Body Parts

Hispanization Has Brought Social Chaos to Southern California

We have friends going through a family crisis that reflects the social chaos created by the rapid Hispanization of our region in the past several decades. They are a Guatemalan family living in  Moreno Valley. Their teenage children, born here, are caught up in the vicious gang warfare that afflicts schools and social life wherever young people congregate. Gangs disrupt the schools. Teachers are numb from constant conflict inside and outside the classroom and have difficulty fending off cynicism. In the malls and movie theaters, gang clashes are common. Shopping centers and theaters must hire armed private, security guards and impose evening curfews on minors to make their stores and restaurants safe for patrons. Territorial warfare between gangs rage throughout nights, with tagging, over-tagging\*, car window smashing, drive-by shooting, and other acts of vandalism marking boundaries. The struggle between Hispanic gangs and Black gangs, as Hispanic gangs try to cleanse neighborhoods, is as violent as sectarian warfare in the Middle East. The murder rate is so high that police refer to Moreno Valley as "Murder Valley". Our friends do not allow their children to play outside the house. Family crises are the norm, not the exception.

The family disorder that exists among the labor and rural classes in Mexico and central America has been brought to Southern California by immigrants. Here, stresses on family cohesion are exacerbated by the difficulties of assimilation and employment. Family dissolution, out of wedlock pregnancy, female-headed households living in poverty and welfare, and drug abuse are endemic. Legions of single men, working at casual labor, live in shacks, seek employment by harassing customers at Home Depot and entertain themselves on the streets by harassing women. Alcoholism is pervasive and inflicts its deadly consequences on everybody on the roads, because Hispanic men assume it is their right to drive when drunk. Residential streets are flooded with intoxicated drivers. Few persons can testify they have never had near-death collisions with drunk Hispanic drivers. All these swirling forces of social disintegration have penetrated into our friends' family.

Their bright, sixteen-year-old daughter, who is beautiful, adding to her woes, cannot find the ground in her life. Her dreams of becoming a veterinarian are under assault, because the schools are under assault. She cannot study and cannot get adequate academic counseling. Her family cannot afford to sell their Moreno Valley home to live in a better neighborhood. Other family problems have driven her to act out. In her vulnerable condition, a nineteen-year-old man, who is a drug addict and lives on the street, has taken advantage of her. She befriended him. Her attraction to him has divided her family, who see the young man as a threat to their dream of a better future for their children.

The family asked us to help them in anyway we could, and so we do. If we cannot help the family resolve the situation in the Moreno Valley, the daughter may come to live with us. She would be able to finish high school in Riverside. We could shelter her from the social storm now battering her family, at least until her family is in a better position to do so itself. We hope this step is not necessary; she would be removed from her close girl friends, whose comradeship has been an important support. She is not yet a victim of the social chaos into which Southern California has plunged. She struggles bravely like a swimmer trying not to drown; but the social forces pulling against her are very powerful.

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* Update. June 2, 2007. Tagging and over-tagging, as well as murders, provide a measure of the gang problem in the Moreno Valley. The City of Moreno Valley employs three full-time maintenance workers to clean and paint graffiti. Graffiti markings are removed within 24 hours of being reported. Someone in the crew is working 24/7. In the first five months of this year, 2007, the city had 3,346 calls reporting graffiti and the workers removed 10,521 graffiti paintings. Realize that graffiti is one end of the gang problem, at which young boys (usually boys) are recruited, that ends up in murders over territory, drugs, and sex at the other end. (Dan Lee, "Team zeroes in on graffiti", The Press-Enterprise [Riverside], Sunday, June 3, 2007, B1.)

Update. June 13, 2007. The Press-Enterprise reports that, as of May 17, 2007, there were 11,877 documented gang members in 474 documented gangs in Riverside County, California. (Douglas Quan, "Injunction would ban gang activities," The Press-Enterprise [Riverside, California], Wednesday, June 13, 2007, B7.)

Update. June 27, 2007. I must be onto something, if a Harvard professor's research proves it.

Going to the Doctor When I'm not Sick

During a stretch of my childhood, my family suffered a variety of misfortunes that affected how we dealt with doctors and dentists. In the 1940s and 1940s, my father carried only major medical insurance and no dental insurance, so visits to doctors and dentists were fee for service--cash out of pocket. For ten years or so, we had no cash. We received food for the poor. Eventually, my parents lost their home to a tax sale. In these circumstances, none of us went to the doctor or dentist except in an emergency or as required by school or an insurance policy or otherwise under duress.

My parents let me know that it was my job to keep myself out of trouble--out of sickness and free of accidents. When one of us needed medical care, everyone sacrificed something to pay for it. I resisted going to a doctor except when I was well. My resistance was not the usual reluctance of a child to face needles and pills the doctor might prescribe. If I went to a doctor and returned home with a "clean bill of health"--a phrase filled with double meaning--then I was rewarded by not being subjected to financial grumbling. Alas, I was a sick child, suffering epilepsy, allergies, and asthma as chronic conditions, in addition to the usual run of childhood illnesses. I did manage, however, to avoid serious accidents. Because I was epileptic, I cautiously restricted my athletic play that might have created injuries (perhaps I should say, my athletic play was carefully restricted by my parents for me). I thought it was better to be sick and not see a doctor than to endure the woe of disapproval that I would receive from my parents when I returned home with a doctor's bill.

I have never been able to outgrow my childhood attitude about going to the doctor and dentist, even though I have been in an HMO paid for by my employer for most of my adulthood and have spent a large amount of time at clinics and in doctors' offices to treat my chronic conditions of allergies and asthma and illness that resulted from my weakened immune system (fortunately, I outgrew my childhood epilepsy in my middle teens). The vast resources of specialists, tests, and treatments that would reassure most persons today have always generated anxiety in me, even as I availed myself of them frequently. For each visit--at the moment I am waiting to go to the dentist--I struggle with the self-defeating attitude that I shouldn't go to the doctor or dentist unless I am well. I begin each consultation with an apology.

Hemet VFW Honors Hemet High Schools Iraq War Dead

Hemet High School has lost more of its graduates to military death in Iraq than any other high school in the nation. To honor them, the local VFW has changed its name to the Hemet High Veterans Memorial Post. Riverside's Press-Enterprise has the story of this deeply affecting memorialization, and other stories about losses in Iraq.

More Deadly Missile Attacks Against Israel

Hamas and Fatah are now using longer range, more powerful missiles against Israel. The first hit Sderot yesterday. Israel needs to reoccupy Gaza and remove the population, every person, from the strip of land, moving them to Egypt or elsewhere.

The Virginia Tech Massacre, Self-Defense, and Civil Defense

Riverside's Press-Enterprise asked inland youths the question, "what lesson, if any, should people take from the recent Viriginia Tech shootings?" The newspaper printed seven replies (The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, California, May 27, 2007, Perspective [op-ed section] D4). Andrew Salter, 21, a student at the University of Redlands, urged caution, not to jump to conclusions based on ideological creeds. Patrick Sweeney, 18, a student at UC Riverside, stated that "we" (society?) should no longer ignore the "problems of loneliness, social isolation and social cruelty that plague our society." How we treat people effects how they treat us. Rebecca Vineyard, 17, of Romona High School, warns that there are dangerous people and we need to make sure they get counselling. Kaitlin Barr, 18, of Hemet, who will enter Point Loma Nazarene University in the fall, sees the massacres as the result of human freedom to choose. Because we can choose, evil can happen; but we cannot get rid of evil without getting rid of freedom. Alex Iteen, 17, attending Corona High School, sees the massacre as evidence of the need for gun control. Anna Dewey, 17, a student at Corona High, also, believes that we need to give compassion and assistance, without suspicion, to persons who need help. Sarah Mojarro, of Chaparral High School in Temecula, thinks that administrators need to take the possibility of violence seriously.

None of the students suggested that everyone needs to be prepared to defend themselves against violence and perhaps training and preparation to do so would be a good idea. Certainly, they believe that someone should defend them. I'm willing to wager that if these students were asked whether their parents should defend them (their children) against a gun slinging intruder in their homes, the students would quickly say, yes, parents should do that. If we asked the students whether, hiking with friends, they should protect their friends from an attack of a mountain lion, they would say, yes, they would do all they could. If we ask whether, alone at the beach when a bully starts to push them around, they should protect themselves, they certainly would say, yes, they would. If we asked whether, if they had children, they would protect their children, surely they would say yes. Nonetheless, they did not think to suggest they should protect themselves.

Why did it not occur to the students that preparation or training for and exertion of individual and group self-defense in the face of murderous attack is an appropriate tactic, and the necessity for it an appropriate lesson to be drawn from the Virginia Tech murders? It occurred to others. Almost immediately after the massacre, conservative bloggers asked why students weren't defending themselves. The quick--and probably accurate--answer to this question of the student's passivity is that schools are authoritarian institutions in which students are regulated and administered, so they naturally expect the institution to be their first line of protection. The nation witnessed, during the Katrina emergency in New Orleans, the lesson that dependency on government reduces self-reliance. Thousands of the city's citizens were trapped, when means of self-evacuation were at hand. Helplessness is the by-product of dependency in the welfare state and in the administrative state.

I think that the remedy has to be massive citizen training in civil defense programs. To suggest that the nation's citizenry needs to be trained and prepared to deal with emergencies--whether floods or mass murder or terrorism--seems to ask for the impossible. How could 300 million people be trained and prepared for an emergency that might require three days separation from private stores and services and governmental support? Wouldn't such a plan require a massive governmental program of the sort that conservatives, like me, don't want?

There are alternatives. Millions of young people have been trained by the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts in outdoor activities. Summer camps train another million more. It would be possible to require national training as part of a civil defense program, set standards, and then let contractor organizations conduct the training.

To all experts' judgment, the nation faces more terror attacks here at home, as well as overseas. We might find terrorists, as in Russia, taking over a school and killing children, or seizing a synagogue or church and murdering its worshippers, or releasing chlorine gas in a subway, or blowing up office building with explosives made from fertilizers, or releasing smallpox by mail into a dozen cities. We might face hundreds or thousands of deaths and injuries. Then there is the great threat of nuclear attack. In any situation, citizens might be required to grapple with the terrorists themselves, or to organize rescue, or to evacuate a region, or to sacrifice a few of themselves to save the greater number of victims. Without training, we have seen, they will be unlikely to accomplish any of these necessary actions.

The nation needs a civil defense program, in which everyone should participate. There would likely be collateral benefits. Such a program would meet the same needs of getting everyone to contribute to the war on terrorism and building moral fortification that reinstituting the military draft would accomplish, which liberals so frequently demand and the Department of Defense does not want. Americans as individual citizens need to have greater self-reliance and civil defense training is the better way to accomplish it.

Israel Takes Hamas Leaders Into Custody

Capturing enemy leaders is wrong why? Yeh, some were elected. Would it have been wrong in World War II to take Hitler and other Nazi party/government officials into custody? Hitler was elected, too. Certainly not wrong; just not enough. Execute them. The killing of Jews will stop only when Jews kill enough of their enemy; that's how wars end.

December 7, 1941: Eleanor Roosevelt Appeals to Women

After a surprise attack, the country faces a long war. Eleanor Roosevelt appeals to women to have the courage to go about the routine of ordinary life and to support homeside morale whenever they have the opportunity. Her words are worth hearing today. (From the Stanford University Sound Archive.)

Dishwasher's Ennui

In creative projects, I focus my mind like a laser, drawing together my mental powers for a project. My mind is taken over with the new project as a complete world in itself. I live in it. I can hold the beam together and on target for hours. Often I work until late at night, unaware of the passage of time. Meanwhile, the rest of the world in which I live, the real world, rattles against my brain's door like a sand storm, demanding attention. I stumble out of containment, grapple without interest and ineffectively with practical tasks. Confronted with a small lot of dishes that need to be washed, I spent ten minutes reorganizing the placement of plates, bowls, glasses, plastic cutting boards, and dinnerware in the machine. Because I did not have any cooking pots to wash, one quadrant of the lower rack, where I normally arrange pots, was empty. The emptiness seemed like a problem to me. So I placed different plates and bowls in their unusual sector, until satisfied that one particular arrangement, a bowl tilted against rack pins, rather than setting straight up, would best utilize the washing power of the spray arms. I thought, now the dish washing machine won't be bored.

Clearly, I need to return to my projects. I decided to learn how to make videos, which I have never done--yes, I know, I'm way late and past time to do something every person under 35 has done for fifteen years. I have been making brief movies to teach myself to use the video function of my digital snapshot camera and the Windows movie maker software that came with my laptop.

You are invited to view the results at my creative project blog, "Skin and Bones".

More Evidence of Effect of Sunspot Activity on Global Warming

Here.

Is Carter Anti-Semitic?

Former president Jimmy Carter's lack of support for Israel has multiple sources that commentators and critics have identified, such as his experience in assisting the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and Saudi support for the Carter Center in Georgia. Several religious observers note another source that I, at least, did not suspect. Carter appears to believe in replacement theology (1, 2, 3). That is, Carter appears to believe that the covenant between God and the Jews is broken and replaced by a new covenant with Christians, therefore nullifying any religious necessity to support Israel as the Jewish state. That he should believe such fanatical fantasy is, in a word, anti-semitic, just as anti-semitism is the basis for the fantasy in the first place.