Bill Engleson's Blog, page 6

Child Welfare and the World of Film Noir

I have been remiss in posting my thoughts on my two primary blog interests; Child Welfare Issues and Writing Commentary.

Of late I have been enjoyably wallowing in film noir and a fun on-line course offered by TCM in conjunction with Indiana’s Ball State University and film noir expert, Richard Edwards.

Aside from the unfortunately anagrammed BSU, this has proven to be a reasonably serious and comprehensive course.

I mention this pastime of mine because many of my recent Flash Fiction pieces have had a noir flavour.

Does this relate to child welfare? It does if you share my belief that many of the conceits of noir are imbedded in child protection. There is a dark overtone that shades the complex world of children in distress. In noir, the main protagonist spirals out of control, occasionally compromised by women and men whose interests are shallow and sinister. The same spiral of inevitability often seems to exist in the lives of children caught in terror rarely of their own making.

There are few heroes or heroines in noir. In child welfare, there may be some but even they are tortured and often despised.

The BC Children’s Representatives just released report, Growing Up in BC-2015, written in conjunction with the Provincial Health Officer, paints a grim portrait of life in BC for vulnerable children and youth and especially aboriginal children and kids in care. As much coverage as the report will receive, few will read it. It will stay in the shadows where such sadness often sits and waits.

Aside from the link to the Representative s reports, here is a link to one of my latest flash fiction pieces. It’s short, 250 words, and contains the prompt, “Do you want some coffee?”

In my world, the agonies of the child welfare system are far from being sincerely addressed. Flash fiction is, for me at any rate, easily written, fun to create and worth some of my time.

Like many, I suppose, I am easily diverted from the serious issues of the world.

 

Boxed-in thinking…

There are fascinating stories unfolding every second. This one, involving two countries, Mexico and the US of A, aided, apparently by Interpol, essentially involves the quasi-legal kidnapping a 14 year old girl on questionable grounds, grounds that a DNA test early in the proceedings would have fully clarified, needs a bit more light.

Alondra Luna Nunez became the rope in a ludicrous tug of war over her parentage.

Judge Cinthia Elodia Mercado , presented with competing parents, ruled that Alondra was in fact who she proved not to be, albeit it took a week and a state sanctioned kidnapping.

Judge Mercado explained that her role is to “resolve“ the issue and stated further, “We don’t do investigations or make inquiries.”

A system that only does the least expected of it will inevitably fail to serve the greater good.

Alondra is home with her own parents now but the failure of the system is an international embarrassment and those charged with ensuring that the law guarantees the best interests of the child have one more example of systemic abuse.

An amazing story in a world of countless fascinating tales.

A Whistleblower in the wind…

Whistleblowers, I believe, are essential to the exposure of information that, if released, will challenge organizational inertia at the very least and blatant corruption, criminality and cover-up at best.

The news this week that the UN has suspended long time aid worker, Anders Kompass for leaking an internal report conducted by Aids-Free World co-director Paula Donovan (the other co-director is Stephen Lewis) about allegations on the sexual abuse of children by French peacekeeping troops in the Central African Republic , is more than worrisome.

The report apparently was leaked to the Guardian newspaper last July.

One of the many questions that need to be asked is what has happened in the past 10 months to address the allegations. These sorts of investigations take some time but this length of time is unfortunate.

Another question might be why the UN seems to have no whistleblower protection.

War is a blasphemy. The abuse of the innocent victims of war goes so beyond the pale. If the UN has attempted to cover-up even the allegations, it has  brought itself into serious disrepute.

Anders Kompass would appear to be a courageous man who has recognized that sometimes, the pump of justice needs to be primed.

This unfolding story will be followed closely.

 

Harper Lee, Exercise and the value of bathing…

Some days are quietly, gently successful without much effort. Yesterday, Thursday, April 23rd, was such a day. After a few morning moments of questionable creativity…a poem and a brief bit of flash fiction that told an Earth Day story (two days late, but what can you do)…I went to the Gym. (Yes, Denman has a fine little gym in the cellar of the Activity Centre which used to be called the Seniors Center but we all got younger and more active.)

There, I did my regular routine; a solid half hour of not-all-that-strenuous fitness. 20 minutes on the recumbent bike and ten minutes with various weight lifting machines.

Whilst peddling furiously on the recumbent bike, I usually read. Yesterday, I was immersed in the exceptional memoir by Journalist Marja Mills, The Mockingbird Next Door-Life with Harper Lee.

This outstandingly evocative and caring book respectfully tells some of the life of Harper Lee, Nelle to her friends, and her sister, the somewhat older Alice Finch Lee (1916-2014.)

For me, books like this one fashioned by Ms Mills come along fairly infrequently. The sisters’ Lee, though they live (lived) in somewhat of a fishbowl, are portrayed as women growing old gracefully, both involved, curious, active, private, snarky and kind. They both have wonderfully special and, at the same time, ordinary attributes. I hope to have a 10th of their grace in my old age, which I have accepted I am currently somewhat beyond the starting line and perhaps closer to the finish line than I care to admit.

So yesterday, a wet west coast day with streams of sun bursting through on occasion, was quietly, gently successful without much effort.

Today, I found out that a letter of mine was published in our national news organ, The Globe and Mail. I thought I would add it here at the end and a link to the depressing column that engendered my trifling response.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/when-does-a-bath-become-a-necessity/article24058562/

Rubber-duck panic

As someone who has frivolously had a shower pretty much every day of my adult life, I don’t think I have read a more disheartening column than André Picard’s When Does A Bath Become A Necessity? (April 22).

While I confess that I have found aging not to be all that it was cracked up to be, I fully expected to stay clean and perky until the day I left this mortal shower stall. As a boomer, I have been spoiled with sufficient water to drink – and to play in with my assorted rubber ducks. To discover that when the day arrives and I am compelled to enter a nursing home, my bathing routine will be, at best, a Saturday night dunking, much like it was in the old and possibly fictional Wild West, well, you can appreciate my shock.

I would suggest to Quebec Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, a key defender of the one-bath-a-week standard, that he give it a go for a few years. I suspect friends and family will soon suggest he improve his ablutions.

I’d hate to have to resort to “black-market baths” – a term new to me and sounding not a little grungy.

Bill Engleson, Denman Island, B.C

Social Work on the (You)Tube…

March is Social Work month. The following essay meanders a tad. I hope you find something of value in it.

The profession of social work is not often examined with any fullness or depth in television or the movies. (For those of you who may sense some irony in the implication that there are instances where television examines any subject with fullness and depth, I couldn’t agree more. Every though I grant you the ironical tone, I confess to getting a reasonable level of my daily dose of information from television.)

For an intriguing take on the world of social work, there is one surefire example (George C. Scott as a young New York City social worker, Elizabeth Wilson as the Supervisor and Cicely Tyson as the office support person starred in East Side/West Side during the 1963-64 season. This excellent series is now available on YouTube and deserves a new audience.) Typically though, social workers in television are bit characters.

Recently, I stumbled across one such fellow while watching a modest guilty pleasure, NCIS New Orleans.

The basic plot involves the intentional hit and run murder of a navel recruiting officer who is also the foster mother of 2 brothers, one 17 and the other 9. The story eventually spirals out of control as it attempts to dipsy doodle an array of suspects as well as a sub plot involving one of the NCIS officers and the mental health issues of his brother. As for the social worker bit character, we first witness him in action when he exhibits an unnecessarily terse and awkwardly autocratic attempt to rush the separation of the two brothers to different resources. Instantly, we detest the guy. Later, it turns out he is somewhat corrupt and meets an incredibly sudden, self-imposed demise that still seems over the top to me.

The rest of the story is basic cops and robbers with an ending both heart-warming and pat.

But, back to East Side/West Side. The first episode of the show is called The Sinner. The guest star is , talented daughter of the great screenwriter and director, Robert Rossen (who helmed one of my all time favourite films, All The Kings Men.

Rossen plays The Sinner, a single mother who supports herself and her infant child by being a paid companion to men. Yes, sometime into the story, her profession, prostitute, is acknowledged. It is a well written drama and offers no easy resolution.

The second episode, entitled Age of Consent, is a tough uncompromising look at statutory rape laws.

The third in the series of 26 episodes, You Can’t Beat The System, offers two stories; one is about a Korean War vet with PTSD; the other, starring Martin Sheen as a drunken, angry and abusive young husband, is edgy and uncomfortable. The two story lines cross paths and also raise a number of questions, for me at any rate, about confidentiality, ethics and the use of volunteers in a professional setting.

Episode 4, Something For The Girls, is an odd hybrid but I found it enjoyable, a little offbeat yet and not a little confusing.

The fifth episode is, to my mind, an exquisite example of the power of television. Entitled I Before E Except After C, it examines a host of difficulties inherent in the New York School System of the day and offers an approach or two that I imagine might still resonate. The collaboration between the welfare system, the police and the educational system is rendered well, both in styles and values, shared or otherwise. Howard Da Silva, an actor of solid reputation who was blacklisted during most of the 1950’s, portrays a teacher with insight and curiosity.

At this writing, I have only watched these first five episodes. These glimpses into social work as portrayed fifty years ago are fascinating to me. This series engendered a lot of negativity in its day and ultimately was cancelled as a sop to conservative forces.

Half way through East Side/West Side’s abbreviated run, Kennedy was assassinated. I mention this only to offer a bit of context. Another bit of cultural context I feel like offering is that around the time of the showing of the 3rd episode, Sam Cooke, doomed to an early death the following year, and his band were arrested after trying to register at a “whites only” motel in Louisiana. In the months following, he records the song, “A change is gonna come.”

It surely did. And still is.

 

 

Vote on some flashy short fiction…

As someone who spends a fair amount of time writing, or thinking about writing, or wishing I spent just a wee bit more time actually getting on with my writing, I have sought out activities that might challenge my daily exercise regime around my old rustic writer’s block. The past few weeks, I have enjoyed participating in a weekly flash fiction contest. The host, Wendy Strain, posts a prompt on Monday, entries have to be in by Friday. Whoever wants to vote on their favourite have to vote on Saturday (and maybe part of Sunday-but it’s a little vague to me) and then we start again. This week’s prompt was “winter’s nap.”

Here is the link to this week’s entries. http://www.writeonwendy.com/winters-nap-wow-555-story-time/

They are each only around 500 words. Enjoy. Vote if you care to. Sign up and enter your own stories for the coming weeks.

For me, I am back on track and the weekly flash fiction challenge is somewhat akin to a weekly crossword puzzle. Pump priming, as it were.

 

An ethical jambalaya…

A number of years ago, the Globe and Mail offered a regular ethics column called Ethics 101. I frequently responded to the dilemmas posed and, every so often, my observations were printed. That column, as well as my career in social services, solidified my fascination with ethical situations. These days, there is almost nothing I like more than unearthing a movie or television drama that presents a wealth of challenging ethical dilemmas. One such recent discovery that I am savouring is the Danish television series, Dicte, currently available on Netflix.

The principal character is Dicte Svendsen, a journalist who has returned to her home community, Aarhus, to work the crime beat. Recently divorced and long-estranged from her Jehovah’s Witnesses parents, she lives with her older teen daughter.

Dicte has issues. Way too many to summarize here. Suffice it to say that the plots also have issues, most of them, quite early on, intersect with Dicte’s family of origin conundrums. Plot credulity is stretched, at least in the first 3 full episodes, in that Dicte also happens to discover the first 3 bodies.

(Spoiler alert-) In the first story, Dicte commits at least two ethical breeches. She purloins photos of a pre and post crime scene from her photographer co-worker and gives them to the investigating officer.

Subsequently, she breaks in to the computer of a physician, a co-worker of a close friend, who had already disclosed that the physician had provided medical services to a patient who might provide a lead to the villains.

The first breech eventually gets swept under the employee’s carpet. “It’s all good,” as they occasionally say, they being those who have made peace with whatever it was they did. The second breech occurs without consequence.

While there is a soap operetta quality to Dicte, I found it irritatingly fun and dramatic. The ethical conflicts keep on flying through the first 20 episodes. Religion, child welfare, immigration, corruption in sports, generational deceit; Dicte is a spicy and tasty ethical jambalaya.

War is an everyday event…

Since November 11, 2014, I have been engaged in composing a poem a day reflecting, or responding to, war. I will do this for a year. At least, that’s  the plan. As you might imagine, this has not been a pleasant activity. However, I am very aware that writing poetry and war are two very different things. Here are the sad products of the past few days.

January 8

On the shores of Lake Chad,

Baga, sitting duck of villages,

again feels the bloody wrath

of the nihilistic Boko Haram,

a corrupt clague of murderersl

Streams of blood, some fresh,

Some drying like clots in the dust,

bodies like fallen timber

after a vicious storm

are piled where ever they fell,

In the slaughter.

January 9

Hostages in Paris,

in the gloom of gunfire;

death, as ever,

has no voice;

options end;

the end of choice.

The terrorist

has made his point;

death is his message

blood to anoint.

And should I advocate

a dream of peace,

or leave my idle dreams

in a stage of siege?

I cannot dream of war.

There is no joy in that.

Death and dust are the hymns

That war will ever beget.

 

Aside

Is there anyone

more tortured

then a war poem poet;

all the great poems

have been written

and all poets know it .

The pathetic war poet

awaits his bloody muse;

in the dark,

powerless

like a blown fuse.

 

January 10

Paris is the ne plus ultra theatre of war

but lost in this slaughter

is the insatiable Boko Haram.

One loses track of the outrages.

if only for the contant battery of bloodshed.

Thousands of bodies in one fell swoop

and today, as if audacity needed to be reinvented,

a ten year girl with a bomb

strapped to her body, a life not

to be led beyond today,

blows herself up in the market at Maiduguri,

near the chickens, we are told,

near the chickens in the market of Maiduguri.

January 11

1,000,000 or more march in unison,

in solidarity,

a brief moment, I fear,

of gratuitous camaraderie.

Big moments engender

the loosely linked arms of world opponents

in a mock hieroglyphic of harmony

but it will unravel when those everyday

smaller political moments rear their

familiar heads. We are more

defined by those slighter enterprises

which occupy our days, that constantly injure,

that pull us in so many directions.

Still, millions marching,

even in futility, is symbolically satisfying.

But through it all, I cannot get

that 10 year old Nigerian girl out of my brain.

January 12

I have seen so little in my time.

Ten years is such a brief candle

and I have travelled only a short distance,

avoided my enemies; such a scandal

it will be when I explode,

when the explosives around my waist

detonate in a crowded bazaar

and we all meet my fate.

I have seen so little in my life,

a life no longer my own.

Have I been a captive of time

or the twisted men of the Boko Haram?

I am caught in this longueur,

a tedious poet’s lament.

and

I will have no time to wonder

what life may have held for me.

I will be but charred flesh and shrapnel

in the tragic market at Maiduguri,

in the market at Maiduguri.

January 13

Poets have no special powers,

no ex cathedra capacity

to undo, to alter any part of the world.

Poets dance in the lightness of pen;

poets sing into the air, the mortar

and the crust of war do not shiver and shake

with the muted power of poets.

 

A Child Welfare system with no memory…

As 2014 draws to a close, I am fortunate enough to have always been able to add things up. This helps considerably in counting my blessings. One of my pivotal blessings was in having parents who supported me through my topsy-turvy teens and my somewhat roaring twenties. While they weren’t always amused by or appreciative of my coming of age antics, they stuck by me out of some primal duty, or curiosity, or love, or a combination, I suppose.

As a social worker, I had the opportunity to engage in the lives of dozens, even hundreds of young people. My employer, the people of BC, never really had a systematic or effective way to gauge how well we serviced these young people. Any sense of success or failure was, and likely remains, anecdotal.

While I have had the opportunity to know little bits and pieces of the post-care lives of the young people I worked with and for, I have no real sense of what became of most of them, how their time under my tutelage benefited them. More than just my lack of follow-up, my professionally necessary distancing, what also came in to play was the BC child welfare system, an entity that had and continues to have no sense of how effective it has been. Perhaps it doesn’t want to know what worked and what didn’t.

A recent article in the Vancouver Sun examines services offered to youth in their post-majority years. Terms such as “small steps” and “modest” are the best anyone can say about those services. The government is so disinterested in the lives of these young adults, the article implies, that a recent innovation by a third of our post secondary institutions to waive fees and offer additional supports, is not tracked. Government, apparently, has no idea how many of its former charges are benefitting from this welcome and generous largesse.

Not every former youth in the care of the State needs additional services. Many do, however. How many? You could well ask the Ministry of Children and Family Development but they don’t keep those sorts of statistics.

During my tumultuous younger years, my parents paid some attention to my evolution. I think it little to ask that Government do the same for the young people it once attempted to support, and had some measure of responsibility for. Sadly, and all too often, the State seems to be a substitute parental system with no memory.

Even though the Sun article does encourage the notion that the Premiers of all Canadian Provinces should have a summit to address the needs of youth formerly in their care (not to mention those still in a balkanized child welfare system, ) I cannot forget that in Canada, change come slowly, reluctantly, unimpressively, and always, almost always, with our patented Canadian caution.

“Cab Calloway was my number one band guy, I like…”

In the powerful, award winning 2014 documentary, Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory, social worker Dan Cohen and filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tell a compelling story about the restorative finesse of music, the magical ability of the memory of music to draw out bits and pieces and whole sections of past lives, memories buried deep in the muddled minds of people caught in the terrible trap of Alzheimer’s .

Early on in the film, Henry, who first appears as distant as some far away star, is brought to life by the music from an iPod and recalls, with some prodding , that “Cab Calloway was my number one band guy, I like.” As beautiful and transformational a moment as that is, this film is resplendent with such moments.

There are a number of reasons to embrace this film. Here are a few.

If you are a social worker or anyone concerned about the well-being of people, this film gives a grand example of superior social work in action.
If you are of an age when there is the prospect that you might, sooner rather than later, require the need for institutional home care, you might want to start the search for just the right place now. It may not be built yet but there is no harm in looking.
If you love music or have favorite songs, pay attention now to those songs. Plan to have them with you always. If you don’t sing your heart out now, start singing them and make them a part of your everyday way of being. Someday, they may bring you back from the abyss of dementia.