There are jobs you do for money and there are jobs you do for love. It has been my luck in life to do more of the latter than the former.

There are times when I am working with kids in the state system that I wonder if I’ve stayed too long at the fair, if I should maybe consider retiring based on sheer fatigue caused by the realization that while I may win the occasional small battle or skirmish, the war will go on.
But whenever I’m feeling like I want to hang it all up, I think about other people I know in the field, people who go every day to a job where they are confronted by the kids we have so terribly failed that they are in jail before they are old enough to drink, drive or serve in the army. These are the people who work in juvenile corrections with some of the most challenging children in our state.
I had occasion to go to the McLaughlin Youth Center recently. It’s where we send our youth whose criminal behavior has already reached such an egregious state that they need to be kept separate from society. These are young men and women kept physically behind locked doors while counselors, therapists and clinicians try to unlock the closed doors they’ve erected around their mental and emotional spirit. The ultimate goal is to somehow reach them so that they do not graduate from kiddie jail to adult jail.
It’s a difficult, frustrating, sometimes unbearably sad place to enter every day. Statistics on adult inmates show that the overwhelming majority started their criminal career as teens and were never able to deviate from that course as they aged. Those same statistics also show that the overwhelming majority of adult inmates come from broken, dysfunctional homes where physical, emotional and mental abuse occurred on a daily basis. It is not a coincident that many of the kids at a place like McLaughlin began their state journey as children in need of aid through social services.
When my mother died, about 16 years after my father’s death, someone put their arms around me and whispered, “No matter how old you are, it sucks to become an orphan”.  Truer words have rarely been spoken.  Even at 50 years old, I felt lost and abandoned.
While I am sure there are children in places like McLaughlin with caring parents who did all they could to direct their child properly, those children are definitely the minority.
Most kids in juvenile correctional facilities are essentially orphans, whether or not they have living parents. Many of those parents – and I use that term loosely – were really little more than egg and sperm donors. Once the child was born, they used him or her to meet their own physical, mental and emotional needs in ways often too horrific to describe.  Their concept of parenting is based on the child meeting their needs, not vice versa. When these children reach the age of incarceration, they are usually broken and sad, with a sadness often expressed as rage.
Not that these kids could articulate that. The basic human longing to belong causes them to cling to the dysfunctional and harmful adults who conceived them long after it becomes glaringly evident that their “family” has done nothing but harm to them. Breaking the law in ways often violent and sometimes downright sadistic are the only venues some kids have for their anger, an anger usually directed at anyone other than the parents who created it.
So every day a group of dedicated and concerned adults walk into juvenile corrections facilities around this state and try to make a positive difference in a young person who has already known more pain and sorrow that most adults will know in their lifetime. These men and women go back to this every day, day after day, taking care of the victims of a social network that failed to put a net under them while their parents figuratively… and sadly, sometimes literally… screwed them up.
Society pays Lindsay Lohan a millions dollars for her tale of two weeks in jail. They should pay these counselors, probation officers and guards two million for the effort they put in to saving our throw away children.

The latest polls show that the majority of Americans think the war in Iraq was a failure. This should probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone. Once Bush and company stopped beating the drums of war and actually started one, even the most devoted partisans of his policy could not find the WMDs that were our supposed reason for being there. And despite some deliberate obfuscation by his administration, most Americans eventually came to realize that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and was, in fact, one of the most deliberately non-religious governments in the region.

None of the above is in any way a defense of Saddam Hussein, a man pretty much indefensible by any measure of humanity.  He was a horrible, sadistic, barely human being.  But so are a lot of leaders in this world, from the horror of some African dictators to the scary joke that is Kim Jong-il.
Most Americans eventually started questioning why Bush Junior was so hot to take out this particular dictator as opposed to any other.  Historians will be debating that question for a long time to come, from those who believe Junior did it to avenge a threat against his dad to those who think that oil and only oil was the real objective.
What isn’t debatable is that based on the decisions of some old men and women in Washington, a lot of our finest young men and women got sent to a war whose goal was barely comprehensible. But because these young warriors had made a pledge to their country to defend it to the best of their ability when ordered to do so, they went to war and offered all they could to make it successful, even as those old men and women back in DC were stumbling over themselves to define what success would actually look like.
Eventually, as the war went on and on and on, and our economy started tanking big time, the news of the war faded from the front pages of our papers. It was no longer the lead story. The war was replaced by news of Wall Street shenanigans and the fiscal mismanagement that would devastate the financial security of America’s middle and lower classes.
And now the war in Iraq is over. The last combat troops withdrew last week leaving behind only supposedly non-combatant military personnel. Our soldiers are coming home and their return barely rates a blip on our media screens. What began with shock and awe seemingly ends as quietly as a church mouse sneaking out of the vestry before services begin. We left with no clearer idea of why we were there or what we accomplished than we had seven years ago when we arrived.
But this is not the fault of our young men and women who went over there and did their duty with honor and integrity. They deserve better than to come home to dead silence.
In my mind’s eye I can’t help but see the scenes that followed the end of World War II – dancing in the streets, parades, that exuberant sailor sweeping a young lady into a passionate kiss on Broadway.  I don’t expect that level of enthusiasm for the ending of this war. But I do expect some level of enthusiasm for the return of our young men and women. I expect we owe them something, anything, to demonstrate that we honor their commitment to their country and the sacrifices they made.
Because let’s face it, the only reason your son or daughter didn’t go to Iraq was because someone else’s son or daughter volunteered to do so. We had no draft in this war because we had a military full of professional people proud to serve their nation.
So please allow me to say, with all humility at the ultimate sacrifice so many of our young people made in Iraq, with all compassion for those who return with wounds that will change their lives forever, and with joy for those who return seemingly intact, welcome home. We’re so very glad to have you back. And so very grateful for what you’ve done – even if we don’t remember to say it as often as we should.
Thank you.

The recent ruling in California that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional has raised an interesting variety of hues and cries from the general populace. Some concerns raised are clearly heartfelt sentiments by people truly threatened by the prospect of gay marriage. Other concerns raised leave me wondering what constitution people studied in school.

If, in fact, this issue has more to do with a particular religious code than any civil issue, I have to ask why government is involved at all since government really shouldn’t be codifying religious strictures. Isn’t that what happens in places like Iran where Sharia is the law of the land? Do we really want that to happen here?
Let me stress my belief that Christians have every right to not condone gay marriage based on their biblical readings. However, I would be remiss if I did not also point out that in the Bible, slavery is condoned, as is killing your children if they disobey you. So clearly Christianity has a long history of re-interpreting its beliefs and deciding what are really the words of god and what are merely reminders of the morality of a particular place and time.
For those who believe that gay marriage is the death knell of our civilization, remember much the same argument was once used to support the continued ban on miscegenation. Yet removing that ban did not destroy society as much as it allowed consenting adults to love each other without fear of criminal penalty.
Government has a legitimate role in addressing legal issues arising from permanent unions. This can readily be done through the issuing of civil union certificates to any two consenting adults wishing to enter into such a contract. If a couple then wants god’s blessing on that union, they can go to their church and get married.
But the primary issue now before the courts really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the constitutional guarantee of equal rights. It is a secular issue that does not, and should not, relate back to the morality of any given set of beliefs.
I studied constitutional history in college and the one thing I remember above all else was that the constitution was not written to enshrine the principle that if the majority votes for it, then it has to be law. It was written to ensure that laws supported by the majority did not discriminate against a minority by taking away any of their basic rights. It was crafted so that laws passed in this country had to be legal under our constitution, with an independent judiciary created to ensure that occurred.
Government’s interest in regulating marriage is about property and legal rights and children’s custody and protection, not about the morality of marriage. Because seriously, if morality is the issue, why would our laws allow Newt Gingrich to tell his wife he was divorcing her as she lay in her hospital bed recuperating from cancer so that he could marry his mistress?  I don’t see how you get more immoral than that.
Two people in love wanting to get married who happen to be gay is downright old fashioned and solid compared to what passes for marriage among some of our more infamous personalities.  Brittany Spears had a marriage that lasted approximately twenty-five hours followed by one that barely lasted long enough for her to push a second child out who then had to be cared for by one parent while the other sat in a psychiatric ward.
Yet Brittany gets to marry again as often as she wants. This is allowed under our constitution. It’s her right. But I would argue it’s hardly moral.
There are those who believe that two gay people who have been in a stable and loving relationship for twenty-five years are going to destroy our country if allowed to marry, but somehow the Brittany’s and Newt’s of this world should be allowed to keep on going until they get it right.
Seems to me we need to rethink what is moral in this country. And maybe we should also do some hard studying on the difference between religious injunctions and constitutionally protected rights. Ours is a country founded on the principle of law, not the unfettered tyranny of any given majority.

I don’t think I’m what you’d really call a tree hugger. The thought of hugging trees honestly makes me very nervous. I mean, they have bugs and insects and sap and all that icky foreign stuff a city kid like me learned to fear at birth. When you consider I left the city for Barrow, where no trees have grown for a very long time, you can understand that my adult life has not exactly been filled with trees either.

However, I am a firm believer in respecting nature and the great outdoors because without trees we would run short on oxygen and I, quite frankly, have gotten used to breathing the stuff. Since trees apparently inhale our exhaled carbon dioxide and then reverse the process, exhaling it as oxygen, I say more power to them. (And may I also say to my college botany teacher, “See, I told you I paid attention sometimes.”)
My basic relationship with nature is that if nature stays outside and allows me to stay inside, then I think it should be allowed to just run wild. And that brings me to a topic that has filled my e-mail box this week – the proposed purchase of 60 acres of land at the mouth of Campbell Creek to be donated to the municipality of Anchorage for a city park.
From all I can gather, this seems to be a pretty sweet deal. Taxpayers are totally off the hook since the Great Land Trust will pay for the land prior to turning it over to the city. The Trust has raised the funds needed to pay for clean up of the property and address conservation needs of any park developed there.  State Fish and Game would manage the wetlands portion of the property, again alleviating the need for the municipality to kick in any money.
So if this deal is so good why is the mayor nixing it? If, in fact, the mayor’s reason for nixing the deal has to do with his desire to develop the land for housing, why isn’t there vocal support from people wanting that housing? Why isn’t there a hue and cry of support from developers? Why does the mayor purport to be representing private homeowners when the only private homeowners involved are the ones supporting the Trust’s plan for a park?
Once again, in the interest of full disclosure, let me make it perfectly clear that given a choice between a walk in the woods and an afternoon on the couch reading a book about life in medieval England, the book and couch would win every time. So I am not asking these questions because of some vested interest I have in creating a park where I can walk my dogs. Truth be told, the only reason my dogs are even willing to walk around my neighborhood is because they know they get a treat at the end of the walk. The woods hold no interest for them.
But it does seem to me, having lived in two cities with magnificent park systems, that having green spaces that regularly break up the monotony of city blocks is something worthwhile. And to be brutally honest, given what passes as housing in this town, green spaces are critical to keep us all from running screaming into the night at the sight of one more set of Levittown like condos crowded in on one another with no space for parking, playing or neighborhood.
Given the general ambience of what gets built in this town, we should all be beating down the door at city hall to get Mayor Sullivan to change his mind on this subject. We’ve got all the ugly housing we can stand. We don’t need another development of mindless cul-de-sacs that have taken the beauty and wildness of our state and beaten it into the mass of exchangeable bland matter that passes for homes for far too many of us.
What we do need is some of that wilderness kept close, even for those of us who don’t use it all that often. It cleanses our air, eases our minds and soothes our souls.
For goodness sake, if Philadelphia and New York can create amazing green spaces in their crowded urban environments, surely Alaska’s largest city can too.

I realize that most people who work for city and state government are probably very nice and relatively intelligent. After all, I was a bureaucrat once and I didn’t check my brains in at the door.  Well, at least I didn’t do that everyday.

But as I am slowly but surely being strangled by a ring of multiple roundabouts, all of which have been planned by the city to be within twenty feet of my front door, I have to wonder whatever happened to the concept of a traffic light.
You old folks out there remember them, right?  They had three colors that changed periodically giving all traffic its turn at the intersection. They also cost one heckuva lot less to install and maintain that the cost of building a roundabout. But it seems as though somewhere along the way, our city has become absolutely enamored of these fun monstrosities and decided that my little section of South Anchorage was the perfect spot to install all of them.
Given our economic climate, I must express some surprise that we are building these costly beasts with such frequency as opposed to putting in a simple traffic light. I am also amazed at the places chosen for a roundabout. 
Not far from my house is an intersection at 100th Street and Victor that handles traffic from Dimond Blvd. and Minnesota Drive. At what passes for rush hour in Anchorage, it’s a very busy place. There are twelve lanes plus turning lanes trying to maneuver through.
Yet despite the amount of traffic it handles, the intersection is controlled by a four-way stop sign system. You have no idea how much fun that is until you sit there and watch people either try to remember the protocol for four-way stops or just figure they’re in a truck so they’ll take their turn whenever they want.
One block away from this intersection is a roundabout that handles streets coming off a quiet residential area.  For the whole time that roundabout was being built I wanted to go there, tap one of the workers on the shoulder and suggest they’d missed their mark by a block.
When the new roundabout is complete, there will be two roundabouts within three blocks of each other coming south on C Street.  The one at C and O’Malley makes sense. That had been a highway interrupted by a red light. The roundabout allows highway traffic to continue without breaking speed for at least another block before it comes to… yes, you guessed, a red light.
I know there are traffic planners out there with all kinds of designs and numbers and concepts about why traffic circles are better than the invention of pizza. One of the main reasons I hear constantly is that a roundabout forces traffic to slow down. Well, I may be wrong about this, but so does a red light. And I’ve got to guess it’s more cost efficient.
But the best part of all when roundabouts enter your life is the excitement it adds to driving in Anchorage. Not that Anchorage needs more road excitement. Between moose, potholes, giant trucks that think they own the road and drivers who think it’s safe to turn right on a red light while sipping coffee, talking on the phone and writing notes on a work order, most Alaskan drivers have all the excitement they can stand.
While it is true that the average driver will eventually figure out how to navigate the roundabout in summer when all the arrows are showing and they’ve had enough practice, there is always one driver who is clearly entering the roundabout for the first time and has not a clue as to where to be or what to do. You drive defensively in fear of this driver’s sudden lane changes and exits.
Come winter, that driver is inevitably joined by the drivers who can’t seem to remember what they learned in the summer now that the snows of winter cover up all the directional arrows painted on the road.
Yeah, I couldn’t be more thrilled that yet another roundabout is coming my way. It brings back wonderful memories of riding bumper cars on the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City when I was growing up – just slightly more dangerous.

I find myself frequently castigated as a liberal by various online commenters.

I don’t think the word liberal is anymore heinous than the word conservative. Both are nothing more than the description of two political philosophies put forth by mostly honorable people who want to achieve what is best for America but differ or how to get there. The fringe in each group does not represent the majority.
What I find amusing is that the same people who hurl that word at me as the basest of epithets seem to think that because I am more liberal than conservative, I must love every liberal candidate for office.
Would that I could!
Unfortunately the thinking part of my brain frequently interferes with my ability to blindly follow anyone calling themselves liberal. You see, I actually believe that you have to look past labels and see what the candidate really intends. Many liberal candidates no more represent what I believe than do their conservative counterparts. 
This all started because my column last week was about political pandering. I was taken to task for not bringing up liberal panderers as though I was implying they did not exist.
Quite honestly, for so long as Bill Clinton hovers over our political landscape, no conservative can ever hope to hold the pandering crown.
Pandering to every special interest group that will open its wallet to you is an integral part of our current political system. It will not go away until we truly reform how our elections are funded.  And while I realize that we long ago cast off the bonds that once tied us to Great Britain, their electoral system deserves a serious look when considering reform.
In England, you have six weeks from when an election is called to when the vote is held. All funding for that election comes from the public coffers.
Instituting some form of these two points could immediately alleviate two of my major complaints about the state of political campaigning in America today. One is the ungodly length of our campaign seasons. The new campaign often starts before the winning candidate in the most recent election has even been sworn in. It’s as though the point of the exercise was the campaign itself and not the actual term of office.
The other is the astounding amount of money that must be raised to ensure a credible campaign on any state or national level. You cannot maintain the distance needed from large corporate sponsors and special interest groups while holding your hand out for their largesse. When they drop thousands of dollars into any particular candidate’s bucket, their motives are usually not altruistic as much as prepayment for future favors.
If all candidates were required to run their campaigns based on the money given them through a federal election fund, the playing field would be leveled and corporate and other special interests would not have a place at the table so much closer to the candidate than you and I do based on our relatively paltry donations.
For those of you out there screaming that all I’m doing here is putting the government further into debt, let’s not forget that now that corporations have achieved their long held dream of personhood, they can also be taxed to pay for the campaigns.
In fact, I think the fairest thing to do would be to add up what they gave in the most recent election to all the candidates they wanted to influence and make that their yearly contribution to the fund plus inflation.  Then they could enjoy the complete benefits of personhood like the rest of us do who pay lots of taxes because we have no corporate tax shelters.
This is a win-win situation. My ears won’t have to bleed from year round campaign blather. I won’t be harassed to donate to the candidate of my choice because if I don’t, the other guy who clearly represents evil will win. Candidates will actually be judged on what they say and stand for, not the unspoken demands of their corporate contributors. And corporations will come fully into their own as the real people they apparently want to be.
Alas, as my mother would say, “If wishes came true, beggars would be kings.” And my ears wouldn’t bleed year round.

I guess it’s the nature of the political beast. In order to win the most votes, you have to say things so vague that the electorate can pretty much read anything they want into it, thereby ensuring that they think you represent them.

Imagine the shock most of us feel when that turns out not to be true.
Let’s take a recent statement uttered by Our Gal, Temporary Sal.  Yes, I know this is like shooting fish in a barrel but she is so good at this stuff that it’s hard not to go to her barrel when looking for the vacuous statement du jour.
A while back, Sal came out in support of Joe Miller in his effort to beat Lisa Murkowski in the Republican senatorial primary.  Here’s part of what she wrote: “…it is my firm belief that we need a bold reformer who is not afraid to stand up to special interests and take on the tough challenges of our time. Joe Miller has stepped forward. I am thankful for his willingness to serve. He has fought alongside me and others to help clean up the Republican Party here in Alaska by bringing in new leadership, new ideas, and commitment to putting government back on the side of the people, not any political machine.”
OK, first there is the obvious conflict inherent in claiming to want to put government on the side of the people and not any political machine while at the same time firmly aligning herself and Miller with the Republican Party in Alaska.  As for new leadership, can you say “Randy Ruedrich”? Because I can. And the last time I looked, he was still head of the Alaska Republican Party.
But even more interesting is the initial reason Sal gives for backing Miller. She claims that he will “stand up to special interests...” Hmmm. I guess the Tea Party doesn’t count as a special interest group. Or did she mean special interests that wouldn’t give him money anyway because they have opposing viewpoints?
Special interests that agree with you are still special interests.
If Sal was not mouthing political double speak here, Joe Miller would end up looking like just your run of the mill candidate who potentially could be bought and sold on the open market to those special interests that fall in line with his philosophy. The state of politics being what they are today, that seems to be the only way to generate enough cash to run a competitive campaign. We all know that. Why try to pretend otherwise?
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a politician honestly acknowledge that the groups funding his or her campaign are just as much “special interest” groups as those of their opponents?
By the way, just to be perfectly clear, this is not me endorsing Lisa Murkowski. God knows she has enough on her plate without having to defend herself against my endorsement.  I am using Joe Miller as an example only because I found it curious that the man Sal said was not going to be beholden to special interests in now in a potentially competitive race for his party’s nomination only because of the money a special interest group is about to pour into this state on his behalf.
We have a long campaign season ahead and I am begging politicians to not say things so blatantly and obviously pandering that my stomach heaves when I hear it.  Don’t tell me you won’t be taking anything from special interest groups when you will so long as they are your groups. And don’t tell me you’ll stand up and be independent of any party while running to be that party’s candidate. 
Alaskans deserve honest candidates who want to honestly debate the issues of the day and where they stand on them. No obfuscation. No blurry sentiments that melt in the light of day. No denying with your right hand what you left hand is doing. And no statements so painfully untrue as to make us cringe.
I’d like to get through this election cycle without my ears bleeding from the noise it generates. However, I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. I’ll just hold tissue to my ears to catch the blood.

Julia O’Malley’s recent pieces about the cost and price of addiction clearly struck a chord with me given the amount of years I’ve labored in the field of human services.

My memories of working with addicts stretch back to the late sixties and early seventies when I worked in a hospital in Brooklyn making extra money by pulling a second shift in the ER. Heroin addicts would come in with virtually no vital signs, we’d shoot some Narcan into them and, in an amazingly brief span of time, they would wake up. Almost inevitably, their first question was, “Where’s my stash?”
They knew that if it had been found, it had been flushed away. It was our little way of trying to prevent seeing the same addict in for an overdose twice in one night. When they realized their stash was gone, all thoughts of thanking us for saving their lives fled. Instead, we were treated to rants that made Mel Gibson’s phone calls sound like Sunday sermons.
Since then, I’ve had the sad misfortune of dealing with people addicted to everything from alcohol to cocaine to crystal meth and back again. I’ve had parents who skin popped the drugs, mainlined the drugs, snorted the drugs and ingested them in ways too ugly to describe. They did all this, as did the young lady Julia chronicled, despite knowing with some certainty that it would cause them to lose their children – maybe permanently.
Addiction changes how you view life. It changes your priorities. It causes you to justify the most unjustifiable behavior because nothing else matters but the next hit and the next high. I’ve had parents sit in front of me totally wasted while telling me how this would be the last high, that from now on their children would take first place in their lives, that they were tired of living this way.
They meant those words in the instant they said them. Then the high would wear off and suddenly nothing mattered again except that next hit.
People who have never dealt with an addicted friend or family member cannot begin to comprehend how much support is needed for an addict to make the right choice when the urge hits. They view getting high as simply a sign of weak character, indicating someone who should simply be locked away because they obviously don’t want to be sober. But jails aren’t a solution. Not only are they significantly more expensive for taxpayers than treatment programs, but they often offer no way for the addict to learn the skills needed to at least try to break the cycle. Given what we know about how many times the same people cycle back through the criminal justice system because of their addiction, and given how expensive we know that option is compared to treatment, you’d think it would only make sense to send these people back through multiple treatment programs rather than jail.
At least in treatment there is the possibility that this time it will take, that this time the addict will emerge with the skills and support system needed to keep the devil at bay.
Unfortunately, when it comes to politicians having the courage to point this out to their constituents, they usually wimp out in favor of looking “tough” on drugs. “Lock’em up and throw away the key” is the stance that wins elections in America. What rarely works is getting people to understand that prison is not only prohibitively expensive but most often an exercise in futility when dealing with addicts.
I understand the frustration that comes from watching someone re-enter a treatment program for the fifth, sixth and tenth time. I firmly believe that kids should not be held hostage to their parents’ addictions and inability to stay sober despite treatment. If the parents can’t sober up for their kids within the first year of state custody, parental rights should be terminated and the children given a chance for a healthy life in an adoptive home.
But when you are looking at the best bang for our tax bucks in treating addicts, the math is simple. Jail is expensive and rarely works. Treatment programs are cheaper and have a better success rate. 
You shouldn’t need a calculator to figure that equation out.

As someone who survived the grey whale rescue in Barrow, I feel I should have some say on who gets to play me in the movie. Simply put, Angelina Jolie.

Hey, I could have looked like that once if I’d wanted.
Anyway, since one of the chronic complaints about outside media stories on Alaska is that no one ever gets the details right, let me offer the producers a few suggestions.
For starts, be honest about the reporters and film crews who came to Barrow. That means showing the looks on their faces when they first landed at the airport and found out just how desolate and cold the tundra looks that time of the year.
Follow that up with their horrified expressions as they realized that the hotel did not have a bar, and their even more horrified looks when they realized there were also no liquor stores in town. This theme should be augmented with a series of quick cuts showing these brave men of the media making frantic phone calls to staff who had not yet reached Barrow demanding that they bring up as many bottles of booze as would fit in their luggage and, if need be, dump the underwear to make room.
Here’s another part of the media frenzy that needs to be captured. It’s the part where, after a few visits out to the distant point where the whales were stuck, and a few minutes spent in the frigid night with the Arctic wind blowing off the ice, these gallant reporters decided there had to be a better way to get this story out to an American public bored to death by the lackluster presidential election pitting a sadly helmeted Dukakis against a grey patrician named Bush.
Though some tried to be conscientious, most quickly tired of the adventure of getting in a truck in sub zero weather and bouncing out on a fairly non-existent road to three lonely holes cut in ice and no guarantee the whales would be there when they arrived. It made the Dukakis-Bush campaign look downright inviting by comparison.
So after a few trips out to the site, these media stalwarts decided to send their technical crews out to film anything new that might be happening with the whales. Meanwhile they sat huddled in their rooms, sipping on whatever was brought up in their compatriots’ baggage. When it was time for them to film their daily report, they would walk outside to the beach next to the hotel. They’d position themselves so the only thing in the frame was the frozen, desolate beauty of the Chukchi Sea behind them with their perfectly coiffed hair almost hidden by the parka hood pulled up as tightly as possible against the ever blowing wind.
From that position they would give their report as though they were actually standing at the edge of the ice where the whales were trapped. As soon as the report was done, they’d dash back into the hotel and resume their previous activity.
Most people in Barrow were happy about the presence of the media. For one, anyone with a car who would bring them out to the whales was paid generously. For another, after living through the initial moratorium on subsistence whaling and reading articles calling them whale killers because they wanted to continue to follow their millennia long traditions, it was nice to get publicity that showed a more balanced picture of the compassion that was also part of their culture and lives.
The Inupiat hunt whales for survival. The whales give themselves to the Inupiat in an ageless rhythm of respect and mutual dependence. The respect of the Inupiat for the mammals that share their environment and ongoing battle for survival is great. Helping to save some stranded gray whales was just another part of the continuum.
And, to be perfectly honest, it was totally amusing to watch these reporters trying to film their piece while standing next to the hotel with the ocean behind them, the wind threatening to blow their helmet hair straight out to sea, and their voices shaking from the cold.
Hey, the dark season was closing in and when that time of the year rolls around, you take your amusement where you can get it.
The media greatly amused us.

You know you’re dreading the rapidly approaching political season when contemplating America’s increasing girth is preferable to dwelling on the upcoming campaigns and those fun polls that ask if you would still vote for Candidate A if you knew he was a cannibal… not that there is any evidence he or she is, but just asking.

It seems that after many years of searching for the one small area in the back of the store near the restroom where plus size clothes were usually displayed, these clothes may soon be going mainstream.
Growing up, my clothes came from a store called “Chubettes”. My mother, who weighed 99 lbs. on her wedding day, probable spent a good deal of my childhood wondering how she ended up with a daughter who had to shop in a store like that.
I graduated to Lane Bryant, the only store in its day that carried clothes for the “generous” figure. Of course, finding clothes that fit and were also age appropriate was two different things. While Lane Bryant beat the heck out of the three dresses available to me in a regular department store, neither was selling style to a size challenged teenager.
Now that America is finally catching up with me, the need for plus size clothes has grown to the point where manufacturers actually see a profit in creating lines that will cater to the larger females in our midst.
However, if we are to be absolutely honest here, the fact that clothes may now be available to women of a certain size is but a small step towards overcoming the last great prejudice of our age: Women of a certain size are often viewed negatively, whether someone is assessing their potential intelligence or potential as a sexual partner.
Marlon Brando played an aging romantic lead in a movie called Don Juan DeMarco when he was literally the size of an elephant. He played it opposite a pencil thin Faye Dunaway. 
Fat men can be sexy. Fat women can’t.
While that attitude may be changing with America’s growing girth, it is still quite ingrained in our psyche.  As we all now know, what appears on the movie screen influences us way beyond anything reasonable. How many size zero women do you actually know who don’t have a serious illness or eating disorder?
The sad thing is that despite the fact that there are more overweight people in America than ever before, despite the fact that even fashion designers are now looking at plus sizes as worthy of some attention, despite studies that show that some overweight people are perfectly healthy and physically fit, there is still a very thinly disguised line of discrimination against people who do not conform to a standard of beauty that for some of us has always been beyond reach.
Multiple studies show that way too many overweight people do not get the jobs, respect, promotions or social life they deserve because they are judged by their weight before any other factor has a chance to be considered.
Think of the recent march of oil and finance company executives who have paraded across your TV screen while uncomfortably answering questions about how their businesses have almost killed America. Some may have been considered “portly”, a figure we associate with male success and power, but none were fat.
Now think of the women who are winning political races or getting admitted to the executive rest rooms.  Not only are women of size barely visible in that context, but even slightly portly women seem to not be allowed on the train.
Anyone who thinks that Sarah Palin’s rise to fame and fortune had nothing to do with her beauty pageant looks is simply delusional.
Being an overweight woman in America means being an unwilling participant in the last allowable form of visible discrimination. It means you not only have to work twice as hard as men to prove yourself, but you also have to be prettier and thinner than the woman down the hall whose only attribute for success may be her looks.
I long for the day when Kathy Bates is the romantic lead who wins George Clooney’s heart, and no one in the theater laughs at the concept.

Back in the day, a young man who would one day be president wrote… or had ghost written, depending on whom you believe… a book entitled “Profiles in Courage”. JFK’s book detailed decisions made by brave men who knew they were putting their political future on the line for a principle in which they believed. 

If that book were written about Alaskan politicians today, I don’t know if we’d find enough material to even call it “Profile in Courage”.
Political opportunism and pandering has reached such an unprecedented depth in our public life that we don’t even blink when our governor claims to veto an additional appropriation for Denali KidCare because of his principles concerning abortion but doesn’t explain why he leaves the rest of the program funded and providing exactly the same services.
Do his principles have a monetary cut off point? If you make up to 150% of the poverty level his conscience allows you to have an abortion if your life is threatened by your pregnancy, but if you make 200% of the poverty level his morals suddenly kick in?
If your principles say that a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy if her life if threatened is wrong, fine. Those are your principles. So live up to them. 
To do that, you’d have to veto the whole program, not just the increase – unless, of course, this is less about principle and more about pandering. Because most politicians know that if they tried to kill the entire Denali KidCare program, they’d have a hard time with voters in the fall.
Apparently their principles don’t outweigh their political ambitions.
I say if Governor Parnell really has objections to the less than one percent of Denali KidCare money that goes to abortion services of any kind, from counseling to sonograms and back again, then he needs to stand up for his principles and announce that he will veto the entire program if elected. Let the people of this state decide if they agree with what he stands for when they go into the voting booth.
Then there are our weak kneed legislators, the ones who voted for the increase in funding but are now not willing to consider a veto override because the governor has caused them to want to review and study the matter more. Are we to take from this that for the three months the legislature was in session in Juneau and we were paying their expenses and they were mouthing support of this increase that, in fact, they were out bowling and hadn’t actually studied or even read the bill?
At least in the days when oil company lobbyists ran the state we could assume that someone had read the latest proposed legislation, if only the lobbyists themselves.
If our legislators were unable to comprehend what they were voting for when they increased funding for Denali KidCare, a program that’s been around for over twenty years and has already been litigated up to the Alaska Supreme Court, what is the chance that any of them actually understand AGIA?
These legislators, who are apparently just now discovering that they may not really support a bill for which they voted, should stand up and tell us whether they truly support Denali KidCare; not just the increase, but the whole program.
That, of course, would require that they actually read the bill. Maybe a lobbyist could help them with the big words.
Many, many years ago, the Alaska Supreme Court made it clear that if we offer reproductive services as part of a health care package, we can’t pick and choose which services to offer. In fact, some of those very politicians who are now rethinking their support of this bill, claiming to have just found out that it provides services for all reproductive choices, were around when that case was decided and have consistently voted to fund the program in ensuing years.
So you can see where some of us might be a bit skeptical of our political candidates’ suddenly found concerns over how state money is being spent. What have they been doing in Juneau all these years if not familiarizing themselves with the programs they keep refunding?
Principles or political pandering… you decide.

I waited. I waited and waited. Then I waited some more. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for Barack Obama to express the outrage I felt at the destruction of our wetlands and sea caused by a company that, it is becoming more and more obvious, put profits ahead of safety.

Eleven people are dead, an entire ecosystem is in the process of being destroyed, thousands of livelihoods have been wiped out and our president is just now, over a month later, starting to sound angry.  Had George Bush been president during this disaster and acted this way, the Democrats would have hung him out to dry.
It is a sign of how out of touch our president is with public frustration and outrage when you hear no less a committed Democrat than James Carville on NPR with his voice shaking in clear anger at the hands off attitude that seems to have pervaded this administration in dealing with the spill and its aftermath.
I find little comfort in the fact that the president has finally said that BP will be held accountable. I find less comfort in the fact that he is now claiming that the government has been in charge since the day the spill happened. Because if that is true, he and his administration have now surpassed the Bush Administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in being totally, pathetically ineffectual.
With each day that the government and BP dance around each other, more sea life dies, more wetlands are devastated, and more jobs and lives are forever changed.  Ask the people of Prince William Sound how responsive Exxon was to the devastation left by its disaster. Ask them how much the federal government stood firm against Exxon and made them meet their obligations. Ask them if, twenty years later, life has ever returned to normal.
There are some who argue that accidents happen and this blow out is but one of them… the cost of doing business when you’re drilling in the deep sea for oil.  But BP received permission to drill based on their assurance that they had the technology needed to avert a catastrophic spill or mitigate its damages. Clearly, BP had neither. They either lied or simply didn’t have a clue. Neither answer is very reassuring for the future.
In fact, the truth is potentially even more horrendous because there were safeguards in place that were warning of a major crisis about to erupt and they were ignored.
As for mitigating the effects of the catastrophe, am I the only one who noticed that the oil industry was no more prepared to mitigate the effects of this spill on the environment than they had been to mitigate the effects of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound?
Same old booms came out to contain the oil, same scratching of the heads as the oil hit the beaches and destroyed wildlife habitat, same questions that techniques being used might cause more harm than good. 
Would I be wrong to assume the industry did nothing in the past twenty years to advance their knowledge of how to clean up a spill?  Would I be wrong to guess that since developing clean-up techniques is not a money making proposition, it went to the bottom of priorities… right below testing to see if techniques that work on the ocean shelf are also operationally safe in deep waters?
And where is our public indignation as entire species sink into extinction?  Perhaps our addiction to oil causes us to be cautious in our criticism of anything the industry does.  Addicts don’t mouth off to their suppliers for fear of being forced into withdrawal.
For over a month oil has spewed into what David Letterman refers to as the “New Dead Sea”. We’ll never know how much since BP hasn’t decided how much to tell us about.  Given the fact that lawyers for generations into the future will be arguing liability for this spill in court, I’m guessing BP will never honestly confess to the amount.
I am at a loss as to why the president is not more strongly conveying our outrage to BP. It leaves this administration looking as hapless as Bush and Brownie during Katrina. And here I thought we’d traded up.

The story in Monday’s paper said that urban and rural kids have about the same rates of death by guns. The difference is apparently that in the cities, the deaths are usually murders. In rural areas, it’s accidental shootings and suicides.

Anyone who had lived in Alaska for more than ten minutes can attest to the truth of those findings.
A few months ago a former reporter and I discussed Bush Alaska and its seemingly intractable problems of substance abuse, domestic violence and suicide. She said it had once been suggested to her that the reason things were so difficult in the Bush was because death was so frequent that the villages never reached the point where they stopped mourning. If you never get beyond mourning, you never start healing.
Death in Bush Alaska overwhelmingly has a young face to it. And even more overwhelmingly, suicide in the Bush has a young Native male face to it.
Going to the funerals of Elders who lived long and productive lives is sad but part of life’s ongoing rhythm. Going to the funerals of people cut down by diseases over which they had minimal control is sad but a sadness often relieved by the knowledge that they are no longer suffering.
But going to the funerals of young men who choose to end their lives for reasons most of us can never comprehend goes beyond sad. It begs the question of what is missing in their lives. What are we as a society not seeing that is so dramatically and negatively affecting them?
It’s almost too easy to point the finger at drugs and alcohol.  That they play a role in many suicides is not a big secret. But it isn’t only young men in the Bush who abuse these substances. So do women, girls, middle aged men and women, grandmoms and grandpops. The reach of substance abuse is long and leaves no age group unaffected.
Which brings us back to the question as to why young men in particular are prone to suicide when drinking while others pass out and live to drink another day?
Another easy target to finger in the quest for answers is firearms. They are ubiquitous in our remote villages as protection from predators and a means of feeding your family.  Children in the Bush are as familiar with guns as I was with the Mickey Mouse Club.
So why is it that the one age group seems to pick up guns and point them at their heads more than any other?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “The suicide rate for American Indians/Alaska Natives was 10.84 per 100,000, higher than the overall US rate of 10.75. Adults aged 25-29 had the highest rate of suicide in the American Indian/Alaska Native population, 20.67 per 100,000. Suicide ranked as the eighth leading cause of death for American Indians/Alaska Natives of all ages.”
But here is the scariest statistic. “From 1999 to 2004, American Indian/Alaska Native males in the 15 to 24 year old age group had the highest suicide rate, 27.99 per 100,000…” That is almost triple the overall US rate.
If you look at employment among Alaska Native males and females, you find that women are more often employed and, if employed, are more likely to be in jobs that are full time and not seasonal.  Maybe if you have a purpose in life, a reason to get up the next day, something that makes you feel as though you and your life have value, you don’t have to look for relief from the emptiness at the end of a gun barrel. Maybe part of the answer is somewhere in there.
Some families who lose a loved one to suicide have the kind of problems that cause you to think, “Well, what can you expect?” But there are many families in which love and stability and boundaries were firmly in place and the young men grew up knowing they were cherished and valued. Yet they still put a bullet to their head.
I don’t have an answer. But I do know that whoever said the Bush never gets a chance to stop mourning and start healing expressed a truth any of us with roots in Bush Alaska know all too intimately.

It amazes me that we are willing to put millions into building more prisons but balk at putting a few thousand into programs that lessen the need for those prisons. Perhaps it’s because prisons are built for a concrete population. Putting money into helping foster kids make better choices as adults is more nebulous. We can’t know how many of them will make good choices and not end up in our penal system.

That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t give them the best chance possible. If we don’t want to do it because it is the right thing to do, we should do it because every kid that ends up in jail costs us more in the first two years of jail than it would cost to give him or her a fair start in life.
In Alaska, we spend an average of $44,000 per prisoner per year.  Ten prisoners will cost us $450,000 in one year. For the $55,000 proposed in this year’s state budget, the University of Alaska can offer 10 more tuition scholarships to kids who have few other options.  For every one of those kids who find a way to make it in life, we recoup that investment if they stay out of jail just one year. And we get the added benefit of another productive member of society who will not spend the rest of his or her life depending on it for handouts.
I can already imagine my legion of online “fans” readying their comments to this concept. They’ll explain how they were abandoned on the side of the road when they were 5 and managed to pull through and become productive adults using only their wits and the dirty diaper they had on when their parents dumped them.  They didn’t need no stinking government handout.
To all these lovely and amazing people I can only say, “Well, good for you.”
But not everyone is a superhero like these “fans” who seem to think that any government program costing money not going directly into their pockets is a bad program.  Ergo, Medicare good – Medicaid bad.
My feeling that the world would be a better place if we all exercised a little more compassion and a little less judgment towards those less fortunate invariably leads me to being called the worse epithet many people can possibly imagine.  I am… pause for gasps of horror… a liberal. In fact, I simply believe that our society will only thrive if we make every effort to bring even the least of our brethren along on our national journey towards peace and prosperity.
George Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Well, I’d just as soon not repeat the French Revolution. You might remember that all those peasants told to eat cake if they couldn’t get bread decided to relieve those with both cake and bread of their heads. 
Nasty things happen when a society decides that if you are one of the “haves”, it’s because god made you are superior to the “have-nots”.
The legislature this year passed a lot of small tweaks to our child care system to help foster kids make it to a good place despite the fact that they got a raw deal to start life.  Nothing that will break the bank like the cost of the gabillion dollar capital budget that, because it was passed by “conservatives” and not “liberals”, is considered a wise expenditure of government dollars to stimulate the economy. No, the money being requested to help kids get from foster care to independent living without ending up in jail or homeless on the streets wouldn’t be enough to pay for a feasibility study for the smallest capital project proposed.
But it will be a start towards creating the opportunities these kids need coming out of foster care to meet their potential to become productive, contributing members of our society.
Or, we can continue to take a perverse pride in the fact that a 2009 study by the King’s College London International Centre for Prison Studies found that in the U.S., 756 people out of every 100,000 is incarcerated, making us number one in the world for putting our citizens in jail.
I’d rather be number one for something else.

In the best of times, which would be a time without war, being a military spouse is a challenge. You move a lot and you spend more time than you could possibly have imagined being a single parent.  It is not a calling for the faint of heart.

I just spent a few days with a military wife whose husband is on his third deployment in as many years. She is raising two small boys by herself for the next few months. But thanks to the advances of modern technology, her husband gets to be an active father in his sons’ lives from halfway around the world.
Every morning my godchild Emily dials up some mysterious number called Skype on her computer and suddenly there is her husband Greg. She places him on the counter in front of her two sons who are having their cereal. Dad finds out about their day and talks about their plans. Sometimes he plays his guitar and sings to them.  If the boys get rambunctious, dad issues words of caution about their behavior.
For these boys, one of who will tell you without hesitation that his dad is a superhero, this is a normal part of family life.
When breakfast is over, mom picks up the computer and carries it to wherever she and the boys are going so that dad can continue to participate in their morning routine. When the boys lose interest in dad because they’re in the playroom, mom retreats to a private place and has the kind of conversation husbands and wives are having all over the world over their morning coffee.
As I watched this daily routine, I wondered how my parents would have felt if this technology had been available during World War II. Or how my contemporaries would have felt if they had it during the Vietnam War. I wondered how much it would have enriched their lives and relationships to be able to maintain this level of communication. And I wondered how much poorer our literary and musical arts would have been without the great love letters born of the separations of war.
That’s when Emily told me that despite the daily “face to face” contact she and Greg maintained, they still wrote to each other. She said sometimes they wrote their own love letters and sometimes they sent passages and poems of love written by others in a different time and place that expressed something apparently ageless and universal.
The art of letter writing may be on life support, but there are some places where it is still very much alive and thriving.
I must say I was very impressed with my godchild and how she handled the separation from her husband, the challenges of single parenting, the loneliness that comes at night when you want to turn to your partner and smile that you made it through another day without the children winning.
Thanks to old men in Washington who send young men to wars with what sometimes seems like little reason, Emily is not alone in being a single parent. She is surrounded by a cadre of military spouses who understand what life is like when your partner is thousands of miles away. They share comfort with each other and make each other strong. And sometimes they just get a babysitter and share a drink away from diapers, bottles and drool.
Emily is lucky enough to be stationed near her childhood home so she has the added support of old friends, sisters, uncles and grandparents who provide help and respite with a smile. But in the end, when night falls and the kids are asleep and the single military parent lies in bed gathering strength to do it all over again the next day, that parent is alone. And I have to wonder why no one has proposed a day of celebration and parades for all these parents who keep the home fires burning.
English poet John Milton said, “They also serve who only sit and wait.” Well, these parents may not get to do much sitting, but they do get to do a lot of waiting. I never realized just how hard their sacrifice was. My hat is off to all of them.