Tales from the Shark Tank

Ok, now. Time for roll-call. Brain? Check. Hands? Check. Internal random connection generator? Check. Lungs? Hey, lungs, wake up! Yeah, you have to. The others can’t go anywhere without you, so get going, ok?

Let me tell you, this is no way to run a vacation. It’s a good thing we cancelled the trip to Ohio, because there is no way I could have done it anyway. As a friend of mine said, I need to remember that bronchitis is a disease, not a hobby. I’ve reached the point of being uncertain which is worse – the illness or the cure. These are some kickin’ antibiotics, and I can tell you they’ve kicked me pretty effectively. It’s sort of like staging a raid on an apartment building. All the good, helpful tenants go quietly when told. It’s the trouble makers you want to evict that chain themselves to the plumbing and shout rude things at the cops in the riot gear. That’s where I am. All the bacteria that are supposed to be in a body have been summarily evicted from mine, leading to attacks from the rear and other unpleasantness that I will not specify. Unfortunately, those causing bronchitis demonstrably still have claws dug into the carpet.

Mind you, I’ve managed to have a good time in spite of it all. I can sleep when I want to, and sew when I want to. I may not have enough breath to take a walk, but I can greatly appreciate warm sunny days anyway. It’s wonderful not to have people popping in every 10 minutes with another crisis that has to be dealt with forthwith before I’ve finished putting out the previous brushfire. I know I’ll walk into a full forest fire on my return, having missed two of three days before I was due to be out. I know I won’t be able to find anything in my office, because the rest of my department descended upon it and cleaned up my horizontal filing system. I don’t have to try to banish the quilt designs that want to dance in my head, because I’m not obligated to think about and resolve something Very Serious Indeed. Hey, I can sit here and write! Should have done it sooner, I know, but kvetching when I can’t summon a sense of humour makes me crazy. I don’t want to listen to me, and if I don’t want to listen I won’t inflict myself on anyone else.

So that’s my vacation. It’s a quiet interval taken up with a total lack of energy. My brain is getting the break it so desperately needed, but this is still no way to run a railroad!

I actually did get the number of the truck – ok, school bus – that hit me. It was 112. No harm done to any human, and minimal harm done to the car. I won’t say as much for a neighbor’s lawn, as I drove up onto it in an almost-successful attempt to avoid being swatted by a skidding bus.

But that just seems to be part and parcel of life around this neck of the woods. I was planning to take my mom and go visit my aunt and uncle in Akron again this year, this time sans kidlet. It just takes him too long to recover from the disruption of his expectations. That is now on hold, as their younger daughter, all of three years younger than I, has just been put on a transplant list for a liver transplant. Given her blood type (B-), I’m not holding my breath. So far no one in the family is a match.

The worst of it is that the damage was caused by physician carelessness. Her doctor put her on a dose of a drug that does liver damage way over the level recommended, and then never checked to see if it was affecting her liver for several years. I foresee a malpractice suit in the near future, but first things first – and the first thing is sheer survival. She has three kids, and while they’re pretty well grown, none of them has made the leap from “mom’s real sick” to “mom might die”. I understand that. It’s normal to think your parents are immortal when you’re 18 or 19. But the fact is that their mom very well might not survive this.

Then there are her folks. Her mom is worried sick about this daughter, and about the prospect that another of her kids might yet be put at risk to save the sibling’s life. (There’s one kid who has yet to be tested.) My aunt was planning to take off work the week Mom and I were coming in. Now she isn’t; she can’t stand to keep still. I understand it very well indeed.

On the other hand, the news from another quarter is good. A friend who had brain cancer a few years ago had called about a month ago, saying that it looked like there might be a new lesion on his most recent MRI. He had another today, and thank all deities you can think of, it’s clear. The docs have decided the spot was a radiation artifact.

And there’s something else huge in there too, but I’ll talk about that after the fact. I want it to happen so badly I can’t see straight, which leads directly to a superstitious fear that to talk about it would be to screw it up.

I think I’ll go to sleep for a while. Maybe when I wake up, the time-storm will be over. Even if it’s not, I’ll at least be more rested when I face it.

Recently my agency has been much in the news for -(gasp)- issuing id based on fraudulent documents. Everyone is shocked – shocked! to learn that there is a little group of less-than-scrupulous translators and smugglers that have been assisting illegal immigrants to obtain id cards and driver’s licenses from Indiana. For so many to be issued, say the pundits, there must be a lack of oversight.

Document forgery has a long and dishonourable history. There’s no way that low-level clerks in government agencies can keep up with all the ways technology can fake social security cards, permanent resident cards, visas, driver licenses, id cards, and so on and on. And of course, the best place to conduct such business is in a city, where there are so many people in and out and so many transactions that the clerks don’t have time to examine each and every document too closely. And you know, this ring has been operating in Indianapolis, in the most densely populated area of the state. Funny thing about that.

I feel sorry for the Commissioner. What isn’t being reported is that this ring has apparently been operating for at least seven years, through several administrations. The current Commissioner is being blamed for something he did not set us up for at all. He has in fact tightened id requirements tremendously, often over the vociferous objections of the inconvenienced public. I think personally he really has stepped on some civil rights, but that’s just my personal opinion.

Now we’ve been told that the Governor has appointed an independent investigator. The man is a former federal marshall. All agency staff are to give this person and his staff “all assistance possible”.

I have no idea what this man is going to do, but I do know it will be neither pretty nor pleasant. I suspect strongly we’re in for several months in which my boss will have all her time and attention taken by this brouhaha, which means in turn several months in which I will be doing both my job and hers, and that while the legislature is in session. And did I mention that part of my job is writing or rewriting sections of code on the fly?

You know, I would really like a few dull moments.

My father-in-law, a well respected attorney, has been known to say that there are classes of victory. A class “A” victory is one in which you got your client everything they both wanted and hoped for. A class “B” victory is one in which you did as well as anyone could under the circumstances, and better than anything your opponent was willing to agree to. That’s what I got.

As planned, I ran in the door yesterday making a beeline for my closet. As I flew past, my husband commented that he was sorry I was being thrown back into Juvie again. Poking my head out of my closet, I observed that it was more accurate to say I had thrown myself back in. “Well” opined my spouse “someone’s getting railroaded, and it’s made you mad.” I just nodded; that summed it up quite succinctly.

I realized how long it had been since I’d been out there when I didn’t know any of the outer office staff. That turned out not to be a problem. The bailiff may have been new, but the judge wasn’t, and remembered me well enough to tease me a little.

And I got my victory. The child was charged with felony possession of a switchblade, and the prosecutor was demanding immediate detention. He walked out the door with his parents, looking at a year’s probation and a delinquency finding of possession of a knife on school property, which is the lowest level misdemeanor Indiana law holds. I couldn’t make it go away entirely, not when the knife had fallen out of the kid’s pocket in plain sight of the principal. The other things they had piled on for charges simply vanished.

And the judge got informed of his staff’s abuse of authority. I told him that the child’s mother had been denied access and told neither she nor her child had any rights. He was not amused in the least. Judging from the instructions given the bailiff after the hearing was over, someone on the previous day’s evening shift was about to have a very bad day. I learned that I can walk back into Juvie and not freeze like a deer in the headlights. I learned that my reputation carries weight even when I haven’t been there in 7 years. And I did what I wanted; I derailed the judicial express. That part of the victory is class A.

I’m doing something I swore never to do again. I am walking into Marion County Juvenile Court dressed as an attorney. I’m doing it for a friend.

My friend’s son forgot he had his pocket knife, and took it to school. I find this easy to believe. They live on a working farm. But he’s been charged with possession of a switchblade and a couple of other offenses and suspended summarily from school.

His mother, called by the school, ran out the door but got there after he’d been taken away. She went to the Juvenile Center last night, but was not permitted to see him. She’s been told that as a juvenile he has no rights. No right to counsel, to see a parent, or anything.

I don’t do criminal law, but I know that’s nonsense, and I want the folks over there to know someone other than a “mere” mother is watching. So I’m going with her. That entails going home and changing clothes first, because, well, it’s casual Friday and I’m in corduroys and a sweatshirt.

Right now I just want to get him out and get him home. I’ve tried the two best attorneys for this I know. One is in a jury trial, and the other in New York for a bat mitzvah. So I’m going myself. No one should walk into that alone. It’s designed to intimidate parents as well as kids, and it works. It’s designed to make people feel helpless, and it succeeds.

I got out of that kind of law because I grew weary of the numbers of families I couldn’t help; of the system that claimed it was there to help kids at the same time it did everything possible to dehumanize them into submission. I burned out from the sheer numbers. But I can do this – take this one step, for this one child. Next week, his mother can talk to one of the other attorneys. Today I’m going into the swamp.

I’m still plowing my way through the provisions of the Patriot Act relevant to my little bailiwick in Administrative Law. As I’ve read along, I’ve begun noticing a sort of echo in the back of my mind. I’ve seen this before, albeit in much more archaic language, but where?

And then I thought I had it, and took a break to Google my hunch. Bullseye! They are much shorter and more succinct (I think War and Peace is arguably more succinct), but the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 bear a remarkable resemblence to the Patriot Act.

My first reaction to that was “don’t we ever learn?” But then I thought about it again. And I realized that even though we do have spasms of xenophobia, eventually we get past them. The Alien and Sedition Acts disappeared. The signs in windows in the 19th century reading “No Irish need apply” disappeared. The KKK flared but was ultimately discredited, as was the House Committe on UnAmerican Activities. The miscegenation laws were declared unconsitutional and repealed. That happened as recently as 1974. I hope the Defense of Marriage Act and its ilk meet a similar fate soon.

It takes the stubborn voices of courageous people to make these derailments of justice unacceptable, and the time it takes is damned uncomfortable to live through. But it does happen eventually, and it does not require a military coup to make it happen. I just hope this time the pendulum swings back toward moderation and sanity sooner rather than later.

I just found the following definition in a federal statute.

the term ”individual” means a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence.

It is in a recently passed statute, part of the USA Patriot Act. What both frightens me and makes me angry about this is the way it dehumanizes illegal immigrants. Yet again, it defines them in a way that bars them from claiming what we consider basic rights.

The ghost of Joseph McCarthy must be smiling.

Hey, guys? Yeah, you, over in the corner with the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration? Yeah. You, and the guys from Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and especially you all with the Transportation Security Administration. Have you been reading too much Tom Clancy recently?

Ok, we’re small potatoes over here, but we know a bit about bureaucracy and red tape anyway. We also know a bit about who does what, and that’s what you guys seem to have lost track of. You’re so busy finding ways to make us look for Terrorists and Enemy Aliens (from Jupiter, perchance?) and -gasp- illegal residents for you, and pay for the privilege of doing so, that you seem to have conveniently lost sight of some basic facts about the organizational structure and powers of government in America.

Now, in one sentence: Licensing and record-keeping agencies cannot be law enforcement agencies. They don’t have the power. They don’t have the authority. Got that? Don’t tell us to arrest folks with documents some clerk thinks might not be entirely on the up-and-up, cause we can’t. Don’t tell us to notify INS of illegals that wander into license branches, ’cause we can’t. There’s a federal statute called the Driver Privacy Protection Act that says we can’t. I know, you read the USA Patriot Act, and it’s so monstrous that it drove all rational thought and memory from your minds, but the rest of the federal code is still out there and still applies, and a few of us even remember that. And for pity’s sake don’t tell us to hold those folks in the branches until the police get around to coming to take them away! What are we supposed to hold them with – laminator plastic? We are not the enforcement arm of the INS, the FBI, the SSA, or any other pot of alphabet soup you care to call upon. And while I’m at it, before you require us to send you information, please figure out who should get it and what you’re gonna do with it. That really doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

I would also like to see some rational relationship between the requirements and the purpose at hand. You TSA folks? Why are you asking for information appropriate to determining a Pentagon level security clearance for a guy with 2 years of high school that just wants to drive a truck? I can maybe see it if he wants to specialize in hauling high explosives, but why apply it to the guy who isn’t going to haul anything more incendiary than milk? Next thing farmers are going to need the same clearance and security assessment, because they accept large deliveries of fertilizer.

And – oh. Well, no point in going on. You’ve just gotten another bright idea, and you haven’t heard a word I’ve said. Oh, well. Guess I’ll just go try to figure out how to keep a couple of statutes from colliding headlong. Maybe I’ll go read the Bill of Rights while I’m at it, just for nostalgia’s sake.

For one reason and another (mostly sheer inertia) I hadn’t checked my non-work e-mail since Tuesday. I just went and read it.

The e-mails and the comments on the blog blew me away with the depth of friendship in them. Kerry, I’d read Thinking In Pictures, but the other things were new to me. More wonderful is that you took the time to track those things down and give me the links. Thank you even more for the vote of confidence. I miss you, Chick.

Dorothea, thank you. That was utterly unexpected and completely marvelous, as well as impeccably timed. When all my focus has been on Joseph, you reminded me that I’m in this too, as myself and not just his mother.

Li, I will indeed talk to your mom. Murray, thank you for hugs when I need them.

I have some amazing, wonderful friends. Because of you, I’m pretty much in one piece. Thank you all.

My ever-quirky imagination is chanting “Oh, have you seen the Michelin Man” to the tune of “Muffin Man”, with a closing line of “He works at BMV”.

Yeah and verily, I have seen the Michelin Man. He’s blond, about 6′5″, roughly 400 pounds, and wears a knee length pale grey down jacket quilted in 6 inch wide poofy channels. The overall effect is quite – um- striking.