Friday night is the winding down time in millions of homes, mine is one such place. Fix the computer, get ready for the next week's battles; but I am in the information business and news happens when it happens and it happens in out of the way places. Not next door. I am not a fireman, someone ready to run from crisis to crisis. There is little to be learned that way: I want the truth, not the drama. There is drama that comes naturally and is real, then there is stuff manufactured in the news room. When someone forces the envelope, generally they are making a political statement and politics and the truth don't mix. Ask the Newtster, or the guy with herpes in charge.
I have been working for almost three years on a series of articles about the childnappings and other abuses of power at the Department of Social Services. I have been using our local Department in El Paso County because they are not the worst or the best but they are typical. They have their good, bad and very ugly sides.
I do not applaud them when they simply do their job and protect children from abusive parents; that is what they are paid to do. Why praise some one for working; do you applaud a cab driver for getting you there or a pilot for getting you to the ground again alive? One of the things I have observed is they do not do their jobs well and their agency turnover is very high. The only bunch that stays with the job are the child grabbers: their department gets perks.
I take Social Services apart like a bad watch when they mess up because they are intruding, invading, destroying the lives of people. Not merely people but poor people; they don't go after the rich; the rich can do what they want to their kids, it's the golden rule.
I have watched parents lose rights for infractions like having something the social worker and her accomplice the cop want, envy, sloppy drunken bum Judges, the assorted gangsters working for or with poor women's baby's social worker, the list is boggling. One wonders where and when people are going to either snap and start shooting or simply go mad, curl in ball and cry.
The phone rings about eight thirty and my associate Ms. Shell has a terrible tale from Arizona. A woman, Mary Elisabeth Shipke, is holding her child at pistol point, in a small town outside of Tucson. I listen to the voice and this woman sounds really serious: "I have a nine millimeter pistol and I'm not going to let the police take my baby. The cops kicked in my door... Call the militia. " That's the sound of postal. Armed and mad.
Being mildly mad is a condition of these days to survive but this is postal. This is a condition brought on by social workers and psychologists. These so-called helpers had four years ago taken her son and they were back for her daughter. They had taken her son because she nursed him until age two and a half and the judge said that nursing a child of that age was sexual; because she could not afford a lawyer her son was seized and given or sold to someone else. He has vanished like in Chile, Brazil or Mexico. The father, a rapist, is a local drug lord. He is protected.
Things that make people behave weird, if the people are harassed, are magnifed. This time she had her windows open and that is a sign of neglect in Arizona. She had told Shell that the Department was using her to breed children for sale. The local militia said she was taking public assistance and deserved to lose her child. She is disabled.
There is a little known provision in the new poor laws signed by William Clinton that allows the police to enter public housing or section eight housing anytime they want and take what and who they want to. This law has not been tested but there are many police that love to get what they want... Woman, children, stuff, all belongs to them, our civil servants.
The father of the baby is a law student and so not human in the context of our tale. She was trading sex for legal advice, right from the canon of ethics in Arizona. Lawyers doing the public as they are trained too...
Shipke with her pistol is making a last statement. Who owns our lives: the police, the Department of Social Servies, a corrupt judge, the lawyers who take the money and plead out the innocent? When and how do we stand up for ourselves; one at a time or all together?
Postscript: Shipke surrendered to the cops, was taken to the gulag, and her child is finding a new home.
©Cordley Coit
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