Well hello there, winter

A good ol' Oklahoma panhandle snow storm is blowing its way through Wisconsin today, dumping something like 6-10 inches on those of us in Madison and generally making a mess of the roads. Area school kids lucked out with a snow day, but most of us poor working fools still had to make the choice between making the trek to our various jobs or missing a days' pay.

Being the stubborn, hearty soul that I am, I opted for the 15-mile drive to work. It wasn't fun, but we made it (the decided lack of other cars on the road probably helped).

This is exactly what I suspected would play out when I went on a very pleasant walk last evening through the first, calmer part of the snow system. Since school snow days filled with sledding and hot chocolate are sadly a thing of the past for me now, I decided that it was a good chance to get out and enjoy myself before mundane responsibility set in the next morning. Camera and tripod in hand, I headed out into the neighborhood, passing a few people walking dogs lightly dusted with white, eventually making my way to Circle Park. I set up and took a few pictures near the powder covered merry-go-round, then strolled down to the lake and back.

Other than the ever-present distant rushing of cars out on the main roads, the only sounds were the falling snow, geese out for a paddle on a patch of still exposed water, and the occasional peal of laughter from two young girls who were building a stumpy little snowman nearby.

People's Christmas lights reflected everywhere, casting a warm glow across the accumulating snow, and here and there I caught a quick glimpse through a front window into a cozy living rooms and kitchens.

A good pair of boots, a warm jacket, gloves and hat, jeans, and my natural internal furnace kept me warm as I went - and I couldn't help but feel extremely grateful that I was so fortunate as to be able to really enjoy such a walk. And it was good for my mind, which I think has lately been a little more overloaded than usual with various issues of varying degrees of importance.

Sometimes a nice walk through the snow is all it takes to shake that off, though. What does it for you?

Inmates deserve better health care

We're all struggling for a better health care system (or any actual system, for that matter) in this country. To most folks, it seems strange that in a place as prosperous as America so many of its citizens lack even the most basic coverage.

So it may be difficult for some to find the time or the will to think about what things are like for those citizens who have landed in prison. Regardless of what they've done, though, these are human beings and therefor deserving of at least basic medical care.

Sadly, however, a combination of negligence and thinly-stretched resources have made for a pretty terrible situation for many inmates of Wisconsin's prison system.

Just two days ago, Bill Lueders at Isthmus reported on a call he'd received from the mother of an inmate being held in prison in La Crosse. She was desperate to get better medical care for her son, Robert Hawkins Jr., who was suffering from "severe stomach problems, high blood pressure, a chronic cough, and blood in his vomit and excrement" but was not getting proper medical attention from prison staff or doctors.

Lueders, being associated with a Madison publication, referred the stricken mother to the La Crosse Tribune, which did end up running a story about the issue. By that time, however, Hawkins had died. It had been two months since he'd first been incarcerated and had been exhibiting symptoms. Two months before prison staff saw fit to have him hospitalized.

And there are more examples of this sort of terrible scenario playing out in our prison system.

Curtis Heino was incarcerated at the Outagamie County Jail when he started to have breathing problems. His wife called to complain that whenever he'd gotten like that in the past, he'd come down with pneumonia. The jail's nurse brushed it all off:

"Nothing big going on with that guy at all," registered nurse Frank Koehler reassured the jail sergeant. "He's got the creeping crud like everybody else that's working in the jail has got. … He’ll survive."

Nineteen hours later, on Jan. 13, the 5-foot-8 Heino was found on the floor of his cell surrounded by bloody tissues and towels, according to jail officer reports obtained by The Post-Crescent through the state’s Public Records Law.

Still another incident involved a female inmate at the Taycheeda Correctional Institution.

Michelle Greer, 29, died within hours of pleading repeatedly with corrections officers for help with an acute asthma attack Feb. 2, 2000. She collapsed on the floor of a dining hall, where she died gasping for breath, still clutching her inhaler. She had told corrections officers multiple times that the inhaler was not helping her condition. Corrections officers had contacted Taycheedah health services twice on her behalf and were told by nurses that the situation was not an emergency because Greer could still talk.

And there are more stories - too many to list here. What's going on in our prisons may just be a reflection of a greater problem being faced by the nation. Our supposed health care system is in shambles, run by profit-driven institutions, unevenly distributed, and prohibitively expensive.

As far as I can tell, there are two big things at issue here: 1) Our prison systems are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, and 2) Our health care system is bloated and failing. The combination, for many, is lethal.

It doesn't have to be.

Pushing aside any arguments that prisoners don't deserve good medical treatment simply because they're prisoners (because that's just fucking wrong), we need to focus on fixing several problems. The United States has the highest number and percentage rate of incarceration in the world. That's one in 100 adults behind bars (more than 2.3 million), at a cost of nearly $50 billion a year for state governments and $5 billion more for the federal government. This is not an area where we should take pride in beating even countries like China.

Between the massive economic downturn and these sorts of numbers, it's no wonder that many prisons find themselves strapped for adequate cash and staffing, something that too often leads to the kinds of deadly scenarios described above.

Measures like killing the so-called War on Drugs, mandatory minumum sentancing laws, and other wasteful and/or discriminatory rules would held to ease the number of people behind bars. So would more spending on things like public education (argue all you like, people are less likely to turn to a life of crime if provided with better opportunities early on in life).

But some of this comes down to negligence, too, and we need to hold the responsible parties accountable for these peoples' deaths. We also need to make sure better training is provided for jail staff, so that the often clear-as-day warning signs don't go unheeded.

The most important thing is that these are almost all avoidable deaths, as we should be doing what we can to see that they are, in fact, avoided. No more phone calls from weeping mothers, please.


(photo by Gìpics on Flickr)

Sunday Brunch: Sausages

Ah, Kids in the Hall. How I do miss serialized doses of your insane, delightfully Canadian brand of comedy. Well, barring DVD purchases, there's always Youtube to bring back some of my favorite sketches. This one is probably one of their most absurd, for sure, and has stuck with me ever since I first saw it so many years ago. I share it now with you all:

My own private Lord of the Flies

I'm going to tell you a story.

Sorry, I'm feeling a touch nostalgic.

It's the early 1990's, and we find ourselves in the midst of a newly booming suburb about 40 minutes west of Chicago. Everywhere, corn fields and streams are being bulldozed to make way for identical fairy rings of bland, Barbie Doll houses. This once quaint river town is quickly transforming, its outer reaches spreading like spilled water on porous paper with the construction of big box retailers and chain restaurants.

In the middle of one housing development, a band of adolescent children have begun to take advantage of the sudden proliferation of dirt hills, trenches, cast-off bits of wood, and rocks. Gleefully, they begin to build ramshackle forts and huts within these side effects of progress, using the battlefield-like terrain to wage petty wars of harmless fun against rival groups of kids.

Me and my two best friends--Alicia and Dave--were one such tribe. Only three in number, we still considered ourselves a force to be reckoned with. In the side yard of Dave's house, just across the street from where Alicia lived (I, the odd one out, lived some distance away in the church manse, a small house blessedly surrounded by trees instead of muddy fields), new houses had yet to go up, but space had been cleared for the purpose. This meant several large heaps of dirt and rocks, plus scattered pieces of wooden boards and pallets that practically screamed at us to be used as building materials.

We were powerless to resist. Spending countless summer hours outdoors, toiling in the dirt, we eventually built a fort in one such mound. It had an inner cave area, with ledges on top protected by packed dirt parapets. From it, we could keep an eye on the next nearest band of ruffians, who had dug into a dirt pile just two yards down.

From our fortified perches, we kept an eye on one another, wary that, should we leave our fort for any amount of time, our enemies would rush in and attempt to seize control. We stockpiled throwing-sized dirt clods, stick swords, a few small rocks, and--perhaps our most prized possessions--a mound of discarded, mutant-huge, rotting vegetables from a nearby garden. No joke, these turnips and such were gigantic and stinky, ie: perfect.

And so, when the assault finally came, we were ready--or so we thought. A handful of boys and one girl, all a few years younger than us but bold as barbarians, came charging down from their hill, intent on taking our fort.

Dirt clods and giant vegetables flew threw the air, accompanied by war cries and the occasional yelp of shock from being hit. We stood atop our ledges and lobbed with all our might, confident that we would prevail.

I was kneeling to pick up a particularly large and decomposing turnip when everything went south. Something obscenely hard and painful thumped into the back of my head and knocked me clean over. I tumbled down the back side of the mound. At the bottom, clutching the quickly forming lump, I bent over and picked up the offending projectile. A dirt clump with a huge rock clearly embedded in its side.

Oh, the line had been crossed.

The unspoken rule of the suburban battlefield was that no real pain was to be inflicted, no actual rocks thrown--only dirt and vegetables and insults. But there was no way my attacker hadn't noticed the stone lodged into his dirt bomb, I thought. I called dirty pool.

It wasn't the most tactically sound plan ever, but my temper took over. I ran out from behind the hill, empty-handed, looking for the offending kid. Most of them were distracted, busily trying to scramble up the dirt and toward my two friends, who had continued their defense in my absence. One of the older boys, though, was still standing at its foot, clearly looking for good pieces of dirt to throw. Jackpot.

I rushed him, shoving him sideways onto the ground before he knew what was happening. I could have punched him in the face, or kicked him in the groin, or any number of things to pay him back for the rock to the head.

Instead, at that very moment, one of their mother's started calling them in to dinner, and the atmosphere changed in an instant. Two of the attackers--siblings, apparently--turned tail and ran back toward their house, yelling something about it being pizza night. Alicia and Dave started chatting with the remaining kids about some upcoming street hockey game.

The distraction provided enough time for the kid I had tackled to push me off and scramble back to his feet.

"See you later!" he said and then trotted away. As my fugue state slowly subsided, I stood and brushed dirt from my clothes, still smarting from the knock I'd taken. But I was glad that things had gone as they had. I didn't really want to beat anyone up. The rock in the dirt was probably an accident, or just a poor but not malicious choice.

Whatever, the important thing was that we'd maintained control over the fort.

Three days later, bulldozers came and destroyed the dirt mounds and began laying the foundations of several new homes. We had to go further and further away to find dirt fields and mounds on which to play, until eventually the whole subdivision had been filled in by houses and small parks. Even the nearby stretch of woods, where we'd built a sprawling tree fort, was cut down to make way for more development.

Some of us turned to garage bands and elaborate scavenger hunts to pass the time. Others went for less wholesome activities, of course. Eventually we all moved away or drifted apart. But sometimes, even today, I still rub the back of my head and think about how silly we were, and yet, how terribly human. Mostly, though, I think, man, that kid was a total douchebag.

Get a light

I have a bad temper sometimes, but this is just ridiculous:

Two bicyclists came up behind O'Brien, with one saying they were going to pass him on the left. As they passed, O'Brien said, "Get a light."

Dunlavy apparently asked him to repeat himself so he did, with the couple then telling O'Brien to mind his own business. Dunlavy apparently then tried to run O'Brien off the road.

The pair followed O'Brien to his home, where the light talk continued.

The female said it appeared O'Brien had plenty of lights and asked for one, so he gave one to her, but Dunlavy still was upset and clamped his hands around O'Brien's head, according to a police report.

The report added that he twisted O'Brien to the ground and kicked him in the ribs, but Dunlavy denied doing so when he was arrested.

I admit that it's a little rude to just yell "get a light" at a fellow cyclist, but the sentiment is completely legitimate. Riding a bike in the dark is dangerous enough as it is, let alone if you're lacking some sort of illumination. It's hard for other cyclists to see you, as well as motorists. Seriously, it's really in your best interest to get a damn light (which aren't necessarily all that expensive) if you're going to ride at night, so I do understand where O'Brien was coming from.

Regardless of whether or not the statement was rude, there's absolutely no reason to then harass the guy for it, going so far as to follow him home and smack him around a little. Cripes, O'Brien even gave them a light for free.

But I guess some folks have anger management problems, or maybe just major insecurity at being called out in front of their girlfriends. Who knows.

Point is twofold: night riding requires a light, and really, we all need to chill the fuck out.

EDIT TO ADD: As always, Bike Snob NYC provides some humor on the situation.

Afghanistan, we (really) hardly knew ye

Have you ever read an article or story about a subject that really made you take a moment and think to yourself, "Damn, I don't know what I thought I knew about that"?

I recently came across just such an article. "How We Lost the War We Won: A journey into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan" by Nir Rosen turned out to be an incredible eye-opener for me.

An American reporter granted nearly unprecedented access to some of the most off-limits part of that country, Rosen relates a story of a far more nationalistic than fundamentalist resurgent Taliban--one even open to women in schools and jobs--and a situation that cannot be "won" through military means.

I urge you to read it. Go on, I'll wait.

A taste:

With the Bush administration focused on the war in Iraq, money poured into Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, who were eager to maintain a second front against the American invaders. The Taliban — once an isolated and impoverished group of religious students who knew little about the rest of the world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive warlords — are now among the best-armed and most experienced insurgents in the world, linked to a global movement of jihadists that stretches from Pakistan and Iraq to Chechnya and the Philippines.

But this isn't a Bush bashing piece. Rosen gets down in the dirt and dust with the people of Afghanistan, literally risking his life to bring this story back to the rest of the world. And his main point seems to be that merely throwing more troops, more brawn at the problem is not going to fix much of anything.

"More troops are not the answer," a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. "You will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman." It is a point echoed in dozens of off-the-record interviews I conducted in Kabul with leading Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahedeen and Taliban commanders, and senior officials with the U.N. and prominent aid organizations. All agree that the situation is, in the words of one official, "incredibly bleak."

...

As one top official with a Western aid organization put it, "We're simply not up to the task of success in Afghanistan. I'm increasingly unsure about a way forward — except that we should start preparing our exit strategy."

The key line, and my inferred moral to Rosen's story, is this:

"This can't be solved other than by talking to the Taliban," says a top diplomat in Kabul. A leading aid official adds that it is important to understand the ideological goal of the Taliban: "They don't have an international-terrorist agenda — they have an Afghanistan agenda. We might not agree with their agenda for the country, but that's not our war."

It's a tough pill to swallow. I'm the polar opposite of a fan of any regime or ruling power that oppresses any of the people over whom it holds sway. I don't agree with conservative Islamic doctrine, or any doctrine, that subjugates women. But Afghanistan is not my country to rule. It is not anyone but Afghani's to rule.

The trick, of course, lies in making sure that Afghanis, all Afghanis, have an equal and unthreatened voice in those ruling decisions. Part of that does, I believe, require outside involvement, but much more in the form of international aid for infrastructure rebuilding, schools, security training, and know-how for a whole host of programs and problems. Not so much with the armies and weapons.

It was, after all, the US and Soviet Union that provided the region with much of its military training and armament. I would argue that it is then up to us to help them recover from all of that, but not by repeating past mistakes. Like the man said, you will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman.

Crass, but you get the point.

What's really interesting to see is how that country's government is now slowly flexing its independent muscle, perhaps emboldened by the prospect of the end of the Bush administration. Just today, the Karzai government made what's being called a "surprising reversal" and agreed to sign on, with 100 other countries, to a treaty banning the use of cluster bombs. The United States, it should be noted, has refused to sign the treaty and had been urging Afghanistan, one of the countries worst effected by the bombs, to follow suit.

Whether Karzai's move is purely political or not, it's impressive and important. Cluster bombs, much like modern nuclear weapons, are, in my opinion, completely unneccesarry tools of barbarous overkill. And the people they most hurt--regular Afghani citizens--are who we should all be listening to anyway.

What this all comes down to, I think, is the same moral of the story that we've learned (or were supposed to have learned) from Iraq. More often than not, the people who actually live in a place are the ones who best know what that place needs and how its people live. Even with the best of intentions, an outside power that swoops in and attempts to force change through violence is destined to wreak havoc and, usually, fail in its ultimate goals.

The US wanted to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan as part of their larger effort to "contain the spread of communism". They succeeded at that, but in the long run provided training and weapons to people like Osama bin Laden, who would go on to return the favor by helping to kill thousands of people on 9/11.

The US wanted to prevent the Islamic Revolution happening in Iran from spreading into Iraq and other nearby countries, and so threw its support behind Iraq during the '80-'88 conflict. In so doing, they helped supply the regime of Saddam Hussein with many of the weapons and intelligence it would go on to use against our own forces.

We have to stop supporting dictators and regimes simply because it seems convenient to our country's own selfish goals at the time. It always comes back to haunt us in the long term, which is a tense we seem to have a difficult time thinking in. We also have a difficult time asking for help and advice from the people most likely to know what's really up: the locals. And we are far, far too quick to rush toward force and violence as means to our ends.

I thought I knew a thing or two about Afghanistan and the Taliban. But things, as they are wont to do, change or are not what they at first appeared to be--and we all need to work to keep our minds open and flexible to keep up with the times. We need to really listen to the Afghani people to find out what they want, and then stick to that plan. Sorry Mr. Obama, but "more troops" isn't going to win that war. Through arrogance and incompetence, we've already lost it. Now's the time for finding a way to lend a hand in securing a meaningful peace--and to give up the reins of power and control over anyone but ourselves.

We're still waiting

This just gets worse and worse, doesn't it? I don't even know what to say:

The notorious 911 call from Brittany Zimmermann's cell phone the day she died carried the sounds of a woman's screams and a struggle, according to long-sealed search warrants obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal.

The warrants were only unsealed because of time - officials had asked judges to continue resealing them, but the most recent expiration date was allowed to pass unchallenged. Maybe that was the easiest way for them to release this information. Passively.

Whatever the case, we can all now see one of the likely main reasons why officials didn't want this stuff out in public: it makes them look really, really bad.

Still, many questions remain unanswered. Why, if there was audible screaming and struggling on the call, did the trained dispatcher claim not to hear anything (as according to her and to former 911 director Joe Norwick)? And why didn't she follow up on the call, as procedure dictated? 48 minutes then passed between the call being made and police being dispatched to the apartment, presumably only because Zimmermann's fiance had by that point also made a 911 call.

I recognize that it's unlikely much could have been done to actually save Brittany's life. But it is very much worth our while to question what might have been done differently so that her killer could have been caught and brought to justice long ago. There's always a better chance of that if police are dispatched immediately. But they weren't, and the perpetrator remains at large.

And the 911 center? Still having issues, even after all of this. Although they were much quicker to release information on what went wrong afterward, their handling of the calls leading up to the beating death of a man in Lake View Park in November was also very poor. Negligent, even.

Yet Kathleen Falk still insists that "problems at the 911 Center have been overblown. The facility, she maintains, has been well managed and adequately staffed."

I don't place all of the blame for these problems on Falk's management, or on any one person for that matter. But her continued dismissals of, in my mind, perfectly valid concerns over 911 center performance do nothing to bolster her position. They make her seem out of touch and unconcerned with the very real problems faced by the center and the community it serves. It certainly won't solve everything, but having an executive willing to really confront these issues head-on would definitely be helpful.

Upgrading 911 center software and equipment is important, but so is making sure there are adequate staffing levels (and training) so that no one is forced into heavy overtime. Hiring an experienced, accountable center director would be a good start, too.

All of this is not to say that I'm endorsing Nancy Mistele's run for Falk's office. Frankly, she strikes me as an even worse choice for the job. But that won't keep me from calling for accountability from Falk and everyone else involved.