Local Schools Integrate Mindfulness

According the an Akron BeaconJournal reporter, “Warstler Elementary School in Plain Township began a recent school day” with a focus on mindfulness.

“This is the morning routine at Warstler where the school practices mindfulness, a form of meditation that involves using techniques like “belly breaths” and “mindful movements” to improve students’ focus and help them better cope with their emotions. The Stark County school district piloted mindfulness in Warstler last year and was so pleased with the results that it started the practice in all of its elementaries this year. The district hopes to expand the method to every school by next year.

Plain is thought to be the only district or one of the few in the Akron-Canton area using mindfulness, though U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Niles, who recently wrote a book about the practice, has helped get it started in several schools in the Youngstown area.”

Finally, there might be a growing connection between the ‘play well with others’ we learn in kindergarden and how our elite work together in Congress.  And to the degree this is true it will benefit our kids and communities, country and leaders.to to .   America Today: Ryan, LaTourette find ways to cope with stress of a divisive CongressDecember 31,2012 04:22 AM GMTStephanie WarsmithBeacon Journal Publishing Co. Copyright � 2012 Beacon Journal Publishing Co. Inc and Black Press. All Rights Reserved. Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the express written consent of the Akron Beacon Journal is expressly prohibite

According to the Akron BeaconJournal,

'U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Niles, began practicing a type of meditation called “mindfulness,” and even wrote a book about it. He thinks the technique should be used more in schools, corporations, the health-care industry and by his colleagues in Congress.

“I think it could help,” he said in a recent sit-down interview…..

Ryan wrote a book called A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit, published in March, that details his discovery of mindfulness as well as the research behind it and how it’s being used in schools, the health-care industry and by first responders and the military.

“I believe I would be derelict in my duty as a congressman if I didn’t do my part to make mindfulness accessible to as many people as possible in our nation,” Ryan says in the book.

Ryan was able to secure $1 million in federal funds to start mindfulness programs in schools in Warren and Youngstown. He said the effort has showed promising results and is being expanded from kindergarten through second grade to kindergarten through fifth grade.

“Growing up, I remember two phrases being drilled into my head from my mom, the nuns, and my other teachers: Pay Attention! And Be Nice!” Ryan wrote in his book. “Well the most frustrating part of growing up and hearing that was that no one ever showed us how to pay attention! It’s not something you do automatically. It needs to be taught and practiced.”'

Leadership, from the heart and head, works.

Designated Drivers and Crack Heads
A very smart friend told me he was unable to understand how one could compare drunk driving and crack.  I imagine there are many others who had a similar response.  I completely understand your perspective and I do not want to suggest that there is only one clear and uncontroversial way to look at this question.  Here is how I am thinking about it.

When we decide as a society to say this harm-causing behavior is a crime (and another is best treated as a public health problem), we usually have reasons.  I am suggesting here that one reason might be to choose on the basis of the level of harm caused. 

This is why I was surprised to hear the rest of the story on crack… the level of harm associated with crack is more comparable than media story lines suggested to the harm associated with another addiction-related crime, drunk driving.  This made me pause.

We all lived through the headlines about crack.  Several good studies show that, like crime coverage in general, the mass media reporting on crack (and TV shows that built on this) distorted our perspective in ways that amplified the harms, leaving us with a new term, ‘crack head.’  At the same time, media coverage of drunk driving (and later meth) more often framed these stories as public health problems (and less often framed them as violence problems), leaving us with a new term, ‘designated driver.’  A stark contrast.

Of course, in reality, both cases are both about harm and addiction.  That is the point.  When the harms caused are great in both cases, why choose to help the offender recover his life in one case and create one of the most punitive regimes possible for the other offender, making it less likely he will pay taxes and parent responsibly after recovering from his addiction?  (Note:  my preference would be to treat both cases as public health problems, rather than treat both with extreme punitiveness, but that is another conversation.)

So we need to consider other explanations, beyond the level of harm caused, for treating one harm-causing activity as an addiction (erasing the choice a drunk makes to take his first drink) and the other as street crime (erasing the behavior under the influence that blurs the choice making). 

Maybe harm caused is not the criteria we should use.  But if that is the case, then we need to justify the War on Drugs without reference to any desire to keep our families or communities safer, and identify what other criteria we are using. 

In this case, unraveling this question makes it more difficult to see our five decade long incarceration explosion as simply (or perhaps even primarily) about crime control, as Michelle Alexander persuasively argues.  If the harms caused by an entire generation of young black men are disproportionately targeted by the War on Drugs and media stereotypes, an entire generation of fathers get felony records (while other harm-causing fathers do not) preventing them from voting, blocking job opportunities, and marking them for extra attention by law enforcement and in our media-distorted imaginations about the sources of harms most likely to hurt our families.

Their Crimes, Our Crimes
The most common response when one points to racism in the criminal justice system is to note that our prisons are three-quarters black.  They are in prison because they are guilty of committing crimes, no other reason, certainly not anything linked to racism in the system itself.

Michelle Alexander, author of New Jim Crow, in response to a question during an interview…helps us see the misdirection central to this denial.

“The dramatically different manner in which we, as a nation, responded to the crisis presented by drunk driving and the crisis caused by the emergence of crack cocaine speaks volumes about who we value, and who we view as disposable. 

During the 1980s, at the same time that crack cocaine was making headlines, a grassroots movement was emerging to address the widespread and sometimes fatal problem of drunk driving. Unlike the drug war, which was born of deliberate political strategy to exploit our nation's racial divisions (part of the Southern Strategy to flip the South from blue to red), the anti-drunk driving movement was a bottom-up movement led most notably by mothers whose families were shattered by deaths caused by drunk driving.

By the end of that decade, drunk drivers were responsible for about 22,000 deaths annually, while overall alcohol-related deaths were close to 100,000 per year. By contrast, during the same time period…even though crack babies, crack dealers, and so-called crack whores were dominating the news…the total number of deaths related to ALL illegal drugs combined was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk drivers.

The total of all drug related deaths due to AIDS, drug overdose, or the violence associated with the drug trade, was estimated at 21,000 annually - less than the number of deaths caused directly by drunk drivers and a small fraction of the number of alcohol-related deaths each year.

So how did we respond to these competing crises that were unfolding simultaneously?

Well, in response to the advocacy of groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, most states adopted tougher laws to punish drunk driving. Numerous states now have some type of mandatory sentencing for this offense - typically two days in jail for a first offense and two to ten days for a second offense. Possession of a tiny amount of crack cocaine, on the other hand, was given a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison.

The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.

Drunk drivers are predominately white and male. White men comprised 78 percent of the arrests for this offense in 1990 when the new mandatory minimum sentences were adopted. They are generally charged with misdemeanors and typically receive sentences involving fines, license suspension, and community service.

Although drunk driving contains a far greater risk of violent death than the use or sale of illegal drugs, the societal response to drunk drivers has generally emphasized keeping the person functional and in society, while attempting to respond to the dangerous behavior through treatment and counseling. People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.”

How can we explain this choice?  Our choice to treat the addiction more often suffered by those who look like us as a public health problem, with nearly no time in jail and no felony record to prevent turning a life around…and yet to treat the addiction more easily associated with those who do not look like us as a crime that can only be responded to with extreme punishment creating felony records the make turning a life around a monumental challenge…even though the behavior of those who look like us causes so much more harm?

 

Why blog?  Good Question.
A favorite former student posted today and asked me who my target audience is for my blog.  At first I dashed off that I think of my target like I think of my students, though I do not share the blog itself with students until after a class is done.  This is a type of analysis very close to what I do in class.  Beyond that, I never really thought of a market segment to target…other than myself…since I really enjoy writing a blog!

Then I started thinking more, as often happens in response to the most common questions from students.  Maybe I should have a target market?  Am I writing without considering any particular audience?  That hardly seems smart. 

When I teach, or write, about political conflict I work hard to find ways to frame questions that moves us toward ways of talking & thinking that are based on the best available data.  I try to select issues and frames that are less about drama and more about being reasonable.  I tend to get interested in conflicts that challenge empty platitudes or sound-bites that distract by design.  I guess I hope there is an audience of thoughtful people on all sides of any conflict who might read this blog without recoiling from what feels like a stacked deck or just another rant. 

Julie calls this kind of writing, when I do it well, my ‘conflict management voice’ and I like that label, though I am sure I do not always live up to that standard.  I have my own views, of course.  These drive what I write in the blog a lot more than they drive what I bring to class.  But in both cases I want to express myself in a way that invites engaged and thoughtful conversation with those who also care about the conflict, particularly if they disagree with me. 

My new book project involves interviewing area clergy to use their analysis as primary source data for a book tentatively called Engage with Love: Christian Approaches to Conflict. I guess that is what I try to do myself when I write and speak about politics and power, conflict and struggle, disagreements and controversies…engage in a loving way and engage with the heartbeat of the universe.  As St. Francis is said to have said, ‘preach the gospel at all times; when necessary use words.’

 

Part of me wants to write a blog that informs, gently nudging all of us to reconsider our own sacred cows, and that invites a response, a silent pause, a nod or hmm, which says the text and tone and image touched something, it is a form of writing & speaking that includes a heavy does of listening and engaging.  If you read this blog, let me know what you think about it sometime.

 

Blizzard of 2012
Maybe it comes with being in my 50's, but after driving 360+ miles from Chicago to Akron through some of the worst winds, roads, and white out conditions this New Englander has ever seen I am exhausted and thankful.  Exhausted from all the energy it takes to navigate highway driving during a serious winter storm.  Tired from worrying, as we passed dozens of cars and trucks that had spun off the road on both sides, and three pile ups, one bad.  Butt sore, back aching, eyes weary. 

Thankful for the work of first responders and Ohio Department of Transportation workers for preventing things from being even worse and helping those who ended up in trouble.  Thankful that I survived all those years in my late teens and twenties when I was more likely to be one of the chuckleheads driving way too fast on highways like we navigated yesterday and today.  Thankful in a million ways for my partner, but in this post particularly for the above photo that captures both the beauty and the danger of stormy weather.

Newtown Happens in the Inner City Everyday
Newtown shocked us.  As Jesse Washington points out, however, our shock is one of the more important, and less talked about, aspects of this story. 

“For years, voices have cried in the urban wilderness: We need to talk about gun control. Yet the guns blazed on.  It took a small-town slaughter for gun control to become a political priority….

…The moment also is causing some to reflect on the sudden change of heart. Why now? Why weren’t we moved to act by the killing of so many other children, in urban areas?

Certainly, Newtown is a special case….  But still: “There’s a lot of talk now about we have to protect our children. We have to protect all of our children, not just the ones living in the suburbs,” said Tammerlin Drummond, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune.

In her column Monday, Drummond wrote about 7-year-old Heaven Sutton of Chicago, who was standing next to her mother selling candy when she was killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout. Also in Chicago, which has been plagued by a recent spike in gun violence: 6-year-old Aaliyah Shell was caught in a drive-by while standing on her front porch; and 13-year-old Tyquan Tyler was killed when a someone in a car shot into a group of youths outside a party.

Wrote Drummond: “It has taken the murders of 20 babies and six adults in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Connecticut to achieve what thousands of gun fatalities in urban communities all over this country could not.”

So again: What took so long? The answers are complicated by many factors….

…In March, the Children’s Defense Fund issued a report titled “Protect Children, Not Guns 2012.” It analyzed the latest federal data and counted 299 children under age 10 killed by guns in 2008 and 2009. That figure included 173 preschool-age children.

Black children and teens accounted for 45 percent of all child and teen gun deaths, even though they were only 15 percent of the child/teen population.

“Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it,” said CDF president Marian Wright Edelman in the report.

It got almost no press coverage…until nine months later, when Newtown happened.

Even our conversation about addressing gun violence in the wake of Newtown reflects this blindness.  In urban areas assault rifles are far less lethal than semi-automatic handguns.  Let’s take care of all of our children as we deliberate on this question.  Consider this editorial written by a conservative judge.

The Line Between Law-abiding and Law-breaking is thin and blurry

Everyone, even the most law-abiding among us, has probably broken the law, likely multiple times.  Here is a simple list of 67 common violations.

1.    driving faster than the posted speed limit

2.    driving faster than 20 MPH in a school zone

3.    seriously speeding on a highway

4.    minor shop lifting (including office supplies from work)

5.    cheating on taxes (for those old enough to understand)

6.    parking illegally

7.    consuming an illegal drug

8.    transporting (knowingly or not) someone in possession of an illegal drug

9.    living in a home where someone is growing pot

10. living in a home where someone is selling pot

11. driving after drinking alcohol

12. driving while drunk

13. driving with a child who is not in an approved car seat

14. consuming a prescription drug recreationally

15. taking a prescription drug from someone else

16. taking your parents’ liquor

17. jaywalking

18. getting into a fist fight

19. threatening to hurt someone

20. sex before your age of consent

21. underage drinking

22. failure to report a crime against a minor

23. trespassing

24. doing a donut on someone’s lawn

25. vandalism

26. smuggling cigarettes and wine in from Mexico w/out paying the duty

27. hiring an illegal maid

28. Using mother nature as your restroom

29. ripping the tags off of pillows and mattresses

30. movie hopping...paying for one but watching more than one

31. jumping the turnstiles on the subway

32. littering

33. illegal downloading

34. keeping a library book

35. seeing a crime and failing to report it

36. not stopping at a stop sign

37. bringing your own snacks into the movies

38. public intoxication

39. sex acts in public spaces

40. some sex acts in your own home with your legal spouse

41. loitering

42. pulling over on side of highway/road

43. doing u-turn in a prohibited zone

44. slander

45. too many occupants in car

46. not wearing seat belts

47. providing false identification…using a fake ID

48. inaccurately filling out a form for the government, or school, or a job app

49. workplace theft of time…personal calls, etc all while being paid for that time

50. fireworks (in some states)

51. backyard fires (in urban areas)

52. TPing someone's property

53. texting/talking on cell while driving (some states)

54. parking too far from curb (parallel parking)

55. improper passing

56. driving with a tail light out

57. driving with expired plates

58. driving without a valid license

59. opening someone else's mail

60. smuggling chocolate into the USA

61. violating Fire Code by exceeding maximum number of occupants in a space

62. making moonshine

63. riding a bicycle on the sidewalk

64. not wearing a seatbelt

65. staying after hours in a public park

66. running a red light

67. not cleaning up a pet's droppings when not dropped on your own property

Of course, we can all identify one or two items on this list that we might challenge as not technically illegal or whatever, but that is not the point.  Step back and take in the list as a whole.  The message is not really controversial:  we are all law breakers. 

That does not mean we are not upstanding citizens (some of us anyway!) who contribute to our communities, love our families, and work hard.  It turns out that the meaning of being a law-abiding citizen is something of a paradox in the real world. 

This matters and it doesn’t.

It does not matter, if the take-away message is we need to be humble and cautious about pointing our fingers at other’s law-breaking to demand ever more extreme forms of punishment for minor crimes (the single largest portion of those incarcerated in the past decades have been non-violent drug offenders, many first offenders caught with small amounts of pot).

It matters because the most common response to any discussion of racism in our CJS is that ‘ there are more blacks in prison, so they chose to commit more crimes, and deserve it.’  And if we start from the premise that we all commit crimes, multiple crimes, but only some of us are stopped and arrested and charged and sentenced and then labeled a felon for the rest of your life (unable to get a job or housing or assistance), then the simple insight here matters, because it transforms this most common of responses from ‘common sense’ into a claim in need of examination (at least), if not from ‘prevailing wisdom’ to ‘self-interested and bullshit justification’ for allowing our CJS to operate like a 21^st century Jim Crow system. 

I did not come up with this argument, but I recommend you take a look at Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow.  She is a professor of law at Ohio State (listen to her on the Colbert Report) and she will be speaking in Akron as a part of Rethinking Race on February 7, 2013.

 

President Obama:  Stop Drone Strikes, Torture, and Close Guantanomo
There are many types of high powered weapons inflicting violence on children, or other vulnerable populations suffering from a concentration of disadvantage, around the world.  Many of these are manufactured in, and sold by, the US.  Much of the time it is American leaders or citizens deploying these weapons.  While it is important to pay attention to Sandy Hook, our own violence, even if we focus only on violence against children, runs a lot deeper.

The 'More Guns' Thesis Abandons the Rule of Law

The CDC reported that in 2003 there were 30,136 gun-related deaths in the US: 56% suicide, 40% homicide.  This is 8 times greater than our industrial allies.  For children under the age of 15 it is 12 times greater.  We have the highest rate of youth homicide and suicide among any industrialized nation.

The correlation between gun availability and gun deaths is consistent across all industrialized nations: more guns, more gun deaths.

US crime rates are NOT higher than other industrialized nations…but the lethality of our crime is a lot higher, because guns are involved in 21% of assaults, 43% of robberies, 52% of suicides, and 68% of homicides. 

• States in the US with the highest rate of gun deaths:  California, Louisiana, Alaska, Nevada, Mississippi, Alabama.  Among these…all but CA are among those with the least strict gun control laws.
• States with the lowest rate of gun deaths: Massachusetts, Hawaii, Connecticut, New York.  Among these…all but RI are among those with the most strict gun control laws (and RI laws are moderately strict).

People with guns massacre children, men and women because the weapon amplifies the hatred or mental illness or stupidity.  Guns alone do not kill anyone.  People with guns kill millions more than people without guns.  And we know we can reverse the trend, because we can see policies that work in some states and in some nations.  We need to just do it.

As Coates puts it…to fail to just do it is to abandon the rule of law for a Hobbisian state of nature that is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.”

Quoting an analyst from the American Conservative, Coates’ blog notes:

“…what troubles me most about…the general More Guns approach to social ills -- is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian "war of every man against every man" in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies.”

Coates himself concludes that

“One of the points of a democratic society is to put brakes on our most animal impulses--impulses which are universal across humankind. I think much of our recent firearm legislation -Stand Your Ground for instance--runs in the exact opposite direction.”

Read Coates entire blog here…well worth the time.

Our violence problem includes guns but runs deeper too

 

 

John Lott, the economist who wrote "More Guns, Less Crime," has been an intellectual leader for the less gun regulation camp for many years.  A 2003 Mother Jones article provides a review that includes:

 

"...Still, economists like Stanford's John Donohue and Georgetown's Jens Ludwig say that when first published in 1997, Lott's work was novel and even cutting edge. But the intervening years -- and increased scholarly scrutiny -- have not been kind to the "More Guns, Less Crime" idea. In fact, social scientists have turned away from the thesis even as Lott has stuck by his original conclusions. As a result, to maintain his argument Lott has had to go to considerable lengths, as demonstrated by a recent brouhaha over a massive critique of his work in the Stanford Law Review.

 

The Stanford Law Review critique, authored by Yale's Ayres and Stanford's Donohue, analyzed more recent crime statistics, extending Lott's original 1977-1992 crime dataset to include data through the late 1990s. As it turned out, after 1992, partly due to the end of the 1980s' crack cocaine-related crime wave, crime rates dropped dramatically in states with large urban centers, many of which had not passed right to carry laws.

This fact proves highly inconvenient to the "More Guns, Less Crime" argument. After testing Lott and Mustard's analysis with more years of data and different econometric tweakings, Donohue and Ayres conclude, "No longer can any plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to reduce crime for all or even most states"; their analysis even suggested such laws might increase violent crime."

And just the other day Lott was interviewed by Soledad O'Brien.  Of course, the argument Lott has been making for years is only one part of the larger debate, but since it keeps coming up....

"I don't mean this is a disrespectful way, but Columbine happens in the ghetto everyday...."

Daily Show on Gun Violence and Bob Costas...

 

Nostagic for the 50s?

Gun Violence Again
While I do not want to insult those who are expressing their outrage or sorrow or shock by praying for those other families, I suggest we might also try to imagine exactly how we would feel if it were our child that was senselessly murdered.  Then, with the clarity that comes with such a perspective, it seems we would want to both pray for the victims and try to start making sense of this complicated, stubbornly stalled, gun violence debate.

In Gun Violence: The Real Cost, the authors estimate the annual cost of gun violence in America is more than $100 billion.  In the past, researchers have focused only on medical costs and lost productivity, but these author include myriad additional, concrete, costs in their calculations.  According to the publisher,

“All of us, no matter where we reside or how we live, share the costs of gun violence. Whether waiting in line to pass through airport security or paying taxes for the protection of public officials; whether buying a transparent book bag for our children to meet their school's post-Columbine regulations or subsidizing an urban trauma center, the steps we take are many and the expenditures enormous.

Cook and Ludwig reveal that investments in prevention, avoidance, and harm reduction, both public and private, constitute a far greater share of the gun-violence burden than previously recognized. They also employ extensive survey data to measure the subjective costs of living in a society where there is risk of being shot or losing a loved one or neighbor to gunfire.

At the same time, they demonstrate that the problem of gun violence is not intractable. Their review of the available evidence suggests that there are both additional gun regulations and targeted law enforcement measures that will help.

This urgently needed book documents for the first time how gun violence diminishes the quality of life for everyone in America. In doing so, it will move the debate over gun violence past symbolic politics to a direct engagement with the costs and benefits of policies that hold promise for reducing gun violence and may even pay for themselves.”

One online review of this book, however, raises the counterpoint that sustains the pro-gun lobby. “In explaining how ‘gun violence reduces the quality of life for everyone in America’ the authors miss the mark on how gun ownership reduces the probability of crime and enhances the standard of living of everyone.”

Does gun ownership ‘reduce the probability of crime’ and enhance everyone’s standard of living?  In the shadow of today's news, common sense says no, and my non-expert read of literature tells me that the research strongly suggests no, but the debate continues.

In “Linking Gun Availability to Youth Violence,” Alfred Blumstein (one of our most respected criminologists) and Daniel Cork found that as homicides committed by young offenders increased from 1985-1995 “an important factor” was the “significant increase in availability of guns to young people.”

In a very good read, an paper in 2000 called ‘Guns and Gun Violence,’ the author reviews the factors that drove gun violence up in the 90s and down since, focusing on the 1980s increase in the production of inexpensive, high-capacity, high-caliber semi-automatic pistols (replacing previously common revolvers) that were “widely available for the first time in the late 1980s.”  The author also reviews the literature to remind us of the following:

1.    “Not surprisingly, the more guns there are, the more gun crime there is.”

2.    There is a ‘close relationship’ between gun availability and rates of gun violence.

3.    “Keeping a firearm at home more than doubles the risk that a member of the household will be killed in a firearm homicide.”

4.    “Robberies and family and intimate assaults are three times as likely to result in death with a firearm is involved.”

But listing what the best available data suggests has not (yet) tipped the balance in this debate.  Beyond gun violence, is the question of violence itself.  Let me suggest one other perspective to consider.  There is already an exploding cottage industry analyzing the ways that the shooter was so unlike you and I, so evil as to be incomprehensible.  This may be true.  But it may also be less accurate than we want to think about.  One blog noted that continuing on the trajectory we seem to be on in America, with ever more guns more easily available, may bring us to a 'terrifying' place, where we become "a country living in hiding, ordering life online rather than living it." 

And another blogger, summarizing the media conversation at this point, surveyed the labels being applied to the shooter in an effort to explain this tragedy.  These include: "brainiac, mentally disabled, personality disorder, needy, withdrawn, awkward, nerdy, struggling to be social, on the honor roll, and subject to outbursts."

It is possible that there is something about American culture, or post-modern societies, something about ourselves and our communities, we ought to be examining here?  Is the availability of guns and gun violence driving us toward 'living in hiding' and 'ordering life online rather than living it,' or might this also be an indictement of a consumer society that places materialism on the highest alter, commercializing and diminishing everthing from Christmas (the real 'war on Christmas') to community, saturating communication channels with alienation, violence, and self-absorption?  How many of us, at 20 years old, were/are/will be 'awkward, withdrawn, brainiacs struggling to be social' or how many of our most respected elites are the poster boys for 'subject to outbursts' and yet we are suprised when some from within this odd tribe we have created act out?

Like everyone else, from prayers to finger pointers, I am just trying to get my mind around yet another senseless, and seemingly preventable, tragedy.  I do not want to suggest any level of expertise on this topic, only concern and a desire to help us all figure this out together.