Opioids, Me, and Numbers

            I'm sitting at my desk debating whether or not to take a Tramadol tablet (50 mg, generic for Ultram): an opioid. I usually take them near bedtime, when I do take them, but not too near since I take other medications then, and the combination can get my sleeping heart rate and blood pressure inconveniently low — or in some other way get me dizzy. I've had the Tramadol prescription for a number of months now, but have only taken a small number and wonder if I'm going to be counted by some activist or other as part of "THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC."

            I think about such things since I've fitfully followed the opioid story in the newspapers and just listened to "Opioid Overdoses: Mass Casualty Zones in America" on 1A, the NPR discussion feature from WAMU in Boston that's replace The Diane Rehm Show.

            Even in so respectable a venue, I heard few significant numbers. A literal epidemic is "the rapid spread of infectious disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time, usually two weeks or less. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic" (Wikipedia, "Epidemic").

            What are the rates of opioid overdoses per 100,000 in various areas? Of those, how many per 100,000 population are fatal? How many are intentional suicides? How many are accidental overdoses with prescription drugs produced under FDA supervision? How many are accidental overdoses with street drugs? How many are accidental overdoses from people using the drugs improperly through ignorance of proper dosage and/or a desire to get high?

            I'm an old man, and I've lived through a number of "epidemics" and "crises" hyped in part because people think, correctly, that the best way to get attention (and funding) is mongering fear. So there was an earlier crisis in painkillers — inevitably addicting for some portion of the population — and then a crisis in pain because many people in puritanical ("Suck it up; 'No pain, no gain'") American society couldn't get sufficient or sufficiently-strong pain-killing drugs. And now THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC!

            (Rule of thumb: Last generation's solutions can make for some of this generation's problems.)

            If there were generally knowledge of the relevant numbers, and their implications, we might have an informed discussion of what might be the most effective responses and determine what's politically possible. I'd like that: I spent the biggest part of my life in southwest Ohio, near Dayton, a center of the "epidemic"; and I'm taking, now and then, an opioid. I'd like lower-volume, logically-respectable discussion, starting with statistics using the phrase "per 100,000 population of ____."

            Accidental overdoses from street drugs might be most immediately dealt with by providing FDA-tested, properly labeled drugs. Suicides are a different matter. Both involve serious discussion of difficult political problems. For one thing, if despairing people in Rust Belt America don't kill themselves, what are we, as individuals, communities, and a country, willing to do for them to relieve understandable despair?

* * *

            One of the participants on the 1A panel had as her central talking point, "Addiction is a disease"; all right, but so is cholera — and central to preventing cholera epidemics were public-works sanitation projects. We have to look at drug use in its social context, and drug issues are social and political issues. So two-and-a-half closely-related things to end with: (1) Opioids are pain-killers, so we should expect some addicts. His second point was that we can't talk about "the drug" and "the user." There will probably be a number of drugs for one thing. More important is that social context. So (2) Remember that we did NOT have a heroin epidemic with former military heroin users returning from Vietnam. The great majority were able to leave their pain and heroin back in 'Nam. Those who returned to more pain in the US and available narcotics often went back on the needle. So there's that rule that with any pain-killer, a certain proportion of users will get addicted, to which we can add that opioids are psychoactive, and any drug that can get you buzzed will be abused. But the number of addicts and abusers can be reduced with social support, with reducing their pain, and with moving toward a society where we address compassionately and sensibly — using science and logic, figurative head as well as figurative heart — our problems and don't go immediately and exclusively for a pharmacological quick fix or criminalizing disease.

The "No-Visible-Scars" Approach: Disciplining/Harming Kids and Others (29 June 2013)

Most of us learned as kids, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me," which we modify as adults to add, "Words just leave those invisible wounds that fester for years and years, poisoning relationships and our lives …."

I was going to write on this topic again anyway — indeed, I'd already written that opening paragraph — when I listened to David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013), which includes a story in which a young Sedaris gets paddled by his father. In earlier books, Sedaris had talked about his father's dinner-table custom of hitting his wise-ass kids on the heads with a heavy spoon, and I thought that a bad thing for the father to do: scalp wounds can bleed a lot, nerves in the scalp damage easily and take a long time to heal, frequent head trauma of even a minor sort can harm the brain, and I agreed with the instructor of the one psych course I took that it's unethical for big people to beat up on little people.

Still, the instructor noted that kids are pretty resilient and that the research as of that date (mid-1960s) indicated that all sorts of systems of discipline could work with children so long as the general environment was loving and the system applied fairly and consistently. As the instructor threw in, "It won't warp their little psyches if you hit 'em now and then; and there's your psyche to consider" — and then repeated the ethical point that adults shouldn't beat up on kids, ever.

In the story with the paddle, however, the young — but not all that young — David Sedaris wasn't beaten up by his father and had behaved really, really like a brat. What bothered me in the Let's Explore Diabetes stories about the elder Sedaris (and remember that these are stories, and we haven't heard Dad's side) — what bothered me with this to-some-degree-fictionalized Dad wasn't that he'd once paddled his son but that he consistently undercut him verbally.

There may be something in my personal background working here. I can recall only one occasion when my father hit me — on the arm, with an arrow I had loosed in the apartment — but our parents didn't work very hard to disguise that (CLICHÉ ALERT!) I was our mother's favorite and my sister my father's favorite. Also, I was "the good one," the occasional arrow-equivalent notwithstanding, and my sister "the smart one": all the way through to at least my PhD and getting tenure at a respectable university.

Quick story. My sister called me one time laughing and saying that she'd called our father to tell her that her son had made Phi Beta Kappa. My father sent on his congratulations, paused, and said, "Well, that can't be such a big thing; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa."

Anyway, and for sure, I was kind of sensitive to — let's call it "verbal negativity" and leave "abuse" for more serious issues — to verbal negativity by the time I was a junior or senior in college.

I recall helping to run my fraternity chapter's Hell Week then and having some inspectors from the Interfraternity Council show up for yet another surprise inspection and getting into a moderately friendly discussion with one on pledge training. He politely declined my invitation to camp out in our foyer (or some similar snarky remark) and noted that he and his colleagues had returned because there were rumors that my fraternity chapter included sweat sessions of the boot-camp persuasion in our pledge training. Neither confirming nor denying the rumors, I noted that IFC held us responsible for the behavior and, as we said back then, discipline of our pledges and wondered aloud what sanctions for pledge-ly mischief he would recommend.

He told me that his house used line-ups where a pledge would be verbally dressed down (and verbally torn down) in front of his pledge brothers.

"The 'No-Visible-Scars' approach …?" I said, innocently, and thought "Now that is barbaric" and said that we didn't do that, and wouldn't. We'd line pledges up and yell at them as a group, but if we were going to say hard things about a pledge we said them to the pledge in private; and however much we were willing to use Parris-Island techniques for motivational aerobic exercise, we avoided the Marine tradition of tearing a guy down (destroying a boy to build a man, breaking the man to build the Marine [see Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket or just about any Marine movie prior to the 1990s).

            I am a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union and close to an absolutist on free speech; and contrary to some of my allies in feminism and on the Left, I strongly differentiate between speech and actions and limit a phrase like "speech acts" to something like, "I now pronounce you husband and wife" (or whatever), or "You're fired!" And I note again that David Sedaris tells stories, and even if they are 100% true to his perceptions and memories, we don't hear from his parents and siblings. Still, to my ears, the elder Sedaris comes through as something of a villain.


            I can forgive him his heavy spoon and (far more easily), his occasionally swatting a bratty son. Cutting the kid down, though, figuratively, hitting him with "verbal negativity" at just about every exchange — now that is kind of barbaric and cruel.

A-Rod, Macho, Masochism, & One Cheer for Performance Enhancing Drugs (9 Aug. 2013))

"No pain / No gain."

         I'm writing at the time of another scandal about performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports, and I want to join those making a provocative fringe-view assertion and then go off on my own, on sports and PEDs briefly, but mostly on the more general topic (singular) of machismo and masochism.

         After all the responsible, and respectable, and true things are said against PEDs — all the proper health-warnings promulgated and sermonettes on fair-play rehearsed — let us consider that, on the other hand, on balance, it might be better for really dedicated and/or obsessed athletes to take PEDs than to put in the workout and practice time it would otherwise take to be world-class athletes. There's a kind of perverse puritanism working that condemns warping lives through drug use and admires warping lives through too much dedication to what are, finally, conditioning, skill-acquisition, and games. 

         Let me repeat a story. When teaching at Miami University in, significantly here, Oxford, Ohio, I had a student varsity athlete, a swimmer, tell me how exciting she found her life at Miami U. Where, I asked, was she from; and her answer was "Sydney." "Sydney, as in Sydney Australia?" I asked, mostly rhetorically (she had a strong Australian accent). "Sydney's a great city!" I said. The nature of Sydney, however, wasn't something she knew: "I was swimming all the time." Now that was overstatement; she had to sleep and eat and go to school and all — but allowing for overstatement, that was pretty much her life: if she was awake, she was probably in the pool or weight-room. She didn't really have a childhood.

         Now I wouldn't have kids injected with PEDs or other sports-related drugs. Another of my students had his knees shot up with a pain-killer and anti-inflammatory so he could finish a high school football game, and if the coach and trainer had been taken out and shot for that, I would protest — I'm a staunch opponent of the death-penalty and supporter of due process — but my protest would be muted. (The guy's father did punch out the coach; I regret, as I'm sure he does, that he did not get to punch out the trainer — and apparently didn't successfully press charges or sue.)

         The high school football player could have been crippled, and he answered my question, "Uh, how are you now?" with "Well, I can walk — but I'm not playing football any more." The coach and trainer are guilty of child endangerment and child abuse, and the endangerment part at least would apply to any parents who had their kids use PEDs.

         But college athletes and older are adults, and if my swimmer student saw her only choices as PEDs, obsessive training, or never quite making the Olympics, I would fear she would choose PEDs and excessive training and hope that she'd lower her athletic expectations — or, failing that, try moderate drug use, sensible training, and having a life. In the case of children, I'll continue on the fringe and say that parents who make their kids train for sports (or music or theatre or anything) to where the kids have no other life are as guilty of abuse as those having their kids shot up with PEDs or painkiller plus anti-inflammatories.

         I'm far from the only person making such arguments, and what interests me here is that our effect on policy has been somewhere between inconsequential and nil.
         Obviously there are problems with literally equating over-pressuring parents as child abusers, and obsessive athletes with the pathologically obsessive: it's a bad idea to break up families and jail parents for pushing too hard for gymnastics or ballet, or to commit committed jocks to "Hotel California" in the sense of some insane asylum (besides, the Camarillo State Mental Hospital is now Cal State Channel Islands, a different kind of mental institution). And there is much to be said against the sort of low-pressure child rearing that has the goal of instilling high self-esteem, regardless of low achievement.

         Still, it's a question why it's immediately obvious to most Establishment Americans that PEDs are bad but excessive training and workaholic behavior are somewhere between no big deal and virtues.

         The answer to such a question lies in part in our Puritan and (small "p") puritanical heritage, and also in part in our concepts of macho as well as, and perhaps increasingly, macha.

         It is after all, called, in Max Weber's phrase, "The Protestant Work Ethic," and the founders of New England were about as Protestant as you can get: people who had given up on purifying the Church of England and ended up in the overly-tolerant Netherlands and then moved on to the new world to found pretty strongly Calvinist and definitely radical-Protestant Congregationalist congregations and colonies. Work for them wasn't just punishment after Eve and Adam got our asses kicked out of Eden but a downright good thing. Hard work was even better than just work, and success from hard work was a sign you were one of the few Elect and not part of the many totally depraved and damned.

         Success from hard work: good. Easy success because of natural ability and good luck — unless you're a really strict Calvinist and believe in Election, not that pagan good luck: questionable. Quicker, less painful success through chemistry: bad.

         More, there's that small "p" puritanism that sees pleasure as an evil and a snare, and a subgroup of that that goes one further: if pleasure is bad, pain is good.

         We can see this in extreme asceticism, especially when asceticism takes the final step and goes over into not just denying the body pleasure but into outright self-abuse: and by this I mean something like self-flagellation, as opposed to "self-abuse" as a perverse term for masturbation (a twisting of words that is a triumph of puritan-PC linguistic engineering).

         And this brings us to one of those odd areas of agreement between various religious and culturally conservative doctrines, and what I have called "The Macho Creed."

            When I was in my thirties— so a while back but still in the late 20^th century — there was a US military recruiting ad using the theme of "DISCIPLINE," an ad I was able to parody by reprinting the text, just with the addition after the final "DISCIPLINE" of, "AND OCCASIONAL BONDAGE." My intention was to point out the irony of how much pain and guff "real men" are willing to take in proof of manhood.

            Boot-camp hard-ass Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick'sFull Metal Jacket (1987), is an exaggeration — I recall Lee Ermey saying he never inflicted on any one cohort of recruits all we see inflicted on the platoon in the movie — but the abuse was based in fact. All that was done to Pvt. Joker's training unit, Sgt. Emery had done at one time or another to recruits he was putting through Marine initiation at Parris Island. And, until it gets overly brutal or lethal, such hazing has its place: serious initiations need to require high cost for the initiates, and, given the uses to which Marines are put, their initiations need to be serious. I just object to seeing submission as all that manly or honorable, and I don't think much beyond a fraternity hell week can be justified in contexts less than preparing for combat.

            Which gets us to athletic "fun and games" (as we used to call the more unsavory hell week humiliations back at my old frat lodge) — which gets us back to various kinds of abuse in athletics.

            The least problematic cases are with self-abuse. You have the expression from personal training "No Pain / No Gain," and this makes some sense in weight training, where to gain muscle mass you need to put some strain on the muscles: work them toward fatigue if not to and beyond. Real pain, though? I was taught in PE and told by my physician, "Pain is nature's way of telling you 'Stop doing that.'" The mantra "No pain, no gain" is controversial with individual fitness training, but is far more questionable with team sports. As soon as more than one person is involved, the question becomes, "Pain for whom, gain for whom?" In the case of the coach and trainer who shot up my student's knees, future pain for him was immediate gain for the coach: depressingly small gain, actually, given what was at stake, since my student's team was winning the game, and the coach had a winning record — and tenure as a PE teacher.

            Less sensational but also harmful is verbal and emotional long-term abuse of athletes. Again, I'm willing to accept the logic of hell week or Hell 10-Weeks of initial Basic Training; that's initiation and indoctrination, and is okay so long as the hazing stops fairly quickly and, throughout, is stopped short of brutality. But there are too many coaches spending too many seasons on the brink, and too many athletes who have to put up with more than a week or a few weeks of systematic humiliation. Part of the problem is lack of a tradition of young athletes organizing to demand respect and (with modesty and prudence) draw some lines. A good rule of thumb is that of E. E. Cummings's character Olaf, with my emphasis (and capitalization): Speaking this much truth to power, that "There is some shit I will not eat."

            Another part of the problem is that masochism inherent in parts of machismo and machisma.

            I'll handle machisma first since the concept is weird and, public health excluded — a major exclusion! — not as threatening a matter as machismo, which, health matters excluded, it's pretty much a part of.

            Another student, another story: This one staggered into my office, sneezed, coughed, wheezed, and dropped off a paper on my desk, only somewhat spotted by her bodily fluids. She rasped, "Here it is," and waited for my thanks and appreciation. She didn't get any; I said something like, "Okay, now go home and get some sleep; I would've given you an extension." I wasn't going to thank her. I wasn't going to be impressed. What was going through my mind was (1) that she'd exposed me to Whatever Is Going Around — although I'd probably been exposed already (students are notorious disease vectors) – and (2) that far from being impressed that she'd trekked over with the paper, I thought her socially unskilled that she couldn't get a friend to drop it off and/or unsophisticated about modern technology that it didn't occur to her to just send me the essay as an e-mail attachment.

            I discussed this matter with some women colleagues, and they told me the problem was Great Grandmother Ferguson.

            They'd all been brought up on some version of Great Grandmother Ferguson, "who dropped the twins while plowing the south forty; bit through the umbilical cords; put one twin to each breast to suckle; finished the plowing; then went home to nurse a houseful of cholera victims; and you, you little weakling, you're complaining about some minor appendicitis. Woman up! You're whining like a boy!" The rule was, "Real women don't get sick," or they don't allow a little pneumonia to get in the way of getting work done: that's for boys and men, who "never have to go through a three-day labor like I had to for you — and then you ripped me apart!"

            My colleagues explained to me, "Girls are brainwashed, Rich; it's the Macha Creed, and you just have to tell them that times have changed, and we're winning the Revolution, and now women and girls can take a day off to be sick the way men always could. Or at least rich men."

            I thought that story and line were great, and I repeated them back to the class, to which several young women responded, "Right! Boys are wimps! If they get sick they go to bed!" And I repeated the point to rather militant stares and repetition of "Boys are wimps!" and finally just said, "All right — all of you! If you're sick, don't come to class. I gave you a roster, with contact information; you're divided into groups; get someone to cover for you." And we moved on.

            Following "Erlich's Law of Equal and Balancing Absurdities," when many Americans aren't checking out the drug store's fifteen varieties of pain-killers, they're into theatrically enduring pain in semi-silence and bragging about it. With women, it will be birthing children — you want to compete with that, fellas, and you gotta get yourself maimed in a popular war — and, with women, the macha claim (as such) will be carrying on in spite of illness. With men, it's going to be a toned-down version of John Rambo's sewing up the wound in his arm in [Rambo:] First Blood (1982) — a pretty good movie, actually, which can't be held responsible for its sequels — or, and most especially, something in the manner of many of the movies of Mel Gibson.

            If we're going to talk loosely about "The Protestant Work Ethic," and I've done so, we can talk also about "The Catholic Pain Ethic." As George Carlin of blessed memory pointed out, there is the tradition — strong in parts of Irish Catholicism — where "The priests were always pushing for pain," even if, with guys anyway, "You were always pulling for pleasure" (Class Clown, 1972). The first sentence in the Carlin quote is what counts here, because it brings me to Mel Gibson and those other great analysts of culture, in the tradition of Weber, Carlin, and Lenny Bruce — Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In "The Passion of the Jew" episode of South Park (31 March 2004), it's not just that "Mel Gibson is crazy," but that he's crazy in a very specific manner: few are more macho than Mel Gibson in his movies, and Mel Gibson, Parker and Stone have it, is a very sick variety of masochist. Allowing for satiric overstatement, allowing for more than the usual satiric malice and downright terminal snarkiness — allowing that the great majority of sexual masochists are healthy people with variant, sometimes highly variant, tastes — the Parker and Stone evaluation is correct.

            In an essay in The New Republic for 30 May 1964, George Grella complained that James Bond's "only genius lies in an infinite capacity for taking pain" (p. 17, quoted pdf 12). Gibson's Christ has other qualities but from what I could see with a lot of fast forwarding through a borrowed DVD, in The Passion of the Christ, Gibson literalizes and makes flesh the idea of Christ's taking on "infinite […] pain."

            A recurrent theme in Gibson's movies is heroic suffering, with images stuck in my mind of Gibson's character Porter — just "Porter" — getting his toes broken in Payback from 1991, and Gibson's William Wallace inBraveheart (1995) moving into the evisceration portion of a historically accurate hanging, drawing, and quartering.

            The macho hero kicks ass — and at least a couple of critics have suggested that that's exactly what Gibson's resurrected Christ is on his way to do —  but Grella's suggestion for James Bond is true as well: macho (and macha) heroes take pain. If you don't believe that, ask your local film-noir detective; they get beaten up regularly. Same for a super-macho anti-hero like Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971); it's not what viewers remember, but if you count and time acts of violence — including high-tech torture — vicious little Alex spends as much time or more receiving pain and humiliation as dishing it out. We see such pain-taking in a lot in popular art, and the artistic motif both reflects and instills an ideal of macho that includes being kind of into pain.

            Which brings us back to "No pain, no gain" — or no gain many people will respect — and from there back to Alex Rodriguez and Lance Armstrong and the other PED users, with their short-cuts to winning and macho success.

            It's not just that these athletes have cheated; it's not just that they've upped the pressure on others to use drugs. It's also that we value work as such and want winners to sacrifice and suffer. We value taking pains and taking pain; and we value near-fanatical dedication to one's sport or art or calling.

            Fine, but "moderation in most things," if not "all things," and sometimes we in America — for all our hedonism, still descendants of Puritans and the puritanical — at times we Americans value sacrifice and suffering way too much.

Protecting the Weakest in Our Midst (24 Sept. 2013)

            A State Senator I greatly respect has gotten through the California legislature a bill increasing sentences for possession of child pornography. The bill is recommended as protecting "the weakest members of society" and protecting children from life-long damage, emotional scars that will never heal.

            The Senator has a demonstrated ability to produce carefully-crafted legislation, and I trust her with this bill. Still, I want to look at the rhetoric that goes with such legislation and get to some basics in politics.

            The child-pornography bill doesn't involve serious money, but serious money, in aggregate, is at stake with much legislation designed "to protect and serve the weakest in our midst." Such a formulation sounds good and is good, but I was taught in the Chicago school of practical politics to go back to any legislation that actually does that and get it rewritten to have it help also people with some clout. Indeed, it's sometimes prudent to throw in some goodies for people who don't deserve them and whom you don't even particularly like. You want food stamps for hungry Americans? You may need the programs in a farm bill with over-generous subsidies for over-stuffed giants in industrial agriculture.

            If the programs you set up serve only the truly needy, the really wretched of the Earth, those programs are in danger of being cut the next budgetary crisis. The truly needy, the powerless among us, lack the power — by definition lack the power — to protect their interests; so you build in aid for them from the powerful, even if (on occasion) you gag a bit while doing it.

            You want to protect kids from being abused in the making of child pornography? Increased prison time for possession of such images is one approach, but be very careful, especially in California, that when budgets get tight, money to keep porn fans in prison isn't coming out of programs more immediately devoted to child protection, or programs that might make life a bit better for children, such as art or music classes — or food.

            We love our kids so much we'll throw porn fans in the slammer, but maybe not enough to pay for luxuries for them, like becoming musically literate, or eating fresh fruit.

            But, ah, that professed love of children — and the very real and powerful urge to protect children — should also, always, get us to pause before acting.

            The urge to protect offspring is widespread in mammals and pretty much universal among humans, and we humans add to that imperative our abilities to abstract, generalize, and think imaginatively, to such a degree that almost all of us will try to protect children of other people, even children of strangers. Almost all of us, and those who want to systematically hurt or exploit children we will see as radically different, in a way inhuman, demonic.

            Hold that thought for a moment.

            Now note that the desire to protect children — innocent young girls — was at the heart of what led, pretty quickly, to the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s. And if the late 17^th century colonial America doesn't seem relevant, note that accusations from "recovered memory" of sexual abuse escalated in the United States in the 1980s to include accusations of "Satanic ritual abuse."

            So, RULE: Whenever the debate gets to protecting children and protecting children from abuse and, especially, protecting children from sexual abuse that we will perceive and should judge as figuratively demonic — pause; take a moment.

            And then pause some more. Macbeth is hypocritical when he says it, but he's right that one should be careful not to let rage, or even totally-justified indignation based in "violent love[,] / Outrun the pauser, reason" (Macbeth 2.3.89-90).

            Appeals to protect children can activate some of our strongest emotions and damn well should trigger strong reactions.

            So pause. Think. Note that the relatively quiet hysteria that hit Salem — without riots, with everything formal and legal and done by due process — that low-key, Puritan hysteria left in its wake, as a contemporary reported, "Nineteen persons having been hang'd, and one prest to death, and Eight more condemned […]; above an Hundred and Fifty in Prison, and Two Hundred more accused […]," with five of the people imprisoned dying in prison. Recognize that in the last two decades of the 20^th century less lethal but still highly destructive panics hit Manhattan Beach, California, in the McMartin preschool case and among the well-educated citizens of Christchurch, New Zealand. In the "recovered memory" panic of the late 20^th century, families were disrupted, reputations ruined, and people imprisoned or threatened with prison.

            Recall that however much we in America prize the idea of presumption of innocence — and we prize it less than we brag about to foreigners — however much we maintain a presumption of innocence, to be accused of a serious crime is to be harmed: justly harmed if one is guilty, unjustly harmed if one is innocent.

            To be accused of a sensational crime means bad publicity, easily-accessed arrest records, and time and expense even if all goes very well for you and you are soon released. To be accused of a sexual crime against children is damning.

            Such crimes do happen, far too often.

            A friend I'll call Kevin lived with a very nice woman who was on what I'll call the Illinois Child Protection Special Ops team (definitely not its real name): they intervened in really serious cases. She said one time over dinner that she was somewhat surprised by all the publicity a "home alone" story had gotten in the Chicago area. She mused that, well, the kid was cute, White, and middle class, so the story was news. For her it was the sort of routine case her unit referred down the line to rank-and-file cops and caseworkers. When I asked about the sort of cases her unit handled, she thought about something she could discuss over dinner, and told a couple of horror stories that enraged me and turned my stomach.

            That's the one hand.

            On the other hand, my compassionate friend Kevin helped out a young woman with schizophrenia and had her accuse him of raping her, in a rather implausible context. Kevin went in to see the local police and was told his young, schizophrenic friend had been in. Her mother had also come in and told the police that her daughter had dreamed the rape and that Kevin had been kind to her daughter.

            The cops were aware of the young woman's mental problems, and, possibly illegally, didn't detain Kevin or the other men she fairly regularly accused, nor did they force her to submit to a medical examination.

            Rapes do occur. Child abuse occurs: a significant amount when we note most abuse is nonsexual and combined with neglect; and people concerned only with sexual abuse and nonchalant about all the other kinds should expand their circle of concern. (They should also shut the hell up until they've repaired their moral compass.)

            One last point here.

            Almost inevitably in receiving alerts to sexual crimes and sexual exploitation, we're told the victims are scarred for life.

            I'm certain many are, but we should wonder if all victims are scarred for life and if fewer would be permanently damaged if permanent damage wasn't expected of them. My mother was a great believer in the "self-fulfilling prophecy," and the idea is valid.

            Let's say a child is forced for a while into child pornography and is raped and neglected and, for a while, is abused; and let's say you run into her — or him — as a young adult and ask "How are you?" and are told "Fine." And then you clarify that you really care (most Americans who ask "How are you?" don't give a rat's ass and will be upset if you try to tell them in any detail). And upon clarification that you really want to know, you're told again that the person is fine; that s/he had some therapy and support from friends and family and is getting on with life — "And how are you?"

            With luck, and some justice in the world, the people who harmed this healthy young adult are in jail, and they deserve it. They deserve exactly the same sentence if the victim recovers as they would if s/he were "scarred for life" and never recovered from the trauma.

            And we should want that victim to recover and hesitate to accuse her — or him — of denial or false consciousness. We may believe such victims have been victimized and will always be victims, at best recovering, never recovered, but it's probably evil to insist on that belief so much that we set up a cultural expectation of permanent damage and a system of norms where former victims are punished, if subtly, for saying "I'm fine" and getting on with their lives.

            I'll repeat the word "evil."

            It can be effective rhetoric and good politics to present victims "scarred for life." In terms of ethics, however, people making such assertions need to look up the statistics on recovery and cite those statistics and, if possible, offer victims the hope and even the cautious expectation of recovery: it's ethically required for honesty, diligence, and in hope of the possibility of a positive "self-fulfilling prophecy."

            So California will get our laws on the possession of child pornography more in lines with those of other States, and that's probably a good thing. The debates on such matters, though — debates on sex, violence, exploitation of children — should proceed with minimal sensationalism and very great caution.

            I trust the good Senator sponsoring the child-pornography possession bill and see so far no problems with the increased sentences in extreme cases. (I'm a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union and trust them to keep an eye on how the new law is enforced.)


            More generally, though, for all such debates: Kids must be protected, but adults also deserve protection. We need to aid "the weakest in our midst," but in ways that will survive budget cuts. We need to follow "the good angels of our nature" in responding to threats to children — and keep a grip on our emotions; otherwise we risk that we will "Outrun the pauser, reason" into evil, ironically doing evil when trying to do good.