Aug. 01, 2002 - 21:16 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Abuse

A word that can be used to define many different things that have gone on in the past, present and probably in the future. It knows no age, sex, nationality or creed. It can and often does happen to someone or more than one anywhere in the world.

Leafing through a Smithsonian Magazine of March 2002 that I had not yet read I came across that famous face on page 21, one that brought back memories, a type of expression that I had seen on folk in my own town during those years. It is a picture of a grim and suffering, pain, worry and almost hopelessness written on the stern visage of a mother with two of her ill clad daughters huddling against their raggedy mother.

In 1936 an employee of the Resettlement Administration, Dorothea Lange, a photographer whose position was a clerk/ stenographer who began to document the Depression in pictures of things she was seeing. She invoiced her film and travel expenses under, "clerical supplies." One day she was driving along an empty road in California and noticed a sign that said Pea-Pickers Camp and almost kept going her way because she knew the pea crop had been frozen. She turned around and went back, turning in she approached a female migrant worker and was given permission by the lady to have pictures taken of her. In all I think there were five taken, one of them is on page 21.

In talking the 32 year old woman told Lange they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children had killed. She told Lange that she had sold the tires off her car to buy groceries.

Lange developed her film and took the pictures with her, told her story to the editor of The San Fransisco News and showed him the pictures. An article was published along with her pictures relating that migrant workers were slowly starving to death in Nipomo, California. The story was picked up by the UPI. Within days the federal government supplied 20,000 pounds of food. By that time the woman had moved on. Not told is how she was able to move on, maybe by her and her kids riding with someone in their car that still had wheels and gas.

One picture, but it showed the plight of thousands if not millions of people who were suffering the effects of the Depression. Aid to unemployed people often came when it was almost too late. A matter once again of too little, too late. Migrant workers have always been low man/woman on the totem pole, and still are for that matter, treated a little better but earning low wages for hot, heavy back breaking labor.

Until aid came from our government by forming the WPA, PWA, later I think came the NRA too plus some relief checks, city folks were not migrant workers, could not find work and had not the means, knowlege or wheels to be migrant workers. I remember seeing boxcars and gondolas on moving trains full of men going somewhere else seeking work at a new place. Most of the time work wasn't there.

That was abuse suffered among others in similar condition. As is the plight of many people overseas. Each wave of immigrants to this country suffered abuse when they landed here. The Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles and others each had their time in the barrel until they finally became accepted as equals. Sweat shops in the east and textile mills also robbed many young people, kids and old folks of having enjoyment in their lives. They were too busy working to do more than gulp a bit of food (if any was there) and go to bed. Just to drag out of bed to do the, "Same song, umpteenth verse," the next day.

There are pictures and accounts of how city folk fared.

History shows the suffering in other countries from early times to the present day. Much of this abuse is suffered in a group, not alone.

Then I ran onto an article in the Rocky Mountain News of July 31, 2002 of five year old Stephanie Martinez who became a statistic on the last day of 2001. Dying from sepsis caused by unbelievable abuse and untreated burns on her feet, buttocks and other parts of her body, ostensibly from her turning on the hot water faucet in the bath tub and falling into the hot water apparently. The coroner said that in his 25 years of experience he had never seen such terrible abuse. He also said that the burns did not show the splash pattern which occurs when someone falls into hot liquid.

The story is long and complicated. The mother of Stephanie and her two brothers was in jail for parole violation and in an effort to keep her kids together she allowed the grandmother of one of the children to take all three of them in her home.

The process seems to be the same as related in Dave Pelzer's book, "A Child Called It." Heavy punishment if she even gave a hint that she was being mistreated. And she was definitely being abused but dare not say a thing, often taking the blame for wounds and brusies on herself. Trial date has not yet been set on the charges of child abuse resulting in death and murder 1. I would hazard a guess that in the guise of penal economy that she will be allowed to cop a plea to lesser charges. But the child died from sepsis, abuse, alone in a closet in horrible pain on New Years Eve day, 2001.

She was one of many persons who died, others who at the present moment are still alive are suffering similar abuse. Something often not reported until too late. Social Services country wide I think is getting a bad rap. They try but by the time they get into action it is already too late.

Bonnie of The Chattering can recount many of the things she ran into when she was a child advocate, I think she even has a web page dealing with the subject. Unbelievable things. My Daughter-in-law who just retired after thirty years of teaching in primary schools has told of some things she saw as a teacher. I remember her once saying some such thing as, "I don't have time to teach much of the curriculum, I'm too busy raising the children. Teaching them things that should have been well taught to them before they started school. I guess I'm expected to raise them and teach them too."

So, from the beginning of man's ability to recall, every form of mistreatment known has existed regardless of race, creed, color, nationality, wealth, poverty or age. All of my years, from my age of awareness the question has always been in my mind and heart. WHY ? ? ?

I utterly despise Abuse . . . . . . .

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