--- "Charles A. Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
>
> I now think, I was headed for juvenal hall which is
> the temporary
> holding facility for the CYA system, exactly because
> the cops
> had no place else at 2:00am in the morning to put
> me. What else could
> they do with me? The only other alternative would
> have been to take me
> to their local station and put me in their holding
> cells, i.e. the
> drunk tank.
>
> This happens hundreds of times a day all over the
> country. What is
> especially outrageous is when an adult is badly
> injured or is sick and
> taken to the hospital ER. If they have children and
> they are the only
> legal guardian, the kids are going into the CYA
> system while social
> services, foster care, family court and whoever else
> processes them.
>
[WS:] As I sain, it is a terrible thing, but what is an alternative? What are you going to do with kids that are practcially abandoned by their parents? Leave them to their own devices? What are you going to do with kids who were functionally abandoned the day they were born and raised by the streets?
The Baltimore Sun had a story a few weeks ago about a kid that just disappeared - dusfunctional parents either on drugs or in jail, the kid was taken care by a distant relative (which BTW is the current standard practice in social services - trying to place the kid with blood relative before forster care is considered). The relative at ceratin point decided that she was unable to take care of the kid and simply left him on the steps of a social service agency (or so she claimed)- and the kid vanished in the thin air. Just disappeared without a trace - not even the body has been found, if there is the body.
So what is the alternative to the current system of social services, and for thar matter criminal justice system? What are they supposed to do with the level of dysfuction in this society? Fucked when they do, fucked when they don't.
Typically of the US style populism, people get incesed when an institution screws up from time to time, but they remain silent when the holy cow of the "natural family" is totally FUBAR. But the fact of the matter is that for certain segments of the population things are pretty much FUBAR whether something is being done about it or nothing at all. Put them in the system, the bleeding harts will cry abuse. Leave them alone, the streets, the gangs and durg dealers will "take care" of them and the bleeding hearts will cry neglect.
Blaming institutions seems to be the favorite blood sport in the US, and I am well aware that my skepticism of this practice is almost blasphemous in this culture. However, I simply don't see any alternative at least in the short term. There is very little that can be done to undo the dysfunctinality deeply ingrained in this society. Even in the best possible world, it will take two or three generations to undo the deeply entrneched culture of violence and poverty and dysfunctional adaptations it produced.
And in the meanwhile, one will have to deal with the short term consequences of that dysfunctionality about which very little can be done, at least in a democratic society. One can curse and complain about it, which gives one a delusion of doing something, one stand back and watch, and cry, and be overwhelmed by helplessness, or one can turn his back, go about his business trying to forget. Either way, it will make no difference.
PS. I attached an excerpt from Kafka, _The Trial_ that exquisitely protrays this sense of futility. Enjoy!
Wojtek
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/beforethelaw.htm
Franz Kafka Before the Law
Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests.
The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”
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