Exposing This Kind of Neglect
Same words ... two different directions ... "Failure to protect" is the heaviest charge in family court — a parent can lose her children to it ... Did you know that government has no constitutional duty to protect a person from a harm that it knows about? ... Even a restraining order carries no enforceable right to be enforced ...
Right now every state in our nation defines a parent's neglect with this list: failure to provide adequate food, shelter, medical care, supervision, education ... Further up the chain — nutrition programs are being cut, housing waitlists are years deep, millions more uninsured — and the definer fails its own definition ...
Conditions become the charge ... The empty fridge ... a child is home alone because a shift can't be dropped ... In many states ... neglect does not include failure caused by financial inability — and yet more new cases arrive anyway ...
Abuse hides ... neglect files itself ... A budget is the one place a shrug gets written down — every cut has a date, vote, signature ... The passive voice does the escaping ... but the record exists ...
Government is the only caretaker that collects its fee in advance ... by law ... with penalties for missing a payment, then decides afterward how much care the fee bought ...
Every state orders teachers ... nurses ... and doctors to report a parent's suspected neglect — it adds up to millions of calls a year ... each opening a file ... There is no mandated reporter for the government's neglect: a teacher has to call about the hunger she sees ... and has no number for a lunch program that was cut ... Same child ... same hunger ...
Refusals cost more than the care ... Prevention is the cheaper purchase — neglect cannot shelter under scarcity ... The government always pays afterward ... larger ... when the payment buys nothing back ... It's their insane preference ...
The best-documented neglect there has ever been ... Clear risk ... ignored ... is at its purest with Mother Nature ... The warnings sat in writing in the oil companies' own internal research ... Decades of documented risk before the escalation now has arrived as extreme ... drought, wildfires, floods ... The weather now in more places reads like a neglected child's bids for attention ... each louder than the last ...
Witnesses were the protection plan ... Checks and balances were the founders' own case plan written against power itself — oversight is protection ... and dismantling it is the oldest move a neglectful hand makes — closing doors so nobody can see in ...
Posterity ... Our nation's founding list — justice, tranquility, general welfare — and it names the children outright ... The children are in the first sentence of the Constitution ... Neglect is a breach of the oldest promise ...
The US is now split ... When caretaker and ward are the same body ... neglect turns inward — a nation neglecting its people is a body declining to feed itself ... an immune system reading its own cells as the threat ... Self-neglect as the national diagnosis ...
Social Security cut elderly poverty by more than half ... clean-air law counts saved lives in the hundreds of thousands ... the wire reached the last farm because government carried it — so this is neglect by a capable caretaker ... which every moral tradition weighs heavier ... and "government simply can't" is foreclosed by its own record ...
And the protection system's front line is itself neglected — caseworkers carrying double loads at low wages — the removal machine is wearing the rescuer's uniform ... So the want flowing underneath may not be more intervention ... It may be care much more so than custody ...
Un mot sur qui est qui ( Word About Who's and Who )
Qui sera notre ... Who will be our ...
Qui va soulever cette lourde charge? ... Who will lift this heavy load? ...
Qui va partager cette responsabilité? ... Who will share this responsibility? ...
Qui veut grimper aux murs? ... Who wants to climb the walls? ...
Qui se déplace avec grâce sous des draps qui se replient comme des drapeaux? ... Who moves with grace under sheets that curl like flags? ...
Qui va aider le ... Who's going to help the ...
Qui fait des heures supplémentaires dans les deux emplois? ... Who at both jobs are doing overtime? ...
Qui crie en silence à cause de la hausse rapide des prix? ... Who screams quietly because of fast rising prices? ...
Qui conduit vers l'avant pour sortir d'un endroit en arrière? ... Who's driving forward to get out of a backwards place? ...
Qui est sans électricité et perdu dans la chaleur extrême? ... Who is without electricity and lost in the extreme heat? ...
Qui rampe sur les traces de cendres? ... Who crawls on ashes trails? ...
Qui s'arrête au milieu de la rue pour regarder une lune en croissant qui brille? ... Who stops in the middle of the street to gaze at a glowing crescent moon? ...
Qui va être notre prochain cauchemar? ... Who's going to be our next nightmare? ...
Qui n'est pas capable d'ignorer ou de détourner le regard de toutes les autres âmes qui se trouvent là-bas et qui sont en fauteuil roulant? ... Who is not able to ignore or turn away from all the other souls out there who sit in wheelchairs? ...
Qui va chanter une chanson maintenant qui puisse nous porter? ... Who's going to sing a song now that can carry us? ...
Qui va ( avec les bras tendus pointant vers le nord et le sud ou vers l'est et l'ouest ) crier alléluia au bord d'une falaise? ... Who's going to ( with arms extended out pointing north and south or east and west ) shout hallelujah at the edge of a cliff? ...
air we swallow
forcing extra hot air past our tongue and into our stomach
do do do do do
Don't be afraid to say hydrogen methane ... cuss pah laye
Lit up inside and glowing, this is what our Yes is made of: we can't swear that ... what we can swear at is ... During passing punctuation gas, when our whole job is do do do do do dots marked and carbonated colons. Air we swallow ... forcing extra hot air past our tongue and into our stomach ... don't be afraid to stand up and say ... Hydrogen methane! ... cuss pah lay cuss cah lewd ... same bloated belch same flat burp ... Whatever it pushes is difficult soft parts ... We brought a kidney stone ... you brought noisy somewhat flagellation ... Every condition becomes a charge that it sounds like dimensional tree bark ... Eye saw found a breath punctuated by gaps ... Love thins where insane preferences run hot ... The place where we hear editorial instead of Our Elder ... The weave is one of the things we will most definitely defend ... with and without self-preservation.
