Tag: autism spectrum

17 more unjust things going on in America

Continuing in the vein of my blog posts on March 24 and 31, and April 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, and yesterday, today I highlight 16 more unjust things going on in America.

  • The Trump Administration has fired two Democrat-appointed members of the National Credit Union Administration. Since it was created in 1970 to credit union members and their deposits, it has been a bipartisan board.
  • The entire staff of the NIH office that sets federal poverty guidelines have been fired. It was the office that set eligibility guidelines for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care, and other services.
Photo of two bags of groceries
  • A top National Institutes of Health nutrition researcher quit his job after one of his research reports was censored because it did not reflect a preconceived outcome Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. desired.
  • US Secretary of Health and Human Service Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is so ignorant about the autism spectrum that he said, “And these kids will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” When that statement hit social media, people came out of the woodwork to express their disgust and anger at Kennedy for making such a statement. One person after another gave personal examples from within their families to contradict every word in Kennedy’s statement.
  • The BBC reports that the US is poised to place a 3,521% tariff on solar panels from Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. (Is Trump just pulling numbers out of a hat?) The Solar Energy Industries Association says such tariffs will hurt American solar manufacturers because they will raise the price on imported cells for solar panels assembled in the US. Trump hates solar power and wind power, so he will do whatever it takes to destroy those industries. He is pushing “clean coal” energy.
  • As President Trump paves the way through Executive Orders to boost the coal industry through expanding coal mining into federal lands and removing emissions restrictions on coal-powered plants, there is concern over the simultaneous elimination of 900 employees of the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety. Included in those work force cuts are people from the respiratory health division in West Virginia that oversaw a black lung X-ray screening program.
  • More than 790,000 children under the age of six are in the Head Start program this year. They get educational help, meals, and healthcare. The Trump Administration is ending the program which has helped 40 million children since its establishment 60 years ago.
Photo of a little boy smiling with his school backpack on his back
Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash
  • In a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni last Thursday, Trump called himself a “tariff savior,” and admitted that he does not know what the Republic of the Congo is. He said, “You know they release jails, Giorgia, from all over the world. Not just South America. The Congo in Africa. Many, many people come from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they came from the Congo,” 
  • The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments from the Trump Administration that the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution should end. The Court will hear arguments in May. Trump maintains that the children of mothers who are in the US illegally should not automatically have US citizenship.
  • Via Executive Order on Thursday, Trump ended all protections on the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. About 750 miles west of Hawaii, the area was set aside as a US Monument in 2009 by President George W. Bush and expanded in 2014 by President Barack Obama. Trump’s order opens it up to commercial fishing, although it contains more than 160 seamounts (undersea mountains), coral atolls, and endangered sea turtles and whales. Typical of his blind goal of being the first in everything, Trump said, “The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader.”
  • Remember the cancelling of 1,200 National Endowment for the Humanities that I mentioned in my April 16, 2025, blog post, 16 more highlights of how things are going in America? The Associated Press reports that one of those grants was $282,000 to enable the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to digitize more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records. For 150 years, indigenous children were taken away from their parents and put in US Government boarding schools where they were prohibited from speaking their language languages in the name of “Americanizing” them and “civilizing” them. It has only been in recent years that these stories have started coming to light. Another of the grants cancelled was $30,000 for the Koahnic Broadcast Corporation and the Alaska Native Heritage Center to broadcast oral histories of elders in Alaska. This coincided with the Alaska Native Heritage Center’s loss of a $100,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to curate a boarding school exhibit. I hope all tribes are taking steps to preserve their stories, and I hope that someday those stories will be available for all to read and hear.
  • Trump is going after the major TV networks. Specifically, he is suing CBS over an interview with Kamala Harris that they aired on “60 Minutes.” He is upset because the interview was edited. I’m sure he know from his own experience on TV that a lot of editing occurs in TV. Full interviews are rarely broadcast, but he sues people at the drop of a hat. This sounds silly on the face of it, but the Executive Producer of “60 Minutes,” one of the most-trusted investigative news programs on TV, resigned today because he said he is no longer able to produce the show like he has in the past and he’s not going to bend his knee to the Trump Administration. If Trump can get his tentacles into all the major news networks, we are most certainly doomed.
Photo of a cell phone with CBS on the screen
Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash
  • Trump is going to reclassify federal employees who work on policy matters as “schedule policy/career.” They will be required to support the President’s policies, apparently, in thought, word, and deed.” He said, this will finally ensure that the federal government is run like a business. That sends a chill down my spine because by its very nature and purpose, the federal government is not a business. It does not produce a product to be sold on the open market or even on the black market. It does not manufacture shovels or picture frames or sheets and towels. It provides services for the good of the whole. It does those things that individuals cannot do for themselves. It protects citizens from outside interference. It provides for the common defense. It operates a system of courts to protect citizens and visitors alike. It secures fundamental individual rights as well as the rights of the people collectively. There is a fundamental blatant intentional misinterpretation of the purpose of a democractic government by Donald Trump and his followers. They are hellbent on destroying every shred of the US Government as we have known it for 249 years. May God forgive them, because I cannot.
  • The US State Department has issued “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” since 1977. These reports include all countries and are mandated by statute to give a “full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights.” Now that the United States is guilty of trashing human rights on our own soil, the Trump Administration has ordered major changes in what those reports include. The reports will no longer include involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices, arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, serious restrictions to internet freedom, extensive gender-based violence, and violence or threats of violence targeting people with disabilities. The elimination of these parts of the traditional reports are across the board. These abuses will no longer be reported for any countries. When the Trump Administration is guilty of such abuses (or planning to put them in place?), I guess it would be awkward to put in black and white that his regime is guilty of the same things as other dictator-led countries.
  • First Lady Melania Trump got credit for hosting the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn on Monday, but it became obvious weeks ago that her husband was calling the shots. It was the first Easter Egg Roll with corporate sponsors. There was a reading nook and photo op sponsored by Amazon; a “Bunny Hop Stage” sponsored by YouTube, owned by Google; and an “AI-Powered Experience and Photo Opportunity” sponsored by Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Thread’s parent company, Meta. A “Ringing of the Bell Photo Opportunity” was sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange. Call me sarcastic, but… nothing celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ like a bunch of billionaires buying more favor from the US President. To show how Trump has transformed the Republican Party into something unrecognizable… Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer who served in the White House Counsel’s Office during President George W. Bush’s Administration told CNN, “That would have been vetoed in about 30 seconds in my day.”
  • Four police officers from Seattle have asked the US Supreme Court to keep their names out of public records related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. I would like to think they are embarrassed about their participation. One has to wonder how dedicated they are to upholding the law.
  • And this from The New York Times on April 21: The White House is getting ideas from various sources on how to create a “baby boom” in the US. Ideas being floated are to pay a married woman $5,000 when she gives birth, and married women will be encouraged to have six children. Another idea is to set aside 30% of Fullbright Scholarships for married women with children. Another idea calls for government-funded programs to educate women about their menstrual cycles so they can better understand when they are ovulating. There could be a National Medal of Motherhood for mothers with six or more children. The new word being bounced around is “pronatalism.” Vice President Vance told a March for Life anti-abortion rally in January the he wanted “more babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to raise them. It seems that Elon Musk thinks the low birthrate in America is a threat to civilization. (Some people think he is a threat to civilization!) It seems that the people behind this think women are putting too much emphasis on education and career and not enough emphasis on being reproductive machines. The Heritage Foundation, which led Project 2025 is a driving force behind this. Some of the people pushing this baby boom want the National Institutes of Health to ramp up research into infertility. Too bad Trump and Musk have already fired most of the researchers! Duh! The lengthy newspaper article does not address race or ethnicity, but it doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. The Trump Administration certainly doesn’t want women of color having six or more children. I’m sure when all is said and done and the US is turned into a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, there will be restrictions on just which women qualify for the honor of giving birth and raising six or more children. It seems to me like if they were merely interested in boosting the birthrate, they wouldn’t be working so hard to deport 11 million people from Central and South America. Hmmm. But wait… don’t a lot of families today with even fewer than six children rely heavily on Grandma and Grandpa to help raise their children? Just what most grandparents need… six more children to raise! And let’s have a show of hands: How many of you men want six or more children? Go on. Don’t be shy. Raise your hands if you want six or more children. This is one more slap in the faces of single people and non-traditional families. As if single people aren’t already taken to the cleaners by the IRS! This would be funny if it weren’t so sick and misogynistic.

Until my next blog post … tomorrow

I hope you’re reading a good book.

Pay attention to what’s happening at the hands of the Trump Administration. This is the time to do what you can to stand up for American democracy.

Remember the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, and western North Carolina.

Janet

#BringBackOurGirls

Do you remember back when we all used the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls on social media in 2014 after 276 school girls in Chibok, Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram?

Do you know that 112 of those young women are still held by Boko Haram?

Today’s blog post is longer than usual, but please take a few minutes out of your busy day to sit quietly and read it.

Beneath the Tamarind Tree:  A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Girls of Boko Haram, by Isha Sesay

The story of the 276 Nigerian school girls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014.
The Beneath the Tamarind Tree: A Story of Courage, Family, and The Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram, by Isha Sesay

Beneath the Tamarind Tree:  A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Girls of Boko Haram is not a pleasant or easy book to read, but I feel compelled to read books like that in order to better understand the world around me. You will, no doubt, recognize the name of the author, Isha Sesay, as a veteran journalist on CNN.

To refresh your memory, on April 14, 2014, 276 teenage school girls were kidnapped from their Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria by Boko Haram. Boko Haram is a militant Islamic group based in Nigeria. The group’s goal is to institute Sharia or Islamic law. Translated from the local Hausa dialect, Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden.” Boko Haram adherents mainly live in the northern states in Nigeria.

In this book, Isha Sesay reconstructs the events surrounding that 2014 mass abduction, but also offers some brief historical backdrop which must be known in order to understand how and why such a thing happened.

Ms. Sesay explained the history as follows:  “Nigeria’s largely Muslim north and its predominantly Yoruba and Igbo Christian south” were combined to form the country of Nigeria by Great Britain in 1914. After numerous coups, it was decided after every two terms the presidency would alternate between the north and the south. However, political problems continued and Boko Haram was founded by Mohamed Yusuf in the early years of the 21st century. Unrest grew in 2014 when the two-term Christian president from the southern part of the country, Goodluck Jonathan, hinted that he was going to run for a third term.

With that political state of affairs in mind, let’s delve into the story of the abduction of 276 school girls on April 14, 2014. I don’t want to give too much away, in case you want to read Beneath the Tamarind Tree, so I’ll just hit some highlights from the book.

  • 57 of the 276 girls escaped early on and managed to get back home
  • When Ms. Sesay arrived in Nigeria three weeks after the kidnappings, she was shocked to learn that Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan was spreading the word that the event was a hoax
  • When Jonathan’s successor, Muhammadu Buhari, was elected in 2015, Buhari said it was not a hoax. This gave everyone hope, but then when he was to meet with parents of the kidnapped girls and representatives from Bring Back Our Girls, he refused to meet with them. Eventually forced to meet with them, he took the opportunity to try to distract them with other issues and cast Bring Back Our Girls as the enemy of the government.
  • In October of 2016 – 2.5 years into the girls’ captivity – 21 of the girls were released to the Red Cross and lawyer Zannah Mustapha. Mustapha had taken it upon himself to broker a deal between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram. It is not known what concessions the government made that made the release of 20 girls (plus one as a “bonus) possible, but all along Boko Haram had demanded the release of some of their own who were imprisoned.
  • At the time of the release of the 21 girls, some 50 of the original 276 girls had succumbed to Boko Haram pressure and married Boko Haram men.
  • The 21 released girls were emaciated from more than 900 days of hunger and abuse. They had been uprooted numerous times by Boko Haram as the militants tried to hide them from anyone who was looking for them. One of the buildings they were housed in at one point was bombed by the Nigerian military.
  • On May 7, 2017, 82 more Chibok girls were released.
  • By January 4, 2018, 107 of the Chibok girls had escaped or been released
  • Boko Haram kidnapped 112 school girls and 1 boy from a school in Dapchi on February 19, 2018. All but one of those girls, a Christian who refused to convert to Islam, were released after a couple of week; however, that one girl was still being held by Boko Haram as of the writing of Beneath the Tamarind Tree, which was published July 9, 2019.
  • As of the writing of this book, more than 100 of the Chibok girls are still missing and assumed to still be held by Boko Haram.

I think the overriding thing I learned from reading this book – the thing I will most remember from this book – is the tremendous and abiding faith in God and Jesus Christ held by the vast majority of the Chibok school girls. It was their faith that sustained those who have escaped or been released.

In interviewing the 21 girls released in 2016, Ms. Sesay, a Muslim, was gobsmacked by the fact that the girls had forgiven their captors and even prayed for their captors. It was a reminder for me that Christianity, at its very core, is a religion of forgiveness. Forgiveness is, apparently, an idea that is foreign to other religions or at least some of them.

Update from Reuters new agency, since reading the book:  On June 12, 2019, 300 Boko Haram killed 24 people in an attack on an island in Lake Chad in Cameroon.

The Things We Cannot Say, by Kelly Rimmer

This is the first novel I’ve read by Kelly Rimmer, an Australian author. This book is a combination of today in the life of a woman whose son is on the autism spectrum and years ago when her grandmother was young and in love in Poland in the years just before World War II.

The grandmother is now confined to a nursing home and cannot verbalize her thoughts and desires. One of the interesting aspects of the story early on was how the grandmother was able to learn how to use the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ACC) app on her great-grandson’s i-Pad to communicate her feelings, requests, and answers.

The grandmother’s early history is pretty much a mystery to her granddaughter, but there is something the grandmother persists in trying to communicate. It involves a man named Tomasz and what was so important about him. Will the granddaughter travel to Poland to look for this man in the country of her grandmother’s birth? I don’t want to give the rest of the story away, in case this sounds like a novel you’d like to read. Suffice it to say there are numerous twists, turns, and surprises in this novel.

Although it’s a book of fiction, the plot was inspired by the author’s grandmother’s story. She weaves a story of challenges, desperation, true friendship and devotion, and undying love. I highly recommend this book.

Since my last blog post

I’ve been reading!

Until my next blog post

I hope you have a good book to read. I’m reading ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­One Good Deed, by David Baldacci and listening to Before I Let You Go, by Kelly Rimmer.

If you’re a writer, I hope you have quality writing time and your projects are moving right along.

Thank you for reading my blog. You could have spent the last few minutes doing something else, but you chose to read my blog.

I might take a break from blogging next week. If you don’t see a blog post from me on September 16, rest assured I’ll be back online on September 23.

Let’s continue the conversation

Were you aware that more than 100 of the Chibok school girls are still being held by Boko Haram a numbing almost five and one-half years after the April 14, 2014 mass abduction? If my rough calculations are correct, today is Day 1,974 of their captivity.

On Saturday, September 7, 2019, a Nigerian film, “Daughters of Chibok” debuted at the Venice Film Festival and was named Best Virtual Reality Story. The intent of the film is to show how the Chibok community has been affected by the 2014 kidnappings and to remind the world that 112 of the 276 school girls are still held by Boko Haram.

Please share #DaughtersOfChibok, #BringBackOurGirls, #ChibokGirls, and other appropriate social media hashtags to remind the world that this story is ongoing and 112 of the girls are still held by Boko Haram.

For more on that film and the stories it tells, go to http://saharareporters.com/2019/09/08/nigerian-film-chibok-girls-wins-us-award and https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/08/africa/vr-daughters-of-chibok-intl/index.html.

Janet