Class, Race, Bureacracy and Blame: The Walrond Breastfeeding Case

Social Issues | Vikki Wing - 12:12pm May 26, 1999 PDT (# 31 of 83)

It wasn't solely a lack of insurance that caused the delay in the child receiving professional help. It seemed to be a bureaucratic tangle of needing this form first, to get that form, to finally get the form that let's you get free treatment. There seemed to be a string of unrelated and separate SNAFUs, each one perpetrated by a different individual sometimes in different agencies that finally accumulated in to one big tragedy.

I saw an hour-long report on this case many months ago. After watching Tabitha Walrond talk about what happened and how she felt, I remember thinking that this was a truly horrible and tragic case of "shit happens".

I don't mean to sound unfeeling, because I'm not. But as a society we seem to have forgotten that every situation in life does not come fully resolved in a one hour long episode, with the bad guys in jail and the good guys having a beer with Miss Kitty. There isn't always someone or something to blame for every unpleasant event.

And I can't help but think that the jury in this case, disgusted by the photos of the dead child, reacted by deciding that "Someone's gonna pay for this!" Unfortunately, for her and IMO for "justice", poor not too bright Tabitha Walrond was the one sitting in front of them at the time.

In a legal world where juries regularly reward the stupidity of "victims" with million dollar settlements because they weren't bright enough to read the instructions on their new chains saw, I find it patently offensive that we are jailing this young woman who has already lost so much.

Homicide, life on the streets

Television | ted burke - 11:03pm May 27, 1999 PDT (# 1589 of 1594)

The sense of the show is that at anyone time a character thinks they've come to an understanding of how some universal principles operate in the world, some crisis, some kind of natural catastrophe or outbreak of meaness upsets their paradigm, leaving them confused, angry, demanding answers about the "why" of evil from a sheer surge of global energy that never bothers to answer. Frank with his arguments with his Catholic God come to mind, but also G with his Blue Brotherhood provincialism, and even Bayliss, with his Zen enlightment being only another Totalizing paradigm that works only to shield him from the nagging notion that perhaps there is no "why" behind the random homicides he investigates, and that the only reason to track down and bring killers to justice is all show and tell, a flurry of activity that distracts the grieving and the frightened from what may be this worlds' scariest truth: there really is nothing behind any of these things, nothing to maintain, no "great' truths of moral virtue to be upheld. These detectives have been pounded relentlessly from the first day of the show, and since it , dispite the strong vein of humor, is mostly in the Tragic form, we have displays of Hubris being smashed to bits, slowly, rapidly as the situation fits the action: expectations are constantly downsized, withered, dying from the sheer onslaught of raw phenomena that has no humor , or inkling of irony.

Bayliss, at the end, displayed an air of listening to one view after another, realizing that from Munch to G to Lewis , the world views expressed are as valid as it makes the skin of the sayers fit better, yet the only thing he learned was that he had loved Frank, and that thing, that person, who had given his job meaning at all was gone, and with the departure, his reason to stay.

We have Bayliss leaving through the door he came through seven years earlier, knowing at last that only love gives meaning to the world, and that the lack of love kills it.

Does morality exist without religion?

Mind and Spirit | Sinecure Bend - 10:59am May 22, 1999 PDT (# 3 of 201))

I do not think morality rises out of religion, nor do I believe religion to be "the hammer that seeks to enforce the moral code."

While I do believe that there is a level of morality which is common to the whole of mankind. In general, I see morality as a relative term, left to social construct (religion, culture, law, peer group, etc.), personal conscience, and ones own concept of right and wrong. For instance, one person holds that sex outside of marriage to be immoral, while another holds that group sex is an excellent way for some friends to spend a Friday night, with no pangs of concience. Yet both may consider themselves to be very moral people. In the same way, the gang member who feels that "his people have been messed with" and puts a bullet in someones head, has acted well within the moral ethics of his particular subculture. Even though he has acted outside the morality of the larger society in which his subculture exists.

I see religion as just one standard or formal set of guidelines for morality upon which all within a particular community or group may agree.