Letters to the universe

someday i’m sure you’ll get it together and look back at these times and laugh.  i can imagine how comfortable you must be in your new self, without the limitations of time, self-consciousness, and financial capacity.  I can totally see you as that hot mama, with style, grace, authority and options.  the kind of mom all the kids wished they had cuz you “get” it.

someday i’m sure that all of these “others” who used to live under the category of friend will fade into vague memories of folks that came and went.  whose trip through your thoughts don’t elicit confusion and delay because you’ve allowed them to sway you from the work you should be doing.  I”m also pretty sure you would have figured out how to stay focused enough to build the empire i only now half jokingly talk about.

one day when i come to meet you things for me would have changed so dramatically that i won’t remember ever having this discussion with you.  it would have faded into the mush of stuff that only gets in the way of what needs to be done.. or whats really important.. like your babies.. who are growing like weeds faster than you can remove thhem.

in the meantime, pass on some hints about how i can keep it moving.  i could really use it.

V

i’m sorely disappointed in you. so quick to criticize, yet not quick enough to act. always down to analyze a situation but never offering enough of yourself into it to really make a change. often you get lost in your own feelings, not quite listening to what others are saying. I suppose my life’s mission should be looking after you and having patience when you rebel.

i would have thought all of this real life livin’ would have kicked more of your bullshit out of the system.  but quite often, i find that you are still reveling in your egoism as much as ever.  all of this self-growth you talk must be for the benefit of others, cuz it sometimes doesn’t seem as if you’ve incorporated any of it at all.  you spend so much of your waking life thinking and processing and thinking some more, yet when it comes to those moments, you really have a hard time making new and better choices.

let me stop berrating you for a second to say, i feel for you.  often i see how relatively unconvinced you are of any positive comments others give you.  but that just goes to proving more of my point, you really haven’t realized your value.  Blame it on whoever you feel like, but there really is no one at the end of your finger except you.

so, what are you going to do about it?  when will you stop complaining about whatever it is you are angry at for the moment?  when will you get on with the business of becoming the person you really want to be?  cuz you do know, there really is no other time than now.

love,

you

everyday you teach me about some of the most profound things… the depth of your need to make connections, the purity of your intention and expression, and how clear of a mirror you are of me and my energy.

i love this age!  i know you don’t quite understand everything yet, and thats ok.  neither do i.  I’m probably going to try to figure it out as you ask me those huge questions.  in the meantime, i’m not going to let the irony of the situation pass… lolo told me to seriously evaluate how i live my life.  and at this very moment, i’m acting like a machine and not being very mindful of my limitations.  i know I am not a very good example.  So i’ll go to sleep now.  not at your behest, but because i just can’t keep these eyelids open any more.

i love you,

mommy

hey all, here is a write up of what i was going to present… this is supposed to go between r. and d. let me know what you think, if it applies, if there is continuity with the rest of the project, etc etc.

nessa
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Toxic Tour Picture Slides prepared:

In the most simplest manner, the A. C. has three main categories of actors: the government, the corporations and the citizens. Each category has people who are for and against the project with motivations that are dependent on their dispositions and that have affected the project history through their actions. I will express the sum of the political interchange by telling two stories of how the politics of public spending is applied.

Officially, this project is lauded to be the most significant infrastructure project in recent history. It succeeded in bringing inter-governmental collaborators to accomplish a very complicated task. Fed, State, L.A./L.B. City, County, Ports, ACTA Board. They have all agreed that the expansion of the ports would result in positive gains for the region. They obtained funding to accomplish a herculean task. They accomplished the project and obtained significant profits to pay back the loans almost 25 years early. While the task was huge, and the steps complicated, the vision was already agreed upon. There was opposition from truckers and truck companies who stood to benefit from a weak rail infrastructure and from community advocates who wanted more investments in the community. But overall, it was a model project that is a measuring stick for other projects around the country and world.

The other story is about the little guy; like one of 30 families who live in Vernon during the evening. The average person who lives in the cities of Vernon, Huntington Park, Lynwood and Compton experiences what we can only consider terms and vocabulary on the daily.

Charters & Incorporation, Jurisdiction and Enforcement: Traveling down A. in parallel with the corridor, you experience a sharp difference between the cities and the unincorporated areas of the county. In terms of jurisdiction and enforcement, these border areas are unkempt and often unchecked for the strapped county. The results of this include blight, poor enforcement of regulation, and lawlessness. Additionally, there are differences in how each city operate and divide up the resources required to maintain themselves.
(pictures)

The existing industrial zoning is currently operating in dangerous proximity to children and families. Environmentally, much can be done to improve the production, distribution of goods on every level. The existing industrial zoning can be complemented with better mixed use projects that include tax generating commercial and safe affordable and low income housing, so that the industrial regions could be better enforced to be up to safer environmental standards.

Fiscalization of Land Use – Rezoning land for business to gain the tax. RDAs are an example of this.
(pictures)

Market supply and demand: While the rest of america pines for cheap goods, corporations are going global to find the cheapest manufacturing and importing it into our stores. While we all pay the sales taxes at the stores, the costs of import taxes are passed on to us through the price of goods and we are all subject to the tax incidence therefore we have an effect on the elasticity of the demand of these goods.

Elasticity of Demand – Related to tax incidence. Having options of demands (to buy something or not) makes it elastic of flexible. Where there are no options it is inelastic.

Tax Incidence – Who actually pays when adopting a new tax-who’s affected by it.
(pictures)

The effect of the comparative advantage can be seen in the exponential increase of activity in the ports.

Comparative Advantage – The principle behind globalization. Doing what you can do better and letting other do what they do and then trading. Basically, whoever can do a thing best should do it and then pick a trading partner who does something else better. It makes the nation stronger.
(pictures)

The ports, and the outlying communities are subject to nearly 1.3Trillion in trade that is shuttled in and out of its vicinity.

Gross Domestic Product – It’s used as a benchmark to compare against history and other nations. It’s also a measurement of goods and service produced. The US is the global leader and powerful as an economic influence. Other nations look and listen to us.
(pictures)

The A. C. is an example of a collective good that belongs to everyone and should benefit everyone if used to its full capacity.

Collective Goods –. A public commodity that belongs to everyone, but you have to pay for it. It benefits all, yet no one can own it. e.g. water

If the A. C. were used to its full capacity, and the outlying communities and cities were retrofitted by Redevelopment then the communities that are being directly impacted can stand to benefit more equitably from it.

Redevelopment Areas/Target Areas (RDA) [Tax Increment and Financing] – Special districts are created within a city for improvement or redevelopment. Usually lots of businesses are built in this area, but 20% of it must be used for housing. Growth in this area remains there (property tax revenue), but sales tax is returned to the City. This is way Cities can generate revenue from property tax because they bond against it.
(pictures)

—————— next slide

CHART : Player Motivation Action/History

Government – Pro Corridor : Infrastructure building for a better economy, port growth. 1.3 Trillion in economic impacts to the region. less traffic.

Fed, State, L.A./L.B. City, County, Ports, ACTA Board. Leadership and passage of project. Obtained financing creatively. Prime example of intergovernmental collaboration.

Government – Con Corridor: Want more financial support, environmental impact. Note: concerns were about the impact of the trucking through their cities and the added expenses on the cost of road rehabilitation.

Cities of Vernon, H.P., Lynwood, Compton. Suit against the Board and won 1.2 million dollars for job training and graffiti removal.

Corporation – Pro Corridor: Better, cheaper, Faster option to getting to distribution points in and through California.

BNSF/Union Pacific; Walmart, etc. Sold right of way privileges to ACTA Board to develop the combination of several rail lines. Eased the wheels of project.

Corporation – Con Corridor. No opposition?? Perhaps only from the Truckers and companies that operate truck distribution / logistics. No actions that were outright conveyed through research.

People – Pro Corridor: Jobs, less traffic, safety, long-term environmental impact.

People – Con Corridor: Short term Environmental impact of project construction, cost to taxpayers. Note: the concerns of community advocates (CBE) surround the larger impacts of large-scale trade to the local region, advocating for more redevelopment that benefits the local communities in terms of localized jobs, healthier environments, and infused capital for small business loans and infrastructure improvement.

__________________________ next slide

Conclusion: As stated in our earlier lectures, the average person has very little effect on the budgets spent by government. However, we can effect policy to make better choices. The moral of the story is that the A. C. is definitely an example of good public spending, but that it could also be made more effective if it was more efficiently utilized. Some solutions could include policies made by the Port, City, County, State or Federal transportation departments as well as Train and Truck transportation companies to

* incentivize the use of the Corridor over trucking.
* incorporate better particulate screening devices on trucks.
* speed up the production of hybrid or electric trains

Here is D. with more about the externalities of the A. C. project and other incentives for its use.

————- next slide

My head is full of semi-useless information and trivia that may be useful in a game but tends to cause me to stumble in the day to day. While I thank you for giving me the faculties to appreciate the long-term value of information, I beg you to give me more grace in wielding it. ‘Cuz sometimes, I get so lost in these circular thoughts that I wonder if it has impacted my quality of life.

For example… this whole A. C. project. it all started out innocently enough, a group decision that had come up through a class in the politics of public spending. we all agreed that we wanted to do something that shows the positive side to public spending, benefits and all.

so then i was in charge of looking at the politics that the various actors were responsible for. Rather simple, I thought.. no problem to take on this section with my current workload. Most sites and sources already delineated the stakeholders and discussed their motivations and actions. And would that have been easier to do, of course. Is that what I did, of course not.

On Friday, I took the Toxic Tour with Communities for a Better Environment, an Environmental Justice organization that looks at the systemic ways low income communities of color are (for lack of a better word) victimized by the industrial and commercial companies that travel through their communities and the governments who allow for it to happen and make policies that benefit economically rather than socially.
With the concepts of power, privelege and oppression so freshly ingrained in my head, and this long-standing conversation I’ve been having with myself around beginning my personal empire (that would translate into millions of dollars and afford me with a comfortable living as well as donor status in the philantropy sector)…. no better way to say, it hella fucked me up.

Let me explain why I’m so confused. While I get globalization, neo-colonialism, and a bunch of other isms that make up the systems of oppression that I have previously committed myself to fighting; Seeing its manifestation up close and in all of its grandeur is making me think about how huge capitalism and how ingrained it is that a few big sounding concepts are like throwing rocks at the ocean. See, I’m no tree hugger by any means. I love beef. I smoke cigarettes and occassionally throw it out the window of a moving car (knowing where it will end up eventually). Dude, I’m fat and appreciate the ability to avoid walking at any cost. I am truly not about hugging stray animals.

However, when companies’ profits are more important that people, when billion dollar oil refineries and industries are set up right along side schools and neighborhoods and little league baseball diamonds, and freeways are overwrought with the guzzling trucks that spew black smoke… and the neighborhood folks (that look like poorer, harder living versions of my family) are more concerned with their day-to-day subsistence than the outlook of their lifespans, something is so wholly wrong with things.

What I learned in the Toxic Tour was that companies whose profits are larger than some countries create a bigger impetus on government spending than a few million people’s wellbeing. That because it isn’t economically viable to hold all the companies accountable to making better choices it is ok to expect people to “suck it up” and deal with the traffic, pollution, asthma, exhaustion and cancers that they or their families get. Because we need jobs, good paying jobs in industries that actually make money.

The trade off in this situation is that everyone, the people included, are willing to accept the system because they are able to bite off a little of that american hot dog. It is a low, humming, buzzing, numbing of our senses… as if we are larvae multiplying on rotting flesh. No horror movie could ever come close the reality of what I am assuming you are expecting of us. Now that we see it, we can’t unsee it. Its like the matrix. Its like being born. Why go through all of this? Why not just live in this permanent state of ignorance?

Ok, I know, I know.. dramatic. But still. the point is that we are forced to trade off at the expense of our humanity, of what we know to be basically true. It is not right to ask one community to pay with their lives for the benefit of others. This is where I am stuck. You have put me on this path of enlightenment.. helped me to understand my own personal industrial revolution.. and now am faced with reconciling it with my present life and the future I’d like to have. I remember and have files of past letters I’ve sent to you regarding stuckness. One time I remember asking you for clarity in understanding my personal function in the world, another I asked you for grace as I began to experiment and make mistakes loudly. Through it all, I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by amazing people and role models. this time, I suppose I’m not sure what I’m asking for. I would just like your company. Someone who understands it better than I do, as I’m sure you do. I need help clarifying this one by one and hopefully getting someplace constructive with it.

On a side note, I’m understanding how this is all connected to my every other thing in my life… How I’m rather tactless, why people have been dropping out of my life, what it means to be supportive and loving to myself and to others, even the importance of literacy for my children and why i need to figure out how to hug them more so that they will value and want to stay connected to others and not become anti-social and psychopathic. In the meantime, I suppose I can always go back to the drawing board and report back the players in the A. C. .

Keep it simple I guess. Thanks, god dude.

Nessa

Dear P. A. ,

As a follow up to our last workshop on power, privilege and oppression, i wanted to make a few more connections to real time events for you. As allies in a struggle to understand the systems that create wrong, we are and will be connected to any uprising anywhere in the world: Haiti, Venezuela, West Africa, India. If anything, this is a good lens by which to understand the importance of economic development.

Please read on for a couple of articles and links that connect the recent global food shortage to globalization and how economic policies in the U.S. affect individuals across the world. Via the wiki on colonialism and neocolonialism, you’ll get an overview of how economic strategies of highly developed countries create a dependency by lesser developed countries that is backwards and unfair.

Some questions to think about: What are our options if food became so expensive that supermarkets had to shut down? Is it fair that one country’s internal/domestic policies become another country’s survival issue? How does colonialism, neocolonialism, economic imperialism connect to American business practices? How does it connect to our personal powers of influence and privelege as individuals who benefit (as Americans clearly do) versus others globally who do not? How is this a personal issue / what are examples of how this affect us or plays out locally and everyday?

Anyhow, happy reading. don’t worry, there won’t be any tests.. this is for your personal edification / mental calisthenics.

In struggle and community,
Vanessa

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Brazil’s Lula: food riots are wake-up call
Wed Apr 16, 2008 8:39pm EDT

By Raymond Colitt

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Foods riots in Haiti and elsewhere are a wake-up call for the world to fight harder against poverty and reduce agricultural trade barriers, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Wednesday.

“It was necessary to watch dramatic scenes for the international community to wake up to the urgency of finding a definitive solution to the challenge of poverty,” Lula said during a lunch with visiting Indian President Pratibha Patil.

Protests in Haiti over high prices for rice, beans and other staples ousted the government on Saturday.

Rising food prices showed that the world “was poorly equipped to face and solve the worst evil of our times,” namely hunger, Lula said.

Food riots also underlined the need for an agreement in the so-called Doha round of global trade negotiations, Lula said. Rich countries need to reduce farms subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports, Lula said on Wednesday during a conference of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Brasilia.

Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or “every time there’s unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger.”

If Europe doesn’t open its market to farm imports, “someone will have to assume the historic responsibility,” Lula warned.

Across the globe, bread, milk and other foods have become more expensive, fueling inflation in some countries.

Patil, whose 3-day visit to Brazil was her first foreign trip since taking office last year, praised Lula’s flagship social welfare program “Zero Hunger.”

Experts blamed price increases on strong Asian demand, adverse climate in some producer countries and increased use of corn to produce fuel in the United States.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned this week during a conference in Brasilia that rising prices threatened to increase malnutrition in Latin America.

(For more stories on global food price rises, please see here)
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN1633420520080417?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory

Dependency theory is a body of social science theories, both from developed and developing nations, which are predicated on the notion that resources flow from a “periphery” of poor and underdeveloped states to a “core” of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the “world system.” This is based on the Marxist analysis of inequalities within the world system, but contrasts with the view of free market economists who argue that free trade advances poor states along an enriching path to full economic integration. As such, dependency theory figures prominently in the debate over how poor countries can best be enriched or developed.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolonialism

overview: “Neo”colonialism implies a form of contemporary, economic Imperialism: that powerful nations behave like colonial powers, and that this behavior is likened to colonialism in a post-colonial world.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism

(5) The political division of the world by the great powers, wherein exporting finance capital to their colonies allows their exploitation for resources and continued investment. This superexploitation of poor countries allows the capitalist industrial nations to keep some of their own workers content with slightly higher living standards. (cf. labor aristocracy; globalization)

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Tracking Agflation: Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/agflation

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The causes of poverty and why food aid is not enough

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Poverty/FoodDumping.asp

Food Aid as Dumping

The way the food aid programs of various rich countries is structured may be of concern. In fact, food “aid” (when not for emergency relief) can actually be very destructive on the economy of the recipient nation. Dumping food on to poorer nations (i.e. free, subsidized, or cheap food, below market prices) undercuts local farmers, who cannot compete and are driven out of jobs and into poverty, further slanting the market share of the larger producers such as those from the US and Europe. Last updated Monday, October 31, 2005.

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The costs of globalization…. various links..

INCOME SIDE – how much is trade really worth
Los Angeles Port: http://www.portoflosangeles.org/about/facts.asp
China: http://tradeinservices.mofcom.gov.cn/en/f/2008-01-10/22497.shtml
L.A. Longshoremen: http://www.pmanet.org/?cmd=main.category&id_category=126
* The domestic business impact of West Coast port trade is $1.3 trillion – roughly equivalent to the GDP of Canada or Mexico.

* As of December 2007, PMA members employed nearly 15,000 registered ILWU workers at 29 West Coast ports in California, Oregon and Washington. The workforce has increased by more than 4,000 since June 2002.

* Average full-time wages for fully registered workers top $136,000 annually. Among individual job classes, the figures for 2007 were as follows:
o Longshore: $125,461
o Clerk: $145,731
o Foreman/walking boss: $200,052

Thank you,

VLV
Program Manager

i have to honestly say that i don’t really have a grudge against you. But every so often, a breakdown in the universal particles occur to remind me that, as a whole, those ideas about you are correct. i know, i know. my penchance for the highly descriptive does tend to squash my fluffy, yet honest, candor. but i can’t help it. this round of letter writing was supposed to be to anyone, anywhere, but i keep coming back to you. if i was smitten with the glow of your omnipresence, perhaps that may have the tone of being somewhat romantic. rest assured it wasn’t.

so basically… look, i know it probably isn’t easy to have to think about your white privilege. but man up a little. i mean, you don’t have to think about this shit unless people like me… so called progressive types, who have an inkling of cultural and political awareness… call you out on it. but don’t crumple like the tissue i just wiped my kid’s snot with. have a backbone. be committed to working this out with me, lets perhaps hope for a second that you do mean what you say.. and that you really are choosing to participate in real social change.. and not that heal the bay bullshit the other beach blonde, blue eyed types go for.

so with that, i just want to say that i gave you a real shot. especially after the bullshit you said about how you hope to understand “oppression better if you married a woman of color and had a multicultural family.” dress that up however you wish, but the fetishization of women of color is directly tied to the systematic ways that capitalism has developed sexual slavery in the third world. on that matter alone, you can’t deny that you have white privilege. while i know all about how white women are objectified, the added layer of our colonial history and political circumstances make this a much more heavier issue than whether or not you feel like you could use some ‘flavor’ in your life. …

wow.. wait

i think i’m too angry to make sense AND be witty… i’ll continue this another time.

VVL

Filipina American married to a Black American male, raising two biracial babies.

When I first met you I was so intimidated.  I worried that you would never accept me because I knew no one would be good enough for your first son.  Not christian or black or a carrier of any memory or tradition you deemed important.  You were this mystery of a woman, so put together, always proper.  With a look that bestowed approval or disdain that would have all the men around you wonder what was wrong.

9 years later, I’m as unrecognizable as you are.  Self-consciousness eating at the confidence I had built like toy blocks in the play room.  You, in a wheelchair or a hospital bed, mumbling words eaten by the m.s.; your body broken into pieces of the woman you once were.

I think about you all the time.  Even if you don’t know it. Or even if I don’t make quite the effort I once had to make sure you knew I was thinking of you.  Sometimes out of duty I have forced myself to come and visit, an obligation of our familial ties.  My children should know you and always have your spirit come to mind when they think of you.  My son sometimes asks to come and visit to give you a hug so that he can make you happy.  I know you must feel that horrible pang by not being able to play with him or sweep them up in your arms.  I can only imagine what it must feel like when he gets there just to shirk away cuz he can’t understand why your love is expressed by your eyes and not your behavior.  Sometimes, at the right angles, my daughter has your smile on her face.  Deep dimples and bright eyes, big forehead and the betty boop face you used to adore.  And I wonder what she’ll know of you as her memories begin to form.

But I write this letter to you, not about them, but about your son.  your first born, the darkest of your little men.  the first of the babies that you populated your nest and made central in your life.  He, of the deep running rivers, silent in the shadows but with the passion of the ages.  You were the prime crafter of version of him I have come to love.  As you lay there in your hospital bed with who knows whats going on through your mind, he is off somewhere trying to figure out how he feels about your convalescence.  So it has been a few years since the initial diagnosis.  I don’t believe he knows quite how to respond, or how to show his support.  I do know that he wants so badly that you become well that he sees nothing other than that.  the purest of emotions that a son could possibly have for his mother.  he loves you so infinitely.

you once told me, in one of the few conversations we’ve ever had, how you used to know him so well that he didn’t need to think. he had you.  to some extent i don’t believe he has ever learned how to do that… think.  i think he has come to believe that there is only the reality you create and the one he tries to keep from you.  and with you so sick, he can’t pretend that you are not willingly trying to make this so.  he has no idea what to do.  and nether do i.

which brings me to why i’m writing you.  ms. lloyd, what do you want me to do?  how do I help right now?  as you lay so helpless, and as your boys freak out.  i’m not sure what i can do to keep them clearheaded.  i don’t know what to do to keep him clearheaded.  i’m not sure what to do. and this is a strange feeling cuz i always have some idea of where to start.  right now, i’m just exhausted.  as the sole breadwinner, i go to work and come home miles and miles away from where i thought i’d be, both figuratively and literally.  i’m torn sometimes as to how to be a good wife and how to be the backbone, the hands and the feet of my little family.  how am i supposed to do this without you?

Nessa

i was online looking for bullshit and came across the frontline program on the pbs site.  after poking around i found the video for the medicating kids program that aired some time ago.

after the first 10 minutes, i started feeling that duke up feeling that i get when i feel angry… you are fucked up, you white, midwestern sow.  how could you sit there getting fatter than fat and complaining about how wild your kid gets.  he’s four fucker.  thats what they do.  and if he’s misbehaving, its probably because you are a horrible loss of a human, not because he’s got some chemical imbalance.

ugh.  this totally brings out all of the woman of color anger man.  are you aware of how fucking dumb you sound when you say that the four year old middle child is acting in a way that is a matter of life or death for your family.

i say that if your four year old has such complete control of your household, its probably because you have no control of it.  if he has a  problem, its probably you.

i mean, this is basic shit man.  women of color all over the world get the simple factor that we are the mothers, and we are in charge.  there is no negotiation.  the men know their obligation of supporting that role too.

as i watch your family pile up into the minivan, with you skinny slight jack sprat of a man at the wheel and your huffing butt in the back seat, two babies in car seats and one in the front, on your way to dr. bacon the medicine man who thinks he can fuck with their chemistry as an experiment.  you fucking asshole.  your laziness is the culprit, not your developing child with the ticks and the slurring and the repeating of hot medicine over and over.

is this what america has come to?  do you feel better that you’re turning your child into a vegetable.. a zombie of sorts?  is his uncontrollable rage to the level that keeps you comfortable.  is his mouth full with a swollen tongue so that he can’t tell you how you’ve betrayed him?

thank you for providing me with the incentive to get back on track with sharpening my parenting skills.

vvl

ps.. i can’t believe i resorted to this level of name calling.  i’m pissed that you led me to this.