. He is. I'm better at explaining the world and the way it works. We both like to hug. I like to cook, he likes to clean.

Since a lot of my background is in teaching, I tend to look at parenting through a teaching lens, or a "creating a space to learn and grow" approach. I know he's going to have more of a "play around, enjoy yourself, act as silly and goofy as you want" approach. I'm sure parenting will be much more complicated than either of us imagine, so I'm looking forward to answering these questions again on April 18, 2008.

I'll be thinking about who to tag and interview...

Virginia Tech Reaction Part Two

This is going to ramble.

A while back, when I was in college, several of my friends were murdered. I wasn't extremely close to the victims; I had met one of them a few times, the others were people I hung out with at parties and shows. They were at my house the night before, and I could easily have been with them the night they died.

The killer was insane and it was theorized he had killed before, in his home state. He also wasn't white and he didn't "fit the profile" for being a serial killer. He didn't get the death penalty but he'll be in prison for the rest of his life.

The aftermath was horrible. There was exploitative media coverage and even a disgusting "blame the victim" element (I just saw that some piece of scum already took that low road with the VA Tech massacre). So above all, I really feel despair and empathy for the friends and families of the victims, and all the people at the university who are thinking "That could have been me. Why wasn't it me? It's not that I'm better, and they were worse. It could have been me."

Second, I'm getting really angry that scum like that blame-the-victims John Derbyshire guy are using this for self-promotion. Since he thinks a .22 is such an easy weapon that should have been overcome, he should try holding a press conference and shooting himself in the chest with one as a demonstration. One problem with .22 bullets is that they're so light, they ricochet off bones and tear through internal organs in multiple paths, and unfortunately I've heard of this because another of my friends was shot with one in a failed mugging (he lived and is fine).

Third, I'm nervous. I don't think there's going to be a huge backlash against East Asians. Still, anxiety was among my initial reactions on learning the shooter was a 1.5-generation Korean-American. Next, I'm angry at people who try to dismiss that reaction and say it's invalid. I was reading a Salon.com article about Asians leaving campus because they're nervous about a backlash, and a large number of commenters are accusing the writer AND the Asians of racism! Damn. If I was on that campus, I'd have the attitude "better safe than sorry" and want to keep my head down too. The attitude "don't talk about racism because if you do, you're racist" is infuriating. Partly because of the perpetual foreigner stereotype, all Asians are often lumped in with the actions of an Asian individual. People have been killed over less. In the 1980s, Chinese-American Vincent Chin was murdered by racists who were angry at Japanese companies taking their jobs. After 9/11, Sikhs were attacked. There's a pattern here, people. Now, I think most Americans are not going to blame Koreans and East Asians, but it's the minority that worry me, the ones that are looking for an excuse.

Finally, it makes me think about mental illness.

The last anecdote I have is from last year. The main reason we moved from our old apartment to our current little brick house is because of a young schizophrenic man who lived upstairs. Again, he didn't "fit the profile".

According to some basic things I've looked up, schizophrenics are not especially violent. Even those who hear voices saying things like "kill the postman" will tend to react: "I couldn't do that, killing is wrong, I like the postman, I'll try not to pay attention to that particular voice in my head". When their inhibitions against violence are lowered by certain drugs and alcohol is when the real danger begins. The schizophrenic who lived upstairs went through bottles of whiskey every day.

He was getting pretty bad. One day when he saw my husband was gone he knocked at my door and kept saying "let me in, I want to f**k you". I called the police, but they wouldn't arrest him. Later that day, he stabbed himself, went to a liquor store, blamed his roommate for stabbing him then ran off into the night. Together with his roommate I got him committed. This is actually not particularly difficult. It just means if the police apprehended him, he would be given a 48-hour observation at a mental health facility. He came back the next day and was apprehended. We moved out soon after that. I hope he's improved now, and nonviolent, but now that I'm cast as one of the characters in the insane narrative he constructed, I don't want to be around if he relapses and tries to pick up the story again.

I'll be watching the coverage closely for the mental health dimensions of this case.

Virginia Tech Reaction

This is horrible.

A Georgian was one of the first murdered.

Victims of Shooting Are Remembered

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17 — Ryan Clark was known as Stack here on the rolling campus of Virginia Tech, an amiable senior memorable for his ready smile and thoughtful ways.

[...]

In the end, as the people here struggled to come to grip with the tragedy, it fell to Vernon W. Collins, the coroner in Mr. Clark’s hometown in Columbia County, Ga., to deliver the news of his death to his mother.

"She was in shock," Mr. Collins said. "It started out in disbelief. She was praying what I was telling her was wrong, and I felt the same way. I wished I didn’t have to tell her that."

"It was horrible, you know, to walk up to somebody you don’t know and tell them they’ve lost a loved one," he added. "It’s the hardest part of my job."

Tall and thin, Mr. Clark, a resident of Augusta, Ga., was well-liked and a member of the university’s marching band, the Marching Virginians, students in the dorm said.

The band’s Web site has an image of him participating in a food drive and says that he enjoyed, among other things, "making t-shirts with his partner in crime, Kim Daniloski, and haggling with street vendors."

He also studied biology and English and had hoped to pursue a doctorate in psychology, with a focus on cognitive neuroscience.

I'm thinking of all the victims and their families and friends and wish for the survivors the strength they need to get through this.

Barack Obama Rally

I don't have much time for a long post so I'll just put up a few details and pictures.

The weather was overcast but overall very nice. Our VIP tickets meant we could stand in a section with a slightly better view located next to the Clark Atlanta University Pep Band.


The CAU Pep Band.


CAU Pep Band dancing a little.



The crowd in one direction.


Another.

The Reverend Joseph Lowery led an introductory prayer. The prayer had some neat couplets on racial solidarity that went a bit like this.

When black
Doesn't have to step back
Brown
Can stick around
Yellow
Is mellow
The Red man
Can get ahead, man
And white
is alright.

Then the daughter of former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson sang the Star-Spangled Banner.


Here he is!



A very excited crowd.



Excellent public speaker. There were mic problems but they didn't throw him off his stride. He seemed to pick up a bit of a Jawja accent as he progressed. That's quite understandable; anytime anyone sells something they have a tendency to match their accents to what they think other people want to hear. He was basically selling himself. I think he put his resume across successfully. He stressed his knowledge of constitutional law and community activism work, during which people often referred to him as Yomama and Alabama. It's a good thing he can joke on his own name, because his enemies are attacking him nonstop about it. The fact that he doesn't have a lot of experience within Washington was advanced as a positive, which I agree with. Less history means less debts to crooked lobbyists.

The speech had a very positive message and advanced a progressive platform. Without mentioning Bush or Republicans by name, he also gave some brief but concentrated criticism of where we've gone horribly wrong. I like how he puts it that "we're funding both sides of the war on terror". He also promises to give me universal healthcare and employ ex-offenders to install more efficient insulating material in my house. Yay! As long as they're not ex-burglars I'm totally fine with that.

I'm still not firmly in the Obama camp, but I might be by the end of the year, depending on how things go.

Does he have a chance? It's hard to say. A potential third-party candidacy from an insane white supremacist like Tom Tancredo could split off the rightmost wing of the Republican coalition and ensure a victory for practically any Democratic candidate.

Barack Obama Rally tomorrow

I have VIP tickets to see Barack Obama tomorrow. I'll be going with my mother and my cousin. I haven't decided whether to support him 100% (I also like Edwards) but I guess we'll see.

On the adoption front, we're just waiting for the homestudy to be approved by the state before we have a matching meeting.

The rest of the weekend is going to be devoted to some serious hardcore gardening. I need to get those bulbs in the ground ASAP.

The Best Don Imus Post and Picture

This is just brilliant.

Booyakasha! Imus Respeck!

Travel Versus Tourism: turning over a rock

This is a long post on a topic I've been thinking about for a while. Coming back from a vacation is a great motivation to finally type it all out. Here it is: a critical examination of whether travel is really different from tourism.

Many Americans are full-on tourists. They go on cruises. They book vacations at all-inclusive resorts. All they care about for their vacation spot is that it has sun, sand, the comforts of America, maybe a little exotic cultural display. Other Americans (like me, and most people I know) hate that kind of stuff. When I travel, I'd like to avoid other Americans. Otherwise, why bother leaving home? We prefer to truly "travel", to meet new people and explore new places, challenge ourselves and return with not just suntans but actual knowledge.

A lot of backpacker-type budget travelers (not just Americans, but from all corners of the world) have a deep emotional investment in the idea that their kind of travel is different from tourism. They are morally superior. They suffer for their knowledge. They read those dippy Paulo Coelho books.

A while back I decided that there was no point in building up a traveller identity in order to feel morally superior. I've started to explain my reasons to my friends and family, with varying results. Here's the gist of it. The traveller/tourist dichotomy is incredibly important for the identity of the traveller, but almost meaningless from the point of view of the local!

I used to work in the tourist industry in Miami. In Miami, the only industries are tourism, entertainment, drug-dealing and geriatric care. Miami, the unofficial capital of South America and the Caribbean, is also kind of a foreign country from the point of view of most Americans.

People like me did not have a very high opinion of the tourists we served every day. I would divide them into several categories:

1. Pasty-faced, pathetic northerners. Good tippers.
2. Eurotrash. Bad tippers.
3. Latin American elitist trash. Bad tippers, unless you spoke Spanish and acted especially servile.
4. English trash. Bad tippers. These were the absolute worst, because unlike Eurotrash, they could humiliate you in your own language. I reminder a friend of mine who was waiting tables for a Scottish tourist. Out of the blue the guy started harassing Americans for being shallow and stupid and not knowing anything about culture. And at the time, my friend was reading The Heart of Midlothian for her literature class, which is a 19th century, densely packed, highly Scottish novel. That guy probably hadn't even read it himself...

(You'll notice a certain bitterness creeping into my tone. But once I left the tourist industry I started liking foreigners again. My family briefly lived in England and I've always been sort of a UK-o-phile.)

Americans don't think of Miami as having a particularly deep or interesting native culture. I think a lot of Latin Americans have a similarly negative opinion of it. Yes, Miami has been debased by tourism, but we were still real people... I feel resentful anytime someone says "oh, that place was ruined by tourism. They don't have any culture over there." That guy trying to sell you the hideous sculpture of Christ made entirely out of glued-together seashells has a culture. Everyone has a culture!

Here's another categorized list. I really like it. It contains different ways that local people think about tourists, and what they want from tourists. The list is numbered from the point of view of a heavily touristed place such as Miami.

1. MONEY. Very simple and very powerful. Just give us money. Preferably cash money. We really need it. We'll work hard for you in order to get it. We might also steal it from you if we get the chance.
2. RESPECT. Don't humiliate me. Don't humiliate my family or friends or neighbors. Don't look down on my culture. You don't have to know all the ins and outs of how we do things down here, just show that you're exerting the minimum effort. Don't come into my place and treat me like like I'm beneath you.
3. SEX. If you're attractive to us, we'd like to have no-strings-attached sex, or a romantic affair. Your foreign sexual customs are either very appealing, or else disgusting but still morbidly fascinating.
4. HARM REDUCTION. Don't trash my place. Don't steal from us. Don't damage natural attractions so that the appeal of our place is damaged for future tourists and our economy implodes. Don't let your fun ruin our long-term future.
5. CULTURAL EXCHANGE: We want to learn about your culture. It's fascinating to us. If you're interested, we'd like to teach you about ours as well.
6. HOSPITALITY: We have a cultural obligation to show kindness to strangers. Fulfilling this obligation also provides us with deep satisfaction.

The problem with this list is that so many of the items are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Money and Hospitality, for example. The longer and deeper tourism is embedded into a local economy, the more the value of hospitality is eroded. I noticed it when I visited Hawaii. Hospitality was isolated, an exception rather than the rule. I don't blame Hawaiians. If strangers are continuously coming to your place and ripping you off, you learn how to stop being friendly to them.

Money is also contradictory to Respect. People in the service industry have to give up demanding respect in order to receive their paycheck. Locals are also frequently willing to harm their own future in exchange for short-term money. They'll let tourists overfish, pollute, build accomodations for them that aren't accessible to other local people.

One of the nastiest things about tourism in Miami is the way that locals became second-class citizens. A Norwegian tourist gets shot? Call out the riot squad. We can't let other tourists think Miami isn't safe! A black person in a ghetto like Overtown gets shot? Expend minimal attention, look the other way.

Let's take that list and apply it to a rural, isolated, indigenous village in the mountains somewhere in Central America. A traveller comes to the village. The first priority is to show them Hospitality, next comes Cultural Exchange. The villagers are fascinated and want to learn as much as they can. The traveller might be too weird and alien to be considered in terms of Sex. The villagers don't think to protect themselves from this harmless person.

Flash forward ten years, and the village has become a semi-regular tourist stop. Some of the tourists have been littering the natural attractions, getting drunk and harassing women... Harm Reduction, Respect and Money come into play.

The movie Y tu mamá también has one of the most brilliant depictions I've ever seen of the ebb and flow of tourism. You have to see the movie, and see the natural beauty of the location, in order to understand, but I'll try and give a summary. The protagonists end up at a remote beach in Mexico. Chuy, a local fisherman, lives there with his family. He rents them a room in his thatch-roofed home, cooks dinner for them and ferries them around in his small motorboat.

After the protagonists leave, there's a voiceover that tells the audience about Chuy's future in a very matter of fact way. A resort gets built on his beach. He has to sell his boat and go work for them as a janitor.

Here's my last list: a series of questions on how to have good tourism.

• Do the locals have control over the location, or is control held by foreign corporations, or an exploitative local elite?
• Are there many spaces that are accessible to tourists, but off limits for locals? As an example, I've heard that some nightclubs in the Cancun tourist strip don't let anyone in who looks "too Indian", in order to preserve the illusion that tourists aren't really in Mexico.
• Is tourism depleting local resources? This is why ecotourism, whenever possible, is such a good form of tourism. It encourages locals to conserve their own environment. In Costa Rica, a stronghold of ecotourism, many locals have deeply held environmentalist beliefs.
• Do locals have any choice to engage in other industries, or are they forced to enter into tourism?

So in closing, I think there are good tourism structures, bad tourism structures, good tourists, bad tourists, good locals, bad locals, and everything in between. That's kind of mushy, I know. A good message for all of us: please don't ever, ever mess with live coral, or eat sea turtle eggs. That's always wrong.

Puerto Rico Pictures: Culebra

The view from our hotel balcony.


On one of our scooter rides to the east side of the island.


Same scooter ride.



The Yankee imperialist readies his forces to invade the island.


A simple beach house that probably cost a million fafillion dollars.


One of many beaches.


Another beach.

Back from Puerto Rico

We got back this morning. We had an incredibly relaxing vacation on the tiny island of Culebra. We also got to see a little bit of San Juan, which is a really beautiful city.

I'll post some pictures later. Meanwhile here's a great video I saw on television there, from a band called Calle 13. I looked them up on Wikipedia and the singer in the video has an MFA from SCAD, an Atlanta university! It's great for those who don't know a lot of Spanish, because the words are pronounced in a very clear, exaggerated fashion. The song and the video are about being bad, so bad he's actually satanic and going to burn in hell. I know that doesn't sound funny, but trust me, it's hilarious.