SteelRigged's Open Salon Blog

I'll agree with the GOP IF-

Wed, 6 Apr 2011 19:04:20 -0400

Okay, here's my compromise.

I would accept the defunding of Planned Parenthood and serious restrictions on abortions if:

1) We provided comprehensive healthcare to all. You have to start women before they are pregnant, cause you never know. Men need to be included because a father's health matters too. Children, obviously from the moment of conception till the moment majority, when they become men and women in the system. There should be specific and extrodinary help for women facing dangerous pregnancies, which may include accepting that even in a world of restricted abortion, it is still sometimes the best choice available.

2) We provide a PreSchool/School system that works. Fully funded! Public! Exemplary! From toddler pre-school to the end of a 2-4 year degree. It also has to be able to accomodate parents who are still studying. Including teenagers.

3) We act seriously to protect working parents from discrimination. Paid materinty and paternity leave. Nursing/Pumping break rooms. Flexible work shedules. Pay and benefit parity. Sick leave for when the kids get older. Systemic discrimination treated as serious as personal "quid pro quo" discrimination.

4) We provide effective, comprehensive child protection and social services. Housing. Counseling. Social workers. Safe places for children in danger. Safe places and help for families in danger. Follow up that sees families in crisis all the way to health, even if it takes years: phsyical health, mental health, spiritual health, and economic health. Alternatively, this includes a foster and adoption system that can protect and place children in homes that provide the care they need, including older children, special needs children, minority children, LGBT children.

5) We actually act like we care about the people who are already here. Giving to charity is good, but when charity isn't enough (and it never has been) voting for the taxes and systems and institutions that do the work of items 1-4.

Because the line between born and unborn is not arbitrary.

Baby Boys and the Bechdel Test

Wed, 3 Nov 2010 22:11:38 -0400

Okay, I have a two year old boy. He loves Elmo, Tigger, and wheels on anything.

I have also realized in the last few days that we don't own a single toddler movie that passes the Bechdel test.

What's that you say? Toddlers shouldn't be watching TV at all? Yes, but I don't have a maid or a cook and sometimes things need to get done. Sometimes he's sick and the movies are the best distraction. Sometimes I'm sick and a movie is all I can manage.

But here's the thing, I've been reading about the hidden brain and how unconscious bias is formed through sheer repetition of pattern and exposure. How this results in little kids having really racist and sexist attitudes because they learn, on an under-consciousness level the patterns of racism and sexism that permeate society before they learn that we have been trying to fight those patterns. Its like the language they pick up the school yard, whether we want them too or not.

Don't think that racism and sexism are everywhere? well lets go back to that point that I have no kids movies, none, that pass the Bechdel test. If there was a Bechdel test for minorities, (2 people of color, that talk to each other, not about white people), my hodgepodge kids movie collection would fail that too.

Help! Please, Please, Please, can anyone out there help me fix this situation! I have Netflix, it shouldn't be that hard.

Here is a list of movies/TV shows that I have watched (but don't own) that are kid appropriate and pass Bechdel:

Chicken Run
A Bug's Life
The Last Unicorn (maybe)
Matilda

Lilo and Stitch

The Incredibles

Wizard of Oz

Rugrats

Shrek 3

all Miyazaki

Charlotte's Web

Powerpuff Girls

Maya the Bee

Here are the ones that have been mentioned to me, but I haven't seen

Harriet the Spy

The Railway Children

Halloweentown series

Hamtaro
all My Little Pony movies
Anastasia

Eloise series

Princess Diaries

A Little Princess

Happily Ever After

Eloise series

Twitches

Twitches Too (both about black girls)
Apparently some Barbie movies also past muster, including:
The Princess and the Pauper
Mermaidia
Fairytopia

Rapunzel

Pigeons are so damned Graceful

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:06:03 -0400

"Pigeons are so damned graceful" spits my Father.

We are sitting in the car at a red light on seventh street,

the corner where the homeless men gather;

soup kitchen on one side, shelter on the other

and police station at the end of the block.

It is the only place I have ever bought weed from a stranger,

this corner, where I paid five bucks for a joint to impress

another 15 year old whose name I can't remember.

I'd planned to boost my Dad's stash, but he was out that week.

It was about then that he told me he'd sworn to my mother

that he'd never smoke me out, but the reverse was wide open . . .

The baby is sleeping in the back, and my Father has forgotten

what he was saying before the pigeons caught his eye,

grey birds swooping in moorish arches over the cop cars

lined up, as always, insectine along the street--

He was talking about Pablum, real wheat Pablum,

wondering if we could get it for the baby,

who is cutting his first tooth. Dad, Grandad now, wants it premixed.

Of course. He tried to find it for me and couldn't;

he thinks its probably gone for a reason, but still . . .

The light changes in its own time, like everything else,

which is good. The baby sleeps better when the car is moving.

The pigeons still on the road alight to the stoplight, and

I think about this moment as a poem, about

men becoming metaphors, the great grey

and shining swirl mushed up in my mouth,

simpled and strained, perhaps even a bit awful

but still, because of the growing, necessary.

How to Kill Grandpa, or We: The Death Panel

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 18:09:30 -0400

Uncle G.'s message said "Call me, as soon as you can." That's how we knew. If Papaw was getting was getting better, there would have been details.

When we called, Uncle G. said "We've been asked to make a decision about removing the ventilator."

"Does that mean what we think it means," my husband, asked.

"Yes," said Uncle G.

"Okay" we said. Then we packed up ourselves and the baby and drove the two hours to the Scott and White hospital by Ganny and Papaw's house. We, the family, converged in the 10th floor waiting room: Granny, the 2 kids, the 4 grandkids, and the various assortments of spouses, including myself. I brought muffins. This was Saturday, August 1. We were going to say goodbye. We were going to join the death panel.

This is a post about politics. It is absolutely personal, but I don't know how else to address why the nation is so divided about healthcare. It is personal. Its about our bodies. Its about our families. Its about life and death and death is so impolite. It breaks schedules. It’s messy. it ignores our wishes. This post is about making one medical decision. I have tried to tell it simply, but it is not simple. It has 94 years of family grudges and blind spots. Its also about the politics of a family, what we fight for.

No more than two or three of us were allowed in the room with Papaw at a time, so we went in shifts. My husband and his sister, a newly minted nurse herself, went back together. They've been through a lot together. Both pulled themselves out of difficult childhoods with help. My husband was essentially adopted by his martial arts dojo when he was 16. My Husband's sister was saved by a local community action program that help ssingle mothers get their GED's and pay for nursing school. She was the class validictorian. The both deeply belive in communities helping each other. Papaw didn't.

The quintessential story of Papaw is that as his hearing faded, he never would use a hearing aid. He denied he was deaf no matter how obvious it became. Sadly, it took a long time to become obvious, even when he could hear, he didn't really want to listen to what anyone else had to say. Especially not women or children. (Even as his children became grandparents.) Everyone waiting to see this dying man had been persistently, if often gently, dismissed by him for the past 50 years. He firmly believed himself a classic self-made man.

After we'd gotten to the hospital and hugged everyone, Uncle G. told us that, on the doctor's recommendation, they'd decided not to continue the ventilators past Monday. Granny ate a muffin and made a dark joke about doctors. I don't even remember what it was, just that it was funny, and black, and totally unexpected. I stifled my laugh and wondered where this wry witty woman had been hiding.

My husband and sister were switching shifts with their cousins, the two other adult grandkids. All of us married. All of us with young children. While they were all there the nurse monitoring Papaw took them aside and said "We know the family has directed the doctor to end ventilation support on Monday. But we don't really have clear instructions from the family on what to do if he crashes before then, what happens late tonight. He's often worse at night." Poor nurse she had no idea what she was stepping into.

Dutiful as always, the grandkids carried the request back out to the waiting room. The nurse hadn't said, "he's going to die tonight," but my sister-in-law looked at his fluids and monitors and told us that's what she meant. By "us" I mean our generation of grandkids and spouses. Telling "the kids", our parents, was . . . complex. Telling Granny, seemed too sad to bear.

The main complexity was my husband's mother, "Aunt P". She was Granny and Papaw's daughter and live-in caretaker: also, a very difficult woman who has a various times in her life, generally during custody battles, been diagnosed as having a schizophrenic or borderline-personality disorder. She hasnever recieved medical treatment, becuase neither she nor her father believed in "that kind of Doctor." She is functional, in a way, and was enabled by her father. It fit his world view that a woman would never be able to hold a job, that she would be unable to support herself or really be independent, unless, of course, she was married. In which case she wasn't his problem, but her husbands. She in turn, passive-aggressively indulged Papaw's every bad habit.

This run of hospitalization started because Papaw had fallen on the front path. He then, in his terrible way, insisted that he didn't need a doctor, just to helped to his easy chair by the T.V. Aunt P reported to us later that it took four hours to "walk" back into the house with Papaw. She set him up in his chair with a glass of tea and an afghan. He said he was in pain. She brought him some Tylenol. That's why it was 18 hours before an ambulance was called for 94 year old man with a broken hip and a fever.

I, the most out spoken of the grandkids and their spouses, had already had one fight with Aunt P over the decisions the rest of the family was making about Papaw's care. Uncle G and his wife had been researching live-in rehab facilities when it looked like he might still recover. They were explaining what they had decided to us, when Aunt P. pipes up and says "Well, don't forget that he might not go." This caused Uncle G. to freeze, he can't deal with his sister at all.

"What's he going to do?" I asked, "Run away from the hospital?"

"He might call people. Friends of his. I know I couldn't stop them."

"Fine. Have the hospital orderly stop these 'friends'." I said, now starting to regret that I had engaged.

She continued asserting that if she didn't do what her father wanted, he, while bedridden, would kick her out of the house. This went back and forth for a while, and ended rather abruptly about the time she said "I know you all blame me for not calling an ambulance." Because, honestly, we did.

The fact that we all lightly blamed her, that we all got slightly tense and telegraphic when she tried to join the conversation was probably the reason that she spent most of the day sitting on the far side of the waiting room with her knitting. It was absolutely the reason that after the nurse told the grandkids that she didn't have directions on what to do if Papaw crashed that night, Saturday, before the Monday order to stop ventilation kicked in, we all approached Uncle G alone. Its the reason Uncle G then turned to Granny without her. I doubt though its the only reason that when she figured out we were discussing something important she threw a fit. She yelled at us all that we had no right to make this decision. “We have to do what he told us!” she insisted. There was nothing in what she said to argue about, we all agreed with her. We all wanted to do what he’d told us he wanted. She was just the only one in the room who felt certain she knew what that was.

Papaw was scattershot. His yard was full of half finished projects. His finances were totally disorganized. I don't think believed he was going to die, ever. Two weeks before when his condition was good, Uncle G, had briefly and lightly brought up the topic of "well what happens if . . . ." Papaw had said "well have them zap me twice and if that doesn’t work, it doesn't work." Of course, "zap me twice" was not a standard of care that the hospital understood. The doctor's were very specific that if Papaw started to fail over the night and they necessitated, it meant cracking the chest, breaking ribs, manually massaging the heart, injections of lots of drugs, and generally lots of pain. Papaw's "directive" was a fantasy. A T.V. version of healthcare. So the question was turned over to us, the family, the mourners, the death panel: guilty lay people who couldn't say the words to each other "Papaw is dying."

So what the hell did he mean “have them zap me twice and if that doesn’t work, it doesn't work." Does that mean “intervene with heroic measures to save me at all costs, even if its only for an additional 24 or 48 hours?” Does it mean that “once I’m obviously non-responsive to recovery efforts, like never coming off a ventilator on my own, stop trying?” Does it mean, “I really don’t want to think about my own death so stop asking me?”

As Aunt P harangued us for even bring this question to Granny, I know all the grandkids were wishing that someone had forced an Obamacare style “death panel” on Papaw. I know there is nothing in the healthcare bill that would have forced Papaw to face the fact that he was mortal, nothing to force him to draft medical directives, but in that hospital I fervently wished there was. Papaw would have hated it. It went against every bone in his body to even permit himself to conceive that he might not be able to direct every aspect himself: of his life, of his children’s life, of his death. Uncle G somehow became a 10 year old boy in the face of that certainty. Aunt P never behaved older than 16. The grandkids all crumpled as we watched our parents crumple. The emotional peril in the family was too great to get the practical questions answered.

These are also moral questions. They are also political questions. Papaw would never have voted for a Democrat. Democrats he felt, did not seem moral, did not speak and act in a moral way. The promoted weakness. The were not in his Church. Papaw church printed cute little pamphlets which he handed out eagerly. They had titles like The Way of Everlasting Life, Endless Life, The Joy of Forever, and There is No Death. Everypart of the healthcare debate, except Sarah Palin, irritated him. He hated socialist anything. His hospital stay was paid for by medicade. His fortune was made building houses on contract for the WPA.

While the rest of us were mulling and parsing what Papaw would have wanted, now that he was sicker, now that we knew zapping twice wasn’t an option, Aunt P went straight to the nurse that had asked us the question. I don’t know what she said to the poor woman, but that nurse came out almost in tears apologizing to us. Saying of course they had the order to keep him alive until Monday, and she didn’t mean to put anyone on the spot, to make anyone feel any pressure. And somehow, though I don’t think anyone really believed heroic measures were a good idea, or even really possible, we all let it go. The nurse took the question back, at the urging of an upset schizophrenic, and we let her. Because it was easier.

Here is a family. A family of differnt ages, different policitical positions, different moral world views. This family is united in crisis; it knows that action has to be taken. This family is trying to do its best, but still the actual decisions are made by the loudest, craziest, least rational person in the room. This was August. If we cannot be straight about healthcare with our own families what chance did any townhall meeting have?

Before you could go into Papaw’s room, you had to put on a paper smock, gloves, and a shower cap. All blue hospital issue. He had a spore infection spread by surface to surface contact, my sister-in-law gave all of us a lecture on careful hygiene, after all, we were all in contact with babies, and none of us had enough health insurance for a little one to get really ill. Papaw was deflated, skinny and sunken by his illness. He couldn’t keep his eyes open, drifting constantly into light restless sleep. When he was somewhat awake, he seemed unable to focus on anyone or anything in the room. He shook. He shuddered and groaned. We touched his hands and feet. We sang anything we could think of, Amazing Grace and Silent Night being the ones he seemed to respond to the most.

Papaw died that night. His kidneys, heart, and lungs were all failing. I don’t know what measures were expended to save him. I don't know how much it cost. I hope he didn’t die in pain. I hope we did the right thing for the family. I hope we can all do better for the nation.

I helped Teenagers get Secret Abortions

Tue, 2 Jun 2009 11:06:10 -0400

I spent my first year as a law student helping teenagers get abortions. I worked the phones at a small non-profit called Jane's Due Process, which as far as I know, is the only organization in the country that helps teens navigate the judicial bypass process to get abortions without parental consent or notification. (You should Google it and make a donation right now.) I am now a volunteer attorney for them. It is righteous work. I am paranoid about telling people I about it. I often leave it off my resume.

Bill O'Reilly may snarl that the "left wing" is trying to silence him, but he has a TV show. Its people like me, and the girls I work with, who have truly been silenced. We are the ones who are staring down the barrel of a gun.

Everybody loves parental consent laws for abortion. They are an easy sell. Who wouldn't want parents involved in the medical decisions of their daughter; and as the pundits are quick to point out the vast majority of teens approach their parents first anyway, so this law only affects a small number of young women. What that means in practice is that the only people truly affected are the people you would least like to see affected: abused teens, abandoned teens, and teen in situations of novel dysfunction.

Judicial Bypass is supposed to be the safety valve on parental consent/notification laws. It's supposed to be a way for abused and abandoned teens to opt out. Of course, it’s often a spectacular failure. Several county and district clerks in my state flat out refuse to accept teens' applications to speak to a judge: a completely illegal act. These are often the same people who accuse clinic staff of disregarding the various restrictive laws that have been woven like a web around them. There are also a fair number of judges in my state, who have publicly declared they will reject any applicant that comes before them, and then do so. (They are elected after all.)

The people who help, the clerks and judges who make an effort to listen before they judge, they don’t speak up much. Discretion, moderation, even humility about personal fallibility, are all anathema where abortion is concerned. If you can’t concede the ethos and pathos of the argument to those who “truly believe” it's always murder, it's best not to say anything at all.

The very first call I took at Jane’s Due Process (again: Google and money) was from a 17 year old who said bluntly, “My mom’s in jail and my dad’s in Iraq” she was living with her older sister who was 22, but the clinics were not allowed to accept the sister’s consent because she was not the legal guardian. Both sisters thought they could get either of their parents to consent, but there was a timing issue. My state only allows abortions up to 21 weeks. It routinely took two or three months for mail to circulate from the base address the girls had to the frontlines where their father was, and then back to them. Their mother, they said, couldn’t receive registered letters at all. So, by the time the permission form got back, a legal abortion would be unavailable. We set her up with a lawyer to try and get a bypass.

I received more than one call from grandmothers who had been turned away by the clinics. They had often been raising their grandchildren from the time they were toddlers. The parents were MIA, but the relationship was informal. They’d been allowed to enroll their granddaughters in school, to claim them as tax dependants, to get them vaccinated, to make every medical decision before this one, but not a decision about abortion.

These of course, were the easy cases. Abuse was much trickier. First off, though abuse was a reason for circumventing parental consent/notification, if a teenager admitted that she was abused, the judge was required by law to open a protective services case. This then triggered an investigation, at which time parents generally found out that she had gone to court and obtained an abortion. (Defeating the whole point of a bypass.) You might think that getting an abused teen out of the household would be a universally good thing, but these are older teens, 15, 16, 17, and the system hates them. There is no good place for older abused teens to live when they are removed from their family. Often they are sent to juvenile detention centers. Rarely is the effort made to ensure that they stay in the same school and receive the continuity of education that is necessary to graduate. They are low priority.

Secondly, these are kids who have survived abusive households for more than a decade and a half; they often think it’s normal. We were trained to ask these young women what the worst punishment they had received was. I still remember the 16 year-old who scoffed at that idea that she was abused and then when asked about punishment said “well, he once threw me through the bathroom wall.”

The last type of call was often from immigrant kids, who protective services would never consider abused, but who faced dire consequences if their families discovered their pregnancies. We had one Ethiopian 17 year-old, a girl with a full college scholarship, who faced being sent back to Africa, denied the chance to go to school, and “circumcision.” She was quite forceful. She told us about a beloved cousin, who when faced with the same situation had been persuaded to tell her parents by a “crisis” pregnancy center; the cousin was gone. Her parents had arranged for her “treatment” in Ethiopia and for her marriage there.

I even sent a girl to Kansas once; she was a marathon runner and a track star. She lost her period every year during training season and so really did not know she was pregnant until the middle of the second trimester. Her parents were hard core religious, and she knew that they would turn her out on the streets no matter what happened with the pregnancy. She didn’t want to be homeless.

None of these teens get to speak out, it wouldn't be safe for them to. We get to pass laws that endanger their lives, but they can’t protest. I worked for them, tried to protect them, but have always kept a slight veil of anonymity because I’m afraid of the personal and professional consequences of doing the right thing, of talking about doing the right thing, in a world that bombastically declares it wrong.

I know I am helping the right-wing make something private into something shameful by being discrete. But I don’t have a T.V. show, I don’t have security guards, all I have is the residual fear that somewhere there is a man with a gun, looking for our office, who is absolutely certain he has the right to shoot me, because I help teenagers get abortions.

When in this “debate” do my deep convictions get honored?