A perilous prescription Kids like J.R. Green need mental health care. Because the state often fails to provide treatment, many get a prison cell instead.Jane O. Hansen - StaffSunday, June 13, 2004 A PERILOUS PRESCRIPTIONIN THIS SERIES> MONDAY: An inside look at life for the boys in one mental health unit. Plus, an update on improvements in Georgia's youth prisons.> TUESDAY: Eric Walker was headed for prison after stealing abaseball bat to protect himself. Instead, Eric became one of thelucky ones.
Let me tell you about the fundamental question this generation(ours) is going to face. It's at the root of all of our problems. It defines who we are and where will we be going. It's going to be the question of life or death to many thousands. Are we going to believe in the morality and rationality of our national economic and political system? We are just going to have to challenge the morality of how resources are dispersed to the least of us.
The question is, are we going to put the rationality of meeting budgets above the morality of questioning the value of human life.
I put it like this. You are a single mother with four children –today you could be a single father with four children. You don't have the income to feed all of your children. Food for your children could be look at as the resources to develop a child to their highest function as an adult. All your children now are starving because of the lack of resources and you have a broken heart watching this now. One day it dawns upon you that for the good of the rest –you are going to have to sacrifice your weakest child.
Before you kill that child -you need to confront the system that defined this choice for you. You need to fight it and you can't take comfort that the rest of your children will be better off.
This is where the management of our nation is bringing us today. Believe me as the problems build up –our bureaucracies will figure out the instruments of hiding the seemingly rational choice that we are making of intentionally sacrificing "symbolically" our weakest child and adults. In most ways, the system will define it as these weak people made that choice themselves. As it sits today –both the democrats and the republicans have hidden the intentional choices we made today with sacrificing our most vulnerable humans for the rationality of our economic system. Many children and adults have died prematurely from our choices already.
Fundamentally all of us have created this bureaucracy of selectively disclosing the facts of the results of our choices for self interested reasons. We all intentionally put these things in our closets and closed the door –and we intentionally forget what we have hidden behind the door. I am telling you, we know what's behind that door.
I am telling you the truth. This system will need an increasing percentage of us as being defined as hopeless and needing a sacrifice for the good of us all. We are all going to have to sacrifice one of our children before this is over. Then one day "it"will define us as being hopeless –and it will be our turn to die for the good of us all. We need to confront what is happening now!
We really need a NASA style blue ribbon commission on with the failures of taking care of our must vulnerable. I think the problemis much broader than the vulnerable.
Oskar Schindler:
"Look, All you have to do is tell me what it'sworth to you. What's a person worth to you?"
First they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
And I did not speak out-
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out-
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
And there was no-
one leftTo speak out for me.
Pastor Niemöller, 1938
--- In rootcauseconference@yahoogroups.com, "Mike Mulligan"
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