BUDGET CUTS WILL PUSH THOUSANDS MORE INTO HOMELESSNESS

Who will pick up the pieces?

Today, Governor Ritter announced more than $50.2 million in immediate cuts to programs that provide medical and mental healthcare services for the indigent (Colorado Indigent Care Programs: CICP). He also intends to slash $7.1 million in financial assistance to the poor and disabled (Aid to Needy Disabled Program: AND) eliminating this program entirely. Balancing the budget on the backs of our most disadvantaged citizens is not the answer. These steps will certainly push thousands more into homelessness without delay. And, relying on non-profits and the private sector to pick up the pieces is a mistake in judgment that will cost us dearly in corrective dollars and in lost human capital.

Colorado’s legislature already reduced funds for health and mental health services for homeless and at-risk individuals during its last session. Stunningly, today’s cuts include the elimination of 59 beds at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Ft. Logan. The Governor indicated that every effort will be made to place each individual in appropriate care in the community, but we wonder how that can possibly happen. There aren’t enough beds available. The Colorado Department of Human Services, Division of Behavioral Health will be releasing the Colorado 2009 Population in Need Report soon. The study estimates unmet need and disparities in health care among those citizens of Colorado with Serious Behavioral Health Disorders who cannot afford to pay for mental health and/or substance abuse services. The very conservative estimate for people with mental health and substance abuse services combined, who cannot access care, is over 150,000 adults, and for children and adolescents, it is estimated to be 18,525 for mental health alone. Colorado citizens with mental illness cannot afford further cuts to this inadequately funded system without pushing many more vulnerable adults and children onto the streets.

Previously, state lawmakers also reduced payments to needy and disabled individuals, through the AND program, to only $200 per month. This is not enough money for any individual to survive on – particularly those judged by the state to be both needy and disabled. It is unconscionable now to take away this meager allotment entirely from more than 6,400 of our neighbors. The men and women that rely on AND have no other income. They have no assets. They are the poorest of the poor in Colorado. They have a disability that precludes them from working. In many cases, this $200 qualifies them for subsidized housing – without it, they will become homeless.

Strains on local government funds have already reduced the ability of local communities to fill these gaps created by the state. Furthermore, as the need for shelter and housing increases, foundations are giving less, due to losses in their investments. Individual giving is in jeopardy as donors worry about their own financial health.

It appears the safety net in our state is broken. At the Coalition, we only have a fraction of the resources needed to meet the growing housing and service needs of people who come to us for help. If all the Governor’s budget cuts are made, including cuts to the Coalition’s Medicaid reimbursement rate, our organization will have to absorb at least a $2.5 million loss instantly to our medical and mental health care programs. Meanwhile, we must find a way to continue to provide housing, healthcare and supportive services to a projected 18,000 men, women and children this year who now have no where else to turn.

We understand that Colorado’s budget is severely strained as tax revenues fall. But, the Governor has said his budget “is a moral document”. We think it’s a matter of choice. Creating crises and despair for so many people is a bad choice.

August 30 at 10 a.m. at First Unitarian Society of Denver at 1400 Lafayette St.
Call 303 831 7113 ext. 0 for more information or go to our website at www.fusden.org.

We will have a mental health fair.

Providers across the region will be involved from behavioral and social services regionally for all ages.

Everyone is welcome to participate in this provocative and simple act of recovery of our spirits.

The service welcomes those who have suffered with mental health issues and their loved ones.

First Unitarian is at the corner of 14th Ave and Lafayette St. in Capitol Hill, a block south of Colfax and two blocks from the convergence of Park Avenue West and Colfax.

Conducted by Randle Loeb
community minister and chaplain

The Red Wheelbarrow (William Carlos Williams)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

The eight line poem above , without punctuation, has passed through endless scrutiny and still does not give up all of its secrets as an example of free verse, says Mary Oliver, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

Today at 2 p.m. Executive Order will come from the Governor regarding the pillage of destitute citizens.
This is a paltry place for civil and human rights for most of the people who have never felt the finite gift of the dream.
The attributes of persistent poverty will be raised up and claimed as required because only the deserving poor have a right to assistance.
The programs that supported the lives of most of those who have no where to turn for generations will be abandoned for good of the rest of those who are left out in the cold.
The reality is that some people in this land feel that people are at risk should be left to their own devices to pick themselves up and carry on.
At the same time that the Governor is announcing twelve percent cuts to Aid to the Needy and Disabled, to health care, subsidized housing vouchers, the child welfare protective services, it will be more difficult for a person to get benefits and sign up for the meager rations that are left.
Even as the government favors and protects the subsidies of business and favorable tax credits for developers, there is no where for the poor to live and so they are committed to their dying.

And dying we all will do unless we can escape this America. We hear in places abroad that people have nothing but they are protected by government.
We hear that in places abroad there is no poverty because people take care of everyone.
Why is it that when one says that we have people living in terrible poverty that no one can believe that this is true.
They always look dumbfounded at the people who are speaking to them as though that makes no sense.
Today history will be made because on September 1 these cuts going to effect will impact the rest of us one way or the other forever.
You cannot strip away the protections of one group and not have that impact the lives of everyone who is vulnerable.
We fail generations of people who must live shortened lives in desperation and without recourse to any where to turn.

This is done when there is nothing left for any of these people but survival. Fifty percent of the poor who are destitute are families and of them two thirds are children under eighteen years of age.

Shame on a society that sees that there is nothing but despair for these citizens.
Shame on a government that cannot provide for the most vulnerable. When the bell tolls for these people to die the responsibility for the carnage is squarely on the backs of the leaders of our government who see that there is a division between deserving poor and the rest of the commonwealth.

Water dripping down from a faucet irritates and stimulates discourse

The space between each droplet is the minute point where

ears prick up at the final resting place of the drop, drip, dripping

where endless space between the din goes unnoticed, until…

Noting the endless source

of all that is around celebrating without diminishing nagging, naming that

which is superfluous and which The label shuns and limits

What matters most is listening to the ebb and flowing movements in moments

Imperceptible, like the whirring of the wings of a hummingbird

Realizing that these spaces, listening carefully, without thought, judgment,

or a quick response,

whether the sound is pleasant or nerve racking,

In spite of time, death and the space between the stars;

Binding us forever together; as one; creating a unity;

out of our diversity and behind all our differences

sounds and movements arising towards a whirring pitch,

evolves into a source of miracles

every mundane triumph of the spirit crystallizes

in the universes’ unknown, unlimited, and divine

I just found out about one very relevant film showing at the Estes Park Film Festival between Sept. 17 and 20. Read below and then if you are interested, go to the festival web site at www.estesparkfilm.com

Here's the film about education

THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT SYNOPSIS

Paul J. Adams III, an African-American man with activist roots in the 1960’s civil rights movement, came from a family of teachers. After being black listed himself as a teacher in Alabama because of his civil rights activities, he moved to Chicago, received a master’s degree in psychology, and then landed a job as guidance counselor at Providence St. Mel, an all-black parochial school on Chicago’s notorious drug-ridden, gang-ruled West Side.

A year after his arrival, Adams became principal, only to be told the following year that Chicago’s archdiocese was going to close the school. After orchestrating a fundraising campaign that received national and local media attention, funds poured in and enabled Adams to buy the school from the Sisters of Providence and convert it to a not-for-profit independent school. To ward off thieves and vandals, he literally moved into the empty nuns’ quarters of the convent inside the school.

He then set about achieving a new goal: To turn Providence St. Mel into a first rank college preparatory school, and its African-American student body into a corps of driven, disciplined, high achieving students.

That was over 30 years ago. Since then, 100% of Providence St. Mel graduates have been accepted to college, half of them, during the last seven years, to first tier and Ivy League colleges and universities.

The road from failing inner city school to a pre-K-through-12 educational system that produces graduates who attend Ivy League colleges and universities was not a smooth one. THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT traces the school’s development from a struggling shoe-string budget dream into a school and a method of teaching that produces not only inspired students, but parents, teachers and administrators dedicated to settling for nothing less than the highest expectations.

As testament to the hurdles overcome, and the efficacy of the teaching model that governs education at Providence St. Mel, THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT features interviews with alumni who share how the school re-wrote the failing, mediocre lives that had been scripted for them because of their West Side origins. The shared consensus is that the school’s philosophy set them up for success because greatness was expected of them.

Cameras in class reveal how teachers are held to just as high and demanding a standard as is expected of the students. Administrators are dedicated to insuring that a teacher’s first and only job is to teach….not to administer, not to become bogged down in red tape or hindered by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

In the 80s, President Reagan visited twice, remarking in the film, “This is the way it should be done.” As a young organizer, President-to-be Barack Obama also visited the school.

THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT is an effect that is on the cusp of becoming viral nationally: The school’s teaching method has been so successful that in 2006 another school, this time on Chicago’s south side became a charter school --- appropriately named Providence Englewood --- solely in order to achieve the same results. In two short years, these students scores have gone from the 9th percentile to the 50th percentile on the Terra Nova Standardized tests. Students at Providence Englewood significantly outperform other schools within their neighborhood.

Those improved scores are…THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT.

Source and to see more:
http://www.theprovidenceeffect.com/

Endless War: The Suicide of the United States

by Dahr Jamail
August 11th, 2009 | T r u t h o u t

To read story with photo, click here

“We hear war called murder. It is not: it is suicide.”
- Ramsay MacDonald, British prime minister 1931-1935

Sergio Kochergin, back home from his second deployment in Iraq, held a gun in his mouth, trying to muster the courage to pull the trigger. Untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and accompanying nightmares and insomnia, heavy substance abuse, and several failed attempts at self-medication had taken their toll on him. He was in an apartment he shared with a friend in Texarkana, Texas, after having spent the past few months with his parents, where he “was drinking too much and causing too much trouble, breaking things, flipping out every day, and cursing at them.”

The decision to end his life came in early 2007, from a desperate need for relief and to avoid deployment back to Iraq. Although Kochergin’s contract had expired, it would have taken more than six months for him to be medically discharged from the military, a period during which he was sure to be redeployed.

A year later, describing his aborted attempt to me, Kochergin said, “I had a .40-caliber in my mouth for a long time, trying to ?gure out the right thing to do. Should I put an end to this suffering or should I allow it to continue to torment me? Fortunately, I fell asleep and woke up the next morning. My roommate came in and fucking flipped out on me and took the gun away to his parents’ house. I stepped out, and with a deep breath of air I was like, ‘Man, this is way too good to just throw away.’ After that, I decided I had to do something. That’s when it sunk in that there’s no point running away. I must start dealing with it and do something and that kind of pushed me up.”

At the time we met, Kochergin had seized the moment of hope that came his way and managed to ?nd a constructive route out of his suffering and possible redeployment. Thousands of others never get or grab that chance.

On July 26, the Colorado Springs Gazette ran a story headlined “Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war comes home.” The article highlighted what is happening to soldiers upon their return from the occupation of Iraq. It begins:

Before the murders started, Anthony Marquez’s mom dialed his sergeant at Fort Carson to warn that her son was poised to kill.

It was February 2006, and the 21-year-old soldier had not been the same since being wounded and coming home from Iraq eight months before. He had violent outbursts and thrashing nightmares. He was devouring pain pills and drinking too much. He always packed a gun.

“It was a dangerous combination. I told them he was a walking time bomb,” said his mother, Teresa Hernandez.

His sergeant told her there was nothing he could do. Then, she said, he started taunting her son, saying things like, “Your mommy called. She says you are going crazy.”

Eight months later, the time bomb exploded when her son used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.

Marquez was the first infantry soldier in his brigade to murder someone after returning from Iraq. But he wasn’t the last.

Marquez, like many others in his brigade, returned home scarred from war, suffering the ravages of PTSD. He, like his fellow soldiers, began to murder civilians and each other, drive around and shoot at people, beat their former girlfriends to death, rape, kidnap, brawl, deal drugs, stab people, commit suicide, and self-medicate via alcohol and drugs.

>From 2007 to 2008, the murder rate for his brigade, the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, was 114 times that of Colorado Springs.

Soldiers are returning from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed mentally, spiritually, and psychologically, to a general population that is, mostly, willfully ignorant of the occupations and the soldiers participating in them. Troops face a Department of Veterans Affairs that is either unwilling or unable to help them with their physical and psychological wounds, and they are left to fend for themselves. It is a perfect storm of denial, neglect, violence, rage, suffering, and death.

Veterans are roaming the country wrought with PTSD. They are armed and dangerous. They are killers.

One of the soldiers in the Gazette article served two tours in Iraq and returned home, like Kochergin, “depressed, paranoid, violent, abusing drugs and haunted by nightmares. But because he was other-than-honorably discharged, he said, he was ineligible for benefits or health care. He was no longer Uncle Sam’s problem. He was on his own.

“I had no job training,” he said. “All I know how to do is kill people.”

Ten infantrymen in his brigade have been arrested and accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter since 2006. Others have committed or attempted suicide.

What is happening to the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team is true of literally hundreds of thousands of veterans across the US.

There are numerous instances of veterans attempting to kill themselves after they return from their deployments. Some of these incidents seem to be an effort to avoid redeployment. Many more look like desperate bids to stop, once and for all, the internal pain that many veterans experience.

After witnessing atrocities in Sadr City in Baghdad, Kristopher Goldsmith had returned home shattered, only to learn he was being stop-lossed and redeployed to Iraq. Testifying on the panel “Breakdown of the Military” at a Winter Soldier event in Silver Spring, Maryland, Goldsmith gave an account of his response to the news:

The moment I learned that, I swung from being the happiest I had ever been in my life to the most depressed. My joy had come from the sense of relief I felt at the thought of being released from the prison called the Army. When that prospect receded, I experienced the most depressing, most agonizing downward spiral I could imagine anyone going through. I was to be redeployed the same week as I had hoped to be discharged, as per my contract, and that was in May of 2007. The day before I … was supposed to deploy, Memorial Day, I went out onto a field in Fort Stewart where there’s a memoriam, a tree planted for every soldier in the Third Infantry Division who has died. I went out among those fallen soldiers and tried to take my own life. I took pills, and I went back to my regular poison of vodka, and drank until I couldn’t drink anymore. The next thing I knew, I was handcuffed to a gurney in the hospital. The cops had found me and literally dragged my body into an ambulance, threw me in there, and locked me up. I spent a week in a mental ward - now mind you I was diagnosed because I had ?nally sought mental health. I thought I was having a heart attack. I believed myself to be strong, but on hearing I was stop-lossed I started having panic attacks and I couldn’t admit that I was mentally or emotionally broken. So I went into the hospital complaining of chest pain and they had me seek a mental-health professional. They diagnosed me with depression and anxiety disorder, and adjustment disorder. But I was still set to be deployed, obviously [a] broken soldier, but set to deploy.

Goldsmith’s ordeal did not end there. He ultimately obtained a general discharge from the military, but the papers cited the reasons for discharge as, “Misconduct, serious offense.” The irony was not lost on the audience when Goldsmith said:

My serious offense was trying to kill myself because I was so damaged by the war - the occupation in Iraq. It was misconduct for me not to get on the ?ight while I was chained or handcuffed to a bed in the hospital. So I lost my college benefits, the one thing that had really given me hope in life that I was looking for - you know, I was gonna be a student, I didn’t know where, I didn’t know what I was gonna study, but I knew I was going to college in September of ‘07. That didn’t happen. My money is disappearing between VA visits and personal instability. I’ve found it extremely hard to ?nd a job. To tell you the truth, I haven’t really looked because I’m having a rough time. So I deliver pizzas on Wednesdays, that’s what I am now, a pizza delivery boy. I was a sergeant, I was a leader, I was a trainer, I was very well thought of. I was one of the most professional soldiers…. I mean I got the paperwork right here in front of me if anyone ever wants to see the proof that I was a very good soldier. But now I’m a pizza delivery boy who works once a week because that’s the only job where I can call in a couple hours before and say, “I’m still at the VA, I’m waiting in line. I’m sorry I can’t come in for a couple hours.”

I interviewed Goldsmith shortly after his testimony. “War is a really destructive thing,” he told me. “It follows you home. And it doesn’t go away.”

What kind of homes filled with the specter of a distant war will this country be filled with as more of our broken, wounded, and destroyed soldiers are brought back?

* * *

In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a stunning report revealing, “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all - report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”

The situation continues to worsen. In the six months leading up to March 31, 2008,
1,467 veterans died while waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. The average duration of an appeal pending a VA decision on disability claims is 1,608 days, which amounts to nearly four and a half years.

As a result, the suffering of returning vets is compounded by the agonizing wait. In 2007, the Army’s official suicide count was 115, the most since the Pentagon began keeping suicide statistics in 1980. In 2008, it rose to 133, and 2009 is currently on track to set yet another grim record.

Meanwhile, the military continues to attempt to conceal the depth of the crisis.

When the Pentagon reports the number of US troops wounded in Iraq (just over 31,000), it fails to mention that it tracks two other categories of injuries: “injured” (10,180) and “ill” (28,451). All three groups comprise soldiers who have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment.

When the VA will not deliver the necessary care, many veterans turn to alcohol and drugs for self-medication. In the Pentagon’s recent post-deployment survey of health-related behavior, released in November 2007, of 88,235 soldiers surveyed three to six months after returning, 12 percent of active-duty troops and 15 percent of reservists acknowledged having problems with alcohol.

The more fortunate among the troops do not need to self-medicate. The military does it for them, in order to keep enough boots on the ground. The dual objective of medicating soldiers is to steady their nerves and to enable an already troop-starved military to retain soldiers on the front lines. Mark Thompson reports in Time magazine, “Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of US troops taken last fall, about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope.”

Sergeant Christopher LeJeune has firsthand experience of this “treatment.” He was diagnosed with depression, and the military doctor he consulted sent him back into the field with the antidepressant Zoloft and an anti-anxiety drug called clonazepam. He says in the Time article, “It’s not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they’re having over there for a variety of reasons. If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills.”

Two out of five suicide victims among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found to be on antidepressants.

* * *

At the Northwest Regional Winter Soldier event at the Seattle Town Hall in June 2008, psychiatrist Dr. Evan Kanter, president-elect of Physicians for Social Responsibility, spoke at length to the 800-member audience about the crippling impact that the occupation has had on the mental health of the forces. Dr. Kanter specializes in treating vets with PTSD. Physicians for Social Responsibility is an organization that has vigorously opposed the occupation of Iraq since before the invasion was launched.

The ratio of wounded to killed in Iraq is much higher than in previous con?icts, and is a far more accurate measure of the scale of violence in the country than the tally of combat deaths. In Iraq, the ratio is 8 to 1, compared to Vietnam, where it was 3 to 1, or World War II, where it was 2 to 1. The reasons for this are the twofold advance in body armor and in battlefeld medicine. Today we can stabilize and airlift people to Landstuhl Air Force Base in Germany within twenty-four hours, whereas in Vietnam it would have taken weeks for those treated in the field to be taken out for proper medical care. As a consequence, we now have service members with dreadful injuries who would never have survived similar conditions in an earlier battle. We, as a society, will be bearing the cost of caring for these grievously injured veterans for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Kanter added that, considering that the US has now deployed well over 1.8 million personnel, so far, to serve in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, “looking at the PTSD and major depression cases alone will give you three to four hundred thousand psychiatric casualties.”

According to Dr. Kanter, these “psychiatric casualties” have a direct link with the high suicide rates in the military. He added:

PTSD is no less a war wound than a shrapnel injury. It can be tremendously debilitating. Symptoms include nightmares and flashbacks, triggered physiological and psychological stress, social withdrawal, isolation, avoidance of any kind of reminders of the trauma, emotional numbing, uncontrolled outbursts of anger or rage, difficulty concentrating and focusing, and a state of hypervigilance, which the military calls the “battle mind.” All these are symptoms that would make it impossible for a vet with severe PTSD to be in the room with us today. Studies that go back to the Second World War have found that combat veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide as people in the general population. Other lesser-known distressing facts are that 9 percent of all unemployment in the United States is attributed to combat exposure, as is 8 percent of all divorce or separation, and 21 percent of all spousal or partner abuse. The impact of all this extends to behavioral problems in children, child abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, incarceration, and homelessness, all of which have implications that go well beyond the individual and reverberate across generations.

* * *

Cpl. Bryan Casler was first deployed to Iraq with the Marines in 2003, at the time of the invasion. Posted to Afghanistan in 2004, he returned to Iraq for another tour of duty in 2005. His experience reveals a good example of the suffering soldiers face upon returning home, as well as the military’s attempts to redeploy those who are unfit for duty.

Casler suffers from chronic PTSD. He has nightmares and grinds his teeth so badly that he dislocated his jaw.

He told me:

“I’m still on edge 24/7. I have trouble being in social environments. I never thought of myself as suicidal, and I still don’t, but for the past few months there have been points where I was driving and I would close my eyes for fifteen seconds and just think about what it would be like to crash my car into a concrete barrier. That’s not me. I never had these thoughts until after I got out. I just don’t feel like myself. I was always a hopeless romantic and now I have relationship problems. I have the greatest girlfriend in the world and I know it’s not her fault. I just have personal problems I have to work out. There are just so many issues. I’m not at rest. And there are these regrets. I think about the Iraq war way too much. I wish I could think about my family more than I think about Iraq. And it’s draining me. I can’t focus in class. I can’t focus at a job. I was working for a union, and I was picketing for the union, and all I could think of was how to end this war. I cannot attend to things that are outside the realm of ending this war. And I don’t think it will be complete relief, but once this war is over, that will be a healing moment for my PTSD.”

After Casler returned home from his last deployment to Iraq, he received a recall order from the Marines stating that “the president had authorized some 1,400 IRR (Individual Ready Reserve) Marines to be involuntarily mobilized.” Unable to get a school deferment, he found himself shipped down to a warehouse where he was reunited with approximately 250 of his peers, mostly from the infantry, who, like him, had already served an average of two or more tours in Iraq or Afghanistan. A general began to lecture them, telling them to prepare to be deployed again.

The memory of that day still makes him livid: “My hands were getting sweaty because I knew I was going to do it (speak up)…. Every time you have someone high ranking speak up, they say something that grabs your lungs and just squeezes. I was like, ‘I know I can’t keep silent, I can’t do this anymore. Fuck the Marine Corps. I’m so sick of it. Sick of this motivated, hoorah screw yourself over for nobody’s good bullshit…. fucking sick of it.’”

Casler said he and his fellow marines were under threat of the military retroactively removing their honorable discharges, removing their health-care benefits, removing their GI Bill, and other threats, if they did not obey the order to redeploy.

One of his fellow soldiers, who was about to be redeployed despite having been diagnosed with both PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury), stood up and asked the general, “Who in their right mind is going to send me back to Iraq? Put a rifle in my hands, send me out there? I’m supposed to lead Marines? You want to put me around Iraqi civilians? I’m not stable, I can’t do this. Who in their right minds is going to approve me to go back?”

At the time we spoke, Casler was still in the Individual Ready Reserve. What if he gets reactivated? “I’m not going back.” He feels it is imperative to continue speaking out against the occupation. It is more than resistance to him; it is his therapy.

Of his activism against both occupations, Casler told me, “That made me a person again. That was my anti-boot camp. That was me becoming human.”

His is a rare success story that most veterans from the occupations have not enjoyed.

While Casler has the opportunity to deal with his PTSD at home while he works his way through college, the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson at Colorado Springs, as part of the 19,000 troops President Obama is adding to the meat-grinder of Afghanistan, has already deployed to one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous regions, near Khyber Pass, this May.

From Annette Walker

To Glen Ford, Executive Editor of the Black Agenda Report:

A few thoughts in reference to your recent article, “The Peculiar Class Solidarity of Barack Obama and ‘Skip’ Gates”, posted on July 27, 2009.

U.S. Presidents should not get involved in local matters, which should be left to state, city and county governments. So this begs the question: Why has Barack Obama become involved in the Gates-Crowley dispute?

You say it’s an issue of class bonding. I disagree. I believe there are two reasons. First, he had to engage in some damage control for his remark that the Cambridge police acted ‘stupidly’. It was an error on his part to admit that he didn’t have all the facts about the arrest, but then go on to make a judgmental statement.

Second, having committed that ‘faux pas’, Obama realized that he had created the opportunity to tread into some very sensitive territory that he has had to be cautious about as President. He had the opportunity to throw the spotlight on a sensitive ‘race’ issue that is national in scope.

You mention the class issue. Let’s reflect on Obama’s background. Upon graduation from Columbia University, he chose not to seek employment in the corporate sector or those areas that attract Ivy League graduates. Rather, he chose to become a community organizer in a predominately African-American neighborhood in Chicago. After two years he left that endeavor because he believed that he would need to be in a policymaking position to better assist poor people and minorities.

You may be aware that “Brother” Thomas Sowell, the economist, is warning people to beware of Obama’s background as a community organizer. Sowell says that Obama’s experience explains why he is trying to lead the United States “down the road to Socialism”. So much for Sowell’s misunderstanding.

Remember that African-Americans with Obama’s upbringing ---overseas, in Hawaii and Indonesia and with little contact with Black Americans—sometimes have a hard time developing positive relationships with us. Obama, however, had a profound desire not only to get to know his African family—in Kenya--, but to be part of the African-American community in this country. His marriage to Michelle Robinson, from a working-class family on Chicago’s South side, fits in with the way he envisioned himself.

After finishing Harvard Law School, he returned to Chicago and entered the political arena. As we’ve been told repeatedly since the Gates arrest, as an Illinois state legislator, Obama had a special interest in the racial profiling issue.

We know about his road to the White House. We also know that his advisors cautioned him about how to handle the race issue during the campaign. In brief, White Americans must feel that he is not going to be a ‘Black President”, but one who “just happens to be Black”.

Obama has always wanted to be and is President of all the people. However, it is a gross error—and just plain wrong—for anyone to think that Obama has set aside the race issue. It’s just that he has to be careful with his approach and strategy.

The Gates-Crowley matter has given him the opportunity to get involved with an issue that is not really local. Racial-profiling is a national issue. And it’s a sensitive issue.

The fact that a Black man of Gate’s professional stature was handcuffed for ‘disorderly conduct’ is instructive for the nation and the world. Yes, others of his stature have been hassled. Colin Powell recently recounted some incidents that he had with the police. In brief, he had to convince them that he really was a high-level official in the National Security Agency when he held that position.

Obama is supposed to stay away from these “local” and “Black” issues. But he knows that the Gates-Crowley dispute made racial-profiling a priority news item. He decided to take a leadership role and create a reconciliation scenario. After all, one of his campaign topics was bringing together people with opposite viewpoints to talk and to develop a working relationship. So he brought Gates and Crowley together in an informal manner (beer and pretzels) to talk.

The fact that Gates is a Harvard scholar and a friend of Obama’s is not the point. By getting involved, Obama has thrown the spotlight not only on racial-profiling, but displayed a reconciliation strategy.

It seems that Obama used the word “stupidly” without forethought. In the end, that verbal error has brought into focus one of the many important racial issues of this time period. The media and the internet have been replete with testimonies by African-American men about their experiences as victims of racial profiling. This is good for the United States and the world. And like it or not, the Henry Louis Gates incident and Obama’s intervention has provoked a national dialogue. And this is good for America.

THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

The Global Village presents analysis of political, economic and social issues at home and abroad. It will deconstruct and demystify some commonly-held assumptions including inaccuracies put forward by the established media and when necessary will "speak truth to power.”

Annette Walker is a writer, radio producer and educator. She worked in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic as a teacher-trainer and traveled throughout the Caribbean including Cuba. She has been a lecturer in the City University of New York, Aurora Community College and Metropolitan State College.