Author: Kidspeak

The sun is out!

Eliot Spitzer is in the Governor’s office in Albany!  Cathy Widom has done it again! There’s a robin in the backyard!  

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
                      Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll

Somehow, the combination of sun, the lovely blue sky as I drove to work, and scanning the blogs and a few psychiatric journals this morning, has filled me with a lightness of heart that I haven’t had for a while.  It all gives me reason to hope.
The real story here is Cathy Widom.

Skip this next paragraph if you don’t want to know why I think she’s important. Skip the entire diary if you find scientific work boring. Just go with the good feelings. It’s a new year, and a sunny morning.

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Who is Cathy Widom and why is she important? Widom is that rare bird who does longitudinal research on people. She follows kids and adults for years and years, and sees how they start and how they turn out. This is not popular work, nor is it easy. It takes money, which pretty much only the feds can fund. Some administrations – do I really need to say which ones? – tend to cut off that sort of research.  It is risky, because you have only a short while to prove your worth to your university, and a single, big longitudinal study that may not show results before your probationary time is up isn’t going to cut it.  But Widom, somehow, has done these studies over and over again.  And quite simply, her work is terrific. If you want to predict how early events in kids lives might lead to later problems or not, research that begins with people early and follows them over time is the Gold Standard. Widom’s work is golden.
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OK.  You are safely past the skipable paragraph, if you want to go to the heart of the matter. Note:  Here’s what Cathy Widom has done:  Widom followed about 1200 kids, beginning with some in 1967, up to being adults, average age about 29. That is a very big group to follow, and a very long time to follow them. About half were kids who had legally documented cases of abuse or neglect between 1967 and 1971 (before they were 11 years old), the others were very similar but without abuse or neglect.  

She looked to see what effect earlier abuse and neglect had on these children, now that they were all legally adults.  She found that neglect put these kids at great risk for depression as children and adults. For abused kids, risk was increased mostly for depression in adulthood. Sexual abuse alone did not increase risk for depression, (though other researchers have identified difficulties other than depression). Physical abuse and neglect predicted many later difficulties. For many of her participants, the depression started earlier than adulthood, particularly for neglected children.  

Why is this important? Isn’t this obvious?  Well, no. The overwhelming majority of research on abuse & neglect is really research on abuse.  There are very few studies of neglected kids. The general assumption is that neglect is not good, but that it doesn’t harm children as abuse does.  Neglected kids, once the dirt and grime are washed off, and the children are fed and their living quarters are cleaned up, are assumed to be ok.  Neglected kids look ok in most cases.  And if you can’t see the damage, most times there isn’t enough evidence to provide help or any kind of intervention.

There have been serious discussions about removing neglect from states’ mandatory reporting laws. Much less help is offered to children who are neglected, compared to children who are abused. Some agencies are very reluctant or slow to investigate neglect reports unless children show signs of neglect that has become abusive, e.g. a child whose neglect has resulted in physical harm, meaning it is now a clear-cut abuse case. Some policy makers believe that neglect cases clog up the system and deflect attention and funds away from the serious dangers that abused children face.  I sat on a state advisory board 8 years ago where this proposal was given serious discussion by a national child advocacy group.  (We strongly objected, I’m pleased to say.)

Widom’s work is very important in calling attention to neglect.  Let me emphasize that she is not saying that physical or sexual abuse has no long-term ill effects on children. It certainly does, but her work on those issues is a matter for another discussion. The piece I’m emphasizing here is that children who are neglected suffer ill effects that go beyond their immediate physical needs, and those ill effects extend into their adult lives.  The depression that many of them will have will also cause difficulties for their children, as is known from many other research studies.

It’s sick, isn’t it? I’m happy that there is hard evidence now that neglect in childhood leads to high risk for bad outcomes years later in adult life.  I’m smiling, because the social agency folks who don’t want to waste time on doing this kind of research because they don’t believe that it is worth doing have been proven wrong.   I’m laughing because we now have evidence of the sort that the bean counters among our legislators, politicians, and opinion makers have been demanding for years – but never expecting to get.  Thank you, Cathy Widom.

And I am happy that Eliot Spitzer is now Gov. of New York, though that’s not my state. It’s a new year, and one in which more children will get to shine, I hope.

Our lame ducks in the Senate have reorganized the National Institutes of Health.  

No roll-call vote seen, not yet, at any rate. Voice votes conceal all. You’ll be missing some other things in the future, too. A few “slight revisions” were tucked into the NIH Reorganization, which passed the Senate in a late night horse-trading session. There were a number of trivial-sounding changes to previous authorizations. This is being sold as a minor revision of the NIH.

A few things, however, stand out, that go far beyond minor. For example, a reduction in required reports to Congress:

The NIH reorganization eliminates specified reporting requirements, including reports on:

(1) the environmental factors contributing to breast cancer mortality rates,
(2) the Secretary’s expenditures with respect to AIDS;
(3) aging research;
(4) autism;
(5) a longitudinal study on environmental influences on children’s health and development; and
(6) a study on muscular dystrophy.

This bill had not been expected to pass the Senate during this Congress. However, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) bargained with the Senate to get the NIH bill passed in exchange for House passage of several bills the Senate wanted passed, including the Ryan White Act that funds community HIV/AIDS programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Powerful new oversight committees. The bill also sets up a couple of new oversight committees, one of which is to review the organization & operation of the various institutes. This committee will be composed of some Institute representatives, and others from outside the NIH. Its so-called recommendations for restructuring the Institutes will in fact be operative mandates, unless the NIH Director objects. It isn’t certain exactly what this will mean long-term for the NIH, however it is very likely that these actions will remove a great deal of Congressional oversight from the NIH.  

We should not think that these were mere minor tweaks of bureaucratic reorganization. They were pushed through in a rush, for a purpose, as yet unrevealed. Here’s a guess: if these committees follow past track records of the Bush administration, it will mean that cronyism and commercial influence will reign over science and the public interest in the setting of priorities in the Institutes. Even the structures and existence of the Institutes within NIH will be in the hands of political appointees.

Are you ready for Bush’s FEMA-type appointees to be deciding on our health research, or cronies of Big Pharma? If you want to see a hint at what these changes will do, look at what’s no longer having to be reported. Who loses from this, and who gains?

In spite of objections from many cities and municipalities and individuals, the Michigan Legislature passed a cable reform bill yesterday that did not include any provision for net neutrality. And you’d think having a strong Democratic governor would be a barrier against such bills becoming law.  No. Not at all.

Given that the large telecommunications industry was not successful in ending net neutrality in the U. S. Congress during this past session, they are going after their same goals on a state-by-state basis. These efforts are passing “under the radar”, as they do not attract the netroots attention to the degree that federal activities do. Michigan is now one of their first successes.

See what’s happened. It’ll be coming to a legislature near you very soon.
Governor Jennifer Granholm, Democrat, in spite of making various noises of concern about the importance of net neutrality, issued a statement today stating that she intends to sign the cable reform bill that omits any sort of net neutrality. Bill supporters claim that 2000 jobs will be created as a result of this bill being passed, and this appears to be the issue that is driving her support.

In reality, the bill allows the giant telco industry to pick and choose who it will serve and who it won’t, and puts the companies above local control and most state regulation. Granholm says that net neutrality must have its own bill.  Fat chance.

In my own inner city neighborhood, cable and internet service is already terrible, with few or no choices available for internet, much less high speed services. This bill allows the big companies to reduce services to less lucrative areas even further, and to focus on the affluent areas of the state without any regulatory mandate to serve beyond what and where it is profitable.

Matt Stoller at MyDD had an excellent article on this yesterday – and the worst fears he cited there are coming to pass.

Governor Granholm’s office issued the following statement in response to the many calls she received expressing concerns about the absence of net neutrality in this bill:

I support net neutrality and will continue to fight for it on the state and federal level. HB 6456 creates over 2,000 jobs in Michigan, improves competition and services for Michigan residents, and it includes a number of provisions to safeguard consumers. The issue of net neutrality is far bigger than this one bill. I believe it is more desirable to pursue the protections necessary to maintain net neutrality as stand-alone legislation in the coming year rather than as an amendment to this year’s legislation. I am committed to ensuring that citizens are protected from greater expense or slower service because of the entry of phone companies into the video/internet space, and I look forward to working on securing continued open access to the Internet in the year ahead.

Google, which has just located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was one of the major objectors to the bill that the Michigan Senate and House approved.

Here is our governor’s statement to Larry Page, co-founder of Google:

Dear Larry:

Thank you for all of the expertise Google has brought to Michigan on the issue of net neutrality. I have certainly appreciated our conversation on this subject. While I am pleased we were able to extend some of the consumer protection provisions in HB 6456, I believe it may be more desirable to pursue stand-alone legislation to further extent consumer protections by enacting net neutrality next year, rather than as an amendment to this year’s legislation.

I strongly agree that consumers should not be charged extra for, or otherwise disadvantaged from, reaching certain sites on the internet that those providers wish to provide for free. Nor do I believe that service providers should be able to restrict access to sites that their consumers have always been able to access. I believe strong consumer protection is important for government to provide, as well as an effective tool to stimulate economic growth in Michigan and elsewhere.

In the interest of taking incremental steps towards improving competition and services for Michigan consumers, it’s best that the Legislature complete work on video franchising this year. I look forward to working with Google and others next year to ensure continued open access to the internet for all Michigan residents.

Sincerely,

Jennifer M. Granholm
Governor

I fear that Stoller is correct:  there is little chance that the Michigan Lege will be able to pass any kind of net neutrality bill, especially in the face of increased power that this bill gives the telecommunications moguls.

And we see the political power of the netroots begin to be strangled, with the fine help of a DLC-approved Democratic governor.

Mr. Armstrong made vanilla wafers for us. Homemade vanilla wafers. I’d never had any except from the grocery, and these were good, really good. Once he brought hot loaves of bread to the class; they lasted about 5 minutes after we tore into them. Quite different from the Wonder Bread most of us ate with our sandwiches from home.

He was the only Room Father I ever knew as a child – or as an adult, for that matter. His wife worked somewhere, but he was a baker. His day started at 3am, so he was free to bring us stuff in the afternoon. The teacher was a little nervous about it, and the Room Mothers didn’t approve. He always did what he was supposed to do, so there wasn’t any good reason to keep him from being a “Room Father”.

After we moved several blocks from the school, I’d walk home with Mr. Armstrong and his son Joe, who was in my class. Joe and his dad held hands, which was strange. I never saw any of the other boys holding their father’s hands.

I asked Mr. Armstrong why he was a baker. He told me that loaves of bread, the things people eat, are important. “They are simple,” he said. “Always needed to live. I want to do something important, to help people live.”
Mr. Armstrong said strange things, I thought. Baking is important?

My dad told me that Mr. Armstrong had been in the war, like him, so one day as we walked I asked Mr. Armstrong what he did in the war. Did he fight? Did he get hurt?

“Oh, no,” he said. “I sort of cleaned up things.”
“What?” I persisted. I could imagine Mr. Armstrong washing dishes, or doing laundry, as my dad did once in a great while.

“Well, there was this place, a beach named Omaha, and our soldiers . . . there was a mess, they fought there, and other guys with me, we cleaned things up. And there was this camp, (he mentioned a foreign-sounding name that I recall sounding like “Buckwall”), with very sick people in it, and we cleaned that up too, lots of those people in the camp had died.

I didn’t really understand, at the age of 7 or 8. A few years later I learned Mr. Armstrong was in Graves Registration in the army. He spent the war taking care of the dead, at Omaha Beach following the Normandy invasion, and after a time, his unit had been present when one of the concentration camps was liberated – probably Buchenwald.

Before the war, he had been a student leader at his college. Planned a career in law. He was outgoing, handsome, well spoken, and a leader. Not the quiet, shy father I had seen. Not the man who chose to work while most people slept. Not the man who walked his son to school, holding his boy’s hand. After the war he gave up his plans for law school, and baked bread.

Bread – necessary for life.

[update]
Did you know?  We are all the Karl Roves of the Democratic Party. We actually lost in this election.

Al Fromm, Founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council, explains it all to us today:

The big political test will come almost immediately, in the ability of Democrats to offer a compelling progressive agenda for the country, and in a 2008 presidential contest that will be about the future more than the past. If Democrats act as problem solvers, not polarizers, that future will be very bright.

That last point was underscored by Joe Lieberman’s re-election victory in Connecticut, which helps solidify the Democratic Party’s credentials as a broad, inclusive coalition able to compete for the vital center of American politics.

Bruce Reed, writing in Slate, is also featured today on the DLC website, alongside Al From’s piece:  He provides the comparison of the Blogosphere to Karl Rove & minions.

Democrats did just about everything right and ran their best campaign in a decade. Field marshals Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer ignored the virtual industry of self-help nonsense (he inserts here a link here to Ed Kilgore’s and George Lakoff’s work – a sly dig at the reading habits of many progressive bloggers) that has paralyzed Democrats’ chattering classes and went back to a simple, proven formula: From the suburbs to the heartland, elections are won in the center.

Emanuel and Schumer went out of their way to recruit candidates that could put the party’s best face forward in otherwise-hostile territory. Despite pressure from various interests, they refused to impose ideological litmus tests. The result? Democrats did the opposite of what Republicans have been doing (and what losing Democratic campaigns usually do). Instead of shrinking their tent, Democrats made their big tent a lot bigger.

<snip>

With mainstream Democratic candidates who weren’t vulnerable on values and weren’t afraid to hit back when attacked, Republican social issues were the wedge that didn’t bite.

<snip>

In fact, the best news of the 2006 elections is the opportunity it gives Democrats to earn the lasting support of the independents and disgruntled Republicans whose votes just dropped in our laps. Tuesday was the death knell for Rovism–the quaint and now fully discredited theory that majorities are built not by expanding support with ideas that work but by mobilizing extreme minorities with ideas that aren’t meant to be enacted and wouldn’t work if they did.

Ever since watching Rove’s success in 2002 and 2004, some on the left and in the blogosphere have been trying to persuade the Democratic Party to follow suit and develop our own smashmouth politics aimed less at persuasion and more at motivating our base. As Lamont discovered, that approach wins primaries–but as Joe Lieberman showed him, that’s no match for pragmatic problem solving in a general election.

It is clear, that the DLC is operating as if the voters who were independent or undecided or moderate Republicans came to vote against the current administration in some sort of vacuum.

They totally ignore the role of the progressive activists in reaching out to these voters and persuading them to vote for Democratic candidates. That is entirely missed. The DLC is thinking that it is solely appeal to centrist positions that has persuaded people to vote for Claire McCaskill, or Patrick, or Webb or Tester or the several other anti-war candidates. They fail to recall that their strategy didn’t win elections before 2002, either. They don’t count the millions of phone calls, home visits, letters written, talks given, due to volunteers solicited through progressive blogs.  No indeed, as the DLC sees it, these people just materialized at the polls, persuaded by the likes of Al From arguing from the Progressive Policy Institute. The citizens of Pennsylvania, for example, were overjoyed to have New York and Illinois pols choose a “safe” Senatorial candidate, in a year when Kermit the Frog would likely have defeated the incumbent.

It is particularly nasty to see the many interconnections of the blogosphere, the courage of ordinary citizen-leadership, the extended group activism, and the fine get out the vote work catalyzed by these relationships compared to Karl Rove’s dirty deeds.

For Shame!

For a few glorious moments this afternoon, we had a great distraction from the political struggles of the day:  A corn snow!

I’m no photographer. All I have is our old point-and-shoot  Olympus, but I had to take a few shots for the record. The snow was gone in 20 minutes, with the sun coming out just in time to set.  It also gave me a chance to practice making thumbnails. Sorry folks, this is a “practice” diary.

To see the photos bigger, click on the thumbnails, (while I keep my fingers crossed!)

There is little enough to look at now in our garden, just leaves and a few blossoms here and there.

For our Canadian Tribbers, here is one of our last Henry Hudson’s, blown off by the same strong wind that brought the snow.

As the sun came out, I saw it a little better.

The cold wind and setting sun quickly made pictures just about impossible. It was only fitting then, just for Family Man and the other Southerners at BT, that I found a few “grains” of snow left on our Alabama Sunset coleus, just as I ran out of light.

What follows is a specific contrast to TeacherToni’s excellent diary on teachers’ unions…with my thanks for all of the excellent series on unions.

Before the beginning

Teaching is one of our family curses.
I don’t really know how far back the teachers go, but our 10th great-grandfather, who died in 1629, was a historian, geographer and teacher. All my siblings became teachers, and both parents were teachers.

Being born, raised, and nurtured in strong, anti-union Republicanism is another family curse.
The first time I uttered a profanity in the presence of my parents without being punished was to announce at the supper table when I was 6 that we had to do something about these goddam unions! I had just read some anti-union editorial in a magazine or newspaper, and I was revved up with political furor, another family curse. My parents fell out laughing and miraculously, they weren’t mad! Being against unions was great!

Of course, where we lived, there wasn’t a union in sight. Some years later, my older sister slipped into apostasy, and became a union rep and eventually a fulltime union organizer for one of the national teachers’ unions in a western city. My parents were deeply ambivalent, but they had begun to see some cracks in the family occupation. My dad couldn’t support our family on a teacher’s salary, and he had left teaching, returning to it only when he retired from a job he really didn’t like.

Still, they were pleased when I began teaching, and they happily discussed the high salaries that teachers got in my sister’s school district. My dad insisted this had nothing to do with being unionized, and assured me I’d get good pay also. He didn’t have a clue.
The Beginning
I was hired in a Texas city that had never even thought of unions of any kind without attaching “evil” or “communist” in the front of the term. During the orientation for new teachers, we had a session with the Superintendent. for Instruction. This man was a legend in that part of Texas, evoking love and fear in many teachers I knew. His talk was labeled The Secret to Being a Great Teacher.

What was the secret?  I had to know. Various possibilities ran through my head as we waited:  Love of learning? Understanding kids? Hard work? Perseverance?  No.

“The secret to being a great teacher,” he said, “is LOYALTY.”

Loyalty?? Surely I had heard wrong.Loyalty?? OK, sure, to the kids, to learning, to knowledge, to. .  No.

” Great teachers are loyal to this school district, and to your school. This means you never criticize. Never complain, never listen to complaints. Defend your schools. If you see a problem, keep quiet. Wiser heads will take care of things. Your number one job as a teacher is your LOYALTY.”

I almost expected him to break out into Be True to Your School

The Reality
School started at 8:30am, but children came in the room beginning at 8. However, we were not to teach them between 8 and 8:30, lest any child be “left behind”. We were in charge of our children all day long. All day means, in this case, ALL day. No breaks. None. We ate with our students. We went with our students to the school library and to the music teacher and to the restrooms.  Our school didn’t have recess, but we did have P.E. – 20 minutes a day. My classes had P.E. first thing, 8:40 to 9am. I had to march them down the hill to the gym, and then pick them back up promptly at 5 minutes till 9 so the next set of classes wouldn’t get in our way walking back to the room.  For the first two years I taught, that 20 minutes was as much of a planning period or break that I had.

Lunch was 17 minutes, door-to-door, meaning from leaving my room to coming back to my room we had exactly 17 minutes. Teachers ate at the tables with their students, no exceptions. We could not leave the cafeteria for any reason while our students were eating. Most of the teachers in my school had kidney infections. I was quickly advised not to drink anything at lunch, because I’d have to take my entire class to the restroom with me.

Our Superintendent was a former football coach – a common qualification in Texas. He demanded complete obedience from his “team”, and sent out memos telling us if there was any policy we didn’t like, that the roads out of town ran north, south, east, and west. The second year I taught, he lengthened the school day 45 minutes. In the third  year, he decreed that schools would open at 7:30am rather than 8, so kids could come in to our rooms for one hour before we began teaching. Teachers had no input into these decisions, and he threatened to fire the committee who politely protested these changes.

We were given a standard calendar and were expected to be on the same page in the same textbook in every class in the same grade throughout the city. Two teachers in my school who were found “off calendar” twice had their art paper and supplies confiscated as punishment. One reaction to this was to go along with the standard lessons, which were terrible. Other teachers became adept at “Plan B”, my personal creation. This consisted of a signal that we passed quickly from room to room when an inspection was being held, giving the far rooms enough time to get out the required lesson for the hour. We kept the “official stuff” at the ready at all times, and could switch over at a moment’s notice.

I remember some requirements with real fondness.  A new member of the School Board was a prominent local dentist. His wife, head of the Dental Auxiliary (do they still have those clubs?) got the Sup to make another decree:  All elementary grade children would be issued toothbrushes and personal toothpaste tubes. Everyday, we were to have all children brush their teeth when they arrived at school, and do this again right after lunch.  With 38 children in my classroom, this decree, if followed, would have taken up most of the morning and afternoon.  Oh, and the mess, of course, that was to be the teachers’ responsibility. Children could not clean sinks because of health regulations.  Our custodians only scrubbed out our classroom sink once every couple of weeks, if then.  If this seems like no big deal to any of you, I’m sure some folks here with multiple children – Second Nature? Cabin Girl?  – might be able to help you “see the light

Our pay scale was based on experience and education, just as almost every district’s teacher pay is today. I was on a higher pay scale because I had a Master’s degree. My first year’s salary was $16,402 in today’s dollars. Over the next two years we got “big raises” from the state legislature, so my pay went to $17807; and $20,543 (today’s dollars). My other benefits included 5 days of sick leave per year, which would not accumulate if I didn’t use them, until I’d been with the district for 5 years. I got one personal day off. (This required proof of good purpose. When my uncle, my father’s half-brother, died, my principal made me re-write the section in which I had to describe my exact relationship with the deceased.  Half-relatives were likely to be turned down, and I’d be docked a day’s pay.).  I had health insurance, which at that time was not terribly costly, and 2 percent of my pay was deducted for retirement, unmatched by the district or state.  I was not tenured, and could be dismissed without any due process, at the request of my Principal.  

My contract also had a morals clause. I could be fired for engaging in “acts deemed unsuitable to persons of high repute”. This included having to obey all of the laws of the county, which was dry, everywhere I went. Drinking alcohol in public, even outside the county, was very risky.  The “unsuitable acts” clause was invoked more often that you might think.  When the students in our county were taking their first day of standardized NCLB-type tests, the fire alarm went off in the middle of a complicated set of instructions. A third grade teacher with 15 years experience burst out with “Oh Shit!!” in front of her students, and she was summarily fired.

She didn’t even make it to lunch.

Promoted by Steven D. The War on Privacy continues . . .

The Senate cast its vote yesterday, passing another bill of Orwellian name:  The Child Custody Protection Act.  9 Democrats crossed over and voted for this bill with the Republican majority. 4 Republicans voted against this bill.

The bill makes it a federal crime for any adult other than a parent to help a teen cross state lines to get abortion services, unless parents have given their explicit permission. It is another “victory” in the long-term strategy to end women’s choice about their bodies by restricting abortion at the so-called margins. In the name of protecting parental rights and child health by insisting that parents provide permission, it promised fines and jail time for grandmothers, aunts, mentors, and other persons who help desperate teens.
All that in the name of involving parents in their children’s health decisions. That’s a laudable goal – good health for teens – but this bill has little to do with promoting health and everything to do with adding restrictions to abortions. Soon we won’t be able to see Choice on the other side of that wall of incremental restrictions.  

There is a dangerous reality for some teens, who live in unsafe or abusive homes. For another group of teens, a life-time of stated rejection of any daughter who gets pregnant offers similar dread, if not outright fear of physical harm.  This bill has no safeguards for those young women, and may push them into a back-door abortion, or some foolish action to end their pregnancy (like the teen couple here in Michigan who attempted to end their unintended pregnancy by inducing abortion via baseball bat strikes to the girl’s abdomen), or birth of a child who is born with the stigma that the current political wingers seem to want to apply to young women who are sexually active. (I could write an entire rant about a person I heard recently suggesting that we need to go back to labeling children publicly as bastards, to insure higher moral standards. But I digress.)

I have seen no reliable documentation that there are hordes of easily led teens being persuaded into having abortions by  dishonest and unscrupulous pro-abortion adults and friends. Most pregnant teens I’ve known have had their parents support for whatever decision they made about their pregnancy.

The small number who did not have parent support, said that they greatly feared their parents wrath. One child reluctantly told me her stepfather was the father of her child. This bill provides nothing to help kids in those situations. It will not produce good communication and loving care where it has not happened in the past.

Oh, I almost forgot.  The Democrats who voted for this bill, just so you’ll remember them when they come up for election:

Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reid (D-NV)
Salazar (D-CO)

Feinstein (D-CA) did not vote

With our illustrious Senate Democratic leader on this list, will there be any organized outcry against this bill?  Of course not!

The war in Lebanon reaches far beyond that land, in great and small ways. One of my lab members, Thaira (not her real name) is American and Lebanese, a dual citizen. Her situation illustrates how this hits hard here in the U.S., where many think of this as only a distant conflict.

Some of the harder issues for my tolerance – not that I should tolerate any of this – are local. Last week Thaira lost a great new job, in her initial two weeks of training, almost certainly because of the conflict between Israel and Lebanon.

Thaira is studying for her college degree; She’s a great student, and a wonderful addition to my lab, given her conscientiousness, her excellent people skills, and her broad perspective on human behavior. She’s lived on three continents and speaks multiple languages. Her years as a child and teen in the Northeastern U.S. make her English fluent, idiomatic, but softened by a very slight unplaceable accent, likely due to family, foreign language schools, and varied U.S. regional homes.

Thaira’s father and stepmother, plus Thaira’s younger siblings, have been living in Lebanon. Mercifully, her dad, who is quite ill, has just arrived in the U.S., along with his younger kids (they are all U.S. citizens). His wife, however, is not a U.S. citizen. Therefore, she was not allowed to come with her very sick husband, even with children who are not so old as to fend for themselves easily. Hard choices.  

Thaira and her husband have both been working at two jobs, to bring his younger brother in Lebanon to the U.S. for college. This brother was approved for a Visa just before hostilities broke out, but he had not received the Visa. His situation is not known now. His family lives in a dangerous area, and their home was close to one hit by a rocket a few days ago.

Thaira and her husband work in restaurants, he planning to own one someday, she as a means of income while she finishes college. It has not been easy. More than once when restaurants have learned that she is Islamic, they have not hired her, or have laid her off if already hired, or fired her, saying that customers found her hard to understand. Some have commented that she doesn’t look “like that, you know”, clearly signaling that they might not have hired her had they known she was a Muslim. Her blond hair and green eyes make her outside their stereotypes, clearly.

Very recently she was hired by one of the more exclusive restaurants in our area. This is very good for her:  Much more money because of better tips and a better work schedule that does not interfere with her schooling. She had two weeks training ahead of her, including a notebook of dishes with all their ingredients, and other information to commit to memory. With her people skills, intelligence, and previous experience, I expected her to be a natural. In addition, her language skills, I thought, would be a great asset to the restaurant.

One week into her training, war broke out. Thaira and her husband had three anxious days of no contact with their families. She did not sleep, and was very distracted in her training. She attempted to explain, but when she mentioned Lebanon, she was silenced and told no excuses would be tolerated. She pushed herself harder, and she mastered the menu, wine list, and the other things. Finally, as the last test before working independently, she served a meal to the cook and hostess, while her training waiter watched. He wrote up an evaluation, for Thaira and the manager.

Except that’s not exactly how it went. Less than 5 minutes after her test, Thaira was called in, and a four page, single-space evaluation was flashed in front of her; from the test she just completed, she was told. The manager read through the evaluation aloud. Thaira is clearly “not elite restaurant caliber”, as she did not master the menu and wine list until near the end of the training period. When a customer asked her about a red wine during training, she confused the facts about two wines she described. Furthermore, her English is bad.

However, it is her “final exam” that she has flunked, outright. Thaira is told she did not offer wine or beverages to the hostess (Thaira insists that she did, and asked that the Manager bring the Hostess in and ask her – perhaps the training waiter overlooked this, but the Manager refused.). The write-up accuses her of being difficult to understand in English, but gives no example. When Thaira asks for an example, Thaira is told that during the final test meal, “You said goodest, a word not found in English, over and over again.” (Thaira says: that word doesn’t exist in the other languages I know, either! I haven’t said goodest since I was about 2!”).

Thaira acknowledged that she was distracted during training, and this made her slow in learning all of the ingredients to the entire menu, as well as memorizing details about the wine list. She explained about Lebanon and her family situation, but said that she learned the material as she demonstrated, and disputes that she did make the two errors during the final exam. The manager just said again that there was no excuse for Thaira to do so badly if she were really a high caliber waitress, but clearly, she was not, at least not in this situation. And she was dismissed.

Thaira got the impression, more by appearance and the way things were said, that her identity influenced her evaluation. She acknowledges that the crisis in Lebanon definitely affected her concentration. What can a person do when crises make working up to standard all but impossible? What if biases also intrude? Why would Thaira’s “language problems” that were so apparent at the end of her training, not be evident in the lengthy round of interviews she had in getting the job?

Promoted by Steven D.

Every week my grad and undergrad students sit down with me for our regular laboratory meeting. It’s when we discuss the various projects that we are working on, touch base across different projects, and keep up with life among the group. Today one of our most diligent members was absent without notice, to our surprise. Then she walked in, some 45 minutes late, visibly upset. She had been detained at the U.S.-Canadian border for questioning and search of her vehicle.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection official Kristi Clemens said some traffic headed into the United States would under go tougher procedures at the 89 ports of entry along the border.

“The current events may result in some additional questions of commuters and travels,” Clemens said. She also said, without elaborating, that her agency has added some “enforcement capabilities” following the arrests.

Although crossing the border is a regular routine for my student – who has a Visa, has furnished the Border authorities with her weekly campus schedule, and is recognized on sight by many of the U.S. authorities at the border, things have gotten worse just recently. More on her story, which suggests that border activity itself is ramping up fear of border crossers as potential illegal immigrants and/or terrorists. . .

My student came to campus expecting a slow crossing. Things had gotten worse in the past several months. Only a couple of weeks previously the border guards had taken her driver’s license, to “check it out”, leaving her very afraid of driving to and from campus without a license in hand. However, this week Canada arrested 17 suspected terrorists in Ontario, (which is just across the Detroit River if you don’t know Canadian geography). She hadn’t heard of the arrests, and didn’t understand why things were even worse that they had been recently in crossing the border.

And on this day, because she had recently had surgery and was rather stiff, in pain and on pain killing meds, she thought it best to have her elderly father drive her. Her mother decided to come too. They could do a little shopping or sight seeing while their daughter was on campus, they thought. My student and her parents left early, because they expected the border crossing to be a little slow.

At the border, my student and her father and mother were ordered out of their van. They were taken separately for questioning that was unfriendly. You can imagine the sort of questions: Why did she want to come to school in the U.S.? Why did she come in when she did not have a class scheduled at the time of this so-called lab meeting? Who was she meeting? What organizations did she belong to?  Why were her parents with her? Were they planning just to stay in the U.S. and not go back to Canada? While she and her parents were being questioned, everything possible was being removed from their van:  wheel covers, spare tires, tools, books, papers, rugs, mats, maps, seats, headrests, etc. Purses and briefcase were dumped out.

Finally, she and her father were told they could go. Nothing suspicious was found in the van, however the father of my student had his driver’s license taken “to be checked out”. Oh, and the heavy seats, tires, wheel covers, and other stuff were left lying on the ground. My student protested that the vehicle had been taken apart and not put back together. She was told that if she couldn’t lift the stuff (her surgery, and the age of her parents), just leave it behind, and leave. They did the best they could, while able-bodied guards who had taken the van apart watched but did not help. I saw her van later in the afternoon and she described it accurately:  it was trashed.

Oh, did I mention that my student is of Middle Eastern heritage?  Could that have had anything to do with the kind of treatment they received?  No, surely not.