The Destructive Power of the Supermajority

There is an ever growing sense that our democratic process is broken, that it's impossible for an average voter to have her voice heard, that no matter how he votes or how loudly he protests the politicians in power are going to take whatever actions they want, the will of the people be damned. This is why voter turnout is so low and why people feel like voting just flat-out doesn't matter. The Republican members of the General Assembly this week seemed hell-bent to show the voters of North Carolina that the impotence of public opinion is not simply a "feeling," it is absolutely a fact. The GOP showed us precisely how broken our democratic process is.

Our General Assembly meets for regular sessions once per year. The "long session" in odd years runs from January-July and the "short session" in even years from April-June. These are the only times that your elected representatives are generally called upon to pass laws. This year, the General Assembly met in 4 special called additional sessions. The last time the general assembly held that many special sessions was 1898 as it moved to cement the passage of Jim Crow Laws, not exactly a proud moment in our state's history and certainly not a time we should seek to emulate now.

Special sessions allow the Legislature to respond to public emergencies, events like the historic flooding in coastal communities following hurricane Matthew in October. The Governor's special called session to pass a disaster relief bill was the ordinary and proper use of that constitutional provision. What happened next was anything but ordinary or proper.

On Wednesday after both houses passed the disaster relief bill, the Republican members of the assembly shocked their Democratic colleagues by adjourning the special session called by the Governor and immediately convening a new special session called by the General Assembly itself. The Democratic members of the assembly were given no notice that the session would be called, or afforded any opportunity to contribute to the formulation of the bills to be drafted and considered. Introducing legislation in a special session called in secret deprives the public of the opportunity to fully vet, understand and respond to new laws. It was a move carefully designed to ensure that as few people as possible would have as little time as possible to understand and comment on the impacts of the new laws.

Over the following 2 days, the Republican's introduced and passed legislation that made drastic changes to state government.

SB 4 completely redesigns the state's election oversight system. It combines the current Ethics Commission and State Board of Elections; changes the composition of the county board of elections in all 100 counties; changes the terms and operations of the Industrial Commission; adds an en banc review procedure to the state Court of Appeals; and makes our appellate court judicial races partisan.

HB 17 strips the State Board of Education of virtually all power to run the state's education system, vesting its previous authority in the newly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, Mark Johnson. The bill also strips the incoming Governor of nearly 1,100 appointments he would have made to the administrative agencies he oversees. This bill hasn't been signed yet by the Governor and if you are itching to make your fury heard, calling the Governor at (919) 814-2000 and urging him to veto the bill would be an excellent way to do that.

Look, I'm not saying that all of these measures are bad just because they were introduced by Republicans. I'm saying they are bad because they did not follow a process that allows for Democratic representatives to contribute to the formulation of important state policy and they deprived the public of the opportunity to offer meaningful input. It would have been really nice to have had an opportunity to consult with the State Bar about the impacts of changes to the appellate review process, for instance. With super majorities in both houses, Republicans were unwilling to have thoughtful, deliberate discussion about these measures with their Democratic colleagues, simply because they didn't need to. Those Democratic colleagues represent millions of North Carolinians. Refusing to engage or compromise with them essentially tells those 3.5 million North Carolinians that the GOP really doesn't give a rip about their opinions, and that is just wrong.

As the public got word of what was going down in Raleigh, they flooded the General Assembly with thousands of phone calls and emails and they showed up in person to let their representatives know they did not have the support of their constituents. But the response of Republicans on the house floor was to discount the emails by saying the vast majority were from out of state (they weren't), and that protestors didn't deserve to observe the proceedings because they were not being properly decorous. None of the Republican comments responded to the outpouring of citizen opposition. Instead they cleared the chamber and began arresting the public and even the media for trying to be present to make their opposition heard. The protestors were not from out-of-state and they weren't paid to be there. They were North Carolinians who were furious with the heavy-handed governing of a general assembly completely unwilling to engage with them or respond to their concerns. Instead, our state government arrested elderly women, a mother who had her child with her, a combat veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a member of the press, and even Santa.

That is why our current democratic process is broken-because our representatives are no longer willing to engage in debate, find common ground, and compromise with one another. They feel no need to respond at all to dissatisfied constituents. In this year's presidential election, North Carolina broke 50% Republican and 46% Democratic. So, despite the fact that the Republican legislature has managed to gerrymander districts to give themselves a 3/4 majority in the legislature, the citizens they represent statewide are practically evenly divided between conservative and liberal ideologies. We are a moderate state and our elected representatives should represent that moderate make-up in drafting, introducing and considering new laws. The only way they can do that is if the Republican members are willing to reach across the aisle, even when they don't have to, to engage their Democratic colleagues in the process of drafting legislation and directing the future of this state. We absolutely have to stop saying that the other side is wrong, simply because they are on the other side. And if Republican members are truly interested in representing the people of this state, they have a duty to respond to legitimate concerns about their tactics and their proposed policies, to put their policies forward and open them up to public criticism and then defend and justify them, and perhaps even modify them so that they are more reflective of the views of the entire state.

Finally, if you are mad as hell about what went down this week in Raleigh, its time to get involved and stay engaged. Many members of the general assembly are likely to be up for election this year in special elections ordered by the court. Contact your local Democratic Party and sign-up to volunteer. Consider running for office or encourage a friend or neighbor to run. Ladies, if you've ever given even a passing thought to running, contact Lillian's List and attend one of their upcoming trainings. Use NC Megaphone to email legislators about issues important to you. Better yet, figure out who your individual representative is and email only their office. Representatives are far more responsive to emails sent only to their office than to emails sent to all 170 members. Even though its frustrating and you may feel ignored or discounted, its important to keep making your voice heard. The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day is lose it.

Abortion. There, I said it.

Abortion is a dirty word. It simply isn't mentioned in polite company. Quite frequently it isn't mentioned in impolite company! Well, I'm not ashamed to let that one little word and all of the emotional baggage and vitriol that comes along with it slip out of my fingers and onto the page. Every woman in this country has the right to an abortion if she wants one. There, I said it.

This week four representatives in the North Carolina House introduced legislation to further restrict access to abortion services. I read the text of the bill sitting at my desk and fought back tears. This evening, on the comfort of my porch, I wept. I wept for the women who will die if this bill passes, for the women whose already painfully difficult decisions will be made worse by a group of men who cannot begin to fathom what it feels like to be the person responsible for the monumental and life-altering decision of whether or not to bring new life into this world. I remembered having to make that decision and I wept for my fourteen year old self.

Changes proposed by the bill include:

• Increasing the mandatory waiting period from 24 hours to 72 hours
• Requiring procedures to be performed by a certified OB/GYN and prohibiting other physicians from performing them
• Prohibiting NC Universities from teaching physicians how to safely perform abortions.
• Prohibiting two of the best hospitals in the southeast from performing abortions at all
• Requiring physicians to report data, including in some cases an ultrasound image, to the NC Department of Health for every abortion performed

These restrictions, while pushed in the name of increasing the safety of women seeking the procedures, actually have the opposite effect. Limiting the number of facilities and physicians who can perform abortion or medically induced miscarriage only serves to limit women's access to medically safe abortion services and increases the likelihood that these women will seek out unsafe abortions or attempt them on their own, endangering their own lives and future fertility. Making abortions harder to obtain does not make them safer.

I noticed as I read through the bill today that the "counseling" requirements remain unchanged. I hadn't had cause to read those counseling requirements until today. I was struck by the fact that they include a provision that the physician must tell the woman that "medical assistance benefits may be available for prenatal care, childbirth and neonatal care" and that "public assistance programs...may or may not be available as benefits under the federal and state assistance programs," and that "the father is liable to assist in the support of the child." All of these required statements seem to be intended to relieve the woman of the notion that she will ultimately be financially responsible for the rearing of her child and to impress upon her the fact that government resources will be made available to her if she only chooses to give her child life and that the child's father will be made to provide for it. Horsefeathers. The intent of these proscribed statements is simply to make a woman question whether her reasons for seeking an abortion are meritorious. They do not seek to improve the health or well-being of the mother or the fetus, nor do they serve to provide for the long-term well-being of either of them. They serve only to guilt her into changing her mind.

Last year the North Carolina General Assembly voted to lower the income guidelines for the state's medicaid program which provides "prenatal, childbirth and neonatal care." Currently, in order to qualify for medical assistance, a single pregnant woman must earn less than $23,000 per year, $2,000 per month. A woman earning $25,000 per year would not qualify for Medicaid services and the cost of her prenatal care and delivery is likely to exceed her entire annual salary. It is the height of hypocrisy for the legislature to impose upon a doctor a mandated script intended to pressure a woman into deciding to keep her child while at the same time voting to restrict the resources that provide for that care. The same rule applies to the legislature's willingness to provide for the child you are encouraging her to bring into the world. How dare you claim that a woman is entitled to federal benefits as a means of inducing her to give birth to a child she may not be able to afford to care for while at the same time denying federal dollars to expand medicaid, cutting funding for child care services and failing to invest in affordable housing initiatives. And, until you are ready to take steps to improve a child support enforcement system that everyone knows is broken, don't tell a woman that the child's father is going to be made to contribute to the cost of care.

Our legislators, in their exceeding wisdom, also introduced this week a bill to limit sex education in the state to strictly abstinence only. The bill would prohibit the education of teenage boys and girls about the efficacy of all forms of birth control, including Plan B and IUDs, two extremely effective and safe methods of preventing pregnancy which have been deemed abortifacents by those on the religious right who seek only to motivate their base for political gain and care very little about the health or wellbeing of women and girls. 

There seems to be a movement on the right to force impoverished women to have children they don't want so that they can then hold those same women up as examples of the greedy culture of poverty that wants to live off of the state so that they can vote in further cuts to social programs. I simply cannot understand the thought process that leads one to believe that you should restrict access to birth control and make it harder to afford, limit access to abortions, and then chastise women who seek federal or state financial assistance to raise children they didn't want to have in the first place. On what planet does this train of thought make sense?

You don't have to like abortions. You can believe with all of your might that the person seeking an abortion or performing it is going to burn in hell for all eternity. That is your right. But you do not have the right to prevent a woman from deciding that abortion is the best option available to her. You don't have the right to tell a rape victim that she must bear and rear the child of her rapist. You don't have the right to tell a fourteen year old girl that she must carry a child to term. You don't have the right to tell a woman who has been told her child stands a 99% chance of being born brain-dead that she must bring that child, doomed to a terribly short life filled with suffering, into the world against her own best judgment. You don't have the right to tell any woman that she must become a mother even if her child was conceived in a loving relationship and both parents can afford to provide care. You do not have the right to tell a woman to become a parent. You simply do not have the right.

The hardest thing for me in reading the proposed legislation is the realization that the authors have such an inability to feel compassion or empathy for the women whose lives will be affected. These are real women undergoing serious emotion duress, struggling with a complex decision that you members of our society who possess penises instead of wombs cannot possibly begin to fathom.

If you believe that there is no circumstance which justifies a woman seeking an abortion, that's fine. You are entitled to your belief. But put your powers to use in the service of good, of God. Offer your time and money and energy in counsel and service to young mothers who need it. Find compassion. Buy groceries. Pay for a car repair. Fund child care programs. Don't use those same resources making women less safe.

I grieve for you, my sisters, who will suffer the burden of compensating for these foolhardy legislative actions, and I promise you that I will do everything in  my power to make sure that you have access to safe, affordable abortion services, even if that means I have to drive across the state myself to pick you up, feed and house you. I sure hope it doesn't come to that.

The text of the full bill can be found here. If you are passionate about this issue, I urge you to call or e-mail your legislator. You can find their contact information here.

Keep Your Grubby Paws Off My Birth Control!

I was only 13 when my mother found out I was having sex. It was a terrible time for us. She didn’t speak to me for a week. Her golden child, the one with the good grades, who got up early and made a fresh pot of coffee every morning, who never got into any trouble of any kind, was doing the unthinkable. But she did the right thing. She took the proactive step to put me on the pill. Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent me getting pregnant a mere 11 months later, but that’s a story for another day.

I have been on one form or another of birth control ever since. The pill was never the right answer for me, personally. I have a hard enough time remembering to eat meals every day, let alone remembering to take a pill at a specified hour. So, I’ve tried just about everything, several different brands of the pill, NuvaRing, the patch, DepoProvera, and ultimately the IUD. The IUD is the best thing that ever happened to me. No hormones, no remembering, no thought required, and I’m good for 10 years or more. Yes, please! No babies until I decide I’m ready. And that’s the goal, right? To allow women to decide when they are ready to have children, and thereby reduce the instance of unplanned pregnancies, reduce the number of abortions, reduce the number of single moms dependent upon our social safety network, reduce the number of children in foster care, reduce the entire cost on our overburdened system.

Which is why it is so incredibly difficult for me to understand why, in the 21^st century, we are still have a national debate about the availability of birth control. Why? I thought this was a fight our parents had won. A hundred years ago, you could be imprisoned for counseling women about how to avoid becoming pregnant, and many women were. Margaret Sanger underwent a great number of personal tragedies in her quest to ensure that women had access to birth control. 

And they won. In 1972 the Supreme Court in Eisenstadt v. Biard legalized birth control for all Americans, reversing the Comstock laws that had criminalized the simple act of providing contraception to women. North Carolina was the first state in the country to recognize birth control as a public health measure and to provide contraceptive services to indigent mothers through its public health program. And the rates at which women utilize birth control have been on the rise ever since. A 2013 Lancet systematic literature review found that 77% of women in the United States of reproductive age used contraception.

So, again, I cannot understand why in the year 2014, nearly a hundred years after Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic, we are still having this debate about access to birth control. The requirement for health insurance to provide contraception without a co-pay or deductible was one of the only things the Affordable Care Act got right. Let me say that again, the health insurance company is providing that birth control. Not the government. The right-wing messaging machine has been very adept at selling the notion that the government, that you and I and our taxpayer dollars, are funding the late-night shenanigans of whorish college sorority girls across this great nation by providing them with access to birth control. When the reality is that we all are contributing to an insurance pool that provides birth control to 77% of the women in this country of child-bearing age, probably you, or your sister, or your aunt, or even your mom. And that same insurance pool is unquestioningly providing unfettered access to Viagra, Cialis and penis pumps for men who are very much not of child-bearing age, but want to get their kicks in anyway.

And all of this is what leads me to my present outrage at Speaker Thom Tillis’s plan for providing birth control over-the-counter while removing the mandate for health insurance companies to provide birth control free of charge. Please don’t be fooled folks. This is about money. Insurance companies are none too happy about being required to provide expensive IUDs which can provide 10 years of quality, baby-free life in one fell swoop, for free, when you might easily abandon your plan, and thereby their premiums, leaving them in the lurch. None too happy.

And so we have the present proposed alternative, designed to trick women into thinking that the Republican party is really on their side. That they want women to have access to birth control. But this is not a solution. Not a realistic one. Making birth control available over the counter means that women who would have been able to obtain the pill for free will now have to have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 per year to keep their uteruses zygote-free. That may not seem like much to you, but when you are surviving on less than $1,000 a month, it's might as well be a million dollars. And what does this do to women like me, for whom the birth control pill isn't an effective option? What of my IUD? I’m expected to come out of pocket to the tune of somewhere between $250 and $1,000 or more while my insurance premiums continue to pay for your Viagra? I don’t think so. If I don’t get my little pink pill, or copper "T" as the case may be, covered by my insurance, you don’t get your little blue pill either.

To everything a season

"TO every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Ecclesiastes 3

I remember how well that verse resonated with me even as a small child. Every single thing that happens in life has a purpose. There is a lesson to be learned from every hardship if I can just pay close enough attention to see it. I find myself coming back to that scripture over and over and over as life ebbs and flows through joy and strife, gladness and sorrow, pride and shame, reminding myself at each of those dramatic turns that change is the only thing in life that remains unchanging. Nothing is static. Every sadness is eventually followed by joy. Every heartbreak followed by love. Some people dread those changes in direction. But we shouldn't. They add spice to life. They make it interesting. They give us the opportunity to grow into better people and to improve the lives of everyone around us by sharing that new understanding.

I wouldn't trade any of my experiences, even as terrible as some of them have been, for a life filled with easy love and unchallenged decisions. And my life has certainly not been filled with effortless love or easy decisions. There have been ample opportunities for me to be angry, to hate, to drown myself in the drama and misery of what "they" have done to me, or how "they" have made me miserable. I decided a long time ago that my own spiritual energy is way too precious to me to be wasted on hatred or anger. It is so much more productive to forgive, to try to understand, and then to move on from a place of love and compassion.

I was confronted recently with the idea that I had somehow thrown away the last decade or so of my life because my relationship has ended, that I might look back and wish that I hadn't wasted my twenties. But I think that is the farthest thing from the truth. I haven't thrown away any time. And I certainly don't regret it, not a moment of it, even as difficult as it was most of the time. I'm not certain I could have navigated such a difficult time in my life completely alone. We needed each other. Our relationship served a very real and meaningful purpose for us both. We raised our children together, and did a damn fine job of it, if I do say so myself. We found joyous occasions in the midst of financial struggle and the stress of juggling a houseful of kids with working multiple jobs each, attending school, and, for a great deal of time, maintaining two separate households. We loved and celebrated and fought with equal amounts of passion and energy. We were exhausted together. Our relationship was always a bit unconventional and it worked for us. And I have no doubt that he was my soul mate. The problem lies in how we define a soul mate and what we expect from them.

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. 
A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. 
A soul mate's purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master...” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

 And if that's the case, then I don't want another soul mate. I don't need to be shaken up any more in life. My heart has been broken so wide open that not another ray of light could possibly find it's way in. What I need is a partner who wants nothing more than to wholeheartedly enjoy all that life has to offer, with a smile and a little zippity-do-dah attitude. The time I've spent over the last year or so with a focus on really understanding what I want and who I want to be has affirmed for me that the most important thing I can do is to have a fulfilling and wholesome relationship with myself... before I am a mother, a spouse, a friend, an employee, a volunteer...I have to be my complete self, and be happy with it.

"We are walking around like a circle half complete. You know, we look like the letter C. We are very susceptible to a person of the opposite sex, some other circle half complete, coming up and joining with us- completing the circle that was-and giving us a burst of euphoria and energy that feels like the wholeness that a full connection with the universe produces. In reality, we have only joined up with another person who is looking for their other half on the outside too."  - The Celestine Prophecy

For the first time in my life, I feel like I am a complete person, all on my own, without anyone else's permission or propping up. My fellowship has helped me identify my passions and give them shape and purpose. My path has become clearer, especially as law school draws ever nearer. I know that I am on my way to becoming the very best possible version of myself, and learning to humbly appreciate the awesomeness of who I am and what I am capable of doing. When I enter into the next chapter of my journey, I want to be my very own complete circle so that I am not dependent on another person to be my source of happiness, so that I can appreciate him for everything he has to offer without expecting anything more or different than everything he already is. It's high time I planted some sunflowers of happiness in a field that has lay fallow and dreary for a very, very long season. I'm ready for spring.

Lessons in Small-Town Southern Sexism

In the more than 10 years I've worked in my current position,  I've run across all kinds of people. We seem to serve relatively equal proportions of racist southerners and inconsiderate northerners.  Thankfully,  in both instances,  they are extraordinarily small percentages of our overall clientele and both are to be expected in our small southern bedroom community.  For the most part our clients tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Whether rich or poor, white or black, well educated or not, young or old, they are mostly ideologically mediocre, kind, middle-of-the-road Americans. They are in need of our service, stressed about what is usually a major life event and grateful to have someone else worrying about it for awhile.

In those instances when a client is particularly appreciative or when we have rendered extraordinary service in some way, it is not unusual for us to receive small gifts. Over the course of my career I have received from our varied clientele gift cards, modest jewelry, chocolates, baked goods, wine, liquor and fruits. All of them delicious or beautiful and so incredibly appreciated. In fact, Rick and I enjoyed the most expensive dinner we have ever shared courtesy of a very generous client's Christmas gift.

But not until today had anyone given me lingerie. Well not lingerie exactly, but close enough. I was thanked for my hard work today in a meeting with a client with a gift card for Victoria Secret. I wish i could remember all the things that ran through my mind bin slow motion as i watched him with a huge grin take our that little pink box and say, "And this is for you." The implicit sexual objectification was probably the first thing followed by a full 10 seconds of me running through all of the possible responses to this horrifically embarrassing moment. But,I'm a good southern girl. I know how to smile pleasantly and graciously say thank you, which I did. I mean, I didn't want to be rude. But as my face turned several varrying shades of red and I stammered over my response, all I was thinking was "You have got to be fucking kidding me! On what planet is it acceptable for a 60+ year old man to give a young(ish) woman providing professional services a gift card for lingerie?"

The answer, of course, is: in a southern small town. My client was very grateful for work I did that went beyond the normal standard of care. Something I'm proud to do pretty routinely. And he showed his appreciation in a way that, to him, seems completely reasonable and appropriate.  He even remarked to me about his knowledge that all women love to spend money at the mall. And, as the recipient of that gift in a small Southern town,  I'm not at liberty to educate him about the several ways his well-meaning gift was offensive. No. I smile and say thank you. And comment about how I'll have to try and get there during the semi-annual sale when, in truth, I won't be going ever because Victoria Secret doesn't sell bras in an H cup. He will never know that his comment was offensive because for me to tell him so would serve no useful purpose in a small southern town except to lose us a client and label me as a difficult-to-get-along-with,  ungrateful, "feminist-type."

So I'll take my gift card and buy something for someone else, which will make me happy, knowing that I am so grateful to my client for expressing his appreciation for my hard work, even if he doesn't know how sexist it was.

Life Lessons From My Darkest Days

There are angels among us. I know, I know. It's one of the most cliche things to say. But it is true. Some of us think of them as literal angels with wings and halos. Some of us know them as gurus and teachers. Whatever form it takes for you, it is undeniable that there are people around us whose flame burns a little brighter, whose wisdom is a little more profound, whose impact is felt so incredibly strongly. In my darkest days, I had the good fortune of knowing one of these angels.

I was 18 and had just moved into my own tiny trailer with Dylan. I was living on my own, not relying on the kindness of others, for the first time in my life. I'd barely had a chance to get the place furnished and food in the fridge when my in-laws filed for emergency custody of Dylan. It was a terrible, scary time. They hurled accusations of neglect and fabricated stories about my treacherous parenting. I was alone, and lonely. I was alone in my grief when I learned they had been granted emergency temporary custody because of the lies they had told the court. I was panicked. I knew that my fate and Dylan's were inextricably linked. There was no way that I could go on with my life if I was not being Dylan's mother. And there was no way that he could turn out to be a happy, healthy, productive member of society if I was removed from his life and he was left to be raised by his father's family. I was grief stricken. I was alone in my hatred and contempt. Even after regaining a shared custody arrangement while we continued our protracted court battle, they seemed to make it their life's mission to plot the ways they could make my life more difficult, more miserable, more desperate. And my hate burned bright. I could feel my loathing taking root in my belly and beginning to grow, to consume me. I wished them misfortune. I tried to think of the ways I could seek retribution, make them feel as badly as they had made me feel. I cried. And when I finally found myself at the bottom of my emotional pit, at what I knew was the darkest place I could ever allow myself to go, I called my minister.

I had grown up attending Chad O'Shea's Unity Center services. I had the good fortune of being raised in his church. I never cared much for the Sunday School classes. I preferred to be upstairs with the grown-ups, listening to Chad. And one of the things I had absorbed in my many Sundays spent listening to this enlightened messenger of God was the lesson that we are each responsible for choosing our reactions, for controlling our emotions, for being the master of our own heart and mind. "No one makes you mad, glad, bad or sad. That's an inside job," he would say. Or another of our favorites, "Misery is Optional." But in those darkest of days I was taking serious objection with Rev. Chad's teachings. How was I choosing to be miserable? I most certainly wasn't making that choice! That choice was being made for me. Look at what they were doing to me! How could anyone say that I was choosing this pain and torment? And, even in the midst of that despair, I knew that I couldn't go on hating them the way I was. I didn't want to. I knew it would destroy me. It would leave me bitter and sad. It would dampen my light. But I couldn't see my way out of it. I couldn't talk myself out of that loathing. So, I called up the minister I hadn't seen in years and sobbed.

Chad counseled me through my darkest hours. He talked with me, lovingly and patiently helping me to see that I had no enemies; that no one was trying to deliberately cause me pain. He helped me to see Kathy & Tim as people trying to make their way down their own path in life using only the tools they had available to them. He reminded me that every being on this earth has a spark of divinity in them, a Christ light that flickers and burns within and it is our task to find that Christ light and nurture it, listen to it, talk to it, coax it out. He encouraged me to visualize that spark of divinity in my encounters, to ignore the outer shell that I felt was causing me so much pain, and instead talk to the divine. That lesson is what got me through the next several years as we continued to battle over custody and argue about parenting techniques and routines. I found patience by talking to the divine. I discovered that I had the capacity to love my enemies, to bless those who would curse me, to do good to those who hated me, and pray for those who would despitefully use me and persecute me. I am so glad that we were able to work through that period in our lives and come out on the other side of it as family. Kathy and Tim have helped me over the years in more ways than anyone and I will forever be grateful to them for their help and love. It is easy for me now, looking back, to see how they must have been so scared for Dylan, terrified that this 18 year old kid didn't know what she was doing and would never be able to care for him. And, in truth, without their help I probably wouldn't have been able to. I'm so grateful to Chad for helping me ensure that I left the door open for that relationship to blossom into what it is now, that I didn't irreparably burn those bridges, that I chose light over dark.

That is a lesson that not only saved my 18 year old self, but has saved me again and again and again. I have no room in my heart for hatred. It consumes far too much energy, energy that could be better spent doing good in the world, helping others, making someone smile. It was the most difficult lesson of my life, to learn to forgive and to love those who had caused me great harm. And I will be forever grateful to God for sending me an angel when I needed it most, in my darkest days.

We celebrated the life of Chad O'Shea this past Saturdeay. His church was packed to capacity, with people overflowing into the lobby. The impact he had on my life is by no means unique or out of the ordinary. He touched the lives of everyone he encountered in deep and profound ways. He was truly an angel, a guru, an enlightened teacher and I am so grateful to have known him. He absolutely and without a doubt saved my life in my darkest days.

Wait. What?

It has come to my attention today that, despite my frequent politically charged posts and the proliferation of garbage that passes for news on the 24-hour news networks, many of my friends out there have absolutely no idea what just happened or why our government just shut down. That's okay. No judgment. Here's the breakdown.

Every year Congress adopts a budget. Simple enough. They decide how much money is going to be spent on different government programs for the next 12 months. That funding runs from October 1st through September 30th. If the Congress can't agree (I know, you'd think that never happens, huh? But, yeah, it totally does) on how much money they want to spend on certain government functions by October 1st, they usually agree to just keep funding those programs at the same level as the previous year. Kind of like saying, well, I know our phone budget for last year was $150 a month and we are really hoping to save some money on telephone bills this year, but until we figure out how to do that, we'd better keep planning on spending $150 a month. This is called a "Continuing Resolution." It simply lets the government continue to function until lawmakers can do what we pay them do, which is to compromise on solutions that benefit the greatest number of us, in theory.

For the last several years, a far right faction of the Republican Party has discovered that they can hold the rest of the Congress hostage by refusing to support the bills put forth by their own party or the opposing party unless their very specific demands are met exactly. This happened last year with the continuing resolution, and again with the debt ceiling increase last fall and again in December. Last year the Tea Party members of the GOP were demanding continuing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and refusing to allow even a small increase in tax rates for corporations or high income citizens. This year, they want to "defund" Obamacare.

Now, let me be clear. I am not a fan of the Affordable Care Act. I would have preferred a single payer system. In my opinion, requiring health insurance coverage is about 180 degrees from insuring that every American has access to affordable health care. The mere presence of health insurance companies dramatically increases the cost of care by requiring even small doctor's offices to employ a virtual army of claims processors. Insurance companies are very skilled at bleeding money out of the general population, out of Medicaid and out of Medicare. I mean, once your Medicaid claim is processed and paid, do you ever go back and examine the bill and see what the government actually paid ? Of course not. It's not your money. It got paid, and that's all that matters. Every health insurance claim I have had processed in the last 3 years required at least once call to the company to correct an error and insure that I was paying the appropriate bill, or that the doctor's office was paid the correct amount. A ridiculous chunk of my precious time was spent arguing with insurance companies over the last year to convince them that they should, in fact, pay for my health care, which is their job.

I will go on to say that, just because someone has health insurance, doesn't mean they can afford to use it. A $2,500 deductible for someone making $18,000 a year may as well be $100,000. Its more money than they will ever have available to pay for medical care. And before you say it, no, a person making $18,000 a year does NOT automatically qualify for Medicaid just because they are poor by your standard. That is technically above the poverty line and in most scenarios in North Carolina, would not qualify for Medicaid.

However, even with its inherent failures, the ACA also did several really great things, like end the lifetime caps on coverage, do away with denials of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and make preventative care 100% free to anyone with a policy. For that reason alone, I purchased a policy. Free physical, free pap smear, free mammogram, free birth control? Bring it on, Obama! The law is flawed, terribly flawed, but it was a grand compromise designed to get the most benefit for the greatest number of people while still managing to pass both houses of Congress, which seems to take a friggin act of Congress lately!

So, the GOP says they hate the ACA and they ain't havin' it! The House is held by a GOP majority who says that the only way a continuing resolution is getting through their chamber is if we fully strip the funding provisions for the ACA. Even if this could get through the Democratic held Senate (which they know it can't), it would never be signed into law by President Obama, so really, it's just a great big game of grandstanding. Which is great. Politicians grandstand all the time. They grandstand until they come close to the brink, and then they do what we pay them do. They think and discuss and compromise and come up with a solution. But not these guys.

When their first proposal was turned down, they countered today with a provision that would have allowed your employer to claim a "conscientious" objection to your being provided with birth control. I'm sorry. Wait. What? You want my employer to be able to decide whether or not my health insurance policy will pay for my birth control? Seriously? Is this 1913? Quick, all the 20-50 year old women in the room who think birth control should be restricted, raise your hand! Anybody? Nobody? No? Didn't think so.

The GOP is going to have to get this rogue bunch of Tea Partiers under control before they sink the entire nation. And they certainly better have a quick Come-To-Jesus session with them to explain that their overarching strategy this election cycle is to overcome the appearance that they are waging a war on women. Sure looks like a war on women to me. You better keep your grubby paws off my birth control GOP, cause Lord knows I can't afford to have more children right now, and you sure as hell don't want to pay for them if I do. Sweet Baby Jesus! I cannot wait to go register voters.

From the tiniest voice, "Help! Help!"

I don't consider myself to be a radical. I don't think that my values, while more liberal than some of my friends, are so far to the left that people think, "Wow, look at that wacko. There she goes spouting off her crazy talk again." In fact, I'd like to think that I'm pretty middle of the road.

I think we need welfare reform. The current system does allow some abuses to happen, although they are not nearly as prevalent as the right-wing media would have you believe. Why is it that we still have more than 20 different kinds of "welfare" (think food stamps, cash assistance, social security, disability, Section 8 housing, Medicaid, WIC, daycare vouchers, tax credits, etc.) administered by a bakers dozen of government agencies, all with different income requirements? Why do we require every needy family to meet with administrators from each of these separate agencies to apply and then recertify for benefits every year, or multiple times a year in many cases? Why can't we simplify this process? It wouldn't be hard to create a singular federal form to apply for government benefits, similar to the way the FAFSA allows you to apply for both Federal and State education assistance, to apply for all available government assistance programs. One application should link you with all of the programs for which you qualify. And then, shudder to think, we could assign actual social workers who could help actually lift families out of poverty!

I think we need tax reform. If my congressman can't fill out his taxes without the assistance of a paid professional, the code needs to be simplified. One of the most interesting things I learned on my recent trip abroad is that filing taxes in France takes all of about 90 seconds. The income data is electronically submitted by employers. Taxpayers log on to an online system, answer a few questions, confirm the information submitted by their employer and then, press send. That's it. Done. I want that.

I want women to make their own health care decisions. Whether you agree with their decision or not, it is theirs to make. Whether or not you choose to use birth control, it is their decision to make, not yours. You certainly shouldn't have to resort to back-room political side-stepping to restrict women's access to abortions. In case you haven't ever read anything, ever, it is damn near impossible to force a women who is opposed to giving birth, to give birth, even if that resistance means that she dies in the process of seeking out a dirty, back-room abortion. Conversely, if you give women unfettered access to birth control and education, the number of abortions decrease substantially, go figure.

I think we should legalize marijuana and end the costly and unjust war on drugs. I don't smoke pot, but the people I know who do, aren't criminals and I prefer that my tax dollars not be spent housing and feeding them, when they are perfectly capable of doing that themselves.

I think we should scale way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way back on the amount of money we spend on the NSA, CIA, FBI, Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Homeland Security, etc, etc, etc. The truth is, we are pretty much the safest and most over-prepared country on the face of the earth. Most of the money we force down the throat of this plethora of government agencies serves only to line the pockets of shareholders in major companies supporting the war machine. If you believe in small government, lets start the shrinking process here.

I think we need to reform the way we provide subsidies to big Pharma, big Agro, and big Oil. If you gross more than $1 Billion a year, you don't need a government subsidy...for anything. Can I get a' Amen!?

I think we need to increase mandatory paid maternity leave, require paid paternity leave, and pay for pre-k for working single moms and families with two working parents. At some point, we need to recognize that there is value in providing care. Just because it's "women's work" doesn't mean we should continue to devalue it. If we valued child-rearing the same way we valued "stock-rearing," this nation would be a far, far better place to live.

I think we can find the funding to pay elementary school teachers at least as much as I pay my plumber. Lord knows they put up with just as much shit. And, if our economy has evolved so that nearly every job in the workforce requires an advanced degree, we should pay for 2-4 year college educations for everyone and ensure that our entire workforce doesn't start working with $50,000 in debt before they ever purchase a house or a car or have a baby or a major medical procedure.

While we're at it, we ought to provide universal health care. Doing so will create thousands of new jobs, and stop the hemorrhaging of money from the working class into the pockets of the health insurance industry. Obamacare is crap. The private health insurance industry has done absolutely nothing to control costs and the entire system is designed to funnel even more money from the working, middle-class in this country into the pockets of the rich and further widen the expanse that exists between the classes.

I think we should provide an exemption so that teenagers can be paid a lower minimum wage than working adults. If you, as an adult, work full-time at McDonald's or Wal-Mart to support your family, you should gross more than $1,055 a month and my tax dollars shouldn't have to pay for your food. You should be paid an actual living wage for laboring 40 hours a week. But, if you are a 16 year old teenager living at home with your parents, I'm sorry, but I think you can scrape by on $5.00 an hour instead of $7.00. Seriously, it's not gonna kill you.

While we're talking about wages, how about if we stop subsidizing billion dollar profits for companies who pay their workforce next to nothing. If 20% of your workforce qualifies for "entitlement" programs because you keep their wages so low, your company should pay a hefty tax penalty to cover the cost of those programs.

I think we should expand the earned income credit (the exact opposite of what was done in North Carolina this year when the state legislature abolished the earned income tax credit) and pay it to workers weekly instead of paying it out at the end of the year in one lump sum. Give people money to live on, money to support their families, to buy groceries and pay their electric bill instead of vacation money or tattoo money or flat-screen-tv-money.

Am I spouting off crazy talk? Have I spewed gross inaccuracies that are begging for correction? If so, please enlighten me with your comments so that I can reconssider my positions. Whether you agree with every point I make or not, surely you can agree that I do not spout off from some uninformed, entrenched, ideological viewpoint. These are well-reasoned arguments that, according to the current political paradigm, should not be allowed to all occupy the same brain. Most people I know do not easily fit into a solidly "conservative" or "liberal" box, which is itself a major national problem that we must someday address. Not that we need to all fit more nicely into the two available boxes, but that we should have far more boxes to choose from.

There are many, many topics I have not covered here, like the abolition of the estate tax in North Carolina, the inability of the US Congress to reach an agreement about imigration reform, civil rights of the LGBT community, the wholesale seizure of public water assets for the sole purpose of later privatizing the system, large scale environmental cover-ups to support fracking, etc. There seem to be so many directions to which I can shift my focus that I cannot narrow it down and write about just one thing. There are so many public misinformation campaigns going at once. There are so many problems to solve. There is so much injustice, and I am, after all, just one person. One person, with a very tiny voice, and a family and a job and very little time for protesting, or calling representatives, or writing nasty letters. I sure hope someone hears this tiny little voice, yelling out, like the Mayor to Horton, and hoping that someone hears us, down here in a tiny small town in a rural southern state, yelling, "Help, Help!"

Institutional Failures

The world's major religions share many important teachings, the most important of which is that we should give to the poor. Jesus, Buddha. Zoroastra and Ghandi all advocated living a simple life with few physical possessions and giving all that one did not need for survival to others. None of them required that we first evaluate the merit or virtue of the recipient. None of the scriptures say that we should give to the poor, but only if they are able to first demonstrate that they are really working hard to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

In the US, we responded to these commandments by establishing a social safety net in the form of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (Food Stamps), Public Housing & Section 8 rental assistance, unemployment and TANF (welfare). We created these programs to support the needy because we consider ourselves to be a moral society that does not want to see our brethren suffer and die in a land of plenty and excess. 

The problem is that these systems, as currently designed, disincentivize work and increased wages. This only feeds the public perception that the poor are lazy and undeserving of our assistance. In truth, there are very few people who desire to subsist only on handouts from the government. This is not a pleasant way to live. But, the programs are designed by people who have never had to use them, by bureaucrats who fail to see how one program interacts with another.  

The poor, especially the working poor, must always work to keep their earnings below the levels set by the various programs they collect so that their benefits will continue, so that they do not work themselves further into poverty. If a person is physically disabled and in desperate need of Medicaid coverage, he must apply for Social Security Disability and, once receiving that benefit, must keep his earnings less than about $500 a month. Failure to do so could mean a complete loss of lifesaving medical care. But, what if this person wants to work, at a desk, using a brain that is not so disabled? Our system doesn't allow for that, and that is a travesty. 

A working single mother offered a $.50 raise by her employer must be cognizant of the fact that her raise is going to increase her bring-home pay by less than $75.00 per month, but could result in a combined reduction of more than $100 a month in her non-cash benefits. So, she is likely to refuse a raise and remain on government programs so that she doesn't have to figure out how to make dinner with $25.00 less in groceries. This is not her fault. This is an institutional failure, a failure of the programs' designers to see how the programs are utilized in the real world.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most targeted and beneficial of our safety net programs. It is so unfortunate that NC's state legislature decided to do away with this program this year instead of finding a way for it to function in a more useful manner. It is unfortunate that our national leaders decided years ago to do away with the Advanced Earned Income Credit which allowed a wage-earner to choose to receive the tax refund incrementally over the course of the year. This again represents a failure on the part of our leadership to recognize what makes a difference for people in the real world or the way one program affects another. Currently, families can receive as much as $7,000 in EITC tax refund. This money, when added to an annual salary of $20,000 could mean a substantial increase in the family's quality of life, except that it is given in one lump sum instead of distributed over the course of the year. Not only does this fail to account for the gigantic exercise in self control you are asking of a person who has struggled for a year to make ends meet, choosing to buy bread and milk instead of paying an electric bill, who now has 4-5 months worth of take-home pay sitting in a bank account, but it also fails to account for the fact that having such a large sum of money in the bank is likely going to mean that he is suddenly disqualified from receiving any other public benefits until the money is spent. He is forced to spend this money on large purchases in a short time which does not overall increase his family's quality of life for the coming year. Again, this is not his fault, it is a failure of the system.

It doesn't have to be this way. The system could be fixed. We could take a moment and put some real thought into the design of our safety net. We could have a conversation about what we expect our safety net to provide for people. What is its purpose? What are we trying to accomplish? We could find a way to incentivize work and stop penalizing people for earning a higher wage. We could find a way to wean people off of the safety net programs without decreasing their quality of life in the process. We could streamline the administration of programs so that there is less paperwork and more person-to-person social work. We could pay a social worker to give a family the resources that will lift them out of poverty. We could help them to find those elusive bootstraps. 

"If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." I John 3:17-18 (Christianity)

"There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land." Deuteronomy 15:11 (Judaism)

"Do you know who really rejects the faith? That is the one who mistreats the orphans. And does not advocate the feeding of the poor." Quran 107:1-7 (Islam)

"One may amass wealth with hundreds of hands but one should also distribute it with thousands of hands. If someone keeps all that he accumulates for himself and does not give it to others the hoarded wealth will eventually prove to be the cause of ruin." Atharva Veda 3: 24-25 (Hinduism)

"Possessions are ephemeral and essenceless
Know this and give them generously to monks,
To brahmins, to the poor, and to your friends:
Beyond there is no greater friend than gift." Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, from 'How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator' (Buddhismn)

Narci-Citizen

Stephen Colbert coined a phrase earlier this year, well, a word really, on his popular segment, "The Word". The "Word" was 'narcicitizenship'. He, of course, meant this to be comedic, but I think the word conjures up and encapsulates a very accurate picture of what has developed in the American consciousness in recent years. It's all about me. We don't need welfare programs because if other people just worked as hard as I do, they wouldn't need it. We don't need single-payer health care because if other people would just eat and exercise and buy insurance the way I do, they would have adequate medical care. We don't need gun control laws because I am a responsible gun owner and I want to buy whatever crazy ass kind of automatic weapon I can dream up, and because I will be responsible with it, everyone should have a right to have one. It's all about me. I am the center of the American Universe. Everyone should be a straight, white, middle-aged, card-carrying, picket-fenced homeowner, and if they would just get on the bandwagon, everything else would fall neatly into place without the big, bad, mean ol' government interfering in my life!

Obviously this worldview leaves out droves of Americans who would love to eat more nutritiously and go to the gym, see a primary care physician every time they feel sick, and drive their kids to church every Sunday, if only they could afford to. It fails to even make an attempt to understand the everyday experiences of more than 16 million Americans living in poverty. It fails to contemplate that another person's experience might be different from our own. And the only cure is for us to educate people and connect people. We must put the "narcicitizen" in a room with the impoverished, inner-city, teen mom who, despite her predicament, scored a 1400 on her SAT and now can't figure out how to go to college and raise her child at the same time. Or with the veteran who was doing just fine until he came home to a broken economy that doesn't want to employ him. Or with the 75 year old retiree who worked, saved, bought and paid for his home, and who has now lost everything because his wife has Alzheimer's. We have to connect with each other. We have to foster compassion and empathy. We must show our fellow citizens who are so vigorously supporting "entitlement reform" that those entitlement programs affect people who aren't lazy or incompetent or immoral. The future of our country is going to depend on our ability to do so. Reach out. Speak to your neighbor. Sit on a park bench next to someone who looks just a little outside of your demographic and strike up a conversation. Get of your bubble! Who knows, you might just make a friend or, better yet, change a life.

Wayward teens

               Young people need mentors. They need guidance. They need more than their parents can usually offer. In fact, I think they are genetically predisposed to take any action that is in direct conflict with any advice their parents have given them. But they will listen to a mentor. They will latch on to another adult with whom they feel can more closely relate. In a bygone era, when people lived primarily in villages, or even in a more recent time when more extended families tended to live in the same town on neighboring farms, this role would have been filled by an aunt or uncle, or even older cousin or next door neighbor. A young person who wasn’t quite making their own way in the world would have easy access to a plethora of grown-ups who were willing to introduce them to a trade, point them in the direction of a career, coach them in their personal finances and even in their personal relationships.

                I’m afraid that the more we connect with each other in the virtual realm, the less we really connect with each other in a real and physical sense, and our young people are suffering for it. When they buck against all of the advice their parents (assuming they have parents who care enough to offer advice) are trying to give, they’re so disconnected from their extended families and community that their unmet needs continue to go unnoticed. And as they flounder, unhappy with the advice their parents are giving them and unable to connect with another mature individual, they soak up the advice of other teens who also lack any real level of mature guidance. Eventually we find that they are 20-somethings with no sense of what life is like in the real world, no ability to manage money or prioritize tasks and goals, and absolutely no idea who they are or what they want to be when they grow up.

                I feel strongly that this calls for a very concerted effort in our community. We, as community members, need to reach out to the teens in our local high schools. They need to feel important. They need to recognize that they have value. They need to be taught that there is value in working for a living and contributing to their community. They need to be shown how to manage money. They need to be taught simple tasks like how to fill out a job application, draft a resume, speak with a manager, interview for a job. They need to be shown that they have an inherent self worth that is not tied to anyone else’s perception of themselves. Our girls need to be shown that their self worth is not tied directly to their sexuality and that they are valued without making themselves into objects for the sexual gratification of others.

                I wish I could take them all in – every one of the 12-15 year old girls on my Facebook profile who are trying so desperately to be women already, who think that the measure of their value is directly proportionate to the amount of eye-liner they wear. I wish I could take every one of them under my proverbial wing, to coach them and teach them all the things no one was able to teach me at 14 … before they find themselves in the same position I was in at 15.

Meaningful Action to Prevent Tragedies

My heart absolutely breaks for the parents and families of the 20 children killed in Connecticut today. The grief must be absolutely unimaginable. It is hard to deny that these mass shooting events have been on the rise for the last fifteen years. Just this week there was another mass shooting at a mall in Washington state. There have been 9 mass shootings in the US since January, 2011, according to Think Progress.

We, as a nation, are to blame for these tragedies. We acquiesced. We allowed our elected officials to systematically dismantle the nation's mental health facilities. Counseling facilities and inpatient mental health facilities have been closed, one by one over the last 15 years or so. Funding has been withdrawn. The Medicaid rolls have been cut. And this is the result. This is what happens when we lose compassion, when we tell people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." Unfortunately, there are people in our society whose boot straps just aren't strong enough to hold them up. They snap.

If you really want to help prevent these tragedies, if you really want to see "meaningful action" taken, as President Obama called for today, demand that your government begin reinstating our mental health system. We must provide in-patient care for those who are too unstable to function on their own, or who need more extensive therapies than can be provided with outpatient care. We must provide outpatient care, free of charge, to those who need it and cannot afford it.

Call your representative. Call your senator. Write to them. Write letters for the editor of your local paper. Call on them to provide funding for mental health treatment. And if you know someone who has been struggling with depression or sadness, take a moment from the constant hustle and bustle of your life to call them up and tell them how important they are in your life. That they mean something to you. That you love them.

And keep the families of those 28 victims today in your prayers. God knows, they need it.

Entitlement Reform: A proposal to begin a conversation about meaningful reforms and end political lipservice

It came to my attention last week that there are a great number of people in this country who have absolutely no idea how the government’s welfare programs work. I’m not entirely sure why this surprised me so much. Probably because all of my life, nearly everyone I knew was on some form of welfare. It is nearly impossible for me to fathom what it would be like to grow up in a family that knew no poverty. But, having learned that there are many of you who aren’t familiar with these programs, I find myself called to educate you about what these programs are, how they function and how we might improve them without punishing the poor for being poor. This is a long one, but I hope you will stick with it and hear me out. There really is valuable information here.


I get pretty amped up over the issue of entitlement reform, in the same way that my mother used to get amped up about welfare reform in the 90’s. Even Bill Clinton, whom I admire tremendously, did no favors for the welfare system with his reforms. Sure, he greatly reduced the number of people receiving benefits, but that is not because they were lifted out of poverty. For many people removed from the welfare rolls, their plight was made much, much worse. His “welfare reform” has evolved in recent political discussions to be called “entitlement reform”, meant to encompass any benefit passed along to individuals through the federal or state government, expanding the commonly thought-of welfare reform to include reforms to Medicare, social security, student loans and grants, and unemployment insurance.

It will likely surprise many people who read my blog to learn that I am not entirely against “entitlement” reform. In fact, I agree completely that the system is broken and requires reforms. I just disagree entirely with the reforms that have been proffered thus far by politicians who have no idea how the programs work, who they actual benefit, or how to potentially make them function better. I also have a problem with the political conversation in this country which requires politicians to vehemently bash “entitlement spending” or bash their opponent’s plans for “entitlement reform” without ever offering a single detail of how those reforms might take shape. The fact that they continue to offer-up “entitlement reform” as a campaign catch-phrase in a context that has the average American conjure up an image of Reagan’s infamous Welfare Queen (Google it, seriously), while really planning to gut programs like education grants and Medicare, programs which greatly benefit the middle class is not just wrong, it is downright deceitful. It is the reason that no one in this country can seem to have an intelligent conversation about this election. Instead we all stand around and shout at our TVs, or watch late night comics make fun of Romney’s latest “foot-in-mouth” episode, neither of which are adding anything intelligent to the political discussion. The truth is that there is need for, and room for, so-called entitlement spending in our nation. And the programs can work if we can decide to use them more wisely. By way of example, I offer my own story.

When I was 14, I got pregnant. It happened. I had to deal with it. I decided to have the baby and raise him myself. Now, being a mother at 15 meant that I needed a LOT of help. A lot of that help came from my family and even more from the father’s family. But a great deal has come from the government, both federal and state. It would have been impossible for me to navigate the path that has led me into my current profession and out of poverty without these programs. They were essential to my journey, and not because I was lazy or refused to work, but because I did work, hard, to lift my family out of poverty.

At 15, I couldn’t even drive, and state law restricted the number of hours I could work in a given work week. My mother was not available to support me. I applied for TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needed Families). This program used to be called AFDC and is what most people think of when you say “welfare.” I got a check every month for $253 to be used for whatever I needed it for. There is no mandate that says it has to be used to pay utilities, or that you can only use it to buy clothes at Goodwill, but it is a miniscule amount of money and it is up to the family to use it wisely. There are limits, imposed under the Clinton administration, that require TANF recipients to be either employed, enrolled in school, or actively seeking employment. And even under those circumstances the amount of time a person can receive the benefits is limited to 2 consecutive years, and 5 years in total over your lifetime.

I also applied for Medicaid, a North Carolina state program which is partially funded with federal dollars. Medicaid is different from Medicare, which we all pay for and expect to receive when we retire or become disabled. Medicaid covered my medical expenses so that I could have good prenatal care. I continued to be covered by Medicaid until I turned 21, at which time I was picked up by my employer’s health insurance. My children are currently covered under NC Health Choice, a modified version of Medicaid that requires small co-pays for services they receive. For the last 3 years, I paid a $50 premium per year per child for them to be covered. We pay $1 for prescriptions and $3 for doctor visits. These co-pays could stand to be modified. In truth, I could well afford to pay as much as $20 per doctor visit and $10 for prescriptions. In my opinion, the co-pays should be calculated on a sliding scale based on income.

I also applied for WIC, a program offered through the US Department of Agriculture which provides specific, essential grocery items free of charge for pregnant women and to families with children under 5. This program serves two purposes. It provides foods that contain vital nutrients to pregnant women and children to try to improve their health, and it allows the federal government to subsidize dairy farmers, a task our federal government has loved very much over the last century (anybody remember government cheese?). I received three WIC vouchers per month while I was pregnant that provided me with milk, eggs, cheese, peanut butter, cereal, juice and dry beans. Once Dylan was born our WIC vouchers also provided formula, rice cereal, and baby food in addition to the other items. I continued to receive WIC benefits until Daniel was 5 years old, 10 years altogether. In order to receive WIC, the kids and I had to meet with a nurse every three months to be weighed, have our iron tested and receive nutrition counseling. I understand that the program has been expanded in recent years to also offer several fresh produce items, canned tuna, yogurt and a variety of other foods. It is one of the few government programs to experience such expansions in the last decade.

We also received food stamps, now catchily called SNAP by the federal government. Unlike the WIC program, food stamps can be used to purchase any grocery item regardless of its brand, cost or nutritional value. Food stamps cannot be used to purchase household goods such as toiletries, sandwich baggies, paper towels, etc., nor can they be used to purchase hot foods from the deli. It’s hard for me to recall the amount of my food stamp benefit because it changed every time I switched jobs or got a raise at work. But I believe it ranged over time from about $300 per month to a low of about $150 per month before it ended completely because of my pay increases. Unlike the TANF program, there are no requirements that the head of household be working or seeking work and no limits on the amount of time you can receive food stamps. Also, the amount of benefit received is not calculated on gross wages as other programs are, but are calculated on gross wages minus certain housing and childcare costs which makes far more people eligible to participate in the program.

We also received, and still do receive, childcare vouchers for assistance with daycare expenses. In our area in Western North Carolina, childcare costs average about $500 per month per child for children 1-5 and are even more expensive during the first year of life. The childcare voucher system is set up so that families are expected to contribute a percentage of their monthly gross income toward their childcare and there is a requirement that the parent(s) be working or enrolled in school before even being placed on the waiting list. Luckily for me, there was more funding for this program in the 90’s, the waiting lists were not terribly long, and I had a priority placement on the list because I was a high school student. Had it not been for the assistance provided in this program, had I been required to pay for the full cost of daycare for Dylan and Daniel, it would have been impossible for me to finish school or get a full-time job. Funding for childcare subsidies has declined dramatically over the course of the last 10 years. If a single mother, or even a young two-parent family, has to stay home with a child instead of working they are automatically going to be dependent on other government welfare programs. Let’s be real about the figures here. A single mother working a full-time job at $8.00 per hour is going to gross $320 per week and probably bring home about $280. That means her real income is $1,120 per month, when you subtract the cost of her childcare, her actual income is $620. Can we really justify asking her to sacrifice 40 hours per week with her child to bring home $620? Heaven forbid she be the mother of two children! Then she could spend her entire month working to bring home $120. For many women, it makes much more sense to stay home with their children and draw income from other available government programs. What incentive do they have to work without assistance with childcare costs?

I was also fortunate to benefit greatly from the federal government’s Section 8 rental housing program administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Section 8, now called the Rental Voucher program, assisted with my monthly rent payments. Their formula is a little difficult to explain, but stick with me and we’ll give it a go. HUD says that the average family should spend no more than 30% of its monthly income on rent. So, if you are that single working mother grossing $320/week, you should be spending no more than $426 per month on your housing costs. At the time I was receiving Section 8, the minimum wage was much lower and I was actually making $6.00 per hour. So my 30% contribution was only $320 per month. HUD determines, using a complex statistical formula, what the “market” or reasonable expected rent is for the Asheville Metropolitan Area for houses of different sizes. If you are a family with 2 children of the same sex, you qualify for a 2 bedroom house and the current market rent for that house in the Asheville area is currently $704. When I was receiving benefits 10 years ago that was only $585 and I’m glad to see they have increased it to more closely match the current market. So, HUD will pay up to $704 - $426, or $278 for our example mom. She can go out into the market and find any house she wants to rent so long as the landlord accepts Section 8 and the total rent is less than $704. This was, and is, an excellent program. It assists needy families with housing, a basic human right as defined by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and puts money back into the hands of landowners who paid the taxes to support the program in the first place. Unfortunately, funding for this program saw drastic cuts under the Bush administration, which have not been restored by President Obama’s administration. The waiting list for Section 8 assistance in Asheville has grown so large that they have stopped accepting applications altogether. This is a serious problem, especially when coupled with the fallout from the foreclosure crisis which has forced many families back into rental housing, increasing demand on the market. And in an economy where new construction is extremely limited, the supply of rental housing is not increasing, meaning that rents are going up while assistance shrivels. For our hypothetical single mother making $1,120 per month to shell out even $650 per month to rent a two-bedroom trailer, cheap even by HUD standards, is going to severely limit her ability to provide even the most basic of necessities for her child, and if she is paying $500 per month for her childcare costs, she is already in the hole without spending a single penny on electricity, food, gas or clothing. The solution for many young families has been multigenerational housing. In other words, young families are simply moving in with the folks who are now having to struggle to support their twenty-something’s, their grandchildren, and themselves.

So, now you know all the ways that this teenage, single-mother has mooched off the system for the last 15 years to live lavishly, sometimes even managing to pay the electric bill just before it got shut off, often albeit with the help of Eblin charities. My TANF benefits ended before I graduated from high school because of the time limits imposed, and I was not eligible to apply for Section 8 until I was 18, so I never received both of those benefits at the same time. But, on average, I was receiving roughly $1,200 per month in benefits from the state and federal government (about $300 in food stamps, $250 in Section 8/TANF benefits, $400 in daycare assistance, $100 in WIC vouchers, and about $150/month in health care expenses for myself and for the boys).

I mentioned earlier that there are some smart ways to reform the system. The biggest is in the administration of these programs. They are so splintered and scattered. I had a separate social worker for each and every program. And each program has its own income requirements and calculations for benefits. Each program has a different cycle for recertification and its own set of paperwork to be filled out either annually, semi-annually or quarterly. For years, I had to miss work at least 10 times per year to take paystubs to my various social workers. This may not seem like much, but it means that each one of these social workers, six of them for me, had to send me a notice in the mail, schedule an appointment with me, sit down with me to review my information and have me sign their forms and disclosures, always the same forms I had signed the year before and the year before that and the year before that. They would each tally up my income, notate the difference from the year before, adjust my benefit and send me on my way. At no time were any of them allowed to actually be social workers! They were, and are still, paper pushers whose job is not to help lift needy families out of poverty and off of government programs, but instead to simply tabulate figures, file forms and move on to the next in line. Additionally, it is precisely this splintering of information that allows for people to work the system. Some programs require you to be under a specific gross income threshold, some simply calculate your benefit based on your income, and still others are based on your net income after payment of some basic expenses. Having data collected separately by each program means that individuals can selectively limit which information is provided to each social worker because there is no communication or cross-checking between them.

So, why not reform this system. I see no reason why these programs for the needy couldn’t be consolidated under one umbrella in much the same fashion as the Federal Government restructured a variety of federal agencies under the umbrella of Homeland Security under the Bush Administration. Why require every single recipient to meet with 3 or 6 or 10 different social workers every year to supply each of them with the same information? Why not assign one social worker to the family. Allow that social worker to retrieve the family’s income tax information in the same way that the FAFSA application for college grants does? Design the computer system so that once the tax information is populated from the IRS website into the Social Services program, all of the assistance that the individual or family is entitled to under available Federal and State programs is generated automatically, in one location. Now, this single social worker has done in minutes what it previously took 6 different social workers 6 hours in total to do. How much good can this one social worker do for this family by spending another hour talking about available education programs, job-training programs, parenting classes, early head-start programs for children, and generally supporting the family to encourage and lift them out of poverty? This is what social workers went to school to do. This is what they want to do. We should let them. Simply yanking the benefits away from people and telling them to get out in the world and make a go of it is impractical, ignorant, and lacks compassion. If they were capable of doing so, they wouldn’t have needed these programs in the first place! In addition, consolidating the acquisition and housing of this required information serves to save the federal and state governments in the costs of building space, computer equipment, paper and staffing costs.

Poverty is a cruel cycle which is so very difficult to break out of. Are there people who take advantage of the system, living off of government programs without trying to lift themselves up? Sure, of course there are. But they are not the norm. The vast majority of people using these programs are working parents making less than $25,000 per year. It is not that they are unemployed and lazy for the most part, it is that they lack the skills, education or opportunity to earn more money. (I will refrain from starting my diatribe about the reality that real wages have fallen over the course of the last 30-40 years and every single working family now has to work harder and longer with two wage-earners to sustain the same standard of living previously achieved by having only a single wage earner in every house, but it is worth at least noting.) So let’s talk about real entitlement reform. The kind that could result in meaningful change, in a reduction of the actual poverty rate instead of just putting people out on the street, without food, housing or childcare and telling them to pull themselves up by their tattered bootstraps and get moving.

I am lucky. I was blessed with excellent genes and a mother who taught me to think critically and act with compassion. I have worked so hard to pull myself and my children out of poverty and break that cycle. And for the most part I have succeeded. While we aren’t even middle-class and we do still live paycheck to paycheck, and while they are still receiving NC Health Choice benefits to provide for their medical care and vouchers for a small portion of their afterschool care costs, I am no longer having to use any of the other programs that I was blessed to have been able to utilize along the way, and my children do not remember what it was like to be “poor.” They don’t identify themselves as poor, which in itself will give them a huge leg-up on where I was when I started. Because in this society, if you are poor, there is an implied condescension directed your way, one that weighs on your shoulders and tells you that you are not good enough, that you are reliant on all the rest of the country who are somehow better than you because their circumstances are different than yours and that you should be ashamed. It’s hard to imagine that you are worthy of a better life, capable of providing more, and in fact entitled to earn a real living wage when everything around you tells you that you are not. It is one of my sincerest hopes that this country finds itself doing a serious about-face in the near future when it comes to the discussion of entitlement reform. We should be having real discussions about how the programs work, who we intend to support, how we can direct the benefits to people who need them and help lift people out of poverty instead of shaming them. We have to bring compassion to this discussion. We must. If we don’t I fear that my children may bear witness to the kind of peasant revolts that rocked Enlightenment Era Europe. The poor will only tolerate being shat upon while the rich get richer for so long a time.

An Economy Held Hostage

We all heard quite a bit of news coverage about mortgage derivitives after the foreclosure crisis had its stranglehold on the country a few years ago. It was, and is, terribly difficult to understand. I listened to countless stories on NPR and read articles until my head was swimming with mortgage industry buzz words. The gist of it was that banks figured out that they could get groups of people to buy into groups of mortgages so that they could liquidate the mortgages faster and make more loans. So, your pension fund might decide that the 6% interest paid on home loans was a better investment than the 4% they might earn in a mutual fund. So, the pension fund pools together money and buys a bundle of mortgages from Bank of America. The pension makes money on the interest, Bank of America made money on the origination charges. And now the pension has a steady stream of income on its investment and Bank of America has fresh cash to use to make new loans. This system allowed cash to be infused into the mortgage lending industry so that big banks could keep making more and more loans. And all was great, until it wasn't.

There has been considerable coverage and multiple documentaries about the mess that was created in the housing market when the foreclosures started mounting. The domino effect of rising rates, falling values, increased foreclosures, and ultimately blighted neighborhoods. But, there has not been sufficient coverage about what is going on now in the housing market. We are supposed to think that the housing market is not rebounding and that the overall economy is still sluggish. But this simply isn't true. In the last eight months, existing home sales are up dramatically. Many realtors in my area say that they have more properties under contract right now than they had at any time during the great boom in 2005-2008. The key is that they have contracts, but not closings. It would be easier to build a house by hand yourself than to try to get a mortgage loan right now, and there are several reasons why.

The first is that in response to public outcry, the federal government under Obama implemented rigorous new regulations for the mortgage lending industry. These regulations were intended to insure that consumers were well informed about their loan and the costs associated therewith before they sat down at the closing table. Lenders are now required to provide a Good Faith Estimate (GFE) with expected closing costs broken down item by item. The fees paid by the consumer directly to the bank, called Origination Charges, cannot increase between the time the quote is given and the actual closing. The lender also has to estimate the fees that will be charged by vendors or other third parties in connection with the closing and there are limits on the increases for these. The paperwork behind these regulations is cumbersome for the lender, the borrower and the closing attorney or title company (depending on your state). And frequently they do not serve the purpose intended. The problem 5 years ago was not that borrowers were not adequately informed about their loans, but that there was no policing of mortgage brokers or lenders who were not conforming to the similar and less cumbersome regulations that were in place at the time. There were plenty of borrowers who didn't understand the loan they were getting or the implications of an adjustable rate, interest-only mortgage, but that wasn't because they weren't given a disclosure ahead of time, it was because they were financially uneducated. They didn't know what the disclosure meant and no one was making sure it was appropriately explained to them. What was needed was not more regulation, but smarter regulation and better enforcement.

The GFE requirements are a pain, but we can live them. They are not the crux of the problem. The real problem stems from the interindustry fallout associated with the foreclosure crisis. During the boom, loans were closed with such speed and so little attention to detail that just about any transaction could find its way to the closing table, no matter how poorly documented the borrowers income or how terrible the title problem. As foreclosures began mounting and attorneys and title insurance companies once again began searching title with more care, the lenders found themselves stuck holding the bag on some pretty undesireable properties. And the pendulum swung in the other direction, grossly over-correcting. The process of obtaining loan approval for a conventional residential mortgage has become as complex as the mechanics of a BMW, as frustrating as trying to get a colichy baby to quit crying, and as tiring as running a marathon!

Folks, I have seen it all over these last eight months. A widow told she needed a death certificate for her late husband dated within 60 days of submission to the lender. Perhaps this particular lender believed in the possibility of a zombie virus raising the undead from their graves and sending them scrambling for home loans? A client whose lender's unnecessary hard pull on a credit report mid-way through the application process sends his credit score tumbling an unbelievable 4 points! Evidently a significant enough drop to cost him an 1/8th of a point on his interest rate and $800 in origination charges. Too late to back out of the loan since the lender has delayed closing more than two weeks past the contract deadline and the seller is ready to walk. Another client this week is being asked to make her way through three years of bank records spread among three banks to dig up every single cancelled rent check she has written for the last three years! Are you kidding me!? You have seriously got to be kiding me! And client, after client, after client calls me up to say, "I just sent them three more bank statements, explained the change in my address for the third time, provided documentation to support the loss on my income taxes from three years ago, and now they want WHAT?!" And time after time after time I spend hours of my day reassuring sellers that its not that the buyer isn't creditworthy. "No, Ms. Johnson. Honestly I don't think there is anything to worry about with Mr. Smith's loan. I know it is two weeks past the contract deadline and he still doesn't have loan approval, but please believe me when I tell you they are all like this now." And repeating that same conversation for buyers and agents.

All of this exuberant verification is being done, not to satisfy Washington regulators, but to satisfy the requirements of the inter-bank mortgage trading industry. If Bank A can't show to Pension Fund D that all of these mortgages were really and truly made to highly qualified and vetted borrowers, they might not be able to package them up and sell them off. So, instead of formulating reasonable requirements that would allow money to keep moving through the economy and spur on the housing market and associated parts of the economy, lenders are perfectly happy to delay a closing by several months, ask borrowers to resubmit the same documentation over and over, and ultimately continue to hold the rest of the economy hostage so that they can continue to sell their mortgages in the secondary market.

I know that the loan officers I work with routinely are sick of me. They are tired of me complaining. They are tired of me insisting that they get on with it, that they not rewrite the contracts of our clients since they themselves are not lawyers, that they act with reasonableness, and, heaven-forbid, that they return my phone calls and e-mails. And clearly my frustrations are directed at entirely the wrong people. It is not my local loan officer who should bear the brunt of my nagging and derisive voicemails and repeated e-mails. If I wasn't spending so much time trying to get just ONE of my 25 currently open property files to the closing table, maybe I could spare a few moments to tell my President and my Congressmen precisely what I think about their poorly thought-out and terribly executed mortgage lending regulations and offer them a few suggestions for how they might wrangle our economy out of the death grip of the mortage lending industry.