The Voice of Treason

It’s 5/11 and there’s a Cessna 150 up there in restricted airspace. Run for your lives!!! But that’s not the scariest thing going on in D.C. Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton are joining forces to fix our nation’s healthcare. The race for 2008 has begun. Now that’s scary.

Kudos to the cops in Zion who wasted no time in arresting a murderer. Like most murderers, he thought he was smart. His footsteps and DNA were all over the site of the murder, so he had to go back to the scene of the crime so that the police wouldn’t think it was suspicious when they found his footprints and DNA. But isn’t the cliche that the criminal who returns to the scene of the crime is the criminal who gets caught?

Here’s the nutcase in a nutshell: 34 year-old Jerry Hobbs has an issue with anger management. He has a record of assault that goes back to 1990, and the most recent charge landed him in a Texas prison. It was minor - he chased his girlfriend, and anyone else who was nearby, around a trailer park with a chainsaw. No big deal, because as soon as he was released from prison his girlfriend let him move back in with her and their three kids.

Jerry felt his girlfriend was just too lax about disciplining the kids. His eight year-old daughter, Laura, might have taken some cash from her mother’s purse and was grounded. But mom let her go out with her friend, nine year-old Krystal on Mother’s Day. They stayed out too long, so dad went out to round them up. He told authorities that they refused to come home and that Krystal pulled out a knife (not his fault - the girl had a weapon!), so he punched them and stabbed them over thirty times. He stabbed his own daughter in the eyes. Dad is not a lax disciplinarian, that’s for sure.

The bad news: two little girls are dead and it’s a shame that little Krystal was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The good news is that Jerry Hobbs is going to go away and that his other two kids might have a chance to grow up. Unless, of course, Mom moves in another loser.

Treason number twenty-one: stupid women shouldn’t breed.

So two little girls are riding their bikes through a park in Zion, Illinois on Mother’s Day. And they’re stabbed to death.

On the other side of the world, in Kenya, a stray dog discovers an abandoned baby in the forest. The baby has been wrapped in a plastic bag. The dog takes the bag in her mouth and carries the seven pound, four ounce infant across a busy road and through a barbed wire fence to a shed where she’s nursing her litter of puppies. Children playing near the shed hear the baby crying and investigate. The infant is rescued, taken to a hospital for treatment, and is named “Angel.”

The dog, now called “Mkombozi” or “Savior,” is taken by animal welfare and is sterilized “in an effort to improve her quality of life.” Now the dog will only have to worry about feeding herself, instead of feeding an entire family.

In Kenya, it is common for women who cannot afford to feed their children to abandon them. And it appears that it is common for dogs to take on the responsibility of caring for their offspring instead of abandoning them. Yet the dog is the one who is sterilized.

Treason number twenty: if spaying and neutering is so good for our pets, perhaps it would also be good for our children. The trend now is to get your kids plastic surgery to spare them the humiliation of looking like average teenagers in high school. Why not, in an effort to really improve the quality of their lives, sterilize them instead?

When I graduated from college, our nation was experiencing some tough economic times. It was assumed that we graduates would have no chance of finding work in our chosen fields, so people kept asking me what I planned to do. “Hell,” I said, “I’ll go work in a bookstore if I have to.” And so I did. Time passed and I changed jobs, but stayed in retail. And I learned something valuable from this experience. I learned that I did not want to work in retail, so I left. Dealing with the public is unpleasant enough, but dealing with the public when they are being forced to participate in holidays whether they want to or not is horrific. I sensed that people hated Christmas because they became so surly around the holiday. But the holiday that really brought out a side of humanity that I never wanted to see was Mother’s Day. I had to wonder: do people hate Christmas because they hate Christ? I don’t think so. Do people hate Mother’s Day because they hate their mothers? Well…probably.

My coworker’s mother is dying. She’s been in a nursing home for a long time and has suffered unimaginable pain. He knows now that it isn’t just a matter of weeks or even days. Now it’s a matter of hours. He’s a Sicilian from Long Island; we have had many conversations about our mothers. My mother has been in assisted living since September 2003. She has Alzheimer’s. Other than being diabetic, my mother is healthy as a horse. She’s pretty spry for eighty-one, but doesn’t know she’s eighty-one. When she asks me how old she is, I tell her that she’s 127. She laughs. This is good. I know people whose mothers are afflicted with Alzheimer’s and they can’t cope with their mothers’ moods, surly behavior, and violence. My former boss’ mother got kicked out of assisted living for beating up the nurses. My mother’s mood, on the other end, is excellent. The key, I guess, is that she worked all the surliness and violence out of her system when we were kids, so now she’s nice and mellow. I take her to the doctor and suddenly she’s Ruby Keeler. Wide-eyed, she tells the doctor she feels fine; after all, she can still tap dance. Then she hops to her feet and shuffles off to Buffalo.

But something was wrong the last time she went to the doctor. I had her over for Christmas lasagna, then drove her back to her facility. She was unusually quiet. And her color was bad. I knew it wasn’t my cooking. The assistant looked at her and agreed that something wasn’t right. She took her temperature. She didn’t have one. I’m not a trained professional, but I thought that this was reason for concern. The assistant assured me that it was odd, but not a reason to panic. We put my mother to bed and I told the assistant to call me when it was time to panic. That was Saturday night.

On Sunday, I was in Urgent Care with my mother all day. She was complaining of terrible pain in her lower back and couldn’t stop shaking. The doctors decided that her kidneys were failing and prescribed antibiotics and Tylenol with codeine. I had a problem. I’d convinced my significant other that he should fly out of town for the holidays to visit his mother. I was alone with two dogs: one that was recuperating from recent knee surgery and required constant supervision, and one who was diabetic and needed to be fed and medicated on a strict schedule. But I wasn’t home. I was in Urgent Care with my mother whose kidneys were failing. I had to get home and give the dog a shot of insulin, so I took my mother back to assisted living and gave them a blow-by-blow. I’d be back in the morning to take her to her doctor, call me if you need to.

The next day I skipped work to take my mother to see her doctor. Her pain was worse, she was shaking uncontrollably, and she still had no temperature. The doctor said she was suffering from hypothermia and asked me if it was all right for him to summon an ambulance. Go for it, I said. He was out of morphine, but assured me that the paramedics would have some when they arrived. By this time, my mother was screaming and her eyes were rolling back in her head. She was lucid enough to turn her head to tell me that she was dying.

The paramedics collected her; I drove home to check on the dogs and let them out to pee, then I drove downtown to the Emergency Room. I got there before 1:00. The little girl across the hall sat patiently for someone to come and look at her fingers, which were falling off. The man next-door got tired of waiting for someone to come to check on him so he mumbled something about going home to die and pulled out all the tubes from his body, leaving a trail of body fluids on the floor as he staggered towards the exit. The little girl and I alerted the staff who rounded him up, brought him back to his room, hooked him back up, and mopped the floor.

Time passed. I needed to get home - and that’s all the way across town - to check on the dogs. I told my mother I’d be right back - the dogs needed food and medication. Which reminded me that neither my mother nor I had eaten and she didn’t have any of her meds. So I drove home to take care of the dogs. My cell phone rings: it’s my significant other who has gotten the message I left earlier. Despite the fact that his plane had just landed a few hours ago, he was ready to get back to the airport and come home. Don’t be a fool, I said. Stay where you are - there’s no need to come back here. I got home, fed the dogs, gave them their meds, and let them out into the yard to take care of business. Once they were back in the house, I was back in my car, driving across town to check on my mother. My mother is dying. She’s in pain, and she’s dying. I parked, ran back to the hospital, and got to her room. She looked and me and said: “I can’t believe they don’t even offer you a cup of coffee in this dump.” All I know is that hospital rules should be modified so that not only does the patient get morphine, but the person sitting with the patient gets morphine, too.

Time passed. A doctor came in and introduced himself to me. “I just want to tell you something,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for over thirty years, and you’re the most patient human being I’ve ever met. You’re a saint.” No, I’m a dumbass. But what good would have it done to throw a fit in the ER because my mother wasn’t getting attention? She’d been sedated and I figured if she was feeling good enough to bitch about not getting a cup of coffee, she was fine. They decided she needed a CAT Scan. Off she went, and I followed. The results: she has a mass on her spine. It was 10:30 PM and we were told we could go home. As I was driving to Walgreens to fill her prescription for Vicodin, I was obsessing on the word “mass.” A mass on her spine meant an inoperable tumor. Pain. Death.

I told the assistants back at my mother’s facility to avoid giving her the Tylenol, but make sure she gets the antibiotics and Vicodin. Time passed. Today I suspect that what she had was one hell of an infection that was knocked out by the antibiotics and made tolerable by the Vicodin. A subsequent MRI showed no evidence of a mass on her spine. And her kidneys are operating just fine.

Today is Mother’s day, and I took her out for a walk. It was a particularly beautiful day. We saw all types of butterflies and birds, and a quail let my mother get unusually close. We ran into an elderly man sitting on a bench. My mother sat down next to him and we chatted for a while. Since my mother’s practically deaf, the old man and I were really the ones having the conversation. His name is Tad. Turns out that he and his wife and brother sit with my mother at every meal. His mind is so sharp, that I was a little shocked to hear that he’s 95 years old. He walks with a cane and has a few marks on his face that might be skin cancer, but he’s “seeing the doctor about that so it’s really no big deal.” He talked about his days in the army and all the places he’d seen and the people he’d met. The recurring theme was that he never had a reason to complain. Everyone had always been so nice to him. Even in the Army, they were all swell.

And in all the years he’s gone to the Italian restaurant up the street, they’ve never once charged him for a cup of coffee. We talked for the longest time and I enjoyed the conversation. When my mother and I turned and walked away she asked: “Do you know him? I don’t.”

Last year my significant other and I went to a friend’s graduation party. It was at a trendy new restaurant, and everyone had gathered upstairs for drinks and speeches. We noticed his mother wasn’t there. “Oh, she’s here,” he said. “It’s just that she can’t get up here in her wheelchair.” We just looked at each other. We spent the rest of the evening downstairs talking to our friend’s mother. She has Parkinson’s, but her mind is sharper than mine. She started talking about Swing and Big Bands, then suddenly Bill Clinton’s name came up. She was on fire. I had no idea that woman was so passionate about politics. She and I talked smack about the Clintons the rest of the night.

And that brings me back to the conversations I have with my coworker. His mother is in diabolical pain. I know pain. I hate pain. I blew out my knee again in March - the second time in three years - and I know what it’s like to be in pain and limited by my own body. Trapped, betrayed, unable to do the things I want to do. Things that shouldn’t take any thought or effort. Things that we take for granted.

It’s like teeth. Either you’re born with good teeth and bad gums, or bad teeth and good gums. Either way, you lose your teeth. And so with old age, either your mind is healthy or your body is healthy - which is better? To be in constant pain and hooked up to machines, but have a healthy mind; or to have a healthy body, but never know what day it is or who you’re talking to. Which is worse? I’m still deciding.

So this principal of this Baltimore school hires this 28 year-old teacher because he has a “winning personality.” During the interview she discovers that he’s been convicted of second degree murder, but that winning personality convinces her that a conviction for murder is no big deal - it’s not like the guy’s a serial murderer or anything - and gee, he’s got this winning personality. He’s hired!

Being a convicted murderer is not an issue. And that he might be a tad violent is not an issue. He’s got a winning personality, dontcha know, so that makes him a perfect candidate for teaching kids. The principal figures that the conviction is something that happened a long time ago - ten years! - so it’s not even worth mentioning to the parents. Then three female students come forward to say they’ve been sexually molested by this teacher. The principal’s first reaction is that it’s not the teacher’s fault - these girls were always talking about how “cool” this new teacher was (we know, he has a winning personality) so obviously they were throwing themselves at him and deserved whatever happened. You know, like the provocative 90 year-old woman who gets raped. Of course she was asking for it.

And besides, this teacher has such a winning personality - it can’t be his fault. Like Ted Bundy or Charlie Manson - those guys had charisma! This one told the principal that he hadn’t set out to kill anyone; instead, an unfortunate incident had occurred. He also told her he had changed, and started going to church. She determined that he was a person who needed a chance. Besides, he’d worked as a teacher’s aide, and he had a good rapport with everyone. So when there were rumors that there was “inappropriate activity” between the teacher and some of the students, the principal didn’t investigate. It was those flirtatious teenage girls, dontcha know.

One of the things that convinced me during my student teaching days that I didn’t want to teach was that we were told that we could never put our hands on the students. If a kid was falling out a window, let him fall. Do not attempt to pull him back into the classroom and save his life. Let him fall. Why? Because if you touch a student, you’ll lose your credential. And then there was the little matter of not wanting to give failing grades to high school students who were illiterate. We were told that they couldn’t get a failing grade. They had to be moved along - no one wanted to see them next year. When I protested, saying these kids couldn’t read or write, I was told: “Don’t worry about them: they’ll be taken care of.” Girls would marry, boys would be incarcerated; the government had programs for these students. A few of us thought this was odd. But then, we were probably the ones who, as students, disliked the teachers who wanted to be our buddies and took classes from the teachers that everyone else said were “too hard.” They required that you learn something - or else. I liked the teachers that didn’t tell me everything about their personal lives. I liked the ones who made me read extensively and write term papers. I liked the ones whose tests were challenging. I liked the ones who were a little scary.

Whatever happened to those teachers? Treason number nineteen: Bring back the teachers who made you think that if you didn’t learn what they had to teach, they would hurt you. I know that we’ve been told that those teachers were responsible for damaging our self-esteem and they didn’t make us feel good about ourselves. So if you’re a teacher who demands results, and ensures the students learn, you’re wrong for education. If you have a conviction and a winning personality, you’re right for education. But won’t getting raped in the classroom affect a student’s self-esteem? Am I missing something?

I know that Tony Blair’s getting bashed in the press and that a lot of people in Great Britain are turning on him, supposedly because of the war in Iraq. But I just about piled up my car when I heard a report on the radio that early projections were showing the Tories were winning in a landslide. It reminded me of Election Night 2004, when early reports said that John Kerry was taking the majority of the fifty states - and most people hadn’t even sat down to dinner. That little voice in my head again: “Something isn’t right here.”

If it’s true that the people are against their country’s participation in the war, why would they vote in Conservatives? (Never mind that England is currently enjoying the benefits of policies put in place by the stupendous Maggie Thatcher.) Wouldn’t they be in favor of the war? Wouldn’t their policies be even more hawkish?

The big issue, then, is probably not the war. Still, I couldn’t help watch the election coverage from the BBC (on C-SPAN), and I don’t mind admitting that their coverage confused the daylights out of me. First of all, how many parties are there on that small island? (Don’t ask - there are too many to list and one is called The Official Monster Raving Lunatic Party.)

Next question. Why do they line up all the candidates like it’s a beauty pageant, then announce who got what votes?

And strangest, why did they talk like Tony Blair would be job-hunting this week even though he’d been re-elected? Sure, his Labour Party lost a few seats, but he’s still in office.

My father’s family is English, but I have to tell you that I thank God every day for John Adams. Treason number eighteen: Watch 1776 and remind yourself why we fought the Revolutionary War. If you don’t have the movie, just watch those awful British series on PBS. These are the same people who produced Henry Plantagenet?

In April 2001, officers in Kansas City, MO found a body of a little girl in a wooded area near a church. A few days later, they located her head, wrapped in a trash bag. “Precious Doe” was finally identified this week as Erica Michelle Maria Green and her mother and stepfather have been taken into custody. This murder case might have gone unsolved if it hadn’t been for the girl’s grandfather who responded to an ad placed by a Kansas City missing child advocate, determined for four years to find out who this little girl was. As it turns out, the grandfather was concerned because he hadn’t seen his granddaughter in some time. He contacted the authorities, the parents were found and questioned, and now we not only know the girl’s name, but we know how she died.

Erica Michelle Maria Green was probably exhibiting typical behavior for a three year-old when she told her stepfather that she didn’t want to go to sleep. Instead of pulling out a book and reading to her, he kicked her in the head and he and her mother left her there on the floor for two days without medical attention. When she finally stopped breathing, they took her to a secluded area, her stepfather snipped off her head with a pair of rusty garden shears, and the couple left her and her head there to rot.

In the four years since little Erica was left to die, beheaded, and dumped like trash to be eaten by animals and insects, I imagine her mother has continued to screw the piece of human debris who crushed her daughter’s skull with his foot.

I suspect this story shocks most people who cannot understand how something like this could happen. I’m like that character in the Woody Allen movie who, when his companion asks how could something as horrific as the Holocaust ever happen, says he’s surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Evil is easy. Good is difficult.

I know people squirm when George Bush starts talking about good and evil, but I think the man has a point. We are engaged in a battle between good and evil and what’s scary is that only a handful of people seem to be aware of it. More and more when I hear a story about someone who has found a stash of money and turns it in so that the rightful owner can claim it, or that someone anonymously pays the vet bill for an elderly person who can’t afford to save the life of their best friend, or someone who simply does the right thing in a situation, I think: “How unusual.”

My mother had two neighbors, both women from Germany. Each one had a different story about the events of the second World War; each had a different version of what happened in the camps. One said that it was all lies - Germany wasn’t anything like the place they describe in history books. It was a virtual paradise, dontcha know. Doesn’t explain why she left Utopia for the first GI who offered her a Hershey bar. The other woman wasn’t so loyal to the Fatherland. She says the people in her town were fully aware of the camps - hell, you could smell what was cooking in the ovens. And today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking just sixty years since the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

I know there are a lot of people who think enough time has passed; why don’t the Jews just get over it and move on? Some even deny the Holocaust ever happened. And others don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that it did happen. After all, what’s so bad about killing six million Jews?

Is it how we’re teaching - or not teaching - history? Ever pick up a book of art history and see paintings that you think you’d like to see in a museum one day? You can’t. They don’t exist. They were destroyed during the war. Buildings, landmarks, art, books, brilliant minds, history - all wiped out. Erased. Italians, Poles, Gypsies, intellectuals, writers, artists, homosexuals, anyone who just wasn’t quite perfect enough. Everyone suffered, everyone was affected. And even though films like Memory of the Camps exist and we can see piles of emaciated bodies that could not be burned fast enough to conceal the evidence, we’re unmoved. (The Nazis rushed to hide what had been going on in the camps and it was taking too long to gas, then burn the people in the camps, so they had to speed up the process and cut some corners. There’s evidence that people were burned alive, and more evidence that some were burned, but didn’t die from incineration. They lingered.)

Today there are signs everywhere that anti-Semitism is on the rise. Europe appears to be in denial - again. Yet there are people who ask why did the Holocaust happen? Why did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter? Why didn’t they put up a fight? Why did they allow it to happen?

To me, that’s a little bit like asking a five year-old why she let her parents duct tape her to a chair and burn her with cigarettes.

Treason number seventeen: Evil happens. People do terrible things to small animals, their own children, and other people. We can allow it by pretending it doesn’t happen, or we can chose to go to battle to end it. Be a hawk.

On Tuesday, the first democratically elected government in the history of Iraq was sworn in.

I guess I assume that everyone spends as much time as I do monitoring current events. I should realize that some people have lives. I was having dinner with three friends at a little Italian restaurant tonight, and we started talking about the runaway bride. How insensitive she was to let her family think she’d been killed - how insensitive to let the authorities think her fiance killed her. And then I put a damper on the evening by casually mentioning the mother in Illinois who fileted her two kids last week. From the reaction I got, I suspect that story was buried because of Jennifer leaving the driving to Greyhound.

Thirty-four year-old Tanya Vasilev stabbed her 9-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter over 200 times each. Now the police are wondering if she might have had something to do with the death, five years ago, of her 3-month-old daughter who died in a fire at a town house where the family lived. Hmmmm. Ya think?

Shades of Andrea Yates. Just because a woman is able to breed, it doesn’t mean that she should. I do not pretend to be maternal. When I hear a puppy wimper, I feel like my heart’s being torn from my chest. When I hear a baby cry, I just want the noise to stop.

My father was in his fifties when I was born; my mother was thirty-six. I vividly remember my first day of kindergarten. My siblings were all older; I was four and had little exposure to my peers. So, on the first day of school, I was so excited that I wanted to run all the way there. I was wearing a little tan suit - a jacket and skirt set that was reversible, lined with a bright red floral print. My blouse was probably the last sleeveless blouse I ever wore. A little red shirt made from the same fabric as the suit’s lining. There were little gold buttons on the blouse. The suit was buttonless. I wore red shoes. The weather was perfect. I remember every detail. So today it is still very clear in my head that it was on that day that I promised myself that I would never have children. Let’s just say I wasn’t too impressed by my peers. Can you say Lord of the Flies?

Treason number sixteen: I would rather grow old and regret not having children, than to have them and regret it. My motto: Better dead than bred.

Two teenage boys from Charleston, South Carolina get into a 14-foot boat to do some shark fishing. It’s a blustery day and there are warnings to stay out of the water. They have no food, water, life jackets, flares or radio, so of course they drift out to sea and are there for six days. When they’re finally rescued off the coast of North Carolina, they’re sunburned and dehydrated and have stories about how they survived without food, water, life jackets, flares or radio.

And I’ve become so cynical that my first thought is that this story is a hoax. I see one of the boys interviewed and I’m thinking: “That’s a sunburn? Six days out on the ocean with zero protection and that’s a sunburn? I got a worse sunburn last month watering the backyard!”

What were these kids really doing for six days? They say they ate jellyfish and drank sea water to survive. Why do I see a book deal and TV movie? And why do I even question their sincerity? Why? Because I watch too damned much TV news.

But the story that really haunted me today was the one I heard on the radio on the way to work. New York firefighter, Donald Herbert, was doing his job when a building collapsed on top of him. That was ten years ago. Since the accident, he’s been in a coma, getting progressively worse. His doctors had urged his wife to pull the plug shortly after they determined that her husband was in an irreversible vegetative state. She considered it, but finally chose not to do it and just wait. On Saturday, Don Herbert woke up and asked to speak with his wife.

Ordinarily I’d be only happy about a story like that. But all I could think of was how horrible it must be for Terry Schindler’s family to hear about this. Their daughter was slowly starved to death while only a few miles away a drug-addicted pedophile who had just been arrested for murdering a little girl and burying her alive was on suicide watch. God forbid he should hurt himself. Treason number fifteen: If the secularists who urged that food and water be withheld from Terry Schindler feel that starving to death is a painless (and even beautiful) thing, why do they want my tax dollars to fund school lunch programs and feed starving children in the Third World? Let ‘em starve - it’s beautiful, isn’t it?