ElementalMom

http://uniteforlife.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/just-say-no-to-the-mothers-act/

This blog pretty much says it all. Please go read it, get adequately outraged, and then do something concrete to stop this piece of unexpurgated evil.

Not me, gratefully. Not now.

But over the years, I have accumulated a host of friends who have ended up going head to head with this most feared of government agencies. I have one friend who had CPS called on her simply for the fact that some anonymous passerby thought that having children on a boat looked “dangerous”. The Sunderlands have had CPS called on them three times for daring to let their 16-year old circumnavigate. I assisted my midwife in intervening not once, but twice, in two different counties, when an OB threatened a pregnant woman with CPS if she did not agree to submit to an unnecessary cesarean for the OB’s convenience. I know a woman who accidentally hit her child (she was gesturing while talking, and he walked up) and she had to go to trial to keep him. I know a woman whose husband punched the OB who was literally ripping her placenta out of her, and their child was taken.

And now it’s happened again, with another friend, for the crime of daring to reach for help during a bout of depression, rather than keeping it to herself.

A mother in this culture cannot win. If you reach for help, CPS gets called, and you lose your children. If you do not call for help, you end up like Tina Zahn, or Andrea Yates.

This friend is in Texas, home of so many civil and human rights violations in the past few years. While I do not agree with the FLDS lifestyle, the things that were done to the FLDS were unspeakable, so it’s not surprising that my friend is being run through the wringer.

Moms Rising is collecting stories of mothers and the economic fall. You can find those stories here.

My tirade is there, under the same title as this blog. And as far as I’m concerned, I was pretty darned restrained.

It is ludicrous, nay, ridiculous, perhaps egregious, that “our” policymakers (they are NOT lawmakers, folks, they are our servants) keep giving the very rich more of our money, and we keep letting them. They cry about pay cuts, but how many of us are laying awake at night wondering how we’re going to feed our children?

I think we’ve moved past the days of public guillotines. But I’m not sure how much people are gonna take. When tax refunds are made in IOUs, but we’re expected to still pay, when the bill from the bailouts comes due and most of us have lost our homes, our jobs, and our hope… what exactly do the very privileged think is going to come next? It only takes a casual review of history to see what always comes next.  When the masses have nothing to lose, their ability to conceive of, and execute, drastic relief solutions, manifests.

Guess I better learn to knit.