Clinton dissed youth! I register and recruit young first-time voters for Obama, and they don't just vote, they organize! They're a shot in the arm at all events, the steam that keeps the engines purring with outreach, including canvassing, the all-important face-to-face contact that brings people of all ages to caucuses and primary elections.
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In case you haven't been thinking of equality in the treatment of depression and mental health when it comes to the whole healthcare issue, think again. This story from the NYT illustrates the impact on a small community in extreme poverty when there are few or no mental health services available, especially the threat to the lives of adolescents:
ROSEBUD, S.D. — The two suicides struck the Rosebud Sioux Reservation like a random virus. No one saw them coming.
At the reservation, Luke and Gaylord Black Spotted Horse. Suicide has become the second-leading cause of death for Indian youths.
The young man, 19 years old, played varsity football and basketball at Todd County High School. He was admired across the reservation, in that way small towns follow and celebrate their teenage athletes. The girl, weeks shy of her 14th birthday, made straight A’s at Todd County Middle School, played volleyball and basketball and led a traditional Lakota drum corps.
They hanged themselves. This happened at the end of a particularly brutal two and a half months, from Jan. 1 to March 13, when tribal authorities were called to three suicides and scores of attempts. The next day, with the reservation (population 13,000) reeling, tribal officials declared a state of emergency.
Since then, a woman in her early 20s killed herself with pills, and scores more young people have tried to kill themselves — a total of 144 so far this year, at doctors’ best count; the computer used for recordkeeping was down for six weeks. In May, seven youths who tried hanging, poisoning or slashing themselves to death were admitted to the reservation hospital in one 24-hour period.
What is happening at Rosebud is all too common throughout Indian Country. American Indian and Alaska Native youth 15 to 24 years old are committing suicide at a rate more than three times the national average for their age group of 13 per 100,000 people, according to the surgeon general. Often, one suicide leads to another. For these youths, suicide has become the second-leading cause of death (after accidents). In the Great Plains, the suicide rate among Indian youth is the worst: 10 times the national average.
Here at Rosebud, when six high school girls were approached at the Boys and Girls Club one recent afternoon for their reactions to the suicides, four said they had tried suicide. The four compared notes on their methods — two slashed their wrists, two overdosed on pills — and their motives. “There are a lot of reasons,” said Areina Young, a 16-year-old cheerleader at Todd County High who overdosed on sleeping pills and codeine in February. “We have a lot of issues.”
Plains reservations are among the poorest places in the country, with all of poverty’s consequences. But the why of the suicide phenomenon — why American Indian youth, why the Great Plains — is complicated, experts say. The traumas Plains tribes have experienced over the last 175 years — massacres like the one at Wounded Knee, the decimation of their land and culture — are part of it.
“Very generally, adolescence is a time of trouble for all youths,” said Philip May, a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico who has been studying suicide among American Indians for more than 35 years. “But in many American Indian communities, it’s compounded by limited opportunities, historical trauma and contemporary discrimination. The way the Lakota people and other Plains tribes have experienced history in the last 100 years has reduced the mental health factors that are available to them to cope.”
Tribal leaders at Rosebud took a survey of Todd County students in March. The students’ biggest complaint was that they did not feel safe for fear of gangs. They said that they had no refuge, that their parents were not present, and that they saw too much tragedy, alcoholism and hopelessness.
In response, tribal and community leaders have redoubled their efforts to stem the reservation’s gang problem. They have organized after-school programs, sponsored talks by motivational speakers and made school counselors widely available.
At the same time, schools and the community at large are not commemorating those that kill themselves, said Victoria Sherman, the principal at Todd County High School. She refused, she said, to allow an elaborate memorial during this year’s graduation for a student who killed himself last year on graduation day. “We don’t want to encourage desperate acts,” Ms. Sherman said.
Federal lawmakers are also beginning to address the problem. Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, recently introduced a bill to combat child abuse and Indian youth suicide. The legislation would provide increased resources for suicide prevention training and treatment.
With few places for students on this sprawling reservation to congregate — some commute as far as 40 miles each way to school — the Boys and Girls Club, a former bowling alley, opened before it was ready so students could have a place to gather after school.
Rosebud and the neighboring Pine Ridge reservation, using a $400,000 federal grant, have started training community members and school employees in suicide prevention and intervention.
But tribal leaders say they need more concrete help to turn the situation around. The reservation has only four full-time mental health professionals, and two are leaving soon, said the Rosebud tribal president, Rodney Bordeaux.
“We did the emergency declaration because we needed to get attention,” Mr. Bordeaux said. “We’re saying, we need more funding, more help, now.”
Health services are seriously underfinanced on reservations nationwide. For over a decade, Congress has failed to reauthorize a law that would increase aid.
Officially, three youths at Rosebud committed suicide last year and 193 tried. But not all suicides or attempts involve calls to the police, officials here said.
The group of girls who had attempted suicide said they all knew others who had tried several times.
“A lot of people are just trying to get attention,” Areina Young said.
One girl in the group, a 15-year-old, had swallowed a bottle of Tylenol on April 14 and spent two weeks in the hospital.
“Me, I had a really good explanation,” she said. She started into a horrific story of being raped by her half-brother for years before he was arrested two years ago; of her and her siblings being routinely abandoned for months at a time by their mother, an alcoholic; of her grandmother beating her.
“But now I know that suicide is the permanent solution to temporary problems,” she said. “Counseling really helped me a lot. Put down that we need more counseling. For me, right now, I need it every day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/us/09suicide.html
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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I just viewed Obama’s speech in Detroit, and now I know I want Obama to be President for sure. My former hesitation came from my radical roots and weariness with political rhetoric, but like many who’ve worked hard to change our political, economic, environmental and social downslide in the past, I’m tired of reacting with equal vehemence as my Neo-Con opponents. Truly I am finally sold on Obama’s incremental but steady change with more allies than opponents, and on his knowledge and ability to lead our country through that difficult but necessary transition. I even dare feel optimistic about it! (See http://www.barackobama.com/tv/ under “Obama Speeches” Address to the Detroit Economic Club.)
Obama’s address to the Detroit Economic Council was the most comprehensive I’ve seen and finally touched on almost every issue that so matters to me. Yes, there were the myriad, really well developed solutions for:
• Cleaner alternative and higher efficiency energy
• Increased modernized industry and jobs
• A cleaner safer environment and focus on averting global warming
• Ending our dependence on oil imports by 2020
• Helping the business bottom line and people by providing the same level of health care coverage for everyone as a Senator has
• Providing quality and preventative, efficient and safer health care affordably and with government subsidies to create group rates to cover every individual, but ending monopolies and restrictions that profiteer from providing medical access.
But finally, at the end when Detroit’s Mayor raised the questions about an urban agenda, I remembered, I am still urban, in the Bay Area now even if on an island literally, born and raised in the Bronx NY, having lived in San Diego, CA and Seattle, WA, near one of two opposite borders at one time or another. That said, it was Detroit – immigration wasn’t raised.
As Obama’s address concluded, Detroit’s Mayor raised the question of what to do about fixing our rustbelt and our generally dilapidated cities, and Obama said all I’ve scarcely heard discussed in this campaign, never mind so well thought out. When he sounded like he was promising to fund many programs, I remembered I read an article evaluating his first run for Illinois Senator that said Obama was tenacious about accountability for program outcomes when he was in charge of or on boards of programs in the South Side of Chicago. He’s not an amateur. He knows how to prevent waste and fraud from the start and throughout the process. Obama doesn’t want to just hand out dollars, he wants results! http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/archive/barackobama/
I saw that Obama saw affordable housing for the crisis it is, pointing out something that creeps in the back of my mind still, but was right up there making me nervous day and night when disability almost made me homeless: There is not one city in all the US where a minimum wage worker (or for that matter someone living solely on any government program for retirement, disability, unemployment or general un-employability) can afford their own even modest apartment – all must either share or pay more than the recommended 25-30% of take-home income. Obama recognized there are lots of creative ideas for solving that without segregating low-income renters, and that it requires the federal government’s leadership and financial assistance to coordinate all the groups willing and able to help: non-profit construction companies, city and rural housing administrators, and faith-based organizations. Finally he supports reinvigorating the Block Grant program, much decimated by this Administration, to fund business and commercial development.
I heard him recognize the need to give people who made mistakes and broke laws but paid for their crimes a Second Chance – how bold in this punishment-centered era (even torture – we’ll see our Civil Rights expert-President Obama eliminate that disgrace fast!), how sensible and what a model of truly reasoned generosity instead of penalizing and wasting lives! He’s proposed Second Chance legislation in the Senate with bipartisan support to end legalized employment discrimination against people free but with a record, thus bringing a huge proportion of unemployed exploited urban youth and adults ready to turn their lives around, who are already in our communities, back into the workforce with training, jobs and guidance for transition.
Obama can rattle off the program for fixing education faster than I’ve ever heard, and I’m an Education doctorate-all-but-dissertation specialist! Increase funding for and modernize with proven-best-methods all public education, Early Childhood on; pay teachers more and train them better to replace one million retiring in the next decade; and for both education and urban businesses, wire the city for 100% access to broadband – a notion that left many in the audience a bit stunned, as if not expecting a high-tech recommendation. He didn’t mention he’d proposed and helped pass legislation to increase college grants and hopes to do much more to make higher education more affordable.
All of his plans take into account the twin realities of a history of opposition, and the need to move forward or get run over in the global environment we now live. All of it is to be done in increments, but inexorably forward to a safer cleaner environment, with increased industry and jobs, health care for all with a public and private foundation, and oil import independence and a new alternative energy industry that will help agricultural as well as industrial cities and towns within years of his taking office in 2008. At every stage every participant gets rewards, and penalties if they refuse to lead the country into an alternative energy and employment future.
There was one exception, and it was a big one, I'm the first to say it and write him about it: He called Venezuela's President Chavez a dictator, getting very little positive feedback on that comment, thankfully. We have to stop calling other countries' elected officials dictators just because this administration and corporate interests say so. That said, I hope and believe Obama will be much more open to reasonably discuss Chavez and a viable collaboration to help Venezuela benefit from and expand their economy beyond petroleum once he's out of this miserable campaign spotlight - certainly more so than Hillary, who is simply too indebted to lobbyists and corporations to be independent. And on his energy proposal, I'm not in favor of increased reliance on coal and nuclear power. I'll have lots of company pressuring him on that!
All in all, Obama’s rich background and experience were in full display, and his full grasp of the complexity and finesse needed to push through so much change convinced me. I went from “OK, he seems to be the best we’ve got who can win” to “We need him and only him right now. I will help others working for Obama to win, from now until 2008.” It's a relief that I can really like and have some confidence in the candidate I'll be volunteering for this year. The rest of the Democratic presidential candidate crew sure doesn't give me a thrill.
And we almost lost Detroit this time… from CD “Glory, The Best of Gil Scott-Heron”
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To start on a positive note, let me give props to Air America Radio hostess Randi Rhodes http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/live/, who spent most of her entire program today 11/27/06 covering the lethal impact of racism in yet another case of police emptying their guns into unarmed African American and Latin American men. I noticed that there were more people of color (and police and former police) calling in to her show than usual, and I feel we're just as eager to discuss this rationally and to find solutions as those who deny racism exists in the U.S. are to ignore it.
THE STORY:
50 rounds fired (31 from one officer) kill one man and wound two others after a bachelor party at a Queens strip club let out early Saturday morning. Another case of “contagious shooting”?
The man who died, Sean Bell, was to be married later [that] day. Bell is remembered by his pastor.
FLASHBACK: While the investigation has just begun, comparisons have already been made to the 1999 shooting of an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, who was gunned down amidst a hail of 41 shots. http://www.courttv.com/trials/diallo/
MY POV:
I grew up as a medium-brown-skinned female who didn't speak English until second grade, in a U.S. racial and ethnic ghetto in a huge city. I saw tons of drugs dumped into our community by white men in big shiny black cars, wearing black suits and white shirts; gangs of kids no one wanted to educate or employ, who were left alone by parents working for less than minimum wage in factories, terrorizing other kids, women and the elderly and disabled. Cops could somehow find/catch graffiti taggers successfully but they couldn't seem to stem the gangs - they were afraid of them and hoped they'd kill each other and save them the trouble - and the flood of hard drugs because cops collected money from the white men in suits to target competitors, not the source.
There's a retired cop in my family, and small-time dealers were the priority he was ordered to watch for - not their sources. He was stationed in Harlem, so guess who the small-timers were.
A Latino-Black male family member was racial-profiled consistently when canvassing in expensive neighborhoods to raise funds for environmental rights organizations. He'd have to produce ID and wait by the squad car, in sight of any potential donors he might've canvassed. Naturally he could never cover as much ground as his white co-workers, who merrily made more for themselves and the organizations, unmolested by police. The well-known environmentalist group never filed a single complaint on the police departments, yet they were collecting money for the Human Rights Coalition through the canvassers , as well as themselves.
Many of my African American friends were racial-profiled - and damn near arrested and/or shot - on the very university's campuses that they paid tuition to! Check this latest one, with the post-9/11 Arab student profiling: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15765622
I can "pass" [for white] in winter (especially if I don't open my mouth), so I hear some things that white people would never say around me if they knew what/who I am. All kinds of people of color also, Latin Americans in particular, and some Asian Americans, have spewed some anti-Black rhetoric around me that left me temporarily stunned but never silent. The propoganda against Black people is so intense, so prevalent, and perpetuated in international as well as national mass media. As a result, Black people are as likely to be targeted as criminals in non-Black ethnic communities as in white ones. Most people, including progressive white people, don't care though. It doesn't matter to them how many days and nights innocent Black men in particular spend in county jails, how many jobs are lost, how many families disrupted, how much money wasted on bail for innocent people in hopes of saving a job!
Once I drove for weeks with my tags not on my plates but in my glove box, but it was winter, I was pale, and I was never stopped - until my African American girlfriend rode with me. She was often mistaken for a male by white men, as were many African American women with short natural hair and no visible makeup or jewelry, I often found, even in an African Art History course by the very [white] professor teaching it! Giving her a ride, I was stopped by a policeman, we were spoken to threateningly, she was called "Sir" sarcastically, and I had to put my tags on immediately. If it had been her driving, I can imagine a scary humiliating scenario where she would've been thrown against the car, cuffed and arrested.
I was also followed in sporting goods stores and department stores in general when my girlfriend and I'd shop together. My practice then and since whenever this happens is:
