Last night I read the transcript of the presidential debate.  As a creative writing project, I thought it was poorly done and some of the ideas were lacking in originality.  I might have missed some of the lack of logical thinking if I hadn’t been hit over the head with magical thinking on Sunday. 
 
Sunday, someone commented that they believed the legal behaviors of a minority group were the reason we have terrorism in this country.  My acquaintance talked about when group A’s rights were talked about and when Group A’s rights were secured by law is when terrorism started in this country.  The connection was spurious if it exists at all. 
 
Let’s be clear, any time you ascribe causation for a major event to a person who is impoverished, has no voice, is physically weak, or young, or powerless you are making an inappropriate role reversal.
 
Asking a young child to take on the role of a parent, is an inappropriate role reversal.  Blaming impoverished immigrants for taking American jobs is an inappropriate role reversal and logically impossible.  But they are working in factories, you say.  Illegal immigrants work in factories because the person with power hired them in order to avoid paying a livable wage, benefits, and social security taxes.  The employers have the power to choose to hire legal immigrants or residents.  Corporate American has the power to insist that the government write immigration policies that will allow them to fill their factories with legal workers.  They write enough policy about how they will be taxed, how they will dispose of toxins, and how their product will be protected from legal liability issues.  The employers have the power. They have the choice.  They are the source of the problem, not the guy who wades the Rio Grande and certainly not the woman on a bus with forged papers who thinks she’s taken the proper steps to enter this country.
 
It is always the person with the most power who is responsible for a problem.  It is always the people with the most money who cause social injustice.  The rapist is the guilty party in a rape case-not the victim.  The child-molester is the guilty party in a child rape case.  We just had a case where a middle-aged man accused a four year old child of seducing him – inappropriate role reversal. 
 
Believe me, adolescent boys who masturbate while fantasizing about another male are not the reason we have terrorism.  We have terrorism because the power elite has created economic injustice in other parts of the world.  We have terrorism because the global power elite has bombed the crap out of the homes of innocent people.  We have terrorism because our own power elite allows it, and abets it.  We have terrorism because of the direct actions and policies of the powerful.
 
Those who fall in love with someone with the same reproductive equipment they have, don’t have the power to cause terrorism.  The woman who made a bad choice looking for love and is now seeking an abortion doesn’t have the power to create terrorism.  Impoverished black boys on their way home from the store don’t have the power to create terrorism.  Men who feel better about themselves when dressed like women don’t create terrorism.  Only the wealthy and powerful have the power to create terrorism.
 
The only groups rich enough and powerful enough to hurt others so bad they overcome inertia and strike back are the insanely rich corporate class looking to exploit the weak and steal their resources.  The insanely powerful military industrial complex creates terrorism through lies and lobbying in order to sell more bombs, airplanes, and weaponry.  If you want to know who creates a problem, look for the person with the power.  Look for the person making money off of the problem. 
 
At the end of the day, those who blame the weak, impoverished and vulnerable for the great ills of our time are liars.  Never follow the liars for they will turn on you and you will be their next victim.
 

A New Release by Maggie Tideswell

 

We live an hour’s drive north of the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually Wildlife Refuge and have visited the site several times.  However, one of the dikes that prevented the area from flooding at high tide was breached to expand the salt marsh and make the refuge habitat more varied and natural.   We hadn’t visited since the outer portion was flooded.
 
Hubby decided he wanted to go to see the changes.  I agreed, thinking I could photograph birds for my blog.  Hubby researched the best time to visit and learned wildlife viewing is best for two hours after high tide and two hours before sunset.  He looked up the tides and time of sunset and found a time where high tide happened three hours before sunset.  We had a prime wildlife-viewing window.  We packed our cameras and caught the appropriate ferry arriving exactly as we had planned an hour after high tide and two hours before sunset. 
 
The whole experiment looked promising when we quickly encountered a hawk on a branch.  The hawk was easy enough to spot.  Five photographers stood under his tree snapping pictures.  The hawk was the last bird we saw for the next mile of our walk.  We saw lots of photographers who apparently had also researched high tide and sunset.  We saw some lovers.  I felt comforted to know the human race will continue, but birds were scarce.
 
Once it became obvious that despite the high tide and setting sun we were not seeing a plethora of birds to photograph, I opened my eyes to what was there.  The wind came in off of the Puget Sound carrying the moist scent of salt water.  It sent rippling waves through the tall leaves of the cattails. Grasses danced in the wind.  The ruffled water caused the reflected sunlight to sparkle and shimmer.  A cloud passing overhead sent a shadow scurrying over the meadow.  From our boardwalk we could see dozens of shades of green. 
 

​Bow Wave: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Forever By Delinda McCann
 
This summer, five former members of the staff of the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Family Resource Institute met for some fun in the sun at the ocean.  Mostly, we talked and laughed and got caught up on what each of us is doing in retirement.
 
Getting caught up with each other’s lives included sharing what our adult children are doing with their lives.  Our children are somewhat unique in that we have five that cluster around the same age but have widely different abilities.  These five individuals represent the oldest consistently studied group of people with FASD outside of the first seven people to be diagnosed.  Much of what we know about FASD and the core disability behaviors related to the disability came from looking at these people and constructing studies to verify if we were seeing something universal to the disability.  In a sense, they are the bow wave that directed much of our study.
 
Our method has been to look at these five who vary greatly in IQ and ability to function. When the person with the gifted IQ acts the same as the person with the lowest IQ we’ve been able to form a theory that this might be a behavior related to the disability.  The next step has always been to go find a five hundred to a thousand other individuals to test our theory.  This is how we came up with our list of core disability characteristics that everybody with the disability will have.
 
When we shared what was happening with our adult kids, we shared their successes first.  Sounded good. Next, we shared their challenges, and that was when we saw a pattern.
 
I shared my concern over J’s challenges in reconnecting with her birth father.  I thought I understood the source of the horror we’ve lived through the past eighteen months.  I explained, “She writes me these horrible emails several times a day telling me that I’m not her real mom, and I’m just a caregiver, and she doesn’t want to see me again except when I take her shopping for new clothes next week.” 
 
Jocie bounced in her chair and said, “Oh that’s just like my daughter.  She tells me that she doesn’t want to see us, and I have done this or that wrong, and will we babysit so she and her hubby can go on a trip for their anniversary.  Of course I love my grandchildren, and they can come anytime, but the verbal abuse is really hard on us.”
 
Ann said, “That sounds like my daughter.  She tells me that I caused all her problems, and she would be fine if I’d just butt out of her life then, like you said, she asks me to babysit, and I’m like, huh.”
 
I thought about our daughters who are all turning forty as I clutched my computer where I’d saved all J’s emails.
 
We all hashed this behavior around a bit.  The words Ann and Jocie’s daughters use to talk to their mothers are the same words my daughter sends in an email.  Now, Ann’s daughter has a Masters of Social Work.  She should not talk the same as my daughter on total disability, but she does.
 
I needed to get up and help myself to some chocolate at this point in our discussion.  Once fortified with pure dark chocolate, my brain started forming connections and dredged up old memories of developmental psychology.  I felt like the sun had suddenly come out from behind a cloud. I said, “The mixed message of I-don’t-want to-see-you-and-will-you-babysit coupled with the stylistic language sounds like a developmental stage.  It sounds like they are trying to emotionally separate from us, but of course they still want us to do things with them.”
 
After we thought silently for several minutes.  Jocie commented, “That’s possible.”
 
Ann speculated, “I wonder if this is unfinished adolescent work?  They all had so many issues with FAS as adolescents, maybe they didn’t do the work they needed then.”
 
I speculated, “Or it could be an over-reaction to their shifting relationship with us as we have age issues and are retired and our roles are beginning to reverse to where they need to prepare to help us.  That would be a normal task at age forty.”
 
After we discussed the common elements of our stories and refreshed our memories on how close these women are in age, Jocie concluded, “This is definitely an area that needs more study.  Who wants to tell the researchers they need to take this on?”
 
Why is this important?
 
If this is indeed a characteristic of the disability, it is a demonstration of the lifelong challenges those with FASD face as they age. 
 
It will lead to safety issues for those, like my daughter, who need lifelong support to manage money, manage health issues, and remember the rules to avoid rape. 
 
It is a safety issue for the aging parents.  This behavior is abusive.  We came very close to severing all contact with our daughter for our own protection.
 
If we can define the behavior as a disability issue, our middle-aged daughters can deal with it as they have dealt with so many other hurdles and move on to more healthy relationships.
 
If we can define this behavior as a disability issue, younger women who follow our daughter’s path can be prepared before hand to face a mid-life struggle that is more about the disability than their perception of their amazing parents.
 
It is possible this is more an issue with broken bonding at an early age.  If so, it is still important to define the issue for the same reasons we would want to know if it is an expected characteristic of the disability. 
 
It is important because, the truth will set us free.