and there was quite a comments thread either here or on Jill Dennison’s place, (I think it was a little in both places, and the link to Jill’s is not that thread) about resistance and community teaching. Here’s an example, right there in Florida. All the links within are pertinent and worth clicking to read.
Category: Children / Kids / Minors / Teens / Family
If Congress Passes Terrific Law For Kids In The Forest, Does Anybody Hear?
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
It’s bipartisan and it’s good and nobody fought over it. So the answer is ‘no.’ Read on Substack
Here to warm your heart a little bit is a fable about a magical land called the US Congress, where in the midst of last week’s huge stupid fight about whether to actually have a government anymore, and about whether unelected weirdo billionaires should be able to destroy said government, the Senate passed a little-noticed bill that will update American child welfare laws for the first time in 15 years and help out kids in foster care.
As Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up To Politics points out, there weren’t any big culture war provisions in the bill, and somehow the flaky billionaire with an online propaganda factory didn’t catch wind of it, so the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act passed and was signed into law without getting much attention at all. In fact, when Fleischer wrote about it over the weekend, he noted that “as far as I can tell, not a single other article has been written about this legislation by any news outlet, anywhere.”
Fleischer included a google link so people could check, and I did. Even after his post, nope, nothing much, apart from several social media posts linking to Fleisher, plus the expected press releases from members of Congress who helped pass the bill. The only exception we found was a Yahoo reprint of a brief story from Native News Online, based on a press release from the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), which advocated for the law because it
increases funding for tribal child welfare programs and courts, reduces administrative burdens, closes a gap in data collection for Native children and families who are in state child welfare systems, and requires the Department of Health and Human Services with the assistance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide needed technical assistance to states and tribal nations to improve implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
So there’s a second article, and now Yr Wonkette makes three. Maybe some bigger outlets should cover this, although that might run the risk of bringing it to the attention of some jerk who thinks kids in the system have it too easy and need to be working overnight shifts.
As Fleisher — who staunchly refuses to have a c in his name no matter how often I misspell it — points out, there are some excellent things in the bill beyond the increase of $75 million a year into the budget for “the federal program tasked with combatting child abuse/neglect and protecting children in the foster care system.”
Among other things, the bill allows states to pass on federal child welfare funds directly to families that have hit an economic rough patch, to “prevent children from being separated from parents solely on the basis of poverty-related circumstances” — instead of declaring the parents “neglectful” and taking their kids away.
Other measures in the law will
expand mental health services for children in foster care; ease the transition out of foster care by offering assistance to former foster children until they reach the age of 26; increase funding for the 2.5 million grandparents and relatives raising children who would otherwise go into foster care; create a new requirement that states consult with affected children and parents when crafting their child welfare policies; seek to improve the relationships between incarcerated parents and their children in foster care; and reduce the administrative burden of child welfare caseworkers by 15%, so they can focus more on children and less on paperwork.
That’s a hell of a lot of good that literally got zero mention in the mainstream press, mostly because the bill was written and passed without any drama or denunciations that it would promote witchcraft, turn children into communists, or force Americans to live under the tyranny of the Metric System. And that, Fleisher says, is a damn shame, because “coverage of the country’s legislative output should not be dictated by how much squabbling went into the passage of the bill.” A media focus on dysfunction might be entertaining, but leads to cynicism and to people never hearing about genuinely worthwhile, honest-to-Crom “bipartisan achievements like the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act.”
We think Fleisher is right, though we’d also add that it would sure help a hell of a lot if our politicians, especially those on one side of the aisle, would actually try to legislate instead of trying to get their scowling faces on Fox News. Oh dear, that wasn’t bipartisan of me at all.
(snip-comments on the page)
More cult of tRump maga hate, bigotry, and stupid. They specialize in it.
Listening to clips of Rev. Ed Trevors on this day as Ron and I are spending loving time in the kitchen cooking far more food than we alone can eat. It is the together time that is important. Best wishes to all. A good way to celebrate Christmas day don’t you think. Hugs
If you only watch one of these please watch this one. He talks about the cost of marginalizing those minorities who have less, giving hate to those groups that are different based on your own egos such as the LGBTQ+. He explains why that was never the plan Jesus had for those who claimed to be his followers. I do not share his belief in a deity, but I sure do endorse him message of inclusion and love. Oh and I am about to peel 9 hard boiled eggs so Ron can make deviled eggs which I love warm, he has the new chicken supreme sauce recipe in the oven along with a large ham, only there is no chicken in the chicken supreme. Instead it has lots of potatoes and large sliced mushrooms. We both love the gravy the sauce makes and so thought why not do it with other things. Hope your meals will be as grand as ours. I am so happy right now, the most happy I have been in two months. Hugs.
This is another important one about Christian nationalism and how seeking power ends up losing god. Love it. Hugs
The Cost To The Church For Going MAGA
I have not been posting my by Rev. Trevors. That is an error on my part. This is a video about why the church shouldn’t be bigots, shouldn’t be haters. It is about the distance such things cause in families and people. Hugs
Zombie Trash
Owen’s List: Finding a Way to Recycle Zombie Trash
What started as a father-son weekend project turned into Ridwell, which aims to keep hard-to-recycle items out of landfills.
(Courtesy Ridwell)
The innocent question that changed Ryan Metzger’s life came the summer his son turned six. That’s when Owen asked about the ever-expanding bag of old batteries in the junk drawer.
“What’s going to happen to them, Dad?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do with them? We’re learning about recycling in school. Where do these get recycled?”
“Um,” Metzger said. “I don’t know.”
He knew where to get batteries, of course. And there were always instructions on correctly using them. But instructions on what to do when they died? Not so much. That’s why he fell into the habit of stuffing dead batteries into a drawer filled with all the other small, disused stuff that the family wasn’t sure what to do with.
“It’s heavy, Dad.” Owen waved the bag of batteries around.
It was pretty full, Metzger had to admit. Detritus from flashlights and old toys, smoke alarms and remote controls, with a crusty one that came out of an old toothbrush, these batteries were one of many types of problematic garbage. They had no obvious final resting place, much like garden chemicals, old phones, light bulbs, car parts, cooking grease … a ton of stuff, really, now that Metzger thought about it. You weren’t supposed to put any of that in the recycling bin. But you couldn’t put it with the landfill-bound trash, either, although that’s what many people ended up doing out of desperation or not caring or habit — or assuming (incorrectly) it would all somehow get properly sorted out by this impenetrable, mysterious entity called the waste management system.
“There’s got to be a place for old batteries,” Metzger assured his son. “Let’s find out.”
It took three phone calls to find a business near their Seattle home that would take their old batteries and ensure that they were actually recycled instead of just dumped somewhere.
Father and son decided to drive to this battery recycler so that Owen could make the delivery. On impulse, they asked a few neighbors if they had stashes of old batteries, too. Several did, so Ryan and Owen took those as well.
Owen was so delighted by this accomplishment that he and his father decided to make a regular project out of hauling one different type of problem trash every weekend to the right recycler, offering to do the same for neighbors in their Queen Anne section of Seattle. So they started gathering bent clothes hangers one weekend, burned-out light bulbs the next, and then plastic bags, wraps, pouches, bubble wrap, and Styrofoam, none of which plays well with community recycling programs. Demand kept expanding block by block as word got around about his little father-and-son project. Soon he had to create a subscriber email group to track it all, with a message going out each week on what sort of trash would be picked up next and when to leave it outside for pickup. They dubbed this “Owen’s List.”
Around this time, grateful subscribers to Owen’s List who had long felt guilty about their secret trashiness started offering the duo money. A few suggested they charge for the service. “I’d gladly give up a couple lattes a month in exchange for you taking care of this,” one neighbor said. “I bet a lot of people would.”
Could that be true? Could their father-and-son hobby become a business that would let him leave his tech job behind and do something to help save the world? Seattle residents took pride in living in one of America’s greenest cities, but would they really pay extra every month to change their trashy habits and help Owen’s List patch a gaping hole in the waste and recycling system?
Metzger renamed the service Ridwell, to better explain its mission at a glance, and then set out to find out. (snip-MORE)
(whew!) “Biden Denies Trump The Joy Of Killing 37 People”
(I posted about this earlier, there is success, so I’m posting a funny-serious one about it. Sometimes we win when we step up. -A)
He commuted the death sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row prisoners.
One thing we know Trump was for sure looking forward to for his second term was getting to kill more federal death row prisoners. During the last months of his first term, he went on a full-on killing spree, with his administration carrying out 13 federal executions after a 17-year hiatus.
To put things into perspective, of the 13 prisoners executed prior to his administration, two of them were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Only 37 federal death row prisoners were executed between 1927 and 2019, so 13 in six months was quite the bloodbath.
Alas, his dreams have been dashed, for President Joe Biden has announced that he will commute the death sentences for nearly all of the prisoners on federal death row.
“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole,” Biden said in a statement released Monday morning.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” he continued. “But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
It’s unlikely that this was simply meant to bust Trump’s balls and make him sad — Biden had pledged to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example” in his 2020 campaign.
The three prisoners whose sentences will not be commuted are those who committed crimes related to terrorism and hate-motivated mass murders — Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine people and injured one in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 (his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a shootout with police after the attack); and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018.
The other prisoners were given their federal death sentences for far lesser crimes, like killing prison guards or drug trafficking-related murders.
It’s certainly nice to get this news after Biden’s 1,500 commutations of federal prisoners failed to include political prisoners like Leonard Peltier or Mumia Abu-Jamal and did include the kids-for-cash judge. It’s also nice to see, considering the fact that the DNC removed opposition to the death penalty from its platform after eight years of including it. Hopefully we can get back on that one, given the fervor with which Republican governors have pursued the executions of people who were almost definitely innocent in the last few years.
Anti-death penalty advocates, including Martin Luther King III, Sister Simone Campbell, Rev. Ralph McCloud, and exoneree Herman Lindsey made a video thanking President Biden for taking this step.
“President Biden has shown our country – and the rest of the world – that the brutal and inhumane policies of our past do not belong in our future,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU said in a statement. “By commuting 37 federal death row sentences, he has paved the way for other elected officials to build on his legacy of racial justice, humanity and morality by commuting state death rows and passing legislation to abolish capital punishment.”
“Biden has commuted almost all federal death row. This is indeed a good day to do the Lord’s work,” Sister Helen Prejean wrote on Bluesky. I’m thankful to so many religious leaders and justice advocates who helped make this possible. I pray for victims’ families, knowing that wishing for death is not a healing course.”
Personally, as horrible as their crimes were, and as hard of a decision as it would have been, I still think he should have commuted the sentences of all of the prisoners, simply because — to quote a bumper sticker — I don’t believe we should kill people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong. Also there is evidence that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was unduly influenced by his brother and also afraid he might kill him if he didn’t go along with his plan, and that the jury was biased against him. (Which would be entirely understandable given that they were all from the Boston area, but also technically unfair.) Family members of those who were killed in the Charleston church shooting have said for years that they don’t want Roof executed, and as loathsome as he is, that ought to be taken into consideration. Two of the families who lost loved ones in the Tree of Life shooting, and the rabbi who was shot himself also asked for Bowers to get a life sentence, due to their opposition to the death penalty. One of the many injustices of the death penalty is that it puts those who oppose it in the position, occasionally, of having to ask for leniency for those who hurt them or have killed their loved ones.
But, you know, optics.
In any case, this is a great day for those of us who oppose the death penalty, and for all Americans who may not oppose it but still do not deserve to be hardened by its application.
Touching, timely, poignant-
Christmas on the Border, 1929 Alberto Ríos, 1952 –
Based on local newspaper reports
and recollections from the time.
1929, the early days of the Great Depression.
The desert air was biting, but the spirit of the season was alive.
Despite hard times, the town of Nogales, Arizona, determined
They would host a grand Christmas party
For the children in the area—a celebration that would defy
The gloom of the year, the headlines in the paper, and winter itself.
In the heart of town, a towering Christmas tree stood,
A pine in the desert.
Its branches, they promised, would be adorned
With over 3,000 gifts. 3,000.
The thought at first was to illuminate the tree like at home,
With candles, but it was already a little dry.
Needles were beginning to contemplate jumping.
A finger along a branch made them all fall off.
People brought candles anyway. The church sent over
Some used ones, too. The grocery store sent
Some paper bags, which settled things.
Everyone knew what to do.
They filled the bags with sand from the fire station,
Put the candles in them, making a big pool of lighted luminarias.
From a distance the tree was floating in a lake of light—
Fire so normally a terror in the desert, but here so close to miracle.
For the tree itself, people brought garlands from home, garlands
Made of everything, walnuts and small gourds and flowers,
Chilies, too—the chilies themselves looking
A little like flames.
The townspeople strung them all over the beast—
It kept getting bigger, after all, with each new addition,
This curious donkey whose burden was joy.
At the end, the final touch was tinsel, tinsel everywhere, more tinsel.
Children from nearby communities were invited, and so were those
From across the border, in Nogales, Sonora, a stone’s throw away.
But there was a problem. The border.
As the festive day approached, it became painfully clear—
The children in Nogales, Sonora, would not be able to cross over.
They were, quite literally, on the wrong side of Christmas.
Determined to find a solution, the people of Nogales, Arizona,
Collaborated with Mexican authorities on the other side.
In a gesture as generous as it was bold, as happy as it was cold:
On Christmas Eve, 1929,
For a few transcendent hours,
The border moved.
Officials shifted it north, past city hall, in this way bringing
The Christmas tree within reach of children from both towns.
On Christmas Day, thousands of children—
American and Mexican, Indigenous and orphaned—
Gathered around the tree, hands outstretched,
Eyes wide, with shouting and singing both.
Gifts were passed out, candy canes were licked,
And for one day, there was no border.
When the last present had been handed out,
When the last child returned home,
The border resumed its usual place,
Separating the two towns once again.
For those few hours, however, the line in the sand disappeared.
The only thing that mattered was Christmas.
Newspapers reported no incidents that day, nothing beyond
The running of children, their pockets stuffed with candy and toys,
Milling people on both sides,
The music of so many peppermint candies being unwrapped.
On that chilly December day, the people of Nogales
Gathered and did what seemed impossible:
However quietly regarding the outside world,
They simply redrew the border.
In doing so, they brought a little more warmth to the desert winter.
On the border, on this day, they had a problem and they solved it.
Copyright © 2024 by Alberto Ríos. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 22, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
Peace & Justice History for 12/22
| December 22, 1944 African-American women during World War II had difficulty volunteering to serve in the war effort. Negro enlistment in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) was limited to 10% of enlistees (reflecting the black proportion of the U.S. population and known as “ten-percenters”). Only the officers were trained in integrated units but all served in racially segregated units, and lived and ate in “colored only” facilities. During the war, 6,520 black women served as WACs.Black women were completely banned from the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) until the last year of the war. Through the efforts of Director Mildred McAfee and Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, Secretary of the Navy (and later the first Secretary of Defense) James Forrestal pushed through their admittance. The first two black WAVES officers, Lieutenant Harriet Ida Pikens and Ensign Frances Wills, were sworn in this day. Of 80,000 WAVES, only 72 black women served.  |
| December 22, 1969 The original Radio Free Alcatraz, a pirate radio station, broadcasted for the first time through Berkeley, California’s Pacifica radio station, KPFA. The voice of Alcatraz was Johnny Trudell, an ally of the American Indians who had occupied Alcatraz Island, the site of the former prison in San Francisco Bay.  John Trudell speaks with news media representatives regarding negotiations with the federal government for title to Alcatraz Island. Trudell, known as “the voice of Alcatraz: Listen and learn more |
| December 22, 1993 Operation “Toys for Guns” was begun in New York City through the efforts (and $10,000) of I.M. Rainmaker, CEO of an electronics company. Conceived in cooperation with local police concerned about crime fed by too many guns and the glorification of violence, the program offered a $100 voucher redeemable at Toys ‘R’ Us for a firearm turned in to the police. How it happened |
| December 22, 1997 Paramilitaries associated with the ruling PRI party in Mexico massacred 45 peasants in the village of Acteal in the state of Chiapas. The federal government then occupied the territory with over 70,000 troops and expelled the humanitarian observers who were stationed in the area to monitor the treatment of the indigenous people who lived there. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december22
Scottie's Playtime 