While politicians and lobbyists have preached simplistic mantras, for decades mental health facilities have been shuttered. Not much in-depth news coverage there.
Those closings have contributed to recent intertwined bloody consequences at Newtown, Auroa, and elsewhere. Plenty of short-time news coverage there.
Yes, something needs to be done about registering, training, limiting, etc., the sale of warfare gunnery, magazine clips, and bullets.
However, to reduce gun deaths a three front war needs waging to improve:
1. Education,
2. Middle and lower class working conditions, and
3. Mental health services.
While several governors are pushing for reductions in the number of teachers and cops, more rote memorization of dates, and the pursuit of some form of religious uniformity, lobbyists are calling for armed teachers, stationing hordes of armed guards, and bullet-proofing school windows;
Instead, what healthy communities need is teachers and counselors with class sizes and training that involves them and their students in discussing and learning about crucial issues that we have historically faced; and preparing them for those new ones they will face.
(Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made these graphs of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries http://blogs.ocweekly.com/... )
Without such Socratic learning, we increase the number of kids who will be pushed toward fear and loathing, as so often ballyhooed in rightwing talk radio, portrayed in corporate media, and in our all-too-often warfare dominated public policies. The game plan seems to be – keep the populace sick, scared, and stupid and, hence, easier to control.
Keep ‘em sick -- refuse to cut into the private health insurers bloated bonuses, drug costs, and lobbyist protected market. Scare ‘em -- repeat ad nauseam that, since his hidden, miraculous birth 51+ years ago, a tanned, once poor Kenyan (really Hawaiian), Muslin (really Christian), Commie (really Moderate), Harvard grad (really Law Review Editor too!) seditiously planned to run the White House – and does today to the dismay of those who worship at the foot of the Trump Towers. Stupidify ‘em – concentrate newspapers, radio, and television and use such concentration to repeat stuff all day long that ain’t true, which 20 minutes of Googling can usually prove.
While the uber-rich class has seen their wealth concentration and their incomes grow astronomically over recent decades, low and middle classes have seen the opposite, while logging many more work hours and simultaneously reducing the beneficial parental influence they have on their and their neighbors’ kids. Without providing such fair and healthy working environments for parents and neighbors, we increase the potential for kids to join the ranks of gun-toting crazies and gangs who shoot up and bloody our villages.
While those historically imbued with the gift of age have watched the nation’s streets explode since the 70’s with cardboard and mattresses, tattered sleeping bags, and the shopping bags carts of the homeless, we also note that many of them have problems that stem from more than just lacking a job. Without capturing some of those billions that go into the wallets of executives in our concentrated and lucrative private healthcare and drug industries and pouring those billions into providing better and more mental health services, we can expect our streets to become increasingly crowded and dangerous for those lacking their own limos and Humvees.
The demise of mental health facilities is only one of the causes behind recent unspeakable mass murders. What follows is some history related to health care’s demise connected to promulgations and actions from some influential public figures that should make us question whether such statements and acts didn’t increase the odds that the shootings at Colorado’s Auroa Theater, Connecticut’s Newtown School, etc. would happen.
The text a few paragraph’s below is taken from a yet unpublished book from which a smaller book, Ordinary People Doing the Extraordinary: The Story of Ed and Joyce Koupal and the Initiative Process, (picked by Ralph Nader as one of his Top Ten books for 2009) was produced for the Maine 2002 National Initiative 4 Democracy Campaign.
The ideas that governors’ plant and that are perpetuated by corporate media and foundations often sprout ugly weeds that suck the health out of the good plants around them. For some, this following history may have similarities to recent recall campaigns.
Ed and Joyce Koupal, comfortably living in a plush housing development, had entered the political arena for the first time in 1964 by exposing a Sunset Oil land development scam in Roseville, California, just prior to entering their fourth decade of non-political life. In battling and suing Sunset Oil, they developed such a feisty, crusading reputation that elderly folks, fearful of the cuts in social and medical care that Governor Reagan was proclaiming, approached Ed and Joyce and asked them if they would mount a Recall Reagan Campaign.
From the book: ------
As the Koupal's political reputation grew, many politically dissatisfied citizens approached them and vented their frustra¬tion. Some were upset with lax regulatory attitudes and the pro-business stances Governor Reagan, whose friends shelled out over $5 million (then a big number) for his 1966 election, was elected to administer. Those on the other end were upset that Reagan was taxing them more to build the bigger, more intrusive government that they thought he would dismantle. What were these bi-polar groups asking the Koupals to do? They wanted the Koupals to pull out the plunger. They wanted the Koupals to recall the new Governor.
The Koupals didn't immediately run out to lead a recall Reagan Campaign. They waited, read newspapers, as they always did, and read the political winds. They waited as right and left wingers registered their disdain for Reagan's proclaimed and often differently implemented policies. Looking back on that period, Joyce Koupal once said, "Once we saw that about half of the people were dissatisfied with Reagan's policies, we knew we had a chance." That's when the Koupal’s decided a Recall Reagan campaign could work…
Recall Ronnie
In many ways, Reagan’s brain trust typified what the Koupals saw as wrong with government. Reagan's friends, whose money and skill helped him upset two-term incumbent Pat Brown on November 8, 1966, were the rich and powerful, those unconnected with the work-a-day trials and tribulations of the majority.
Reagan's appointments further distanced him from represent¬ing "the people." Basic government policies were reviewed by his "businessman task force" composed of 250 corporate executives, who molded the direction of his administration. Wealthy busi¬nessmen screened Reagan's appointments, dominated his Kitchen Cabinet and insured that government ran with a commitment to corporate priorities. The result, as Joel Koltkin and Paul Grabowicz point out in their book, California Inc. was:
Reagan's administration took on the character of a full-scale merger of private and public sectors, the ultimate businessman's government. The former head of the Cali¬fornia Real Estate Association, for instance, was ap-pointed state real estate commissioner; a former lumber company executive became state Director of Resources; an executive at a savings and loan company emerged as head of the business and transportation department; a onetime utility industry consultant was placed on the state's Public Utilities Commission; and two horse breeders found themselves on the track to the State Horse Racing Board.
… Following the lead of Ohio's Republican Governor Rhodes, who had fired 5,000 state employees and slashed Ohio's budget 9.1% across the board, Reagan ordered budget cuts of 10%, trimmed more off education and welfare, and froze employment at current levels (eliminating 4,514 jobs). Reagan, like the initial paeans heard from 1995's Gingrich and Company, promised to "squeeze, cut and trim" the budget. In his first rough cut he proposed a budget of $4.6 billion, about equal to Pat Brown's last budget. Shortly after taking his rough cuts, Reagan added back $434 million for a state low-income medical program, property tax relief for local school districts, and for those dastardly "goodies dreamed up for our supposed betterment," which he at¬tacked in his inaugural speech.
His signature affixed at the deadline midnight hour on June 30th 1967 established a $5.93 billion budget, $38 million more than he had even proposed. (By the end of his second term the budget was $10.2 billion, a 122% jump.) Reagan had the biggest state budget in the nation's history and financed it with the biggest tax increase any governor had ever proposed -- $946 million.
Reagan's slash and cut conservative image scared and upset many liberals, as well as some of the poor and relatively power¬less aware enough to sense what implementing his words with deeds might impose on them. His actions, however, didn't measure up to what the diehard, fundamentalist right wingers envisioned would happen. In the process, polls reflected that both the right and left disliked Ronald Reagan.
What happened to the campaign run by a former used car salesman who garnered people like “Cannonball Berg” to help build a “Tommy Knockers” group to raise hell and send funds to “Greenback Lane,” so this muscled political neophyte and his wife could give people a forum to recall America’s most well-known governor at the time he was attending the 1968 Republican National Nominating Convention greasing his presidential campaign machinery?
From the book:
In 1968 780,414 valid signatures were needed to recall Governor Reagan, and according to the AP wire service at the close of the recall, 491,096 signatures were turned in from the 20 most populous counties of the state. Berg remembers the campaign’s close like this:
“How many signatures did they give us? They gave us about 550,000 and we needed some 700,000 +. Reagan was in Florida at maybe a Governor’s Conference. (Jimmy 'Cannonball Berg remembers August as “about the time we did the recall.” Cannonball's August memory might have overlooked the, inconsequential to him, Republican National Convention, which was held in August 1968.) Reagan made an announcement down there that the recall had failed at 10:00 a.m. their time, which was 7:00 a.m. California time; and we didn’t turn the bundles of recall petitions in till 5:00 p.m., just before the Clerk’s office closed... Now how can a guy, even a governor, announce in an interview how many signatures we had when we haven’t even filed them yet?"
Reagan and Rhodes were well known, big state governors whose words carried weight. Their words and often their actions fueled today’s roaring movement to cut public spending on the poor and handicapped and let people stand on their own.
Reagan’s predecessor was Governor Pat Brown, whose promulgations and actions often differed from Reagan’s. In 1959, Under Pat Brown, California had a peak of 37,500 patients in state mental hospitals. That fell to 22,000 when Ronald Reagan defeated Brown for that office in 1967, and continued to decline under his administration and that of his successor and son, Governor Jerry Brown.
Photo from: http://blogs.ocweekly.com/... )
The senior Mr. Brown has expressed regret about the way the policy started and ultimately evolved. ''They've gone far, too far, in letting people out,'' he said in an interview.
Reagan signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS) in 1967, to "stem entry into the state hospital by encouraging the community system to accept more patients. Hopefully, this would improve quality of care while allowing state expenses to be alleviated by the newly available federal funds." It was:
• Designed to protect the rights of mental patients.
• Considered a landmark for its time--a change in the attitude toward mental illness and its treatment.
• Bolstered by advice presented by leading psychiatrists of that day that Tranquilizers would be became the panacea for the mentally ill.
Unfortunately, as LPS was implemented, funding for community systems declined or was not beefed up. Many counties were unable to fund adequate community mental health services. Then, in the early 1980s, Federal Community Mental Health Program Funds, which LPS assumed would pick up the slack, fell under the budget knife, as the Feds shifted funding responsibility to the states.
Over the years, decades, and now generations, the ranks of the homeless have swelled, the middle class has shrunk, and counseling and care for those in need has shrunk. Connected to all this in some way is the murder of 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut, where 22 of them were angelic, innocent children. To reduce the probability of such tragedies happening in our future, we need to control today’s Gatling guns, while restarting investments in educating and counseling the healthy as well as the handicapped. Without such investments, communities do not become healthier.
Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” Psalm 82:4