Stories from the heart

I read this this morning and my heart aches for those who have been lost to gun violence. There are many kinds, homicide, suicide and of course mass shootings. They all share the same fact – death by a gun – but the way they were killed and how they were killed, differ.

These are some from the Washington Post that are about 9 individuals killed by a gun. I have little more to add but to ask that you read these stories and make no judgements other than the fact they are American and almost all of them are of color they are also largely people who were working class, they were not Gangsters or involved in the act of a crime nor even doing anything that would make you go, “Hmm well that is what you get going out to, coming home at…” Guns did this and the people who had the guns got them easily and had no problem using them to kill. We always need a motive, how about “Hey I got a gun let me go shoot some shit. I got to make it right” Who they kill why they kill is secondary to the fact that they had a gun and they used it to shoot to kill a fellow human. What more motive do you need? All gun crimes are hate crimes.

These are nine stories from America’s homicide crisis.

Jaylon was on his front porch.

Jody was at the park.

Juanita was sitting in her car.

Violence found them all

By Washington Post Staff

Nov. 27, 2022

Fowler reported from Jackson, Miss.; Gilsinan reported from St. Louis; Cusick reported from New Orleans; Freedman reported from Memphis; Bailey reported from Baton Rouge; Connors reported from Cleveland; and Rosenzweig-Ziff reported from Washington, D.C.

Topper photos by Kathleen Flynn, Dustin Franz, Maddie McGarvey and Joe Martinez.

Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Copy editing by Dorine Bethea. Story editing by Amanda Erickson. Design and development by Stephanie Hays. Data analysis by John D. Harden. Design editing by Madison Walls.

During the last three years, homicides nationwide have reached their highest levels in decades.

The deadly spike coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic: The rate of killings rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 and remained high through the following year, according to a Washington Post database created to track the toll. Even now, as the bloodshed has slowed, the homicide rate outpaces pre-pandemic levels.

This gun violence tends to grab headlines when it occurs in horrific public spasms: at a Walmart in Virginia, a nightclub in Colorado, an elementary school in rural Texas. But the focus on mass shootings obscures the totality of the American ailment: people killed on city streets and inside their homes, deaths that seldom attract national attention and cases that rarely involve high-profile prosecutions. In many, an arrest has yet to be made.

The slayings have left a trail of grieving families, neighborhoods in mourning and an untold number of people dealing with the trauma of sudden, brutal loss. And the toll is not equally borne.

Gun crime disproportionately impacts people of color, especially Black men. Victim data collected from each city profiled here show Black people made up more than 80 percent of the total homicide victims in 2020 and 2021. And while data show gun deaths have surged around the country, a number of cities lead the way.

The Post visited nine of these places, which have seen some of the nation’s highest recent murder rates. They are spread mostly across the South and Midwest. Some have long been in the spotlight for their homicide numbers, others have not.

In each place, monuments have sprung up to commemorate those lost, some informal and fleeting, others lasting — some public, some private. They mark a death, but just as important, they remind everyone who sees them of the lives lived: the aspiring aerospace engineer, the retired chef who cooked for the hungry, the teen so funny he was granted five minutes at the end of class to joke around, the 4-year-old who laid flowers on her dad’s grave last Father’s Day.

Cleveland

Lawrence Morgan, 17

‘He was my person.’

Bethany Rohrer, left, and a friend of her late son Lawrence Morgan comfort Allison Radulov during a vigil held in memory of Lawrence in Parma, Ohio.

A couple of years before he was killed, 17-year-old Lawrence Morgan posted a sign on his bedroom door: “Guns Forbidden.

“He was always talking about how he hated how people carried guns,” said Joey Kline, Lawrence’s best friend since fourth grade. “He was just so against guns.”

He had other passions too. His mother Bethany Rohrer said her son loved basketball and making people laugh. He was goofy and endearing — one of his teachers even offered him five minutes at the end of every class to joke around, as long as he cut it out during lessons.

“Every memory I have of him is of us laughing and smiling,” Kline said.Lawrence’s uncle Bob Schnable puts together a picture board before a celebration of life ceremony.

Friends were always popping over to Lawrence’s house in Parma, a Cleveland suburb; his mother wanted it that way. The boys would sometimes wander to a nearby park or drive around the neighborhood. That is what they were doing the afternoon of June 21, when someone started firing.

At least 170 people were killed in Cleveland in 2021

Lawrence was shot seven times in the chest and died on the scene. Police later arrested Gunnar Glaszewski, 16, and charged him with murder and felonious assault. Gunnar and Lawrence lived a couple of blocks from each other and went to the same high school. “There was a six-month period where Gunnar was at our house every day,” Rohrer said. “Then they had a falling out, and they weren’t friends anymore.”

The day after Lawrence was killed, two of his friends created a memorial at the corner where he was shot. They wrapped a telephone pole in strips of crepe paper — red and purple, his favorite colors — and attached star-shaped balloons. At the base, they pinned a large piece of poster board with #LLL — Long Live Law.

That evening, they held a vigil. A small crowd of friends and family lit candles; Beyonce’s “Heaven” played in the background.

“He was my person, really the only person I could ever talk to,” said a sobbing Allison Radulov, a friend from middle school. “He’s just a genuine person, never out to hurt anyone.”

“Lawrence was such a good kid,” said Tashondra Forster. “He tried to direct my son on the right path. He was just a positive role model for him.”

St. Louis

Damion Baker, 25

He helped a woman to her car. Then the shooting started.

Family members of Damion Baker mourn near his casket during the memorial and celebration of life services at Lighthouse Baptist Church

Damion Baker was in elementary school when he picked up the phrase he’d use for the rest of his life: “Well, technically …”

It tickled his mom An’namarie Baker to hear her son carefully explain some finer point. The expression captured Baker’s essence, she said. He was witty and diligent, a leader in school and a Division I college football player who went on to run his own construction business.

262 people were killed in St. Louis in 2020

Baker was “cooler than a Cadillac with AC in hundred-degree weather,” his friend Kevin Spraggins Jr. said at his funeral. He had great taste in sweatshirts, An’namarie said, and gave “the best hugs,” according to his aunt Carlotta Baker.

That kindness was on full display on July 3 when Baker escorted a woman to her car in downtown St. Louis. The pair were shot in an attempted carjacking. She survived; Baker died at the age of 25. The case remains unsolved.

At a service in Baker’s honor, images flashed across the auditorium screen ahead of the ceremony. In one photo, Baker is a skinny kid with big ears. In another, he is a grinning teenager in a #17 jersey at Christian Brothers College High School. In one video clip, he is teaching his beloved niece De’Sanyi, now 5, how to brush her teeth. (“Don’t eat” the toothpaste, he advises her on the video.)

Baker dreamed of playing for the NFL, making enough money so his mother would not have to work. But when he realized that was not going to happen, he adjusted. “One thing D-Bake told me was, ‘if we’re stand-up men, that’s all our mama want,’ ” his cousin Abryon Givens said at the service.

Baker’s older brother Devon said their mother called the two of them her “Double Ds.” At an early age, they had decided that meant “dedication and determination.” The boys saw things through to the end, An’namarie said, “whether they liked it or not.”

An’namarie is focused now on ending the gun violence that has taken so many other children from their mothers. “Damion cannot just be some random number of homicide, and we move on to the next number,” she said. “It’s gotta look different.”

Columbus, Ohio

Glenn Clark III, 50

‘He was a proud daddy.’

The family of Glenn Clark III gather in Grove City, Ohio, to commemorate his death.

As a high-schooler in the late 1980s, Glenn Clark III would get out of the shower and head straight outside. The only way to get his hair just right was to speed down the road past his family’s farm on his motorcycle, his family said.

He soon found joy working with his hands while tilling the sod fields at his home outside Columbus, Ohio. That passion led to a career as a mechanic working in factories in Ohio and Kentucky, where he moved with his then-wife, Deana Burke, and his two children.

“He was a proud daddy and a simple guy,” said Desere Adams, 54, his older sister. “He wore T-shirts with holes in them and loved riding his motorcycle. If I needed him, if they needed him, he was there.”After Clark was killed, his parents named their cat Happy, Clark’s nickname.

After he and Burke divorced 20 years ago, he moved back to work in Grove City, Ohio, to live with his parents.

Then, almost seven years ago, he met Rochelle Rice, now 53. On their first date, they spent five hours talking about Vikings — Clark knew everything about the Scandinavian seafarers’ history — and laughing. Two months later, they bought a house near Columbus.

In August, Clark received a promotion. That night, he went to a bar with members of his motorcycle club, the Avengers, to toast his new job. At the bar, a fight broke out. Five people were shot, and at least one bullet hit and killed Clark, one of two Avengers who died.

At least 100 people have been killed so far in Columbus in 2022

Nearly three months later, the police investigation is ongoing.

On what would have been his 51st birthday last month, Adams, Rice and the rest of the family gathered at Clark’s parents’ home to celebrate his life. They all wore their new urn jewelry — necklaces with his photo or Viking symbols and a small place for his ashes — and Adams, Rice and Shadow, now 28, showed the tattoos they had gotten to memorialize Clark.

“He was bigger than Everest in my mind,” Shadow said. “He was my hero.”

New Orleans

Shane Brown, 20

‘He was my little brilliant mind.’

Shane Brown, 20, was murdered in March. His body was found in a canal near this intersection in New Orleans East.

At St. Anna’s Episcopal Church in the Treme neighborhood, the Rev. Bill Terry and his team have maintained a somber project. On large boards hung across the church’s facade, they handwrite particulars about each New Orleanian killed by violence. Date. Name. Age. Method.

Among this year’s names: Shane Brown. 20. Shot.

“He was my little brilliant mind,” his mother, Gloria Brown, 56, said.

At least 205 people were killed in the first eight months of 2022 in New Orleans

Nicknamed “the brain” by his family, Shane Brown was an avid reader and honor roll student who enjoyed programming and robotics. He was also socially aware, said E’jaaz Mason, 31, Brown’s digital media teacher at New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School.

“You can tell he internalized a lot of what is going on in this country when it comes to Black boys,” Mason said. “He cared about the state of his people, and I always really respected that about him.”

Gloria Brown holds her phone showing a photo she made of an “S” she saw in the clouds recently. She said since he passed she has seen the shape in the clouds or in water and can feel his presence. Handwritten names, ages and method of death of New Orleanians killed are kept on a memorial on the facade of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church in the Treme neighborhood, including Brown, who was fatally shot. The program from Shane Brown’s funeral sits next to the Louisiana Film Prize he received for his 11-minute short, “Like a Ship Without a Sail,” when he was in high school. Brown, 20, was an avid reader and honor roll student.

As a junior, Brown approached Mason with an idea: He wanted to make a film about what Black boys experience in New Orleans.

“Kids used to come to me 10 times a day talking about wanting to make a movie,” Mason said. “But literally the very next day, Shane came with a double-sided sheet of loose-leaf paper, with a skeletal structure of a story.”

The two assembled a small team to bring Brown’s vision to life. The resulting 11-minute short, “Like a Ship Without a Sail,” swept the student awards at the Louisiana Film Prize the following spring.Gloria Brown sits at her kitchen table in Slidell.

A year later, as the covid-19 pandemic ravaged New Orleans, Brown graduated in a drive-through ceremony held at a local park. He turned down offers at engineering programs across the country to instead begin his undergraduate education at a local community college. Brown hoped to someday transfer to one of his dream schools, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Georgia Tech, with the ultimate goal of becoming an aerospace engineer.

By 2022, Brown was balancing his courses with a job at the port and getting around in his first car. Then this March, less than two weeks after his 20th birthday, Brown did not come home from work one day.

Five grueling days would pass before Brown’s body was discovered floating in a New Orleans East canal. Coroners later determined he died of a gunshot wound to the head.

Police made an arrest in the case, but Brown’s loved ones said they still do not know why he was killed. Gloria Brown instead tries to focus on appreciating the 20 years she had with her only child. “He was the person that I had asked for when I became a late mom,” she said.

Mason said Brown’s death signifies a loss of potential.

“You never know what that person would have done to improve and perfect our world,” he said. “And now we’ll never know.”

Memphis

Juanita Washington, 60

Juanita Washington’s photo sits outside the dance studio she loved.

“I just want to feel her presence,” said Ladia Yates, 32, owner of the Memphis dance studio where Washington worked as an administrator. “I don’t want anyone to forget her.”

Washington, 60, was fatally shot around lunchtime on Dec. 29, 2021, while sitting in her car in a Walgreens parking lot. A suspect was arrested in Las Vegas in March.

Homicides hit a record high in 2020 — and 2021 in Memphis

Yates had known Washington for nearly two decades. She and Yates’s grandmother Yvonne Paschal, who also works at the dance studio, had become particularly close.

“She was like our sergeant-at-arms,” said Paschal, 77. It was Washington who made sure everyone paid admission at events. She was loving but firm with the kids, and known for her honesty. “She was very open — you didn’t have to guess where she was coming from,” Paschal said.

“I just really didn’t have a friend like I had with Juanita,” she added. “I don’t have anyone that I can talk to and share things like she and I did.”

Washington was considered family by many employees of the studio where she worked for years before she was shot and killed. Yates, center, with some of her youth dancers, pose for a photo while wearing hoodies honoring the memory of Washington. Yates poses with some of her dancers around a memorial honoring Washington.

Washington’s spot at the front desk, beside Paschal, remains off limits. Yates held a candlelight vigil there in the days after the shooting, and has dedicated performances in Washington’s memory, tributes her studio has carried into performances this year.

The first of those came the day of Washington’s funeral — but took place 1,800 miles away in Los Angeles. Yates had committed to a competition there and did not want to back out. The specially choreographed opener, a swirling portrait of fury and grace set to gospel star Kirk Franklin’s “Don’t Cry,” was devoted to Washington.

Earlier that day in a Facebook post, Yates had written: “These folks don’t understand the beast that’s about to come out of me on this dance floor.”

Birmingham, Ala.

Jaylon Palmore, 13

He told his family he was going to be famous.

Kim Woody-Walker, the mother of Jaylon Palmore, stands next to the overgrown garden she and her son kept together. Since Jaylon was killed by a stray bullet on March 5, Woody-Walker has not been able to bring herself to clear and replant the garden.pper

The quiet 13-year-old stood before his parents in their east Birmingham home and made a bold declaration: “Y’all just watch, I’m gonna be famous.A keepsake card from the funeral of Jaylon, who was killed at his home in east Birmingham by a stray bullet on March 5. Jaylon was an avid gamer and hoped to go pro when he became an adult.

It was the kind of thing kids always say, and Jaylon Palmore had said it before. Like the time he told his mother, Kim Woody-Walker, and her husband, Gregory Walker, that he would be a star football player. “You’re going to have to beef up, son,” they replied, smiling at the lanky teen.

But Jaylon’s real passion was gaming. So when he said it again, and told his parents to remember his gamertag — “You’ll be looking for Jaypop27!”— they were inclined to believe him.

After all, they watched the way he set his mind to something and followed through, like when his grades began to slip and they told him he’d lose the PlayStation if he did not shape up. The report cards that followed made his parents proud.

At least 100 people have been killed since the start of 2022 in Birmingham

Jaylon’s stepdad liked to rib him about all the time he spent in his room, controller in hand, headset on: “Don’t you have a girl you can speak to?” Walker would ask, joking with the son he had helped raise for a decade. But really, his parents did not mind the hobby. He was soft-spoken and introverted, and gaming kept him inside, safe and out of trouble.

“My baby said he was going to be famous,” Woody-Walker said. “But I did not know and I did not want it to be this way.”

On the afternoon of March 5, Jaylon was on the porch with some of his older sister’s friends when two cars drove past the house, and gunmen opened fire. The first bullet hit Jaylon in the back and tore through his internal organs. Another hit an older man in the arm; he would survive, but Jaylon did not. In September, more than six months after the shooting, police arrested a suspect in the case. They believe someone else on the porch that day was the intended target.

Jaylon was killed just weeks before his 14th birthday, just months before the end of eighth grade. At school, his teachers and classmates painted a banner with his name in bright blue script and released a raft of balloons in his honor. The sign at the building’s entrance read “We love you Jaylon.” At graduation, the school held a seat open in his honor, adorned with his photo and a rose.

Woody-Walker is waiting to set up her own space to celebrate Jaylon. The couple decided to sell their house, which was full of reminders of their son.

The family did not take many pictures, but they have a reel of memories: Jaylon stroking his mother’s face and asking, “Momma, why you so soft?”; and the time his dad took him fishing, and Jaylon showed him up, catching bream after bream.

The sound of Jaylon’s music, oldies like Frankie Beverly and Maze and Earth, Wind and Fire. And his eclectic sense of style, an outfit never complete without a colorful pair of sneakers.

On May 27, Woody-Walker visited her son’s grave with a big Happy Birthday sign. She cleaned up around the site, sat down and talked to him. She told him she loved him, she’d never forget him and that she would see him again one day.

“Just rest, baby,” she said. “Just rest.”

Baton Rouge

Leslie Joseph Riley Jr., 66

He said he would die under the tree he loved. He was killed there.

From left, Larry Mack, Mike Walker and Charles Russell hang out at a lot that has been a gathering place for longtime friends in the neighborhood in Baton Rouge. Their friend Leslie Joseph “Jody” Riley Jr. was killed there in the afternoon of July 24th.

His name was Leslie Joseph Riley Jr. But almost everyone knew him as “Jody,” a gregarious man with a teasing smile who could often be found lingering in the shade of the towering oak trees at the corner of Tennessee and East Polk streets in South Baton Rouge.Riley is pictured in a family photo with his grandchildren Jaden Brown, right, Kyson Brown, bottom left, and Kensley Brown of Durham North Carolina.

A small vacant lot, it had for decades been an unofficial park for the locals. There were chairs and a grill, which Riley, a retired chef, often used to cook meals for neighbors who could not afford anything to eat. At 66, he had spent his life in the shadow of those trees, growing from a boy into an old man — recently joking with his family that he’d probably spend his last hours on earth in that very spot.

No one ever imagined that would be true. But on July 24, just after 3 p.m., a crackle of gunfire interrupted a sunny Sunday afternoon. Someone in a passing car had opened fire, spraying a volley of bullets toward the trees. Riley, who is not believed to have been the target, died at the scene. A second man, 20, was also shot but survived.

Gunfire has been the soundtrack of a violent stretch here in a neighborhood known as the Bottom — a nickname tied to its hilly terrain but which to some has also come to define the decline of what used to be the vibrant center of the Black community. Riley had been there through it all here, choosing to stay and raise a family even as businesses shuttered and homes fell into disrepair.

LEFT: A memorial plant was planted near where Riley was killed. RIGHT: Leslie Brown, second from right, and his daughters Jasmin Brown, left, Tonniesha Johnson, and Jada Brown, right, pose for a portrait in Leslie’s neighborhood in Baton Rouge.

Riley dreamed of becoming a chef and got his culinary arts degree. For years, he worked at Louisiana State University, cooking at a fraternity house and then at the student union. But at night, he returned to the Bottom to cook for his family, friends and neighbors.

149 people killed in Baton Rouge in 2021, nearly double the number killed in 2019

“He was always passionate about cooking, and that’s how he gave back to the community that he loved,” said Jasmin Brown, Riley’s granddaughter. “He cooked under that tree, all the time. For people he knew, for total strangers. That’s who he was. A man with a heart of gold.”

Riley was angry to see the neighborhood falling into decline, even as other areas of Baton Rouge were being revitalized. His oldest son, also named Leslie, had recently started a nonprofit aimed at drawing city resources and jobs into the community. Riley had recently played in a charity baseball game to raise money for the group. Now, a photo of him from that game is pasted to one of those towering oaks so central to his life.

In the days after the shooting, the spot sat eerily empty. Police have made no arrests. Nearby a sign waved from one of the trees: “Long live Jody,” it read.

Jackson, Miss.

Mariyah Lacy, 4

She buried her dad. Then the violence came for her.

Treasha Lacy, 55, holds a tribute blanket alongside photos memorializing her deceased son and granddaughter at her home in Carrollton, Miss.

Mariyah Lacy slips in and out of the video frame. The 4-year-old is in a pink tank top and ponytail, blue balloons around her. As the camera shifts toward the ground, Mariyah’s tiny gold sandals fill the screen. She lays flowers on her father’s grave.

The clip is from Father’s Day 2021. Mariyah had told her aunt she wanted to “go see Daddy.”Memorial signs remain outside the home of Treasha Lacy in honor of her deceased son and granddaughter.

A year later, her family would bury Mariyah beside him, both victims of Mississippi’s gun violence epidemic. Mariyah was shot sitting in the back of her mother’s truck on June 12. Her mother’s ex-boyfriend has been charged in the killing.

Jackson had the highest homicide rate per capita in 2021, with 153 killings

The family’s “ball of sunshine,” Mariyah was always telling jokes. She loved to be around people and gave everyone she encountered a hug. She liked to stay up late and watch cartoons; Treasha Lacy, her grandmother, would often make a pallet on the floor for Mariyah and her older sister to spend the night. She loved Ramen noodles and seafood; when her father Cornelius Lacy was alive, he would feed her crab legs.

Treasha wanted to honor her granddaughter’s “princess” spirit at her funeral. Mariyah’s casket was covered in images of mermaids, unicorns and butterflies. The toddler was buried in a blue-and-pink fluffy dress; Treasha knew she would have liked it.

Treasha doesn’t like to think about the moments after Mariyah was shot. Was she in pain? Barely 4 feet tall, Treasha’s afraid she knows the answer. “I try not to think she suffered but I’m pretty sure she did,” she said.

Treasha has suffered too. There are days when she is angry. Days when the house is quiet, and it is all just too much to bear. In those moments, she swears she can hear Mariyah running through the house, pulling on her pants leg, saying, “Nana, Nana, Nana.”

Family photos line every wall in Treasha’s home; Mariyah’s face is in half a dozen. A wall in the living room is dedicated to pictures of Cornelius. After Mariyah’s death, Treasha added three more photos of Mariyah, now hung underneath a portrait of her father.

They had the same eyes. Walking down the hall from her bedroom, Cornelius’s photos would greet Treasha each morning. She used to say “Good morning, Cornelius” aloud. Now she silently says good morning to them both.

“What helps me out so much is I know Mariyah is an angel watching over us,” she said. “She’s an angel, and she’s with her dad in his arms.”

Baltimore

Jesika Tetlow, 18

She always wanted to help.

Susannah Ford gathers with friends and family two months after her daughter Jesika Tetlow’s death.

She stood up for her intellectually disabled older sister, classmates who were bullied and any animal she could find. She convinced her family to rescue five stray kittens during two hurricanes. While walking into a Walmart with her mom near her home outside Baltimore, Jesika Tetlow, then 8, called the police because she saw a dog left by itself in a shopper’s car.

“She had this big huge heart for people and for animals,” said Susannah Tetlow, her mother. “She made people feel special and made them each feel like her best friend.”

In Baltimore, at least 200 people have been killed so far in 2022

In middle school, her friend who was having suicidal thoughts had been in the bathroom for longer than usual, so Tetlow volunteered to go look for her.

She found her friend trying to drown herself in the toilet of the school bathroom. Tetlow called 911 and helped save her friend, but the incident made going into school too painful. So Tetlow was home-schooled instead, her family said.

Ford pets one of the cats that her daughter Jesika Tetlow rescued. She had gathered with friends and family to memorialize Tetlow two months after her death. Ford and her son Josh Tetlow decorate a poster with pictures of Jesika. Tetlow was murdered inside a friend’s home during a home invasion.

But when the pandemic hit, forcing classes online, Tetlow thrived, her mother said. She developed an interest in medicine and decided she would either be a veterinarian or a doctor — or maybe both.

On Aug. 30, Tetlow, now 18, went to her friend’s house to take her online classes — she had continued to take classes online even when in-person learning resumed. That night, five masked people dressed in black raided the house. At least one of them had a gun, and shot Tetlow twice through the head and killed her.

Tetlow’s family found out the next morning. “My brain and my heart just shattered,” Susannah Tetlow said of the moment she found out.Tetlow was killed in a home on this block in Baltimore.

The police investigation is ongoing as the family figures out how to memorialize their daughter. A photo of Tetlow and her sister dressed up for homecoming has taken on a new meaning. Tetlow hated being alone and in the dark, so they all got necklaces with space for her ashes so she will always be with them. The family is also wearing turquoise bracelets that say, “Justice for Jesika,” and is hoping to start a foundation in her name.

Susannah Tetlow has also started attending a Thursday night meeting of grieving families at Roberta’s House in Baltimore. “It’s the kind of camaraderie you would not wish on your worst enemy,” Tetlow said of the group, which includes others who have also lost children.

But still, she has struggled to make sense of what happened.

“This is not normal. This is not normal for a city and a country to have so many shootings every day,” Susannah Tetlow said. “This is a human. This is my child. And now she’s gone.”

Dumping Ground

It has already been well established that there are dividing lines in the #MeToo #TimesUp movement.  In France they have already said “Pas plus” to the idea that there is a problem with sexual harassment and abuse and that it could in turn affect romance.

Yes the foundations of all solid relationships start with a man who invites you to his hotel room and then asks you to massage/masturbate/have sex or watch having a shower.  I see it long lasting like the Queen and Prince Phillip only without crowns.

One excited man is Berlusconi of the infamous Bunga Bunga parties and I say  Grazie as I have on my bucket list going to said shindigs as there is nothing hotter than a bunch of aging lotharios and Putin (a class in and of itself) drooling over women young enough to be their granddaughters.  How do I get on the list?

The division is not just continental it is domestic with women of color demanding an exception to the movement and a distinction.  Split, divide and conquer and the reality is that no one’s pain is greater or worse than another, it is all pain, just different, you know like everyone else.

I am sorry but I am not going to spend a great deal of time running a spreadsheet on who is raped/abused more then in turn set a hierarchy chart of who gets more air time, money, attention.  No rape is better rape are you fucking kidding me?

Gender parity and equality means overall equality. So when women are paid less than men that needs to change across the spectrum of race.  If a white man makes 1.00/hr, a black man 75 cents/hr and in turn a white woman makes 80 cents an hour and a black woman 70 cents all of that across the board needs change.  Gee and what about Latin American people, Muslim, Native American, Asian and so on.  This of course includes those of the LGBQT community.  Does it matter to divide that too by color?  We need to focus on the whole pie here and not just the piece on your plate at this point.

And this is across the world not just America.  How about women dying as they are ostracized and isolated from their community during menstruation.   Or young girls taking a page from Wonder Woman to save themselves from abuse.

A woman returning home from work raped on a train.    Or that Ikea my favorite company thinks women should pee on an ad in order to get a discount on a crib. Really?

I look across the country and I see women still marginalized and exploited. They don’t have famous friends or connections or anyone who gives a shit about them.

What about this woman who was threatened for exposing an affair with the Governor of Missouri who was clearly into 50 Shades of Gray only adding blackmail to the factor.  And yet all of this happened before he was elected and should have no affect on his current position right? Well ask former Senator Al Franken about that?  Again let’s start having due process with the court of justice versus the public opinion make the ultimate decision.  

And we have the female workers at Ford who despite having filed lawsuits in the workplace found little changed.  Gosh makes you wonder about that bailout now doesn’t it?

What about the Teacher arrested for speaking about the Superintendents raise at a School Board meeting?  Again note that the South which has been at the bottom of the ladder for Education literally takes prisoners versus those who have the audacity to ask questions.  And as I live in the South I could not help note the race dynamic when the arrest occurred and the story behind the reasoning. Again since moving to the South I realize how complex this issue is and no it will never be resolved unless we level the economic playing field than I suspect some of this may resolve itself.  I have said repeatedly its the money stupid and the color of green that truly segregates in this part of the country.

Time’s Up, you have a lot of legal cases right there pick one or all of the above.

Women are marginalized when it comes to medical care and housing, we pay more and in more ways than with money.

Let’s look at this story that BBC did with regards to abuse in housing when it comes to women by the landlords, county officials and others who are responsible in providing housing.  Gee a British news agency covers this better than an American one but it doesn’t have Reese Witherspoon talking about it.

Which brings me to the Medical Industrial Complex of which I am intimately familiar and have little to nothing good to say.

First was this story from Florida during the holidays about a 94 year old woman arrested after being evicted from her Senior Housing facility.

Or this story from Baltimore about a woman being dumped on the sidewalk and thankfully a man was there at the time to document the entire ordeal.

This was not the first nor last nor isolated in history.  This is from 2007 and is the story of Carol Ann Reyes.

Or this from Las Vegas

Or this from Sacramento

 Or you just bussed somewhere else… anywhere but here!

And this goes back to a study from 1991, so nope this is not new in the least.

And there is my story from 2012 and what Harborview Medical Center did to me.  I am not over it six years later.  I had to sue them on my own.  I appealed it on my own and I lost but I sat with their Attorney at the time (who like all my Attorneys end up leaving their fine gigs a coincidence not lost on me) admitted they altered the diagnostic documents to reflect a less serious injury in order to release me in full blown Amnesia sustained from Traumatic Brain Injury.  Yes there are legal documents to support my allegations and little objections by their Attorney to any of them.  I lost on legal technicalities alone.  If you think any Lawyer would help me, think again.  Personal Injury Attorneys are in this for money and money alone, justice not so much.

So do I expect any lasting significant change from the Time’s Up Me Too movements. Nope.  I can point to the ones that in the last five years have come and gone.  Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter,  Pussy Hats (which should be engaged but note not a word with regard to that) and now this.  What.ever.  America is a dumping ground it is the shithole that Trump spoke of, he just referred to the wrong countries when he did so.

No one’s pain is better stronger more painful. It is all painful.  Let’s find the commonalities and build on those to resolve the differences that exist. 

Inhale This

Sickness and poverty are the two plus two that makes the Medical Industrial Complex healthy.  The idea is that seems counter intuitive to how the complex is compensated and in turn rewarded for their efforts.

I want to point out that the poor are desperate, usually of color and often so ill that they are unable to take the time to make needed decisions with regards to care.  Otherwise known as second opinions.

I refer to the story of Henrietta Lacks that demonstrates how little those faces matter when a medical breakthrough is possible or in fact quality of care as this person is poor, often ill educated and are willing to do anything to restore their health.   Ah the human guinea pig ready, willing and able.

Teaching hospitals are the most notorious and they are in turn staffed and managed by the local Medical School.  Here in Nashville, that is the Metro General Hospital,  the one stop public health facility in a City with less than 40% carrying health insurance (Tennessee opted out of the Medicaid expansion).   This place ran literally bled red until suddenly the Mayor decided to close the facility and change its focus and in turn turn it to Meharry Medical College to operate it as an out paitent facility.    The timing I am sure is coincidental with the Affordable Care Act being whittled away that the once booming business of care is now coming to end with the insurance policies that enabled it and this will be changing across the country.  Note the current CVS/Aetna merger.   So with fewer patients having public insurance and now the potential likelihood of Tennessee ever getting any type of public monies for health of the poor is going on the window.  See the new tax bill lately? It eviscerates social safety nets.

As I know from living in the ‘vile the public housing units are ripe with drug problems and gun violence two very expensive ailments to treat.  Vanderbilt has to be making millions off being the singular trauma center in the area as they treat everything from the daily gunshot wounds to the major traffic accidents that litter the highway.  They are what Harborview Medical Center was in Seattle, massive trauma and treatment center, run by the University of Washington as a science lab.    They are certainly not washing any feet at Vanderbilt but there are several other hospital chains that have doors open and waiting.  Medicaid is big business and money.

I personally experienced the shitty care at Harborview and that colors much of my perception of most medical treatment but I am constantly confirmed by the endless stories at endless hospitals that function as the major treatment center for the great unwashed. The trauma portion is the money maker and the public care is the teaching factor.  Third rate care for third tier population.

When I read this story below I once again thought of Henrietta Lacks as she was a victim as was her survivors of Baltimore’s legendary medical facilities.  Nothing changes when it comes to exploitation of the poor.

Hospitals find asthma hot spots more profitable to neglect than fix
By Jay Hancock, Rachel Bluth of Kaiser Health News and Daniel Trielli of Capital News Service
The Washington Post December 4 2017

BALTIMORE — Keyonta Parnell has had asthma most of his young life, but it wasn’t until his family moved to the 140-year-old house here on Lemmon Street two years ago that he became one of the health-care system’s frequent customers.

“I call 911 so much since I’ve been living here, they know my name,” said the 9-year-old’s mother, Darlene Summerville, who calls the emergency medical system her “best friend.”

Summerville and her family live in the worst asthma hot spot in Baltimore: Zip code 21223, where decrepit houses, rodents and bugs trigger the disease and where few community doctors work to prevent asthma emergencies.

Residents of this area visit hospitals for asthma flare-ups at more than four times the rate of people from the city’s wealthier neighborhoods, according to data analyzed by Kaiser Health News and the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service.

Baltimore paramedic crews make more asthma-related visits per capita in 21223 than anywhere else in the city, according to fire department records. It is the second-most-common Zip code among patients hospitalized for asthma, which, when addressed properly, should never require emergency visits or hospitalization.

The supreme irony of the localized epidemic is that Keyonta’s neighborhood in southwest Baltimore is in the shadow of prestigious medical centers — Johns Hopkins, whose researchers are international experts on asthma prevention, and the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC).

Both receive massive tax breaks in return for providing “community benefit,” a poorly defined federal requirement that they serve their neighborhoods. Under Maryland’s ambitious effort to control medical costs, both are supposed to try to improve residents’ health outside the hospital and prevent admissions.

But like hospitals across the country, the institutions have done little to address the root causes of asthma. The perverse incentives of the health-care payment system have long made it far more lucrative to treat severe, dangerous asthma attacks than to prevent them.

Hopkins, UMMC and other hospitals collected $84 million over the three years ending in 2015 to treat acutely ill Baltimore asthma patients as inpatients or in emergency rooms, according to the news organizations’ analysis of statewide hospital data. Hopkins and a sister hospital received $31 million of that.

Executives at Hopkins and UMMC acknowledge that they should do more about asthma in the community but note that there are many competing problems: diabetes, drug overdoses, infant mortality and mental illness among the homeless.

Science has shown it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to reduce asthma attacks: Remove rodents, carpets, bugs, cigarette smoke and other triggers. Deploy community doctors to prescribe preventive medicine and health workers to teach patients to use it.

Ben Carson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who saw hundreds of asthmatic children from low-income Baltimore during his decades as a Hopkins neurosurgeon, said that the research on asthma triggers is unequivocal. “It’s the environment — the moist environments that encourage the mold, the ticks, the fleas, the mice, the roaches,” he said in an interview.

As the leader of HUD, he says he favors reducing asthma risks in public housing as a way of cutting expensive hospital visits. The agency is discussing ways to finance pest removal, moisture control and other remediation in places asthma patients live, a spokesman for HUD said.

“The cost of not taking care of people is probably greater than the cost of taking care of them” by removing triggers, Carson said, adding, “It depends on whether you take the short-term view or the long-term view.”

The long view

Asthma is the most common childhood medical condition, with rates 50 percent higher in families below the poverty line, who often live in run-down homes, than among kids in wealthier households. The disease causes nearly half a million hospital admissions in the United States a year, about 2 million visits to the emergency room and thousands of deaths annually.

That drives the total annual cost of asthma care, including medicine and office visits, well over $50 billion.

Keyonta lives in a two-bedroom rowhouse on the 1900 block of Lemmon Street, which some residents call the “Forgetabout Neighborhood,” about a mile from UMMC and three miles from Hopkins.

Reporters spent months interviewing patients and parents and visiting homes in 21223, a multi­racial community where the average household income of $38,911 is lower than in all but two other Zip codes in Maryland.

To uncover the impact of asthma, the news organizations analyzed every Maryland inpatient and emergency room case over more than three years through a special agreement with the state commission that sets hospital rates and collects such data. The records did not include identifying personal information.

For each emergency room visit to treat Baltimore residents for asthma, according to the data, hospitals were paid $871, on average. For each inpatient case, the average revenue was $8,698. In one recent three-year period, hospitals collected $6.1 million for treating just 50 inpatients, the ones most frequently ill with asthma, each of whom visited the hospital at least 10 times.

Hopkins’s own research shows that shifting dollars from hospitals to Lemmon Street and other asthma hot spots could more than pay for itself. Half the cost of one admission — a few thousand dollars — could buy air purifiers, pest control, visits by community health workers and other measures proven to slash asthma attacks and hospital visits by frequent users.

“We love” these ideas, and “we think it’s the right thing to do,” said Patricia Brown, a senior vice president at Hopkins in charge of managed care and population health. “We know who these people are. . . . This is doable, and somebody should do it.”

But converting ideas to action hasn’t happened at Hopkins or much of anywhere else.

One of the few hospitals making a substantial effort, Children’s National Health System in Washington, has found that its good work comes at a price to its bottom line.

Children’s sends asthma patients treated in the emergency room to follow-up care at a clinic that teaches them and their families how to take medication properly and remove home triggers. The program, begun in the early 2000s, cut emergency-room use and other unscheduled visits by those patients by 40 percent, a study showed.

While recognizing that it decreases potential revenue, hospital managers fully support the program, said Stephen Teach, the pediatrics chief who runs it.

“ ‘Asthma visits and admissions are down again, and it’s all your fault!’ ” Children’s chief executive likes to tease him, Teach said. “And half his brain is actually serious, but the other half of his brain is celebrating the fact that the health of the children of the District of Columbia is better.”

The close-up view

Half the 32 rowhouses on Summerville’s block of Lemmon Street are boarded up, occupied only by the occasional heroin user. Late last year at least 10 people on the block had asthma, according to interviews with residents.

All three of Summerville’s kids have asthma. Before moving to Lemmon Street two years ago, she remembers, Keyonta’s asthma attacks rarely required medical attention.

But their house contained a clinical catalogue of asthma triggers.

The moldy basement has a dirt floor. Piles of garbage in nearby vacant lots draw vermin: mice, which are one of the worst asthma triggers, along with rats. Summerville kept a census of invading insects: gnats, flies, spiders, ants, grasshoppers, “little teeny black bugs,” she laughs.

Often she smokes inside the house.

The state hospital data show that about 25 Marylanders die annually from acute asthma, their airways so constricted and blocked by mucus that they suffocate.

Keyonta missed dozens of school days last year because of his illness, staying home so often that Summerville had to quit her cooking job to care for him. Without that income, the family nearly got evicted last fall and again in January. The rent is $750.

About a third of Baltimore high school students report they have had asthma, causing frequent absences and missed learning, said Leana Wen, Baltimore’s health commissioner.

With numbers like that, West Baltimore’s primary-care clinics, which treat a wide range of illnesses, are insufficient, as is the city health department’s asthma program, whose three employees visit homes of asthmatic children to demonstrate how to take medication and reduce triggers.

The program, which an analysis by Wen’s office showed cut asthma symptoms by 89 percent, “is chronically underfunded,” she said. “We’re serving 200 children [a year,] and there are thousands that we could expand the program to.”

‘We’re a business’

The federal government paid for $1.3 billion in asthma-related research over the past decade, of which $205 million went to Hopkins, records show. The money supports basic science as well as many studies showing that modest investments in community care and home remediation can improve lives and save money.

“Getting health-care providers to pay for home-based interventions is going to be necessary if we want to make a dent in the asthma problem,” said Patrick Breysse, a former Hopkins official, who as director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is one of the country’s top public health officials.

Other factors can trigger asthma: outdoor air pollution and pollen, in particular. But eliminating home-based triggers could reduce asthma flare-ups by 44 percent, one study showed.

Perhaps no better place exists to try community asthma prevention than Maryland. By guaranteeing hospitals’ revenue each year, the state’s unique rate-setting system encourages them to cut admissions with preventive care, policy authorities say.

But Hopkins, UMMC and their corporate parents, whose four main Baltimore hospitals together collect some $5 billion in revenue a year, have so far limited their community asthma prevention to small, often temporary efforts, often financed by somebody else’s money.

UMMC’s Breathmobile program, which visits Baltimore schools dispensing asthma treatment and education, depends on outside grants and could easily be expanded with the proper resources, said its medical director, Mary Bollinger. “The need is there, absolutely,” she said.

Hopkins runs Camp Superkids, a week-long, sleep-away summer session for children with asthma that costs participants $400, although it awards scholarships to low-income families. It’s also conducting yet another study — testing referral to follow-up care for emergency-room asthma patients, which Children’s National long ago showed was effective.

But no hospital has invested substantially in home remediation to eliminate triggers, a proven strategy supported by the HUD secretary and promoted by Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, a Baltimore nonprofit that works to reduce asthma and lead poisoning.

“We either go forward to do what has been empirically shown to work or we continue to bury our heads in the sand and kids will continue to go to the hospital instead of the classroom,” said Ruth Ann Norton, the nonprofit’s chief executive.

Hopkins and UMMC say they do plenty to earn their community benefit tax breaks.

“It’s always a challenge to say, ‘Where do we start first?’ ” said Dana Farrakhan, a senior vice president at UMMC whose duties include community health improvement.

Among other initiatives, UMMC takes credit for working with city officials to sharply reduce infant mortality by working with expectant mothers. The organization’s planned outpatient center will include health workers to help people reduce home asthma triggers, Farrakhan said.

“Living with people that got asthma — it’s really scary,” said Darlene Summerville, here with son Keyonta Parnell and daughter Ka-niya. (Doug Kapustin for Kaiser Health News)

Hopkins officials point to their health fairs and charity care as well as work in school and neighborhood clinics to help ­low-income families prevent asthma attacks.

“What we do is perhaps not sufficiently focused,” Brown of Hopkins said. At the same time, “we have to have revenue,” she said. “We’re a business.”

After months of waiting, Summerville considered herself lucky to get an appointment with the city health department’s asthma program.

One of its workers came to the house late last year, bearing mousetraps and mattress and pillow covers to control mites and other triggers. She helped force Summerville’s landlord to fix holes in the ceiling and floor.

She urged Summerville to stop smoking inside and gave medication lessons, which uncovered that Summerville had mixed up a preventive inhaler with the medicine used for Keyonta’s flaring symptoms.

“The asthma lady taught me what I needed to know to keep them healthy,” Summerville said of her family. That was late in 2016. Since then, Summerville said last month, she hadn’t needed an ambulance.

— Kaiser Health News

Methodology: Kaiser Health News and Capital News Service obtained data held by the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission on every hospital inpatient and emergency room case in the state from mid-2012 to mid-2016 — some 10 million cases. The anonymized data did not include identifying personal information.

The news organizations measured asthma costs by calculating total charges for cases in which asthma was the principal diagnosis. Maryland’s hospital rate-setting system ensures that such listed charges are very close to equaling the payments collected.

To determine asthma prevalence, reporters calculated the per capita rate of hospital visits with asthma as a principal diagnosis — a method frequently used by health departments and researchers. This may exaggerate asthma prevalence in low-income Zip codes because of those communities’ tendency to use hospital services at greater rates.

However, other data also point to high asthma rates in 21223 and other low-income Baltimore communities — for example, asthma prevalence among hospital patients in a given Zip code.

Three Little Words

Women often want to hear those three words and those would be Dirty Little Whore. 

And if you think this problem is exclusive to Baltimore, think again. Seattle has a cop who refused to investigate rape claims.  And another city jailed a rape victim.. that was in Houston not Qatar.

Yes I can see that these are dirty little whores…

Baltimore prosecutor on woman reporting rape: ‘Seems like a conniving little whore’
By Danielle Paquette The Washington Post August 11 2016

After a Baltimore woman reported her rape to police, the prosecutor on the case shared his thoughts with an officer. “I am not excited about charging it,” the unnamed official wrote in an email. “This victim seems like a conniving little whore.”

“Lmao!” the officer wrote back. “I feel the same.”

The Justice Department unearthed the exchange in a sprawling Aug. 10 report on the Baltimore Police Department, which found rampant discrimination against black residents, a tendency to use excessive force and a rash of illegal arrests.

Toward the end of the 167 pages was another bombshell: Officers frequently dismissed or mishandled sexual assault complaints. They often neglected to interview suspects or send DNA evidence to laboratories. Between 2010 and 2014, authorities tested rape kits in just 15 percent of adult-victim sexual assault cases.

The Justice Department concluded that “gender bias” had infected investigations. “In their interviews with women reporting sexual assault,” investigators wrote, “BPD officers ask women questions such as ‘Why are you messing up that guy’s life?’ ”

Meanwhile, just 17 percent of sexual assault reports in 2015 ended with an arrest. More than half of the reports made to the department languished as open cases.

“This data suggests that BPD is keeping the majority of its rape cases in an ‘open’ status, thus drastically reducing the rate of its rape cases closed as ‘unfounded,’ ” the authors wrote, “and creating the illusion of having made meaningful reforms to its procedures for identifying and classifying sexual assault.”

The DOJ investigation offers an extraordinary glimpse into a city police force’s inner workings. Investigators launched the probe after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained fatal injuries in the back of a police van.

But Baltimore’s isn’t the only force with race and gender problems. Last year, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced that she’d heard about similar unseemly behavior from officers and prosecutors nationwide.

Authorities sometimes make snap judgment about women who report sexual assaults, she said at a White House event, where the DOJ released updated guidelines on how police should investigate rape. Officers judge complainants for getting drunk or wearing short skirts. They aren’t familiar with trauma’s impact on the brain, which can make victims seem strangely calm or unable to remember attacks in detail.

“These assumptions,” Lynch said at the time, “can send the case into a spiral of ineffectiveness, and the victim back into a spiral of despair and pain.”

Sexual assault remains prevalent in the United States. Nearly 1 in 5 women have reported rape, according to the latest DOJ statistics.

The Associated Press reported last year that assailants also operate from within police departments: One-thousand officers lost their badges from 2009 to 2014 for sexual assault and misconduct, according to their report. (Nine states declined to release data, so the number is a conservative estimate.)

Carol Tracy, executive director of the women’s law project, said last year that race is an important part of the sexual assault conversation. “This gender bias is exacerbated when racial bias is added to it,” Tracy said at the DOJ event. “Where bias is explicit, and it is explicit throughout this country, it has to be rooted out. … Rape victims are profiled as liars, from campus to Cosby.”

Shanlon Wu, a former sex crimes prosecutor and partner at Wu, Grohovsky and Whipple in D.C., said all police departments should work to quash their acceptance of stereotypes. One baby step, he said: Officers should actively get to know people who don’t look like them. (Many police forces in the United Sttes are overwhelmingly white and male.)

“Police officers are just like the rest of us,” Wu said. “They can change biases through education and exposure.”

Days of Our Lives

The decline of the middle class has finally been confirmed.  Glad you made it, however quite late to the party, but  you made it.    The recently released Pew report finally confirmed what those of us who were once working class new for quite some time, we fall into the working poor.

As for the poor poor, an ever increasingly larger cohort as that includes many seniors and immigrants who are the outliers when it comes to noting their poverty.   As the safety nets of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Food Stamps, as well as some housing benefits, are actually counted as income.  Remember when income meant monies actually earned? And to some they actually believe that if they had less to none of those, those enrolled in said programs  would have more of the latter versus the former which somehow is a preventive to actually seeking and earning income.  Sure, okay I  can see that getting Granny to work is the key and those lazy raping immigrants or people who want to raise children and cannot afford child care are slackers that need a swift kick in the ass thanks to all that free shit they get!

The reality is that America is not just divided by the politics that represent them, they are divided by the poverty that marks them.

I wrote in Destiny by Birth that whom you are born to economically determines one’s life opportunities, which may explain the Bush family.  But in reality that has been a long line in genetic predetermination, from the DuPont’s to the Rockerfellers to the Dursts, the Astors, to the new lineages of Gates, Jobs and the Clintons.  They are the new wealth that came out of access and opportunity.   The Zuckerberg baby is another but one needs to recall that Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, not Pomona Community College and came from a well to do family already, so the doors were only half a push vs a shove.

Meritocracy like the Middle Class is an outlier.  And yet the dreams and aspirations of those with children still share a common bond – for them to do well.  But the reality of the intrinsic comes against the extrinsic factors that push against that same balloon trying to rise.

Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise

by Claire Cain Miller
The New York Time
DEC. 17, 2015

The lives of children from rich and poor American families look more different than they have in decades.

Well-off families are ruled by calendars, with children enrolled in ballet, soccer and after-school programs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey There are usually two parents, who spend a lot of time reading to children and worrying about their anxiety levels and hectic schedules.

In poor families, however, children tend to spend their time at home or with extended family, the survey found. They are more likely to grow up in neighborhoods that their parents say aren’t great for raising children, and their parents worry about them getting shot, beaten up or in trouble with the law.

The class differences in child rearing are growing, researchers say — a symptom of widening inequality with far-reaching consequences. Different upbringings set children on different paths and can deepen socioeconomic divisions, especially because education is strongly linked to earnings. Children grow up learning the skills to succeed in their socioeconomic stratum, but not necessarily others.

“Early childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s long-term social, emotional and cognitive development,” said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University. “And because those influence educational success and later earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow.”

The cycle continues: Poorer parents have less time and fewer resources to invest in their children, which can leave children less prepared for school and work, which leads to lower earnings.

American parents want similar things for their children, the Pew report and past research have found: for them to be healthy and happy, honest and ethical, caring and compassionate. There is no best parenting style or philosophy, researchers say, and across income groups, 92 percent of parents say they are doing a good job at raising their children.

Yet they are doing it quite differently.

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” They try to develop their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite institutions.

Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are taught to be compliant and deferential to adults.

There are benefits to both approaches. Working-class children are happier, more independent, whine less and are closer with family members, Ms. Lareau found. Higher-income children are more likely to declare boredom and expect their parents to solve their problems.

Yet later on, the more affluent children end up in college and en route to the middle class, while working-class children tend to struggle. Children from higher-income families are likely to have the skills to navigate bureaucracies and succeed in schools and workplaces, Ms. Lareau said.

“Do all parents want the most success for their children? Absolutely,” she said. “Do some strategies give children more advantages than others in institutions? Probably they do. Will parents be damaging children if they have one fewer organized activity? No, I really doubt it.”

Social scientists say the differences arise in part because low-income parents have less money to spend on music class or preschool, and less flexible schedules to take children to museums or attend school events.

Extracurricular activities epitomize the differences in child rearing in the Pew survey, which was of a nationally representative sample of 1,807 parents. Of families earning more than $75,000 a year, 84 percent say their children have participated in organized sports over the past year, 64 percent have done volunteer work and 62 percent have taken lessons in music, dance or art. Of families earning less than $30,000, 59 percent of children have done sports, 37 percent have volunteered and 41 percent have taken arts classes.

Especially in affluent families, children start young. Nearly half of high-earning, college-graduate parents enrolled their children in arts classes before they were 5, compared with one-fifth of low-income, less-educated parents.

Nonetheless, 20 percent of well-off parents say their children’s schedules are too hectic, compared with 8 percent of poorer parents.

Another example is reading aloud, which studies have shown gives children bigger vocabularies and better reading comprehension in school. Seventy-one percent of parents with a college degree say they do it every day, compared with 33 percent of those with a high school diploma or less, Pew found. White parents are more likely than others to read to their children daily, as are married parents.

Most affluent parents enroll their children in preschool or day care, while low-income parents are more likely to depend on family members.

Discipline techniques vary by education level: 8 percent of those with a postgraduate degree say they often spank their children, compared with 22 percent of those with a high school degree or less.

The survey also probed attitudes and anxieties. Interestingly, parents’ attitudes toward education do not seem to reflect their own educational background as much as a belief in the importance of education for upward mobility.

Most American parents say they are not concerned about their children’s grades as long as they work hard. But 50 percent of poor parents say it is extremely important to them that their children earn a college degree, compared with 39 percent of wealthier parents.

Less-educated parents, and poorer and black and Latino parents are more likely to believe that there is no such thing as too much involvement in a child’s education. Parents who are white, wealthy or college-educated say too much involvement can be bad.

Parental anxieties reflect their circumstances. High-earning parents are much more likely to say they live in a good neighborhood for raising children. While bullying is parents’ greatest concern over all, nearly half of low-income parents worry their child will get shot, compared with one-fifth of high-income parents. They are more worried about their children being depressed or anxious.

In the Pew survey, middle-class families earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year fell right between working-class and high-earning parents on issues like the quality of their neighborhood for raising children, participation in extracurricular activities and involvement in their children’s education.

Children were not always raised so differently. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is 30 percent to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than those born 25 years earlier, according to Mr. Reardon’s research.

People used to live near people of different income levels; neighborhoods are now more segregated by income. More than a quarter of children live in single-parent households — a historic high, according to Pew – and these children are three times as likely to live in poverty as those who live with married parents. Meanwhile, growing income inequality has coincided with the increasing importance of a college degree for earning a middle-class wage.

Yet there are recent signs that the gap could be starting to shrink. In the past decade, even as income inequality has grown, some of the socioeconomic differences in parenting, like reading to children and going to libraries, have narrowed, Mr. Reardon and others have found.

Public policies aimed at young children have helped, he said, including public preschool programs and reading initiatives. Addressing disparities in the earliest years, it seems, could reduce inequality in the next generation.

                    _____________________________________________________

This week Flint, Michigan has a state of emergency over the state of its drinking water.  It’s lead levels are at dangerous levels for public health.  The former home of Michael Moore the documentarian who 20 years ago noted the reality of their declining city as the automotive industry began to change its production lines and move jobs out of state and the country.

How ironic that the Executive in charge of the Ford Foundation wrote an editorial in the New York Times this week asking philanthropists and foundations to examine their giving practices. To that I say charity begins at home and we have a big house that needs restoration.

Below is the story of Freddie Gray and his community.  We often think of it as a matter of choice and that again the whole idea of “working harder” will resolve the problems that are stacked higher than any wall Donald Trump could possibly build.

I often think if I was born 20 years later I would end up in similar circumstances.  My parents were immigrants or children of them.  They were uneducated and they were working class, my father a longshoreman, my mother a retail clerk.  So when I am forced to sit through endless hours on white privilege surrounded by some who are immigrants, people of color and work in education I want to know who those people are and then I look to the district and their fake rainbow of executives and administrators who rarely set foot in the schools that mark this district and go “really?”

I want to point out that while we were never forcibly desegregated we finally faced the reality of the way the schools elected to do so in the Supreme Court ruling of 2007, 30 years after the crazed busing riots of the 70s.

The case Seattle Schools and Louisville KY schools at that point used race as a “tie breaker” when it came to enrollment.  At that point Seattle only had two races – white and black – in which to determine and validate enrollment data. Any other color was virtually ignored in a district filled with large portion of Samoan Americans and Native ones as well (and yes all the colors and ethnicities in between, I get it Seattle liberal scolds I get it more than you know).  What is my favorite is that when I tell people it was in conjunction with Louisville, Kentucky, the horrific stares of shock is hilarious as the people here in Seattle see themselves as in align with much more sophisticated provinces.  My ill educated former neighbor all Seattle school born and raised is an example when he trashed the South, I informed him that Seattle is not really much better according to the Supreme Court and since that our funding issues are akin to Louisiana and Oklahoma and their respective Supreme Court rulings on funding, so fuck you Seattle arrogant assholes.  We have always been the reverse Oreo, with vanilla wafers on the outside, milk chocolate inside. *note: milk not dark.

So today we have “International” Schools not the same as International Baccalaureate schools, STEM, E STEM and of course the AP schools and alternative or ALE’s as they are called as a way to integrate said schools.  But I spent a good hour last year talking to a Senior at a high school who was the last of the kids affected by this change.  The next two years that followed that decision was a year that led to schools being closed (my personal favorite the African American Academy by a Superintendent who was African American and later fired by the “racially” diverse board for incompetence)  the end of busing and the push for “neighborhood” schools.  And this young man’s memory of this was quite clear,  as one year he went to a middle school with black kids and then he didn’t.  His high school has a mixed group of kids but they are there for its arts program and of course sports.  This school is in every way an archetype of a school of another era – a regular school filled to the rim with kids who live in the hood and this hood is white and middle class.  And that school’s last scandal of rape and assault was that same year and has been literally free of scandal since, while the same style of school (heavy sports and AP courses) located in the “integrated”  district cannot say the same.

And that is what the school population reflects today. I travel the district and it shows in the classes, the curriculum, the test scores and the overall dynamic of a school.  As I pointed out last week a largely whiter school has few minorities and the reality is that these kids have challenges that allow them to stand out in more ways than one.  So if you think that they will perform academically or behaviorially the same, then you need to get your white privleged ass in there to see for yourself.   It explains why the two boys at the center of the masturbation video are both minority students of two respective racial groups.  And no it is not racist to point that out, it is a matter of fact and it is not to say their race is the reason but it is the simple fact that we have little to know about either boys families but we do know that being different is enough of a reason and we have little to know about what that feels like during a time in adolescent that feeling different is enough of a challenge.

Just throwing kids together is not enough to elminate racisim nor prevent income inequity, it again as I wrote a fact that begins at birth and can determine one’s track “professionally” by age 4.   And that is what you are until 18, a professional student,  who receives for free an opportunity to learn and go on with whatever professional pursuits you are enabled to with the degree you receive. But the catch is that that paper is worth about the same cost of printing ink and paper.  The reality for some the paper is just the hurdle to jump over; those with families, income and opportunity have little respect for that paper it is on to the next to them and for some it may be the only paper they or their family will ever receive.

So below I share the article about Freddie Gray and his life and in turn death.  It was as if it was predetermined.

And so goes the Days of Our Lives………

Why you should know what happened in Freddie Gray’s life — long before his death

By Janell Ross
The Washington Post
December 19 2015

The general statistical profile of the West Baltimore community where Freddie Grey grew up is something most people think they know, even if the details are not committed to memory.

Here is the truth: The abbreviated and not at all easy life of Freddie Gray was, to some extent, shaped by Gray’s choices. He was an American and an adult with at least some of the attendant free will that people assume comes with either status.

But it is also a life altered and quite likely distorted by the net effects of where and how the wealthy country into which he was born and its voters have decided to distribute its resources. Freddie Gray was an American failed more often by his country than served by it. And yet again this week, after a mistrial was declared in the first of six cases against police officers in whose custody Gray died, only the details of his death have become the subject of any real and sustained public discussion.

In this, an already heated presidential election cycle, there is much more about the life of Freddie Gray that is worthy of examination — real political issues. You see, Baltimore might be the biggest city in one of the nation’s wealthiest states. But for the people in many of its neighborhoods, those resources are most readily used in ways that a growing body of economists, sociologists and mental health experts now argue do far more harm than good.

Consider the following, which is culled from federal data, a deep dive into Gray’s path through the criminal justice system written by Buzz Feed’s Nicolas Medina Mora, the Baltimore Sun’s extensive reporting — including this helpful timeline — and multiple reports from The Washington Post.

In the area where Gray lived, data-finding efforts often group a trio of communities as one — Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park. Here, the unemployment rate averaged a stunning 51.8 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to a Justice Policy Institute report published in February. More than 30 percent of those who are fortunate enough to have jobs must travel 45 minutes or more to get to them. The median household income hovers just over $24,000 a year, and in 2012, there were roughly 19 deaths for every 1,000 people between the ages of 15 and 24.

A full 25 percent of children ages 10 to 17 have spent time in a juvenile facility. That’s a quarter of Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park children. That figure is also roughly equal to the share of kids in these communities who are likely to graduate from high school. And more than 7 percent of these same children have levels of lead in their blood — impulse-control and academic-ability-damaging lead — that meet or exceed the state standard for poisoning. Average life expectancy is 68.8 years. And the immediate area where Gray lived does not have a single grocery store or even a fast food restaurant.

Freddie Gray’s West Baltimore was and is the kind of community that those who have other options try to avoid, and those who must live there have to cope with the full knowledge that the odds are truly stacked against them and their children. And should they manage to move elsewhere, some of the same challenges would follow.

The homicide rate in the whole of Baltimore is the nation’s fifth-worst, behind only Detroit, New Orleans, Newark and St. Louis. As recently as 2013, 9.9 — yes, nearly 10 percent — of children born in Baltimore arrived too soon (before 37 weeks gestation), putting them at increased risk of a wide range of long-term health and social problems beginning with low birth weight, early death and academic difficulties. (The figures are even worse for black children in Baltimore and across the country, for reasons that researchers suspect have a lot to do with stress and the overall health of black women.)

 And even that 9.9 percent overall preterm birth rate in Baltimore represents a a marked improvement. In 2009, a full 16 percent of the city’s children were born premature, according to an Annie E. Casey Foundation analysis of federal data.

State prison costs in Baltimore alone approach $300 million each year. 

 When a pair of Harvard researchers examined what, if any, impact the actual place where a person lives, receives their education, etc., has on their long-term economic prospects, they ranked Baltimore at the bottom of their list. A 26-year-old man who spent his entire childhood in Baltimore earns about 28 percent less each year than he would if he had grown up in 100 other major cities, the study found.

In summation, Baltimore — and particularly Gray’s West Baltimore — is not an easy place for a poor and black child to grow up and get an education or a job.

Perhaps most telling of all, though, is this. Almost every disadvantage, challenge and public spending decision described in the paragraphs above had a direct and real effect on Gray’s short life. Arguably, they also had something to do with his death and the heated political debate about policing and Black Lives Matter in which the country is now engaged.

In 1989, Gray was born two months premature, one half of a boy-girl set of twins. Almost two decades later, Gray’s mother told lawyers collecting her testimony in a lead exposure civil lawsuit that, at the time her children were born, she could not read, had never attended high school and had begun using heroin in her early 20s (suggesting that she might have used drugs during her pregnancy). Gray and his sister spent the first few months of life in the hospital, so fragile and ill that one of the goals that doctors set for Gray before he could go home sounds almost elemental to infant life as suck, swallow or breathe: Gray had to gain five pounds.

That minimal milestone reached, Gray went home to a succession of West Baltimore apartments, most of them public housing, where both conditions and eligibility have an almost direct connection to public budgets and the politics of the moment. And in the public housing units where Gray lived, lead-infused paint was peeling from the walls and the windowsills with such intensity that before his 2nd birthday, Gray tested positive for concentrations of lead in his blood more than seven times the level that child health experts now believe can cause severe and permanent brain damage.

 If the magnitude of that misses you, consider what a lead expert told The Washington Post’s Terrence McCoy this year after learning about Gray’s childhood lead levels.“Jesus,” Dan Levy, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the effects of lead poisoning on youths, gasped when told of Gray’s levels. 

“The fact that Mr. Gray had these high levels of lead in all likelihood affected his ability to think and to self-regulate and profoundly affected his cognitive ability to process information.”Levy added, “And the real tragedy of lead is that the damage it does is irreparable.”

Then consider this: Lead paint exposure is a widespread national problem, concentrated most heavily in the nation’s low-income communities. And government efforts to remove lead paint from public and privately owned housing remains woefully below levels that most child and environmental health experts think truly necessary to eliminate the issue. In fact, the nation’s lead paint abatement programs are among those that experienced a budget cut due to sequestration and subsequent federal cost reduction efforts.

And that happened even though some public health experts believe that concerted national efforts to reduce widespread lead exposure — such as removing lead from gasoline — might be at least partially responsible for the precipitous drop in the nation’s crime rate over the past two decades.

Two decades ago, when Gray was entering a West Baltimore public school where many other children were, like him, born premature and then exposed to damaging levels of lead, it wasn’t long before Gray began to struggle. He and his sisters were diagnosed with attention deficit disorders and impulse control problems. School officials moved Gray into special education classrooms.

By the time he reached high school, Gray attended a West Baltimore institution where he had the opportunity to play football but never graduated. Still, had he been in better academic standing, his learning options still would have remained remarkably limited.

Today, Gray’s high school is what researchers at the University of California Los Angles have described as an “apartheid school,” where in 2011 — the most recent comprehensive federal data available — less than 1 percent of the student body is white and 98.7 percent black. Nearly half of the school’s teachers were absent from work more than 10 days during that same school year, nearly 20 percent were inexperienced and teaching for the first time, and just more than 79 percent of students came from families poor enough to receive free and reduced-price meals.

It’s a situation that, at the very least, suggests that significant resources might be needed to provide students with a solid education or prepare them for college. But during Gray’s tenure, the school did not offer even one Advanced Placement course (AP course are generally considered a college prep curriculum).

This has since changed, but much else has not.

By the time Gray reached his 18th birthday, he had been suspended several times from school and had a few run-ins with police outside of it. Then, as BuzzFeed reported, his first adult arrest for a non-violent drug crime actually occurred in almost the same spot as his final one.

Police officers who patrol West Baltimore deliver the arrest, chase and conviction stats that eventually form the basis of those tough-on-crime speeches that politicians (until quite recently, at least) clamored to make. And officers in this area had contact with Gray so often that, the Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post have reported, many officers knew Gray by name.

The arrests were followed by stints in jail that prompted Gray’s family and friends to do business repeatedly with bail bondsmen, enter into bail installment plans, payday loans and legal settlement buy-outs which made the network’s already uncertain financial situation even more difficult. And prosecutors, aware that charges will never stick, leave defendants unable to make bail in jail as a form of punishment. This too is a widespread problem — one that Justice Department officials have said is costing Americans their jobs and homes, and might be contributing to a cycle of crime. None of these practices are illegal, of course.

More often than not, in Gray’s cases, prosecutors later dropped those charges. You see, in a community where public funds are directed mostly toward a certain type of policing and making arrests, a large portion of those cases can’t stand up in court or produce the kind of evidence needed — especially when it comes to Baltimore juries that are increasingly unwilling to convict.

But Gray’s arrests generated enough of a record and a handful of convictions to make it difficult for him to find a paying job. During one of Gray’s longest stints in jail — two years — he picked up masonry skills. Later, he told friends that he wanted to put them to use. But a number of construction companies and building trades’ apprenticeship programs will not consider applicants with certain criminal convictions.

And it seems that Gray’s dependence on what are known around Baltimore as “lead checks” (civil lawsuit settlement payments) was something he’d come to accept as an essential part of his life. With the settlement funds, Gray — who an off-and-on girlfriend and several neighbors have described as fun-loving and known to sing off-key in public simply to make people laugh — could at least buy a constant supply of new clothes, something he liked.

In the years that followed, Gray was changed with a series of mostly minor crimes — an arrest in a nightclub parking lot, for instance, where Gray and two friends were found in a van smoking marijuana. A court eventually found Gray not guilty. In March, Gray was charged with his first violent crime, for  allegedly assaulting a family friend. Those charges were pending, along with a felony charge for possession of two oxycodone pills, when he died.

On the day of Gray’s last arrest on April 12, Gray ran from police. The officers who chased him down found no drugs on Gray, but said that his flight and his presence in a known open-air drug market gave them “probable cause” to make an arrest. Later, the officers found that Gray did have a knife.

But prosecutors have described Gray’s arrest as unlawful. The officers deny hitting or manhandling Gray in any way that might have caused his injuries — although cellphone video of Gray being put into a police van show that Gray’s body appears oddly limp. Prosecutors have argued that the injuries to Gray’s spinal cord which ultimately proved fatal happened inside the police transport van.

This is how Freddie Gray lived and died. And there is plenty about it that is very political and very much worthy of a bigger debate than we’re having.

Parity is not Equality

The symbol of justice is the scales. The idea that regardless all who enter are equal.  We know in reality that this is as accurate as a seesaw with a husky kid on one end and a ballerina on the other.

Equity is the quality of being fair or impartial; fairness; impartiality:  Equality is
the state or quality of being equal; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, or ability; Parity is
equality, as in amount, status, or character., equivalence; correspondence; similarity; analogy.

When you enter the justice system that idea of impartiality is non existent, the rules are stacked against you as you would not be here if you did not do anything, something wrong.  The idea that there is parity is that for those rich, educated and informed they have the option of hiring important representation that may or may not prevent the outcome that is equal regardless of the criminal. (or so we are to believe with mandatory minimums that removes that potential in-discrepancy) but in realty the fees and fines are overwhelming that another level of criminal charges and punishments are levied as this story in Tennessee demonstrates.

So no there is no equality, no parity no justice in our system.  And therefore no equity.

The only thing about Baltimore is that the Prosecutor and the Judge as well as many of the defendants are black, as was Mr. Gray,  so that is the only parity in evidence in this crime. As for the Jury well that is yet to be decided.  But the challenge will be one regardless of either side as this is Baltimore home of the Wire. A show that did nothing but illuminate the disparity of that city’s injustice.

  Another Baltimore Injustice
 By TODD OPPENHEIM
The New York Times
NOV. 28, 2015

 Baltimore — THE trials of the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who died after suffering a spinal injury in police custody, begin tomorrow. As a public defender here, I have watched the cases of the officers move through the Baltimore City Circuit Court.

 These cases are remarkable in that police officers were actually charged in Mr. Gray’s killing, unlike in other recent cases of police violence. But they are also notable in another, less laudable, way. The court has given extraordinary treatment to the accused officers, from their arrests up to their impending trials.

 But thousands of other defendants in Baltimore receive an inferior brand of justice. The exceptions started with the officers’ arrests. With the cooperation of the state’s attorney’s office and the police department, the officers were given the opportunity to turn themselves in. When my clients, who are poor and predominantly African-American men, are charged with serious offenses, they are snatched off the street.

 The officers also arranged a Friday afternoon surrender. That’s important because they were able to post their bail before seeing the judge on Monday.

Those who don’t have the benefit of this strategic luxury are often held in jail because they can’t get the money together in time. At $250,000 to $350,000, the officers’ bails were also disproportionately low, compared with most other cases. Almost any other defendant charged with homicide would have been held without bail.

 A protester charged with much less serious offenses, including disorderly conduct and malicious destruction of property during the unrest following Mr. Gray’s death, received a $500,000 bail. A client of mine, locked up for being near unruly protesters during the unrest, was saddled with a $250,000 bail. Those bails are completely inappropriate for such cases.

 After my client, unable to afford bond, sat in jail for a month, his case was dropped. Unattainable bails change lives. People lose jobs. Families break apart. Bail also affects the quality of legal representation, and being held in jail can make people plead guilty when they shouldn’t, just to get out. Not only are the Freddie Gray officers out on bail, but the court has also arranged for their cases to go to trial faster than nearly any other in the system.

The first trial will take place six months after the indictment.  This is unheard-of. I recently represented a client for a murder charge who sat in jail for over a year only to have his case dismissed. Few defendants in the overburdened Circuit Court have a guaranteed trial date, even those waiting in jail. But because the Freddie Gray officers have received preferential treatment, in that they have been specially assigned a judge, their court dates hold true.

They also have had the advantage of resolving crucial legal matters ahead of the trial, like evidentiary rulings, venue and jury sequestration. (The judge decided against the sequestration, but ruled that the jury would remain anonymous.) Most defendants are forced to argue pretrial motions on the day of trial. In another highly unusual move, the officers were excused from appearing for these pretrial motions, while lawyers argued in their defendants’ absence.

 This courtesy is not extended to the average defendant. In fact, a judge recently issued an arrest warrant for a client of mine who did not appear for his arraignment, a proceeding in Circuit Court that has become a mere formality. He had never been given notice of the hearing, but the judge would not excuse his absence. Is this case the most important Baltimore has seen in recent decades? Absolutely. Is it drawing tremendous media attention? Sure. But there are other cases on the docket involving other people’s lives.

Other accused individuals sit in jail eagerly awaiting their day in court. Because of increased “security measures,” the public has faced long lines and delays to get into the courthouses. On the officers’ trial dates, the court will be likely to reserve a large jury panel to choose from, while other defendants must compete for those left over. The irony is that a lack of fairness in the criminal justice system is part of what Baltimore’s unrest is about.

All cases affect our community, not just those featured on CNN. Either we should treat everyone like the officers (justly) or treat the officers like everyone else (unjustly). Everyone should be afforded the same protections offered to the Freddie Gray officers. All cases should proceed like theirs. But they don’

Hope with Pain

My Sunday evening is dedicated to watching Al Jazeera America. The first show was Fault Lines the story of how an 86 year old Utah woman is hooked on opioids. This was part of their series on the opioid wars and the rising problem that beings with legal pharmaceuticals and ends for many in death or addiction.

One woman profiled in this episode was addicted for over a dozen years with numerous increasing prescriptions to aid pain from a knee surgery done at the same time. Her pusher, whoops I mean Doctor, defended that decision and his work for/with Big Pharma taking payments for education. Conflict of interest not an issue for the Doctor, but the language of the reporter phrasing the questions was. Another Doctor committing a legal crime and denying that he is doing anything wrong yet he sits in his office and a less credentialed individual sits in a courtroom.

The earlier profile was about another woman whose prescriptions had led to several overdoses and inevitably death. I have long said that old bitches they would do whatever it takes to kill us off, this method seems easier than shooting us down in the streets.

There is currently lawsuit in California about this and others who are hooked not on phonics but opioids according to the briefs filed, top opioid drug makers targeted certain well-insured groups, like the elderly, in their marketing to doctors. And it claims that prominent pain management physicians were complicit in promoting misleading facts about the effects of these painkillers on seniors. Yes shooting us up versus shooting us is way more profitable.

Then we have the next show Saving Baltimore about the problems the community has with drugs and the resulting arrests, imprisonment and in turn lack of employment as a result has led Baltimore to a city that has a strong history but a future that is hard climbing. It is amazing to see such beautiful houses vacant and like Detroit one wonders what they could become with the ever increasing homeless who live in shelters or tents versus homes in America’s most dense cities. But to do so there would have to be jobs but I see little discussion on how that would be accomplished. Yet Baltimore wants to change that so perhaps there is hope. And watching the end of the episode it ended in one of my safe haven – the library. There is no better place in which to dream and hope.

And the last show is Freeway: Crack in the System. This is about the crack epidemic and its history on on the war on drugs; dirty cops, dealers and the CIA: the real story of crack cocaine in America features interviews with Freeway Rick Ross, a street hustler who became the King of Crack, and journalist Gary Webb, who broke the story of the CIA’s complicity in the drug war.

I have to believe and I have to hope it is all I have or I could just find a Doctor and he could get me high to wash away the pain

Swimmer Delight

I have not kept up with Mike Rowe since the shut down of the site Trades Hub so I was thrilled when I heard he was back on CNN in a new show called, “Somebody’s Got to Do It,” and in a swimsuit no less.

Given that Mike is from Balitmore it would be fitting he would go there at a time of great upheaval and in his own way provide a boost and a laugh which are all good when the shit hits the fan or the man hits the pool
.
Swimsuit-clad Mike Rowe revisits Baltimore for CNN show

“Somebody’s Gotta Do It” host Mike Rowe
With a new CNN show, Mike Rowe gets back to work

Mary Carole McCauley
May 4, 2015
Baltimore Sun

Baltimore’s image — badly tarnished in the past few weeks by the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray after his arrest by Baltimore police and the subsequent outbreak of violence — is about to get a much-needed boost of charm.

The Baltimore-born television host Mike Rowe is setting this week’s episode of his show, “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” in his hometown. The episode, titled “Highway Boulder Crew,” airs at 9 p.m. Thursday on CNN.

According to the show’s promo, “Mike tries his hand at water ballet, learns rock climbing and repelling in a day and raises a super-sized flag.”

During an interview last month with Sun television critic David Zurawik, Rowe said that during the episode, he participates in a water ballet with the performance art group Fluid Movement, and also spends time at Fort McHenry tagging along with Vince Vaise, whom Rowe describes as “the single most interesting park ranger in the world.”

The episode, he said, tells “the story of Fort McHenry, the Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key, all of it, in a traditional way and then through this wildly interpretive and possibly humiliating experience with me in a water ballet.”

We can’t wait.

Rowe was among a group of celebrities to participate in a Visit Baltimore TV tourism campaign.

The Wire

That was my introduction to Baltimore as likely it was for many people.

David Simon was a writer for the Baltimore Sun and based the series on his experience covering the city for the paper.

I have always appreciated Mr. Simon and want to personally thank him for reminding one that from serial style writing comes great stories, ask Dickens about that.

But also for bringing me Idiris Elba. Hey there were many talented actors and many of them actually came from the streets of Baltimore.

I have refrained from commenting on the City and its struggles as I don’t feel my voice lends anything to the stream. I find once again the best coverage is BBC as they have the appropriate distance to cover the story with a full lens which American journalists need to emulate. At times they contribute to the flames versus not.

But the interview with Mr. Simon in the Marshall Project I think resonates. I link it here and hope you read it. And if you have never seen the Wire, do so.