The Violence of Denying Reproductive Rights
 Published July 27, 2024 Portland (ME) Press Herald

In Maine, 49% of the homicides that took place between 2020 and 2023 were females who were victims of domestic violence (Biennial Report of the Maine Domestic Abuse Homicide Review panel). As this statistic is made public, we know there is transitory astonishment just as when the numbers of children dying from abuse or neglect surface from the Kids Count Data Center. Each of these murders- and those identified as consequent to domestic violence quickly fade from the public view and consciousness if not conscience.

Find me a media article or Judicial discussion of medical risk to a woman seeking to terminate pregnancy which describes suicidality as the outcome for some women denied reproductive choice. Find me one that points to the risk of murder of a woman or a child by domestic violence as a medical risk. Suicidality of the woman or a real risk that she or a child born out of an unwanted pregnancy will be targets of ongoing or emerging domestic violence are rarely if ever identified as medical risks. Being impregnated by an emotionally or physically abusive partner does not spontaneously prevent continuation of that abuse if a pregnancy is brought to term. An abusing relationship history does not evolve into non-abusive parenting spontaneously. Parenting development is complex. Some traverse the complexity. Some do not.

Numbers don't convey the compelling narrative of people's lives or bring the realization that anyone can become one of those numbers.

Women (and men) become helpless in violent and abusive relationships. They can feel utter hopelessness impregnated by a partner whose tendencies and history suggest a future as a negligent, abandoning, emotionally if not physically abusing parent.

The co-option of female choice means she imay be unwillingly forced to become complicit in society's failure to prevent violence- emotionally or physically- to her or children. Maine's homicide statistics analyzed another way reveal the number of children who have died because of abuse or neglect either before or after Child Protective Service involvement. In 2021, 34 children died from abuse or neglect, 31 in 2022 and 25 in 2023. Between 2021 and 2023, the rate of foster care placement per thousand minor-aged children ranged from 9.0 to 9.6 children . There were 2020 children in foster care in 2021, 2320 in 2022 , 2401 in 2023. These numbers from the Kids Count Data Center are after the fact of deep suffering, that has led to removal of child from high risk home and sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not succeed in preventing more suffering.

These numbers are never mentioned in Judicial discussions of the medical risk of denying reproductive rights. Despite the fawning of Amy Conant Barrett or Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito or any number claiming to value human beings, this society , Maine included, fails to protect child-bearing-age women and children far more often than we ever know. We only learn months and months later amid a pile of numbers. The numbers may include women denied reproductive choice who are in deep, irreversible despair . But that too we never know.

This Political Year of Women: Smears, Cheap Shots and Character -Susan Cook- If you missed the smearing, cheap shots and character assassination against women this year, and one woman in particular, maybe you were cut off from earth-bound communication. This year was ‘proof’ strategies flourish, to undermine the credibility and judgment of women- no matter how many credentials she’s acquired, critical responsibilities she’s taken on or professional advances she’s made. If someone wants to reduce her through name-calling, lie invention, Facebook reputation smearing that she has poor judgment, is a crook, controlling, a substance abuser, indifferent to sexual assault, all they have to do is start saying it. Put it on Twitter, editorialize it in the local newspaper, or post it on Facebook. There you have it. Like a public offering traded on the stock market, the smearing gains value the more it’s traded. It is doesn’t matter if you are Hillary Clinton. Or Madeline Albright or it could be you or it could be me. The G-force is heightened when other women take part in it. If you are a woman who criticizes the prevailing regime in this country, that only men become President- you are an attacker. If women join in, it amplifies the case that you are. Stunningly though, permission for smearing and discrediting of a woman- ‘trial by the court of public opinion’ one Party chair called it to justify a smear campaign he actively took part in- ’taking out to the woodshed’ another Party Chair called it- is shored up by gender-bias. Stereotypes that demean women and give others- including men -permission to keep her in her place, discredit her or not trust her are the archetypes summoned by the fury of the smearing. Even though 59 percent of women in this country identify themselves as feminists, there is a blind spot that hides the fact that spontaneous and willing engagement in sexist smearing- if you are a woman -is not feminism. This is what Madeline Albright meant when she said there is a special spot in hell for women who do not support other women. If only permission to smear women was old news. It is not. What is still news is the lack of protest against it by other women. Few labeled what we saw this political year as sexist. Few labeled the women who freely engaged in it- many being paid to do so by through their political jobs- as Not Feminist, Traitors to the Core of Feminist Achievement and Belief, and yes, the progenitors of a return to no reproductive rights, more gender pay inequity, and every other public policy that demeans women‘s judgment and her capacity to choose. Feminist political ideology becomes just so much loose cannon talk and no-filter thinking. You know how women are. Directors of Communication, lofty members of the Judicial branch of Government, - an FBI Director, Attorney General and yes members of the Democratic Party either joined in or couldn‘t really think of anything to say. They said nothing. Where have feminists gone and more importantly why did they go. Sometimes I think it is just a time warp because of all the advancement the women‘s movement has brought and everybody‘s forgotten that the necessary condition for feminism to exists acknowledging that gender makes a difference. I was on a train to the Democratic National Convention and spoke with the leader of a very large Feminist organization. I decried the Democratic Party for openly supporting the Independent man instead of the bright, capable female candidate. ‘It‘s ok, ’ she said. ’He’ll still vote with the Democrats.’ It was not, then, nor is it now ok to ignore the gender of a female political candidate. Femaleness still brings a different voice systematically devalued and overlooked in male-dominated cultures. . Female Genital Mutilation remains a culturally accepted practice in Muslim countries. Women still experience gross economic inequity. Carol Gilligan, the Harvard psychologist, who wrote ‘In a Different Voice-’ openly questioned the exclusion of female subjects from studies used to define human development- from National Institute of Health studies of heart disease to studies of moral development, male experience was routinely seen as equivalent to human. Women’s decision-making about right and wrong is often defined by violations of care for others and one’s self and connection as central to moral awareness. This political year brought back exclusion of women by women . They overlooked gender as a critical political consideration. Carol Gilligan was chosen the first Ms. Magazine ‘Woman of the Year’. She quoted a student of hers who said women become the float in relationship to men-and male culture- the variation in what they think and choose dependent on what males think and choose. Of course, we tend to think women have come a long way from the days when women were humiliated or shamed or bullied into accommodating male beliefs and thinking. I am afraid we have returned to a time when bullying and shaming is the preferred cultural tool for changing what women think. A New York Times columnist editorialized about ‘What Women Lost’ in this political year. I’m not sure that we’ve lost anything. Rather the permission to bully and discredit women has been there all along. This year we had a National stage for it and a male candidate and his team particularly well-versed in pursuing it. And maybe we’ve all just returned to not noticing the women are missing. And women becoming ‘the float’ - bullied, called out as untrustworthy loose cannons and liars, - who change their minds depending on male decisions- like the student Carol Gilligan quoted- that was me - said.

In the Department of Poetic Justice

(and The Great American Wrongbook)

"What Do We Do, # Me Too?"

(sung to the tune of "What'll I Do?")

-Susan Cook-

How would he know,

he's in his Senate seat

and so he's not inside

the woman's body when she does not know

fertilization's arrived.

Mitch still thinks he's the one

who decides what

she does.

Mr. McConnell's gynecology

did not earn him degrees

nevertheless

his mind is focused on

a certain female body's recess

If we say where it is

Morning Edition

will not play that word.

So while we are on that topic

let us ask

just how it comes to this

GOP Senators and Congressmen

still give themselves access

To women's private parts

that Terry Gross can't

mention on Fresh air.

Mr. McConnell thinks that he knows best

just how the zygote fares

if it's in residue

from opiods

or something else she's used

I mean the woman

who was blanked one night

Steve Inskeep can't say it on air.

The man and woman made their bodies touch

McConnell says he knows

exactly if the woman can caretake

a child, or will Mitch care

when there's there's a birth

a new drug addict

neglected. It's just not fair

Will Mitch then just say,

Republicanly, "Oh, well, not mine to care?"

I shouldn't say

it's just Mitch McConnell,

Ted Cruz and Rubio

and Donald Trump- no surprise-

will control Planned Parenthood

as if they know-

what's good-

for a woman's body.

When will they lose their jobs

be fired too.

Their decisions grope

women's bodies

WE are their victims.

Hey wake up! Where are you?

No more groping.

Hash tag it's your turn

ME TOO!

Political Vengeance and the Abuse of Power:
Hannah Arendt's Guide to Totalitarian Behaviors
-Susan Cook-

As we watched resignation after resignation of Trump appointee, during that administration,  maybe the letters of recommendation Presidential candidates have written for applicants for jobs eventually handed out as political favors would be a good character vetting process. Character vetting . How candidates view misjudgements when they recommend someone for the job also tells a lot about the recommender, maybe even more than about the job "applicant". Trump's administration demonstrated that we do not really know how to stop the abuse of power in political office for political vengeance. Despite Hannah Arendt's meticulous analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism of the mindset demanded by the Third Reich, actions that feed totalitarianism prevail.

The permission to forget, blocking, barring, demonizing others as a means to an end is one way the Third Reich accomplished what it did.The public disbelief that anyone would deviate so far from the normal and expectable factored heavily in the Third Reich. No one believed they would do such a thing.

Remember Chris Christie. Chris Christie's recommendations about Bridget Ann Kelly, deputy Chief of Staff and Bill Baroni, the head of the New York Port Authority might help us understand his qualifications for higher office. He needed hired hands with shaky memories who if a Bridgegate-kind of scandal came up would forget. This is the one in which Ms. Kelly colluded with Mr. Baroni to lower the number of lanes feeding the George Washington Bridge. Massive traffic jams ensued. Emergency vehicles, children waiting at daycare, time-urgent travel was snarled. Fort Lee, New Jersey, whose mayor openly criticised Chris Christie, suffered the brunt of the consequence, his town the target for that reason.

One wonders what Presidential hopeful Chris Christie wrote to justify bringing Ms. Kelly on as his deputy chief of staff?

Hannah Arendt describes the beliefs that enhance totalitarianism. On page 436, she writes:

"For a considerable length of time, the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. "Normal men don't know that everything is possible"[and] refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous just as the mass men did not trust theirs in the face of the normal reality in which no place was left for them. The reason why totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as the masses do in the face of the normal world. This common sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is constantly stengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself , who makes sure that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the living dead".

So, Arendt means writing recommendations for applicants for Communication Director positions whose history includes misquoting, exaggeration, exclusion is part and parcel of totalitaran technique. After all, in the Third Reich, "their real secret, the concentration camps,is shielded by the totalitarian regime, from the eyes of their own people as well as from all others." A Communication Director who masters obfuscation, adding one word which changes meaning, changing the numbers, say the number 3 to "several" so that "no reliable statistics" are available, all are behaviors that lead to totalitarianism.

All this happens before or sometimes in collusion with the exercise of the "police state", the banning of participation in public activities or from public places,government offices or to the false labelling of someone as a "threat" - those "yellow star" actions usually associated with a totalitarian, civil liberty abandoning government.

Saving civil liberties means looking at behaviors we ignore when we passively hand out yet another fat government job, acting as if the abnormal is normal, banking- literally- on everyone's wish that it couldn't possible happen here.

The Happiness of the Human Family and Its Familiar Enemy

-Susan Cook-

All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Tolstoi wrote as the first sentence in Anna Karenina. The epitaph he chose to precede it , though, is from the Bible, Romans 12 verse 19. ‘Vengeance is mine. I will repayeth, saith the lord.’ There is no family that quite fits Tolstoi’s juxtaposition of these two observations as well as our very large human family because the variations humans find to reap unhappiness in their own deliberate vengeful acts against others seems endless. We witnessed this most recently in San Bernandino.

But we have seen these cold deliberate acts disregarding human connection before. They are not new. Remembering might help us acknowledge this couple’s deliberate creation of unhappiness is a familiar enemy of the human family- vengeance- in the same family that Tolstoi said so casually and yes, sometimes, monotonously carries out its happiness.

Please remember the murder by hooded Ku Klux Klansmen of a quiet civil rights supporter Emmet Till in the 1960‘s America. Please remember the Holodomar, Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the rich fertile farmlands of Ukraine in the 1930’s. Please remember the Nazi Doctors who willingly used concentration camp prisoners as human subjects in cruel sadistic medical experiments. Please remember the Rwanadan genocide in which one million Tutsis were murdered in 100 days by the Hutu majority. There are many many examples of cold indifference to the human consequence of deliberately created unhappiness.

A peculiarity of the San Bernadino massacre is that parents of a six month old girl carried it out, deliberately disregarding their connection to her. That peculiarity of the perpetrators might even raise the question of whether the parents alleged motivator Isis, carries such force as to untie one of the human family’s most primitive instincts, to bond with and protect a child.

We, after all, worry about the abandonment of a six month old, who by the time they left her that morning would have developed the stranger wariness that attachment brings and now, in her six month old way, knows in her typically human family way, that the most familiar faces, those of her parents, have not come back. These odd parents, concerned enough about the continuity of their membership in the human family to leave a descendant have now out of their vengeance left her alone. One wonders if they were becoming so attached to her and she to them that thoughts of leaving her were becoming- as they do- intolerable- thus pushing them to act soon, before the enormous power that six-month old babies attached to their parents have to keep them close thus rendering parents powerless and unable to tolerate abandoning the child. A six month old’s need for others and their need for the six month old is one of the places the human heart can not withstand pressure no matter where it comes from to leave someone behind. The bond is too powerful.

The vengeance of Isis and these terrorists has been seen before . But it has not yet succeeded in undoing the wistfulness of a six month old looking for her lost connection or our acknowledgment of that distress. That, may be, after all what keeps the effortless unfolding of unremarkable happiness in the human family in the first place, a sensibility no vengeance has ever succeeded in doing away with.

All Happy Families are Alike; Each Unhappy Family is Unhappy in its Own Way:

Some Divorce Holiday Recommendations

-Susan Cook-

Children know that holiday giving, receiving and sharing does not alone dispell the hostilities of high conflict divorce. "All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" Tolstoi began in Anna Karenina (p.17, 1961. Original 1877) . The traumatic severing of high conflict divorce inflicts an unhappiness different for each child . Bessel Van derKoerk, MD identifies Developmental Trauma as one of its outcomes. Like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - an array of nightmares, flashbacks, hyper-vigilance, disruptive anxiety and the self-deprecation of depression- are now carried internally by the child. It is one of the most under acknowledged emotional traumas of our time.

Lawyers know high conflict divorce litigation is a rainmaker. The 40-60,000 dollar divorce means victory- after all that money is spent- becomes the priority- and often cost to the child uncomplaining but internalizing it all, knowing that intense protest all by itself breaks relationships.

After all; hostile divorce threatens the childhood spell that a family never really stops being a family. I use the word spell not to make light of psychological experience- but rather to emphasize the magic of its refuge. My doctoral dissertation research (Cook, S.J. A Sense of Belonging, A Sense of Place: The Child in the Family and the Perspective Taken. Harvard University, 1986. ) included interviews with about 90 children and adolescents about their conceptions of family continuity and attachment. A longitudinal study of children who were between 7 and 11 when I first began the study formed a small, matched sibling subset of the larger project. All children answered questions like: Does a family ever stop being a family? When you're 50 and your sister is 53, will you still be a family?

Astonishingly, 96 percent of the girls held that a family never stops being a family- even if parents divorce. Seventy six percent of the boys held that view. These particpants were in 1st , 2nd and 3rd grade.

The children I studied longitudinally, between age 7 and 11 at time one, were young adults, between 19 and 23, the third and last time. By the third interview, parents of half of the sibling pairs had divorced.

The findings were curious, heartening and worthy of a good listen by every divorce judge and attorney. If anything, time made the children studied longitudinally even more a captive of the "spell" of unconditional family attachment.

Here is Sam who I talked when he was seven, ten and then at 19.

At seven, he told me that family is always a family " because Mom and Dad still remember you and they have pictures of you when you're young and stuff and you will always be a family and even when Mom and Dad die, we'll still be a family because I'll always remember them."

Then, at age 10, "We'll still be a family but we won't get in each other's way and well forget about them more, much more...You'd get in touch with them once in awhile, like Christmas."

By 19 yrs., 9 months, Sam's parents had divorced.

But Sam said, "Even though marriage isn't for life, parenting is. So it's always a family I think no matter how tight they are...no matter how much turmoil is going on,in a certain family, at a wedding or a funeral, everyone would be there....Because it really reasserts who they, who they are. I think like touching base. Like coming home, for me today, I came home. I hadn't been home in awhile and I just sort of lay down where my bed used to be and it was calm, it was soothing, it's protection then you carry that with you. That sense of knowing you always have some place where you can just go and you don't have to look behind your back."

A few Christmas or Hanukkah or Kawanza caveats, for divorced parents- made with the mental health of children in mind.

Cast the spell over yourself that children - especially girls- hold onto. "You are always a family. And you were once a family. Make what the remembering of this season memorable. Do not let this year be the year the hatred exchanged with your ex- be - who knows- just enough to break that spell and make that family- once and for all- no longer a family.

Secondly, for the American Bar Association, please publicly disclose state-by-state the amount of revenue raised by attorney divorce fees- attorney by attorney. There are children who need protection from abusive caretakers. They also need protection from indifferent litigators.

Third, the mental health consequences of family dissolution are not Christmas fantasy They are found for real not just in the broken spirits of children torn from caretakers at the US/Mexico border. A 9 year old I interviewed had been taken from her biological mother when she was 3. In a foster home, she had formed a very close attachment to a foster mother. Now 9, I asked if she had a mother. She told me she thought she did but she thought she had died. She brought a torn and wrinkled photograph, of the mother who was not dead but had been denied contact with the child for several years through a detached, distant legal decision by a court appointed guardian who distorted almost all the facts.

Any one adult can offer real life examples of the hostility that buries family connection. But just like adults world wide collude in the play therapy of someone named Santa Claus, how about taking on this one- even in the most contemptuous divorce . That once upon a time, there was a mom and a dad... now remember the good parts. and keep your hostilty at bay- if only for a day.

The Thickness of the Moral Skin of the US Senate: To Be the Catcher in the Rye

"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye? I'd like-"

"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."

"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."

She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.

"I thought it was "If a body catch a body'," I said."Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch eveybody if they start to go over the cliff-I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

After Holden Caulfield has this conversation with his little sister, in his sojourn before entering a psychiatric hospital, he calls up Mr. Antolini, the Pencey Prep teacher . "He's the one that finally picked up that boy that jumped out the window I told you about, James Castle. Old Mr. Antolini felt his pulse and all, and then he took off his coat and put it over James Castle and carried him all the way over to the infirmary. He didn't even give a damn if his coat got all bloody."

In the aftermath of the confirmation hearing of a prep school alumnus who left a trail of nightmares and unresolved trauma in the emotional web of one 15 year old, the thickness of the moral skin of US Senate members comes to mind. I'll talk about the 2 from my state since I know most about their moments of moral cowering.

In 2007, I was interviewed and quoted by a reporter for Current.org , a public broadcasting newspaper. Susan Collins had contributed mightly to the firing of a popular Friday night jazz host who had criticized the Iraq War- in a genial, understated. way Turns out that the Maine public broadcasting Board of Trustees was comprised of members who together gave over $160,000 to the Republican party. I said (look it up) that Mainers would work hard to defeat Susan Collins in her next go-round she being someone who engages in activities that usually get legislators thrown out of Washington. Now, Senator Collins does not like anyone making reference to her pre-marital relationships in her first 50 years of dating eligibility or recreational activities. That off-sides view that Susan Collins endorses about her own past, may explain her minimizing the testimony of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's sexually assaulted victim. Indecent exposure is also illegal. Instead, she insisted his distortions, lies and beligerence toward his 2018 Senate questioners had nothing to do with his judicial temperament. By Collins' side, as she announced her choice, was Maine's recent failed GOP gubernatorial candidate, former DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew whose cost-cutting adminstration co-occurred with an almost unparalled number of deaths of children at the hands of their foster, biological or step-parents.(https://www.pressherald.com/2018/05/14/letter-to-the-editor-mayhews-dhhs-neglected-maines-children/)

Senator Collins usually hires out her thin moral skin and backlash toward those who threaten. Her one-time Director of New Media Matthew Gagnon was a player on the Maine political commentator scene whose willingness to bully has been documented on the front page of Maine's largest newspaper.

Then there's Maine's other Senator Angus King who ires quickly when anyone calls him out on his - ahem- purchase - when he was governor- of a state-owned oceanfront parcel of land abutting one of Maine's pristine ocean-side state parks. I even a wrote some lyrics sung to the tune from "America the Beautiful" which his purchase decidely was not.The purchase was documented in the Times Record and noted there was no "public bidding" on a piece of property that any one knew would do nothing but increase in value. It is now worth many times what he paid for it by encouraging the right state employee .

"Oh beautiful for spacious me, for land I'd like to buy,

that borders on state property in Georgetown or nearby,

that suddenly the state of Maine would like to sell to me,

the ocean deep, the price real cheap, what better guy than me?"

The morally thin skin of US Senators created a Brett Kavanaugh nomination and hearing that has left millions of sexual assault survivors in this country with a deep sense of moral betrayal. While survivors are compromised because of the emotional fissures trauma creates, many have stepped forward to disclose, despite the insistent cacophony of shame and the self-doubt that the assault is their own fault. Withstanding that self-blame requires morally thick skin which the moral imperative of the Kavanaugh hearing creates.

I do not trust Senator Collins or our other Senators- to be- we all hope they might- the catcher in the rye. Only one came to Holden Caulfield's mind- the teacher who carried the suiciding adolescent boy and didn't even care if he got blood on his jacket. Senator Collins and her GOP Senators minimized the belligerance, hostility and denial of his past of a Supreme Court nominee accused - not in a trial- but a job interview. In the wake of that dismissal, many, many sexual assault survivors who the equally morally thin-skinned Lindsay Graham said "have a problem"( hint: are flawed, damaged, mentally ill) will go home and direct the damage toward themselves- in self-harm, self-mutilation, if not suicidality.

Not one of these Senators can be trusted to be the catcher in the rye- nor can this Supreme Court nominee-. They are far too frightened of getting blood on their jackets or their morally thin skin.

It's Not What You're Given, It's What You Do With What You Get:

My Supermarket Monopoly Contest and the Pentagon Budget

In my state, the annual "Shop, Play, Win Monopoly"game, a"Collect and Win" game offering" "over $250 million in prizes and money saving offers" after 3 months of fabulous opportunities at every checkout moment at my local Supermarket is winding down.

Fingers crossed . I finally went through the hours long process of tearing open (along the perforated lines, of course) each potential gold mother lode held in each small folded square (one for each 10 dollars spent) and then placing each individual rectangular stamp (after meticulously moistening the back) on the "Monopoly Board.

The one million dollar cash prize required that you randomly receive 6 certain stamps each with an assigned number (333A1, 334B1, 335C1, 336D1, 337E1 and 338F1) of bewildering complexity.

I knew it would be tough to win that. So I set my sights slightly lower, the $100,000 cash prize maybe with only 5 specifically numbered stamps .

In every single category I came up one stamp short with the exception of the One Million Dollar prize in which I came up 2 short. Correction, I also came up 2 short for the $500 Portable Grill and Groceries which I didn't really want. Last year, almost the same thing happened. I won nothing.

But how is it that a supermarket chain presenting the same contest in several states offering 28 different prizes manages to precisely track the distribution of millions of these tiny rectangular stamps and confidently state that 3 lucky shoppers "might" win the million dollars or 250 "might" win the $500 Portable Grill and Groceries?

This is in stunning contrast to The Nation magazine's article (November 27, 2018) "Exclusive: The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed". Independent auditors Ernst and Young and others hired to externally audit the Department of Defense reported it impossible to have a reliable audit because of a completely flawed Pentagon accounting system. The audit request came because The Pentagon for 26 years failed to internally audit themselves despite the 1990 Chief Financial Officers' Act requiring all departments and agencies to reliabily internally audit. Only the Pentagon has failed to comply. Impossible to have a reliable Pentagon audit? So, why doesn't the Pentagon hire auditors who took the same statistics classes the people who design the "Shop, Play, Win Monopoly " game did? In the supermarket game, "impossible" probably means one person getting all the little stamps to win "the Million Dollars" and "the $500 Portable Grill and Groceries" and the "$30,000 Jet Skis" . Maybe the "$20,000 College Tuition". And, you know, the Supermarket statisticians know exactly the impossibility of one person winning all 4 of the prizes .

Now, the bookkeepers at the Pentagon have far better benefits and far better salaries. than the Supermarket chain contest makers, let alone the benefits and salaries of the high school kids and young adults who work as baggers and cashiers. But those Supermarket statisticians still figure out these complicated probabilities and get every penny the Federal government levies on the workers in taxes.

By the way, The Pentagon receives $.54 out of every dollar of federal appropriations.

It has a 2.7 trillion dollar budget and no one knows exactly where that money goes.

The Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said at least they tried and the Pentagon didn't think they would pass anyway. That attitude would not be tolerated at my local supermarket chain. They after all track those millions of rectangular stamps and insure that only 75 of the "$7500 Family Vacation" prize will be available. Or have the where-with-all to hire auditors who can. No way will more than 75 people ever become lucky winners of that prize- unless- through some miracle in which Pentagon bookkeepers are suddenly cast down the ladder of success and hold jobs at the Supermarket Chain corporate headquarters. And then more Family Vacations then you could imagine going to the unsuspecting shoppers who- it turns out- with the same stroke of Pentagon incompetence have a major lucky day.

The Nation article went on to say that years of fraud in the Pentagon books works like this. Quote "When the Dept of Defense submits its annual budget requests to Congress, it sends along the prior year's financial reports, which contain fabricated numbers. The fabricated numbers disguise the fact that the DoD does not always spend all the money Congress allocates in a given year. However, instead of returning such unspent funds to the US Treasury, as the law requires, the Pentagon sometimes launders and shifts such money to other parts of the DoD budget." All of it a violation of the US Constitution. And thus the Pentagon's budget increases every single year.

Congress does not demand that the Pentagon enforce the 1990 Chief Financial Officers Act . Each year, the cost of the military budget goes up and up.

Going through the Supermarket Checkout line is very poignant sometimes. Food is our life blood. Sometimes, there's the young mom trying to keep a baby quiet and a 4 year old engaged while waiting to see the cost of all the food piled high in her grocery cart. Food is a largely unsubsidized commodity in this country or at least never subsidized at the $.54 cents of every dollar that the military receives. Until Congress demands that the financial record be set straight, no one knows exactly what the Pentagon spends on what. But you can bet, when military conflict comes, the Pentagon is more than willing to entice the low-paid , no subsidized college tuition - federally taxed supermarket workers- to enlist or - be drafted- to place their lives in the the lottery that every military bloodbath inevitably creates.

One small correction. I did win won thing this year. A free bagel.

As American as Apple Pie:  Domestic Violence and The Abuse of Power to Tarnish Victims' Credibility
-Susan Cook-

The other day on a radio call-in program, Susan Collins, Maine's Senator, justified her vote for Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court because (she said this) even though she thought something awful happened to PhD Holder and Academic Scholar Christine Blasey-Ford, Susan Collins didn't think it was Brett Kavanaugh who did it. In other words, Susan Collins just can't bring herself to grant Dr Ford credibility. Playing both ends against the middle, this time with Dr Ford's credibility, like she has in the US Senate. At the same time, Susan Collins said that to believe Dr. Ford threatens the entire judicial standard of innocent until proven guilty. What she didn't say is that by automatically granting credibility to a Job Applicant over his accusing victim, she replicates an abuse of power that keeps victims silent.

Two of the most agonizing moments for assault victims are when it happens and when the victim discloses. For women, credibility is immediately questioned- with or without professional accomplishment, with or without the scrutiny of a large audience.

On men's side, and on the side of Susan Collins who has gained longevity by playing the middle against both ends, is Power and the fact that men require less Proof to back up their statements than women do. We have seen the backwash from men finally held accountable for their abuse of power in the #Me too movement. Many of those men remain "miffed" or staunch in their refusal to take responsibility for the abuse of that discrepancy - financially, culturally, physically, in professional hierarchies ( 80.7 cents for women for every dollar men make). Indeed, many fall back on their reverence for "Power" to justify the reluctance to continue to fight #Me too.

The Public Radio host whose host public radio organization distanced themselves rapidly finally published his NOT "Mea Culpa" column, advising the reader to "look what happened to me" over a "harmless flirtation". Discrepancy of power places whoever was on the receiving end of the "harmless flirtation", in a subjugated position. Power interferes with saying "No", further undermined when, as the Pubic Radio host said, "she worked for me but it never happened in the office." He called upon his concern for the powerlessness of children in the NOT "Mea Culpa" piece to explain how he has managed to water down his anger toward #Me too which remember "Look what it did" to him. A negligent out not unlike Susan Collins claiming herself the better judge of what happened to Christine Blasey Ford. The magnitude of the discrepancy in physical power of adolescent boys and adolescent girls is not that hard to fathom.

This call-in program preceded the opening of an exhibit called "Finding Our Voices: Breaking the Silence of Domestic Abuse" at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center in Maine, encouraged by Patrisha Mclean, the ex-wife of the singer Don McLean of "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie". He was convicted 3 years ago of domestic violence criminal threatening, criminal mischief and criminal restraint.

One of the women in the exhibit, the wife of a man named "Charlie" who took out a gun and threatened to shoot her after she told him she had almost suicided, did not speak for years of the domestic abuse in her marriage. She left, still not disclosing until two years after she left, at 65, 43 years into the marriage. Had she disclosed before, her credibility would be on the line.

Many years ago, I was a colleague of the man who physically assaulted his wife for those 43 years. With 3 other Professors, we flew to a northern Maine University to teach graduate students. I taught life span development, always including sections on childhood sexual abuse, abusive relationships and abusive parenting. Those were topics that I had a deep commitment to, and still do. In one of the videos I always showed in the class, the victim said "Sexual abuse is about power. The abuse of power." Thirty three years ago, the reality of incest was not broadly acknowledged. Nor was wife battering or domestic violence. Or child abuse. Or parents who gave themselves license to terrorize or abuse. The college where I taught was sexist. I complained about the job inequities of assigning me to teach 4 courses I had never taught before and The "Dean" clearly made a mental checkmark against me for speaking out about that.

No one would have guessed that this quiet man had his own private target when his power was challenged. His wife. And to this day, abuse of power to keep victims quiet persists. The Edna St Vincent Millay Poetry and Arts Festival began a day or so after Susan Collins' radio appearance. It included a Poetry Slam and reading held at night at a local bar. The organizers felt compelled to include a Caveat to poets and artists taking part.

"Please be advised. As participants will include people of all ages, please be sensitive to content and language that might be of concern, scare children or trigger trauma."

No one wants to scare children or trigger trauma. The accusatory nature of the statement was inflated and not necessary in this context. Even when that was pointed out, the organizer still would not take it off the website.

And with it, the perpetrating "Charlies" and the adolescent "Kavanaughs" go about exercising their power. Yet, one more time, those who have experienced trauma will question if they have the power to speak about it or will say it "right" or won't "upset" anyone. Even at a Poetry and Arts Festival. The contributions to the power that diminishes women's credibility are many and varied. From the US Senate, to the dimly lit bar at night, credibility of the victim takes second place to the protective tidings of the powerful. I noticed that a person featured in that video many years ago had signed up for the poetry slam. I made the decision not to take part. I don't know if the person who appeared in the video 33 years ago did.

Love Really Counts: Greta Thunberg Calls on Love to End Climate Change

Greta Thunberg's address to the United Nations Climate Change Summit sounded like love suspicious of yet more betrayal and imminent disappointment. "We will never forgive you"she said, if these leaders fail to act. Greta accused them of leaving Love behind for the fairytale of perpetual economic growth.

The hearts' UPC scan code to distinguish false love from true is not perfect. But its accuracy depends on one premise and one premise alone. Love really counts. And now we bear witness to the  winding and wending path climate change has created into the heart of Greta Thuberg. Where scientific documentation of imminent extinction of koala bears and right whales, the collapse of ecosystems, uncontainable widespread drought and wildfires have not impressed the economically driven, love will. If it really counts, that is.

George Bernard Shaw or some other member of the white Western male canon said genius is perpetual adolescence. Adolescence is the developmental proving ground in which love re-discovers and re-invents itself over and over. It is not naive or diminishing to believe love really counts, as Greta Thunberg does but adulthood is the disproving ground where awareness of love's limits are re-discovered: as life's carbon-spewing, coal-fired engine spews along.

I am not the first to use the phrase "Love really Counts" but I did vote for it at a Board meeting for a Maine center which offers free services to families who have lost a loved member. The Center for Grieving Children was founded by a dear colleague after his sister died. After all, bereavement is not pathology. It is the human molting of an interior layer of love, taking its own very long time to surface. Even under the best of circumstances, grief never quite goes away. So my colleague, Bill Hemmens founded a place where children and their parents could go to sit together in that long shedding. When time for the Board to find a brief summation of the Center's mission, "Love really counts" came up, I voted for it. It passed.

Scientific progress has not eliminated bereavement.Only in its absence after loss of a loved one, does the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (Fifth version) codify with a diagnosis. Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder, ICD-10 code F43.21. For a time, we worked on a project to put into print interviews he had done with children who attended the Center. A very young child whose sister had died, told him, in the safe confines of grief acknowledged, "Sometimes in the night when the wind blows, I can hear her crying." And thus a five year old's image resonates with many who have known grief that is both silent and loud enough to wake you from sleep.

As Greta Thunberg looks dead-on into the eye of the world's money-driven, we are struck by their absence of grief at the loss of the natural world and the complete lack of reckoning that the death that goes unmourned may be our own. Witnessed oblivion makes those who heard Greta Thunberg, listen, shuddering, because, we know she believes love really counts. Her indignation toward the world's powerful as they come to her generation for hope betrays her recognition of the underlying pathology that makes Denial of Climate Change political fodder. And "sometimes in the night when the wind blows" the deniers may be awakened by what they have not done.

Why Women Don't Tell Part 3
The Cultural Anomie that Keeps Violence Toward Women Hidden in Broad Daylight

In the 15 or so years since the first woman was murdered by the alleged perpetrator, the now- indicted and arrested Fifth Avenue Architect, didn't anyone suspect or even know this man had violent tendencies? Aggression toward women? Was there no speculation that his wife and children periodically left because of a recurrent aggression no longer suppressed? Some recurrent resurfacing of a pathology? Did no one suspect or even witness events that raised doubts about violence and aggression in the man's life?

The deaths of these women described only as “prostitutes” as if there was nothing else to say about them, renews fears that this culture's anomie about violence toward women has not gone away or is at least quietly accepted. Anomie, Google says, means “a lack of moral standards, or a sense of lawlessness, or sometimes the anxiety that comes from being in a lawless place.”

Then there is the Anomie about Telling What We Know about someone else's violence and aggression. The arrest of this particular alleged perpetrator hiding in plain sight raises renewed anxiety that cultural acceptance of failing to Tell What We Know persists-Why Women Don't Tell. Surely, someone must have known or suspected this alleged perpetrator's violent side. The Tarrasoff Law would dictate that even healthcare providers disclose to authorities threats of known violence or homicide or committed ones.

Sometimes, the most fiercely internalized moral lessons  come from witnessing in ourselves or in others the horrible aftermath of moral atrocities. The next step is to speak out but we know too well that if you see something you very often do not say something. Telling, comes at a cost- a well known cost that many avoid. Our internalized evolutionary tool for bettering the human race by telling- our sensitivity to human pain and suffering  betrays us. There is no telling. The secret is kept.

I am a psychotherapist who for many years has studied and continues to study and provide Trauma intervention. Knowing itself- witnessing- violence- the discovery of the dark truth can be all by itself traumatic. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V acknowledges hearing about and witnessing violence, atrocious events can lead to post traumatic stress disorder. The frontal lobes- where we plan, decide, our executive skills which lead us through our lives, go offline, as Bessel Van der Kolk writes. Psychotherapist Sebern Fisher notes the neurobiology of a response to trauma may bring fight or flight, tonic immobility, collapsed immobility, an orienting freeze, or loss of consciousness or fainting (the vasovagal response) The human abilities through which we function are hijacked or shutdown completely. All reasons why others don't tell what they have seen, heard or know.

There is also plenty of exposure to culturally sanctioned punishment for Telling by the discloser. A shameful example of that punishment if not assassination  for telling is best exemplified by a Washington Post Pulitzer Prize toting- columnist who reviewed in 1997 “The Kiss”, Kathryn Harrison's telling about her father's incestuous acts with her. The words in the book synchronize almost with precision the torturous emotional sequalae of the act of telling about incest and the incest itself. So precise as to bring  chills which they did on my first, second and third reading. The real topic of the Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley is given away by the article's title: “Daddy's Girl Cashes In”. His review explicates how to take down the girl who tells the truth about being the object of violence- physical or sexual- or fearful that violation or victimization has taken or is about to take place. The visual metaphor of Yardley's stance is that of him standing with his heel on the back of Kathryn Harrison's neck- pushing her face, the mind with which she eloquently and painfully found the words to disclose and the lips that mouthed them in mud. “Slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical”, he wrote. “His seduction of the not-unwilling her. Its essential elements are not graphic sex -- in that department Harrison is coy rather than revealing -- but a revolting mixture of self-pity and narcissism“. “The real act of dishonesty is this shameful book, which exploits the private life of the author's family -- if, by the way, anything herein actually happened as she claims it did...” As if telling about sexual violence is exploiting “family privacy”.

Jonathan Yardley could have served as Consultant for anyone hoping to suppress suspicions about the now DNA-verified suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders. He reminds any perpetrator how to irreducibly discredit Anyone who might Tell the Truth of what they have seen, heard or observed. Yardley even refers to the same geographic area, the “polygon” of the alleged murderer's route writing that salaciousness rather than the atrocity of Harrison's sexual abuse drew readers. “The chattering classes of Manhattan and the Hamptons have homed in on it with the unerring instinct of swine slopping in swill. It is the Flavor of the Month.”

If the response to the trauma of hearing the atrocious does not bring shut down, freeze, a loss of conscious willingness to know what we know, our ethical core can be part of the making sense. There's a chance here that the Cultural anomie of Telling about Violence toward women will be uncovered- if it's held up to the light here- broad daylight where it has been hiding all along.

In the Department of Poetic Justice: Stop Guessing Just Whose Financing was Used...

(and in The Great American Wrongbook)

which could be sung to the melody from "New York, New York"

Stop guessing just whose

financing was used

to pay a certain woman a fee

she thought she was due.

Because now Rudy blows the cover

Michael Cohen discovered,

Sarah Sanders, new news for you?

Maybe he forgot

a bargain he thought

he got or maybe that's the only

checkbook he ever lost

when he hoped we'd elect

him, president, neglect to inspect

check memos: "This one's for sex."

Now Sarah must spin

the spot he is in. Did Rudy call her first

to explain the logic she will bring

to speaking nationwide

saying he never lied.

You know how lawyers

keep clients' hands tied.

The only thing worse

than Mike Cohen's curse

if his client spoke up

said, Yes he had re-imbursed

one hundred thirty thousand bucks,

because sometimes his lucks

run out or he forgets who he...

Start spreading the news.

Embarassed V. 2.

But Mr. Trump will say at least he's telling the truth.

Unlike the White House Correspondents

host, Ms. Wolf made comments

embarassed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights too.

Sarah Sanders might

get her turn next time

while Michelle Wolf is exiled,

excommunicated too

and next year's Nobel Prize

for fiction, Sarah Sanders wins one.

She'll be the Nobel Board's new P.R. hire.