Must Read - Charles Blow on Chavis Carter

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Saturday August 04, 2012 · 11:35 AM PDT

2012/08/04 · 11:35

In today's NY Times Op-Ed, Charles Blow has written an account of the night Chavis Carter was said to have committed suicide in a police car. He had been searched twice and had a quantity of marijuana that was estimated to be worth $10.

The column can be found here. It is a must-read for anyone concerned about the welfare of African-American youth in this country.

Blow writes:

"Police say he committed suicide with a hidden gun while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. According to a local CBS News report, his mother was told that he shot himself in the right temple, but she claims that Chavis was left-handed."

What have we come to? How bad does this have to get before we say enough! I cannot imagine the agony of worry of the parents of a young African-American man or even child.

Please read the column.

What? Bestselling Author: Blue Eyes = Sensitivity

Jinnia

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Thursday March 15, 2012 · 9:04 AM PDT

2012/03/15 · 09:04

So I'm reading the book by Susan Cain: Quiet:The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking last night and it's late so at first I'm not really sure that what I had just read was real. Then when I looked again this morning, there it was.

Last night I was at the point where she was writing about Jerome Kagan's studies. The fact that she does not cite any of his written works or give a direct quote indicates to me that this is her interpretation of his thoughts. The point is that whether he said it or not, she presented it as truth.

Take Disney movies, for example: Kagan and his colleagues speculate that Disney animators unconsciously understood high reactivity when they drew sensitive figures like Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Dopey with blue eyes, and brasher characters like Cinderella's stepsisters, Grumpy, and Peter Pan with darker eyes.

Later in that same paragraph:

Kagan even speculates that some men prefer women with fair skin and blue eyes because they unconsciously code them as sensitive.

Yikes.

The world in which the overwhelming majority of the 7+ billion human beings live is a vastly interesting and complex place filled with people who possess incredible courage and strength and indeed seemingly limitless compassion every single day. People cry out for justice and are so often unheard and oppressed.

Words like those I read last night - promoting a very tiny minority of humans as being extra-special - are diametrically opposed to the needs of real human beings and recreate the worst our species has had to offer over time.

Who Stands for Children?

Jinnia

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Sunday February 26, 2012 · 4:29 PM PST

2012/02/26 · 16:29

Where are the people who stand for children? We have a daily assault on public schools, health programs, children of immigrants, food assistance, the middle class and the poor, the homeless and those who have lost hope - we can blame and blame and blame........but where are the people who are willing to stand? The children can't speak for themselves and their parents are too tired from working long days for sometimes merciless bosses. There's nothing that keeps me up at night more than the thoughts of children being abused and neglected by those who are supposed to protect them.

I realize a lot of the people who stand for children are in the DKos community and really that's why I'm writing this - maybe someone will tell me something I don't know or we can talk about it - or anything.

This is America! That used to mean something. We are supposed to help those who are defenseless. All the things they used to rely on are being taken away. How can we stand by and let it happen? They are there and their little faces are hidden behind big men who fight with each other about how to keep all the money to themselves. When the children get older, they'll be sent to fight wars for the men and no one will care except their poor mothers and fathers who are too tired to fight for them.

There are no answers in this diary. There are no quotes or statistics. I'm just angry and sad. I don't know what has happened to us.

Caitlin Flanagan Joins War on Women

Jinnia

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Sunday January 29, 2012 · 3:33 PM PST

2012/01/29 · 15:33

The New York Times takes us back 50 or more years by giving voice to Caitlin Flanagan in her Op-Ed titled Hysteria And The Teenage Girl which can be found here

No dairy could properly explore the depths of this piece of execrable nonsense:

Both history and myth are filled with stories of girls exhibiting bizarre symptoms around the time of puberty — from Cassandra and her raving, to the girls of the Salem witch trials, to the girls whose households were believed to be the site of poltergeist hauntings, to cheerleaders in New York and North Carolina. Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.

This kind of thought pattern is something we might look for in a time of increasing fundamentalism and glossy-eyed backward gazing as we keep moving into the 21st Century with the entire Republican Party longing for a time when women could be controlled.

We can't go back there. I want to believe we can't ever go back to a time when women were so subjugated to men that they didn't have sports teams for girls in schools and women had to wear dresses or skirts. Those were just the outward manifestations of something much more sinister in society. At least if we keep the word out there about what's happening, we can maybe fight it together.

Charles Blow's Column: Newt's War on Poor Children

Jinnia

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Saturday December 03, 2011 · 8:03 AM PST

2011/12/03 · 08:03

Charles Blow has written another op-ed about the war on children. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about our country's children. The statements by Gingrich quoted in Charles Blow's article are almost unimaginable - except that they come from a person who is willing to win votes by exploiting the most vulnerable among us.

Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/...
I highly recommend reading the entire article. He is a brilliant and inspiring writer.

Here is a paragraph that basically left me stunned:

On Thursday, at a campaign stop in Iowa, the former House speaker said, “Start with the following two facts: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” (His second “fact” was that every first generational person he knew started work early.)

Gingrich's complete ignorance of the situation of children in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods is stunning. He's like the King in Camelot looking out from his castle and asking: "Oh what do the simple folk do?" Leaving aside the fact that he is simply wrong about the lives of those children he wants to send to work, he is so mean it's hard to believe anyone could stand to listen to him.

Is this where we've come?

Texas Raises Taxes On Your Old Car

Jinnia

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Sunday October 09, 2011 · 4:21 PM PDT

2011/10/09 · 16:21

There's always something going on in Texas to benefit the 1%. Today I read this from the Tax Assessor/Collector for my county:

New Simplified Vehicle Registration Fee Structure
Beginning September, 1, 2001 a new standardized fee structure simplifies registration fees for nearly every vehicle owner in Texas. . .
[name of county] residents with a passenger vehicle or truck weighing less than 6000 will pay an average of $64.25. This is a reduction of about $8.00 from the previous registration fee for new vehicle owners and an increase of about $10 for those with older vehicles. This is the first change to the Texas base vehicle registration fee since 1985.

- bold print emphasis added

Now let's get this straight - you people who are holding onto those old cars will be paying more to make sure those with new cars can pay less. Sounds about right for Texas.

Jinnia

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Saturday August 06, 2011 · 10:11 AM PDT

2011/08/06 · 10:11

Charles Blow's Op-Ed in the New York Times today is something I wish everyone in our country could read. It can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/...

Our country's children have never really had any say in what we decide at the higher levels. In many cases, their parents are silenced because they are too busy, over-worked, stressed out, poor, or feel disenfranchised. Marian Wright Edelman - a hero of mine for many years - has been a voice for children in our country. Blow links to the Children's Defense Fund's website and a report entitled "The State of American Children 2011". Among the findings he quotes is this:

The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.

This is so tragic. How can we stand for anything in this country if we do not even allow them to have a future at all? What do we value so strongly that we are willing to turn our backs to their suffering in order to get it?

Blow ends his op-ed by writing:

We risk the creation of an engorged generational underclass born of a culture that has less income equality and fewer prospects for mobility than the previous generation.
It’s hard to see how we emerge from this downturn and its tumult a stronger nation if we allow vast swatches of our children to be lost. My fear is that we may not.

This is my first diary so I'm really not sure how to go about it. I mainly wanted to let anyone know who may not have already seen it that his op-ed is worth reading.

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Must Read - Charles Blow on Chavis Carter

What? Bestselling Author: Blue Eyes = Sensitivity

Who Stands for Children?

Caitlin Flanagan Joins War on Women

Charles Blow's Column: Newt's War on Poor Children

Texas Raises Taxes On Your Old Car

Just Read Charles Blow's Op-Ed: The Decade of Lost Children