The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep.
Night embraces the silent half of the earth.
A vagrant, a destitute wanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road.
A homeless God, lost in the night, without papers, without identification,
without even a number, a frail expendable exile
lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world
and entrusts Himself to sleep.

These graphs were compiled by researchers at the Institute on Assets and Social Policy who followed a cohort of families from 1984 to 2007. The first shows the wealth gap over time broken out by white and black families. The second further breaks the data out by high-income and middle-income. Check them out:

The racial component is undeniable, but also in there is evidence of the beginning of a return to the types of wealth disparities we have not seen in this country since the turn-of-the-century robber barons and the era of unfettered free-market capitalism. During the 1940s and 1950s, our grandparents placed much needed controls on the ability of the wealthiest in this country to freely transfer wealth from the masses to themselves. Over the last three decades those controls have been slowly and deliberately dismantled by politicians who, while crying, “socialism is coming,” have been working in the interest of the wealthy. The results you can see for yourself, and it will only get worse… first for those who are already the most vulnerable in society, but also for all of us. Unless you’re in the top 10% you’re in this with us. We need to relearn what our grandparents knew and act on it, for the good of everyone.

h/t Megan Cottrell

These evil, illegal, undocumented farm workers have heard them, and their response is, literally, “Take our jobs.”  Fill out this online application form and an undocumented farm worker will provide you on-the-job training and then let you take her job. Fair warning: a great many of my migrant students had parents who worked these jobs. They’re not at all what one would call easy or high paying, even by minimum wage standards. Here is the brief job description printed below the application:

Job may include using hand tools such as knives, hoes, shovels, etc. Duties may include tilling the soil, transplanting, weeding, thinning, picking, cutting, sorting & packing of harvested produce. May set up & operate irrigation equip. Work is performed outside in all weather conditions (Summertime 90+ degree weather) & is physically demanding requiring workers to bend, stoop, lift & carry up to 50 lbs on a regular basis.

Perhaps I’m cynical, but I doubt that the people with the microphones, television shows, and radio shows will be rushing to fill out an application for one of these jobs anytime soon.

I noted in the comments section that the night of the town hall meeting,  in response to comments such as this by Rodney Beard of Living Word Community Church (where he claims the title of pastor):

We are trying to bring businesses and schools to Antioch. It’s Antioch together to unite around a common purpose… No more bringing anything to Antioch that is not positive! No more bringing anything to Antioch! The gates of Antioch’s charity are closed!

Jeannie Alexander felt compelled to say, “I know that you are good people, I do not doubt that….”

I do doubt that. We, all of us in this nation, are not good people. We worship at the alter of personal wealth and riches. We take what we want, from whomever we want, regardless of the consequences to others. How then do we call ourselves good?

h/t The Homeless Guy

All of these are myths:

#1 Domestic violence is just a momentaty lose of temper.

#2 Domestic violence only happens in poor families.

#3 Domestic violence is just an occasional slap or punch that isn’t serious.

#4 Head of households have the right to control the people they support.

#5 The victim can always walk away from the relationship.

#6 If the batterer is truly sorry and promises to return, the abuse is going to stop.

#7 If the violent episodes don’t happen very often the situation is not that serious.

#8 Victims have the types of personalities that seek out and encourage abuse.

#9 For it to be abuse the has to be an escalating pattern.

A full write-up on each of these is here.

The full list is in a post entitled Hey Foster Parents…5 Simple Things That you NEED to Remember and it’s worth the time to read through the entire thing. But here’s the one that caught me:

1) I am a child. No matter how much I yell, act-out, hit you, spit at you, destroy things, and tell you I hate you….I am a child and god knows, I have been hurt. Step back before you say something or do something you will regret. Be creative in your use of “punishment” and never hit us or devalue us. You see, that is exactly what we want you to do…to prove you are just another person we can’t trust.

How often we forget that, whether as foster parents, parents, teachers, whatever. Children are children… even when they’re seventeen. A good friend of mine who was a vice principal at an alternative high school once said that the reason why kids push so hard on you is because they have no one in their lives they can trust, and they want to see if you’re strong enough to be worthy of their trust. How often is the answer, no?

The quote echoes that idea. The children most easily thought of as the problem kids are the ones most in need of someone strong they can trust. Are we prepared to be that strong person for them, and if not, where do we get off calling ourselves adults?

TAPPER:  You’ve said we’re a nation of cowards because we don’t talk freely and openly about race.  So in that spirit, let me give it a shot.  Do you think the Arizona immigration law is racist?

HOLDER:  Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea.

Then a little later:

TAPPER:  Do you think it’s racist?

HOLDER:  I don’t think it’s racist in its motivation.

The full interview is here.

Let’s be clear, that entire law is about the tendency of large groups of brown-skinned men to stand in convenience store parking lots looking for work and speaking in Spanish. That and the fact that it makes middle-class, suburban whites feel uneasy to be exposed that closely to the “other”.

You’d think that Holder could at least admit it and then discuss what to do to about it. Let’s be honest and admit it’s about race. Then we could talk about it. Instead we waste words and digital ink talking around the issue and accomplishing nothing, other than continuing to regulate poor, Hispanic immigrant families to on-going poverty.

I’ll go so far as to say that the word racism as been given far too harsh a stigma. We are afraid to admit that people of other races make us feel uncomfortable. It is a demonstrable fact that our species has evolved a strong distrust of the other. If we refuse to admit this, we can never move beyond it. We just end up throwing around euphemisms like, “I want my country back.” We need to talk about racism, and we have to start doing it ourselves. The politicians will never do it for us.

My whole life I thought I was just born “bad” ~ a worthless piece of shit that needed to be fixed.  And in my belief, this was supported by the fact that no-one ever wanted me combined with all the abuse I suffered but never seemed to get “fixed”… And on some level I feel I deserved everything I ever got, including being stabbed by my bio-father.  And then I look at my life and what a failure I am and it seems to go hand-in-hand.

The entire post is worth reading. One question in particular struck me: “If I am screwed up because of trauma and not because its me, why the hell was it not addressed in foster care for all those years?”

That is an excellent question, and one that I have not seen raised in all the rants and raves that fill the Web about Child Protective Services and the foster care system. Way too much digital ink is spilled worrying about the rights of the parents in these discussions and very little on the children.

Given that abuse happens and children need to be removed from their biological parents, given that a return to state-run orphanages is not likely and that the model of foster parents is necessary, why have we not, as a matter of policy, incorporated solid training into foster care programs to enable foster parents to work with their kids and the trauma they have experienced.

Granted, we should not expect foster parents to be professional counselors, but even a little eduction and awareness is all that is required to help a foster parent respond not with, “You’re a horrible kid,” but rather with, “You just acted out destructively, and I understand the things that caused you to behave that way. Do you want to talk about it?” See the difference? We need to make this happen.

Arguing over the accuracy of racial profiling also obscures the deeper and more menacing moral problems with the practice. Arizona’s new law, for instance, will ostracize innocent Latinos, entrench racial suspicions, and lend the government’s endorsement to hostile stereotypes about who “looks American.” It will serve as a regular and painful reminder to Latino Americans that, in the eyes of many, they don’t belong in their own neighborhood. It will poison the interactions between citizens and the police who are supposed to protect them and whose salaries they pay. None of these concerns are undermined by the obvious fact that Latinos are more likely than others to be illegal immigrants.

Similarly, the problem with using racial profiling to catch terrorists isn’t simply that, as Michael Bloomberg once said, “terrorists come in all sizes and shapes and forms.” After all, nobody has seriously proposed screening only Arabs or Muslims. Rather, the question is whether officials should consider ethnicity as one factor in deciding whom to examine more or less closely. We should exclude race and religion from those judgments not because everybody is equally likely to be a threat, but because it would be wrong to institutionalize the alienating suspicion already faced by innocent Muslims and Arab-Americans in their schools, workplaces and communities.

Ben Eidelson

Robin Steinberg writes:

The simple truth is that when you are poor, caseworkers, prosecutors and judges are far less likely to defer to what, in a wealthy white neighborhood, would simply be described as a reasonable parenting decision. When you peel back the rhetoric, and peer past the politics, in the South Bronx, as in other poor communities, the bulk of family court cases are really about poverty.

In poor communities all over this country, children are removed from the custody of their parents swiftly in response to allegations of unpaid utility bills, a lack of food in the cupboards, poor school attendance, missed medical appointments, or even verbal arguments or untidy houses.

As with any government agency, CPS must remain open to critique and scrutiny. Problems within the CPS system must be continually identified and corrected. But the scope of the problem extends far beyond just CPS. To a larger degree it is more about the way we as a society view the poorest among us–the “welfare queens” and the “trailer park trash”–and about the way we as a society regularly fail to “do for the least of these brothers [and sisters].” All too often I read posts that lay the blame entirely at the doorstep of CPS. That’s not surprising as it is more comfortable to externalize a problem, especially if the finger can be pointed at a government agency. The problem however is with all of us. Until we can call the selfishness and self-centered greed that underlies our way of life in the country for what it is, these problems will continue, and we will continue to wring our hands over them while pretending to care.