The New South

I've been really slack about blogging. There's not that much going on right now, and I'm in a low-energy phase. As a reminder to myself, I need to finish that that long-suffering post on the Japanese foster care system, update my links and email expert reader Mom2Many with a description of my dog's social awkwardness with other dogs.

I just read a nice summary of Georgia's changing demographics at Creative Loafing, and it's worth quoting in full. Self-satisfied non-Southerners irritate me when they go on and on about our horrible primitive racist existence down here. Their condemnation ignores two huge points:

1. Believing that "southern culture" = "white Christian southern culture" erases the existence and historical contribution of a vast number of people.
2. We are probably more multicultural than you are.

Georgia’s changing demographics
June 15th, 2007 by tbarnes in Hot Off The Press

Georgia is on track to join an exclusive club, that of states with a majority population of racial minorities, according to the Afro-American Newspaper.

Only Hawaii, Texas, New Mexico, and California have majority-minority populations now. But, according to the paper, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that by 2025, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Arizona, and Nevada are also expected to have less than 50 percent of their population as white.

Whereas growing Latino populations account for most of the nonwhite population in majority-minority states, blacks will be the primary minority in Georgia. Blacks currently make up 29.8% of the state’s population, according to the 2005 census.

Atlanta is already majority-minority, with 68.7% of its population as nonwhite or Hispanic, the Brookings Institute’s analysis of the 2000 census shows. The city attracts minorities because of its strong, diverse economy and reputation for international business, Brookings demographer William Frey reported.

Conversation with an involved brother

I had a nice conversation this morning with someone about my age I know from church. I told him where our family was at, and he told me that when he was 9, his parents had adopted two children from foster care, biological brother and sister. As is usual, they had abuse issues. The aftermath of the abuse is still very much impeding the older sister's quality of life, but the younger brother is doing really well and recently graduated from college.

I told him that I felt like adopting from foster care is dominated by two myths: "all you need is love" and "no matter how hard you try, they're still going to burn your house and kill your pets". The truth is a lot more complicated. You just have to do your best and hope for the best. I feel lucky to have a realistic outline of what it's going to be like.

I have two cousins, one of whom I've written about before. She's one of the most competent people I've ever met in my life. My other cousin has ADHD, and a huge amount of talent he tends to waste in doing incredibly boneheaded things. I don't want to give any examples, but it's the kind of stuff that really makes you want to bang your head against the table.

I recently read an article that gave me a lot of hope for him, though. It said that many people with ADHD have brains that mature differently. They have unstable thought patterns until they hit their late 20s. Once a person with ADHD learns to properly tap their potential, they can shine like a star and shoot past "normal" people. So right now, my cousin is a young man living inside the emotional pattern of a fourteen-year-old, and he hasn't been able to get it together yet, but after five years or so, who knows.

If there's a point to any of this, I guess it's that there are no guarantees in life.

Two picnics

We went to two picnics today, a foster-care-related event and a neighborhood event. I just want to note that I'm proud of my little dog. He's so great around children! He's calm, quiet and lets them pet him very happily.

If we could only convince him to get along with other dogs. He turns into an instant Mussolini in any canine social situation, barking at much larger dogs and working himself into a neurotic frenzy if they don't obey his incomprehensible instructions.

My theory of bad internet behavior

I lurk on several forums and post actively on a few. I have a theory that the dynamics of many internet communities are heavily influenced by their sex balance.

Men and women think differently, but not radically so. Most of this is social and some of it is chemical. I think of male and female style of thinking as two overlapping circles. It's not too hard to go back and forth between the two circles... if a woman starts taking testosterone shots, for example, she'll move way over on the male side. I really dislike the "Men are from Mars" stuff that uses evolutionary psychology to justify vast differences between men and women. I think the reason behind the difference is fairly simple: upbringing (social and cultural factors) plus a little bit of chemistry (hormones).

When people behave badly on the internet they behave badly in different ways, depending on whether the community is dominant male or female. Male communities love rank and hierarchy. There are a few alpha males that establish dominance. The community tries to develop a stable hierarchy in which everyone knows their place. But if the hierarchy doesn't come together or isn't stable, conflict develops over the alpha position. Men start to wave their penises around via their keyboard. A frustrated alpha contender finds out they're outclassed, and decides to be a lone wolf instead of accepting a follower role.

Female communities consolidate according to a group identity. Multiple groups form, and even though each group is actually clustered around a few strong personalities, they invoke the idea of equality to maintain cohesion. Within the group, consensus, lack of competition and a feeling of togetherness and support is upheld; the success of one (in outside competition) is the success of all. If one member of the group feels attacked, the rest of the group launches a counterattack. The community works toward integrating all the different groups and becoming one big group. However, conflict is inevitable as subgroups battle each other.

Let's say two people have a disagreement. In a male community, the man will be able to shrug off an attack, regard their feelings about the message as irrelevant to the message itself, and perceive it as a disagreement, not an insult. They won't personalize it... as long as they are secure in their position in the hierarchy. In a female community, the woman will tend to personalize it more. She will feel attacked, and her group will leap to her defense, sparking off a much wider conflict. However, when conflicts develop, men are usually the blinder followers. Women question the hierarchy more; they realize gradations in between blind obedience and outright rebellion.

Adoption forums are usually 95-100% female! I also post at an adoption-unrelated forum (the Fighting 44s) that's more like 70-85% male. While superficially scarier, and much more R-rated, I think the Fighting 44s actually has less serious conflict than the main adoption forum I post at.

I don't think people are doomed to fall into negative sex-related behavior. It's not something that rules us completely, it's more like a magnet pulling us in a certain direction.

A healthy community has a complex environment where both kinds of organization -- hierarchies and groups -- coexist in a flexible way. Hierarchies are the best way to satisfy a desire for competition and debate. Groups are the best way to satisfy a desire for mutual support and consensus.

Murderer Probably Caught

It looks like my husband's friend's murderer has probably been caught.

My husband had been pessimistic about the chances, but I told him the guy was almost certainly going to get caught. Criminals like that are usually amazingly stupid. It was obvious he was low on the food chain to be doing such a petty mugging and carrying it off so badly. He told someone, and they tipped the police, I bet.

I've been through this before when I was on the outskirts of a serial murder case in college... but the inevitable revenge fantasies really, really bother me. I have no stomach for them. When grief over death turns into rage it just makes me want to put my hands over my ears. I don't wish a horrible death on the murderer, or prolonged suffering. I just hope he's prevented from harming anyone else, ever again. There's one less idiot with a gun and a hair trigger wandering the streets.

Transracial Adoption Essay

This is such a neat, cover-all-the-bases essay that I decided to make a quick link post for it.

From The Transracial Korean Adoptee Nexus blog: My Sister’s Adoption Essay

Loyalty

The concept of loyalty has been swirling around in my head lately.

Loyalty or allegiance is not a prominent part of the modern American psychic landscape. It's too connected to old or alien ways, feudal kings and queens, primitive tribes.

I free-associated the word. It connects with solidarity. But solidarity implies more of an idea of equals working together. There's the possibility of power inequality in loyalty. Dogs are the paragon of loyalty. Parents are not loyal to their children. Brothers and sisters are loyal to each other. You're supposed to be loyal to your friends, but not to your parents. Unless you're in a divorce custody case or family feud. Then, you might have "divided loyalties". When it comes to families, loyalty, as long as the family holds together, is absent, or hidden and unspoken.

This helps me puzzle out the way my father thought of his adoption. He has so little connection with any family left. I don't talk about it much, but I miss that feeling of family. My only connection to Japan is through him. Because of a series of events that was triggered before I was born, I have a half-brother that I have never met, and a half-sister I haven't talked to in more than 15 years.

He calls his adoptive parents "stepparents", never talks of them, and has only told me a few bare details about his biological mother and father. But his loyalty lies near his adoptive home, in the mountains west of Tokyo. It's an attachment to place, to clan, to a name, to the spirits of the earth and water. It's not an attachment to people.

More than a hundred years ago, an order came down that everyone (even peasants!), must have a last name. This was part of a sweeping modernization movement. It made a lot of sense. My father's adoptive ancestor went to the records official, who asked him where he lived. When he told them, they wrote that down and it became his last name.

I get a headache thinking about this stuff. It's like I'm wearing a pair of glasses. In one lens, I look at a world where everyone is a separately formed individual moving around in search of love and belonging while trying to be rational. In the other lens, I see half-formed people sprouting from seemingly random webs, sometimes trying desperately to disentangle themselves, with the webs constantly being ripped apart by invisible forces and woven back together again.

I'm not a huge cultural relativist; I believe all humans are basically the same, but they tend to see their worlds in very different ways.

The Man with the Thing in his Pants

Ever since moving to Atlanta more than ten years ago, I have wondered about the strange man who stands at the corner of Ponce and Briarcliff with the thing in his bike shorts.

Everyone who lives in, works in or travels through eastern intown Atlanta has seen this man and has the same question: "Is that thing real?"

I just found a video about him. This is not a mockumentary. He is really one of our best-known local characters.

There's no nudity in the videos (and thank goodness for that). In terms of dialogue, Part I is PG-13 and Part II has a few R-rated bits.

Mr. Understood: The Willy Terry Story Part 1


Mr. Understood: The Willy Terry Story Part 2

The End of May

In an attempt to climb out of blogging doldrums, I'm posting two links here to commemorate the end of National Foster Care Month, and the end of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Thought Leader Forum on Disproportionality: This is a very interesting link that someone just left in my comments. it's to a forum exploring issues in racial disproportionality in foster care. I will be going through it and listening to some of the sound clips soon. Here's one that I'm going to find especially interesting, as it touches on a local Atlanta issue: "Ray Torres, executive director of Casey Family Services, explores the impact of disproportionality on Hispanic foster children, as well as the urgent need for Hispanic foster parents to improve outcomes for these children".

Fallout Central: Along with the OCA, Fallout Central organized a swift, powerful and effective defense against recent racist attacks by DJs JV & Elvis. Their show was taken off the air. Yay for victory!

In personal news, things are moving pretty slowly. My husband and I have decided on a lifestyle change that is going to improve our home life while also preparing for the arrival of kids. We'd been getting into a habit of internet surfing at night. From now on once I get home from work, no more internet. We'll be doing more reading together on weekday nights. I know, it sounds like one solitary activity replacing the other, but we both think reading together is much more involving.

I finally finished Stephen Saylor's book, Roma, and I was not terribly impressed with it. I love, love, love his Gordianus the Finder mystery series, and this book was also all about Roman history, but organized as a James Michener-type multigenerational historic novel. Saylor is a great writer but this particular genre is not a good fit for him. Historical fiction and science fiction face exactly the same problem of how to impart background information to the reader. There are many potential solutions, and sometimes nakedly artificial ones are better than forced natural ones. In the detective format, background information comes along naturally as the detective follows the clues. But in Roma, there were way too many passages like this:

"Hello my friend Tortuous Prosus Historicus, what a coincidence running into you at this significant geographic location on the anniversary of an important event that happened fifty years ago to an ancestor of mine."

"Nice to see you too, Expositor Pompus Maximus. You know, a strange fit of amnesia came over me, and I seem to have forgotten all the important political and cultural events of the last fifty years, by Jupiter, so could you go ahead and give me a recap?"

Oh boy do I hate that stuff, but once I skimmed through those passages the rest of the book was not too bad. I do highly recommend his detective series, starting with Roman Blood.

He didn't make it

RIP.

A week later, victim of L5P shooting dies of injuries

Living with Gun Crime

I have some more depressing local news to report. A friend of my husband's was shot in the head late last night and is currently in critical condition. Here is the news brief.

It was a failed mugging. These happen a lot. A friend of mine was shot in the chest near that same corner (he's fine now).

I hate this kind of bullshit, I hate loser thugs who think a gun makes them big men, and I hate guns!

My husband is terribly upset, and we're really hoping his friend makes it through.

I have never experienced gun violence directly, thank goodness, but living in this kind of society means that it's a constant low-grade presence. I feel safe, but I have to make a lot of concessions to feel safe. It would be nice to live somewhere like Japan where you can walk down the street late at night without worrying that some random person will randomly murder you.

Personal Update

I'm still working up to that foster care in Japan post.

In adoption news, our homestudy has officially been state approved. We're now sending off inquiries at the rate of two a day. Some of them we have to take off the list pretty quickly. For example, there was a sibling group legal risk placement that we had to back out on because it turns out we're only licensed for legal risk placements in our own state. So far our caseworker has been very responsive and the process is slightly less painful than I thought it would be.

In local news, right now the whole city of Atlanta is like a giant nasty smoke-filled bar. Visibility is very low. I blame anti-environmentalist peckerheads.

The State of Georgia's own policies—or lack of policies—may be partially to blame for the past month's destruction of a quarter-million acres by wildfires in the southeastern part of the state. At least one prominent naturalist has suggested that the state has historically failed to properly manage the area's vast tracts of timberland.

[...]

Absolutely Horrifying Foster Abuse in South Dakota

I've been putting together a positive post about a Japanese organization promoting foster care. I happened to stumble across this abuse story in the meanwhile. I think it might pick up a lot of notoriety soon.

I have never heard of such cold and cerebral violation. I hope the abuser goes to jail for the rest of his disgusting life.

How can we give good foster parents the support they need, keep them from burning out, and keep the bad ones from being foster parents in the first place? It would make sense, if we aligned our national budget with better priorities, to pay foster parents a $30,000 base salary with frequent raises for experience, additional training and degrees in child development and special education. Then raise the bar like crazy. Perhaps an extended pre-licensing-approval period including a psychological exam?

Someone like Klaudt who becomes a foster parent so they can violate the most vulnerable children... this should never, ever be allowed to happen.

05/18/2007
Former SD Legislator Arrested On Sex Charges

A former South Dakota lawmaker is accused of molesting his own foster children and legislative pages.

Ted Klaudt, 49, a Republican rancher from Walker, faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking.

Court documents mention five possible victims. Three were foster children between the ages of 15 and 19 who lived with Klaudt's family. One is a cousin of one of those girls, and the fifth is a friend of Klaudt's daughter.

In the most disturbing accusation, the girls say Klaudt had them convinced they could earn up to $20,000 by donating their eggs to a fertility clinic. And even though he has no medical training, the girls say Klaudt did all the supposed "exams" and "procedures" himself.

Former State Representative Ted Klaudt is accused of manipulating, molesting, intimidating and threatening teenage girls who the state of South Dakota paid him to raise.

[...]

Another complaint, this time against Lou Dobbs

Left at CNN.com via this form:

I am writing regarding your news personality Lou Dobbs to complain about his racist insults against Latinos. I received an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center with some shocking information which I am quoting below:

"Despite being confronted with undisputed evidence to the contrary, Mr. Dobbs says he stands '100 percent behind' the claim that there have been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the U.S. in recent years. What's more, he has attributed part of the increase to 'unscreened illegal immigrants.'

The truth, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is that new leprosy cases peaked in 1985 at 361 and have declined since, even as the number of undocumented immigrants has increased. The source for Dobbs' outrageous leprosy claim is an anti-immigration zealot who once publicly stated that 'most' Latino immigrant men 'molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns."

This email was quite alarming to me, because here I was thinking I lived in the 21st century. What's next? Will Dobbs accuse Latinos of spreading the bubonic plague and poisoning our water supply? Stealing babies and mutilating cattle? Perhaps his next plan is to for America to gather them up and burn them at the stake! I cannot believe a modern news channel is supporting this superstitious claptrap.

Until the hate-spewing Mr. Dobbs is taken off your channel, I will not watch it anymore, and will let others know the news contained therein is simply not trustworthy.

Study on Racial Disproportionality in Foster Care

Although there isn't a lot of actual news in this article, it's a great introduction to a very complicated subject. It's going to be interesting to see what the upcoming study says.

I believe there is a lot of systemic racism feeding into this issue. This doesn't mean that white social workers are all running around grabbing black babies. In fact, almost all the social workers I meet are black, but I'd be willing to bet that there is still major disproportionality in Atlanta counties. It's a systemic problem, and the solution is going to take a huge amount of collective work.

Report on Reasons Behind Disproportionate Number of Blacks in Foster Care Due Next Month
Date: Wednesday, May 16, 2007
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com

A long awaited investigation into the causes behind the disproportionate representation of blacks and other children of color in the foster care system is scheduled to be released in late June, according to the Government Accountability Office, which is conducting the probe.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) asked the GAO in September 2005 to investigate the causes of disproportionate placement and to recommend solutions following a report from the Congressional Research Office, which showed that black and American Indian children were about twice as likely to be among the children entering the foster care system than their overall presence in the general population.

According to that report, theories about racial disproportion in the child welfare system suggest that children of color are more likely to be poor or from single parent homes, which are considered risk factors for maltreatment; that they come into contact more often with social services officials who are likely to report such mistreatment; that biased assumptions likely spur social service employees to report children of color to child protective services, and that children of color have less access to preventive services or conditions that promote permanent placement.

However, the National Incidence Survey, which collects data to measure the mistreatment of children, including incidents not reported to Child Protective Services, have consistently found no link between race and the incident of maltreatment in the general population. National studies show there is no significant difference across racial lines for the number of children who are subjected to abuse and neglect.

[...]

Asian-Pacific Heritage Month PSA

Here's a PSA to get this blog back into a good mood. Go Beau Sia!

No More Entourage (it sucks now, anyways)

I sent a message via this form in response to an episode of Entourage I saw last night after the Sopranos.

Do the writers of the show realize that May is Asian-American heritage month? The last thing I want to see is another example of Asians treated as sex objects servicing their white masters.

I used to enjoy watching Entourage but I have grown increasingly disgusted with the treatment of Asians on the show. Lance's character seemed promising, but the only show on which his character really mattered was one where he was a prostituted sex object. And now the massage parlor episode...

I will not watch this show anymore.

NY Times article on a special needs adoption from China

There was an account in the New York Times today about a mother adopting from China. The child, presumed healthy, was in fact very ill, and after their first meeting, the diagnosis was made that the child would probably be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. The response is a heartwarming counterpoint to the depressing case I wrote about a few weeks ago.

My First Lesson in Motherhood

[...]

“In cases like these, we can make a rematch with another baby,” the one in charge said. The rest of the process would be expedited, and we would go home on schedule. We would simply leave with a different girl.

Months before, we had been presented with forms asking which disabilities would be acceptable in a prospective adoptee — what, in other words, did we think we could handle: H.I.V., hepatitis, blindness? We checked off a few mild problems that we knew could be swiftly corrected with proper medical care. As Matt had written on our application: “This will be our first child, and we feel we would need more experience to handle anything more serious.”

Now we faced surgeries, wheelchairs, colostomy bags. I envisioned our home in San Diego with ramps leading to the doors. I saw our lives as being utterly devoted to her care. How would we ever manage?

Yet how could we leave her? Had I given birth to a child with these conditions, I wouldn’t have left her in the hospital. Though a friend would later say, “Well, that’s different,” it wasn’t to me.

I pictured myself boarding the plane with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn’t Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn’t.

How would I face myself? How would I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie.

I knew this was my test, my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head “No” before they finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. “She’s our daughter,” I said. “We love her.”

Matt, who had been sitting on the bed, lifted his glasses, and, wiping the tears from his eyes, nodded in agreement.

[...]

The ending lines could have been written directly to me. Nothing is ever sure. We have to hope for strength.

We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.

Mother's Day Post

I had originally thought of a long post for the occasion but I just don't have the time. I'm installing a content management system for my mother's website. Not the most sentimental present, but I think it will be much appreciated.

I don't talk about my mother very much on this blog, probably because I have very little to complain about. I mean, I love my dad, but he's nuts. My mother is just an all-around superwoman and her accomplishments are amazing. I'm fortunate to have had a very close relationship with her for 100% of my life.

I'm also giving a donation on her behalf to a great organization called MADRE that advocates for women and families all over the world.

Fugees Soccer in Clarkston

As I mentioned in a post a while back, my mother has done some work tutoring refugee children. She got my husband to start doing it as well. He's been assigned to a boy in the 6th grade who also happens to be on the famous Fugees soccer team!

Here's an interview with their coach.

Here's their website.

These kids are doing great, but they still face a lot of hardship. Life is not suddenly all sunshine and roses now that they're in the US. Many of their families are dealing with PTSD on top of poverty.

I'm proud of my husband. He loves tutoring and has really gotten worked up about the positive male parenting stuff he learned at the conference last month. The volunteer manager is so happy to get a rare male tutor into the program.

Matching Meeting

Our matching meeting was reassuring. A lot of the stuff I knew already, but having our worker repeat it to us in a calm voice made a huge difference.

I now have a list of 30 children from photolistings, and some of them are two-brother and two-sister groups. Our worker explained that she'll send of inquiries and phone messages on all of them. Maybe a third of the caseworkers will get back to her. Often, the listings are out of date. She reminded us that diagnoses and need levels can be unreliable. An unscrupulous foster parent might be exaggerating the need level in order to get a higher state subsidy. Yikes! Conversely, a caseworker or foster parent may be downplaying the significance of certain issues for various reasons. She encouraged us to have her inquire on any child that fit our parameters even remotely.

I've heard stories of people sending off inquiries for hundreds of photolistings before getting back one response that the child's caseworker might be interested in them as a possible placement.

Age: 0-7. Almost all the children on our list are 4-7. Because we're not a medically qualified home, no serious physical disabilities. It's so sad how many of the kids are in wheelchairs or need to be fed through tubes. We don't know sign language or have any experience with severe visual impairment. No mental retardation, or other conditions that would mean the child would only be able to live independently with great difficulty. No FAS or full-blown RAD, or severe psychiatric disorders. Mild to moderate needs for pretty much everything else is fine. We feel especially confident about speech disorders and learning disabilities. We understand many children will have ADHD or ADHD-like behavior (this is a whole other topic I want to write a lot about later, because we have some pretty intense ADHD genes in one branch of our family), attachment issues, grief and loss, massive emotional trauma, tantrumming, etc., and we're doing as much training as possible on the issues we think we can handle. Many of our parameters have an easy justification: children with higher level needs usually need a full-time stay-at-home parent and will say that in their listings.

Applying these parameters still gives me a nasty feeling, like I'm cherry-picking... arggh. That's all I can say. I used to work with mentally handicapped children a long time ago and I especially feel bad about passing over them. They are wonderful. If I had a biological child like some of those children I worked with, I would be fully committed from the beginning... but I feel like I just couldn't dive into the middle.

The ten-year-old is back on our list, though. Our worker encouraged us to put him back in, and my husband and I leaped at the chance.

We had dinner with my parents tonight, and my stepfather asked me when I was going to bring home his fishing buddy! I tried to explain the intricacies of the coming matching stage. Damn, it's going to be tough.

Next week, we're going to another training seminar on transracial adoption. I can't wait to see what the audience demographic is going to be.

Weekend Update

I've been down in the dumps lately. A lot of little projects and long-term goals I have just don't seem to be going well... or going at all.

One major trigger is that I'm not doing ESL this semester. I'd dropped out of the teacher pool in advance in order to be around more for my father. Now that he's long since returned to independence and Japan, I really need to get back into it, or else pick up another volunteer teaching position. That would improve my mood enormously.

On Monday, we're having a matching meeting. We'll get to read through our homestudy and discuss the matching process. Our homestudy approval has been delayed for two annoying reasons: my husband's fingerprints were smudged on the criminal background check paperwork and had to be redone, and my drug test results weren't entered correctly by the lab company. Both of these got fixed quickly and we're now on the record as Mrs. Fresh and Mr. Clean. Amazingly, my husband's teenage mushroom enterprise failed to materialize in the background check. It must have been too old and too trifling. We still have a statement about it in the application, though.

I've sent our caseworker some photolistings I've been looking at. I ran them past my husband and we had to drop one off, which was very sad. I am sure we'll have many such difficult decisions in this coming stage. The boy was above our age range, at 10 years old. There was something about him that we would have been uniquely qualified for, but he also had a serious diagnosis of something that we're not very qualified for.

My husband pointed out that when the boy hit the difficult age of 12-13 he would have been with us for only a couple years, and the situation might get out of our control. That was something I'd never thought about, but it makes sense to me. I realized I might feel more secure parenting a kid on the other side of puberty, say 15 to 17.

It's terrifying jumping into this kind of stuff as new parents, knowing so little about the children who'll be coming to you.

I've heard that the first three years are crucial in childhood development. I've also heard conflicting ideas. "Raising a little kid is easy, just keep them warm and fed and hug them. The hard part is when they get older and start asking tough questions and going through identity crises."

My mother just tells me I was a perfect kid and being a mom was always like a walk in the park. It's nice to hear, but not especially helpful when it comes to triage and thinking of all the stuff that could go wrong.

I think we'll stick with the range of 0-7. In realistic terms this will probably translate to a 4-7 range, unless a foster-to-adopt situation comes up.

Housing Aid for Parents Adopting from the Foster Care System

I was recently made aware of this program because an adoptive mother on another forum recently bought her house this way. It's too bad that only New Jersey and a few other states have programs like this.

There are very strict rules about the pre-adoptive period when adopting from foster care. I've written about this before, but in Georgia, siblings are not allowed to share a bedroom past the age of three if they are of opposite sexes.

I can only imagine the hardship this causes in very high-density urban places. Let's say you have adopted a boy from the foster care system. The boy has two sisters, and a year later they also end up in the foster care system. The parent really wants to keep the family together, but they don't happen to have an extra bedroom in their small apartment. If they don't adopt the sisters, they could end up in an adoptive home several states away, or even a group home if they're older.

The parent could make do for a while. Perhaps they could screen off part of the living room and set up a sofabed. They'll work hard and in a year they'll be able to get a bigger place. Families make do like this all the time. It's not ideal but it's not terrible. However, pre-adoptive rules may disallow this kind of arrangement.

It would be almost impossible for a moderate income person living in an urban area to adopt some of the available sibling groups. Groups of five, six, seven kids... they deserve to stay together, but how? They get split up, or else stay together, but shuttled back and forth among the few foster families who have a really big house.

There's a great need for these kinds of programs.

Commissioner Levin Relaunches Program to Benefit At-Risk Youth

[...]

The expanded Home Ownership for Permanency Project (HOPP) was created by DCA and HMFA to help children placed in foster care due to the loss of one or both parents, abandonment, abuse or neglect. The program benefits children who are available for adoption but are unable to be placed due to a prospective family’s lack of adequate and affordable housing.

"HOPP gives families with poor credit the ability to make needed home improvements that will allow them to adopt or become legal guardians through the Division of Youth and Family Services or a state-licensed adoption agency," Commissioner Levin added. "Through the program, we can encourage adoption that would otherwise not be possible, allowing families to remain together and creating permanent homes for at-risk and special needs children."

HOPP is available to individuals and families who have made a commitment to adopt a child or children, and grandparents or relative caregivers who have legal guardianship. Eligible participants receive services such as below market-rate first mortgages, second mortgages for home improvements to accommodate the needs of adoptive children, and refinancing of first mortgages.

HOPP was created through a partnership with DCA, HMFA, the New Jersey Department of Human Services, the Division of Youth and Family Services, and the Catastrophic Illness in Children Relief Fund Commission.

"Together, we are lending a helping hand to adoptive or foster families by offering them financing to provide good homes for children in need," Commissioner Levin said. "This not only ensures the affordability of housing and rehabilitates homes for the state’s hardworking families – it rehabilitates the lives of children who are desperately in need of families that can love and care for them."

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.