THINK ABOUT IT

It was in Portland, OR, in 1997.  Things were a little out of control.  I took the bus to work downtown and on one evening when I had worked late enough for it to be dark, my bus got caught up in a drug bust.  One perp was backed up against the bus with the cop holding a gun on him right under the window by my seat.  I was curious and moved a little closer so I could see what appeared to be 3 or 4 carat diamond earrings on the perp.  It didn’t occur to me until later that if the cop had fired, I would probably have taken the bullet.

I was getting fed up with the city.  I came home one Friday evening and walked the last few blocks past apartments with broad green lawns.  But here was a car stopped in the driving lane, its doors standing open, and a man dragging a woman across the grass.  She was Asian, probably Vietnamese, and the man was shouting at her.  Then he hit her.  She was almost yowling.

“Hey,” I yelled at him, “We don’t treat women that way in this country.”

The woman said, “It’s okay.  He’s my boy friend!”

By this time I was close.  “I don’t care if he’s your grandfather.  You can surely do better than that guy!”  He wouldn’t let go.  I had a soft briefcase and I hit him with it.

“Don’t do that!  I won’t be able to keep myself under control!”  

“Ha!  You’re already out of control.”  I started to yell, “Help!  Call the cops!!”

Suddenly the tables turned.  The small woman grabbed the big man’s wrist and yelled, “Run!”  I was inclined to chase them, but another bus came along and the two of them jumped on, she still dragging him.  I wondered if they had coins for the fare.  The car was still sitting in the driving lane, lights on, doors open.  I didn’t care. I was fed up.  I headed for home.

At the next corner a classic Mustang intercepted me, driven by a bleached-blonde tough-looking woman.  I recognized her.  She was a Sergeant for PPD.  “Where did they go?” she asked, evidently already knowing the events.  

“The bus.  They got on the bus.”  She went after them.  I went home.  It was one of those nights I was sort of sorry I don’t drink.

The next morning when I waited in the bus shelter, a small Asian woman came to wait.  She looked at me, did a covert double-take and began to laugh.  She said, “Good morning.”  An accent.  I wouldn’t know a Vietnamese accent if it bit me.  I nodded but didn’t start a conversation.  Other people came.  It was another day before I realized she was the woman I had “saved.”  I wish I could figure stuff out in the moment.

In a few weeks the word came to me that the problem had been that the woman had sold the man a stolen car, which was the one flapping its doors in the street.  He wanted the title and she had run out of excuses.

And after that the story grew.  The girl was arrested and was key to the shutting down of a Vietnamese chop-shop.  I don’t think it was because of me.

Silver Court Apartments  My apt was on the corner.

That was out on the open street.  I had totally misunderstood and was probably in a little danger from her friends.  In the once-fancy apartment house there was sometimes muffled violence, behind locked doors.  One evening, after listening to the screaming and thumping for a while, trying to decide whether to call PPD, I went and knocked on their door.  “Is there someone I can call?” I asked.  I think they were a married couple — maybe not.  Dead silence.  Then the woman in a shaky voice, “We’re fine.”  In a few days they moved out.

My cat jumped out the bathroom window in the night onto a canopy over the basement entrance.  But she couldn’t jump back up that high, so she would go around to the front entrance, wait for people to go in and follow them through.  She sat at our apartment door and waited but didn’t meow.  It would be 2AM or 3AM by then.

The first time there was a knock on the door, I just about jumped out of my skin.  But it was the Japanese cocaine dealer from across the hall, knocking on behalf of the cat.  I appreciated it.  We were friends after that.

There was a window box on the bathroom window and I planted it with mostly geraniums but added a nicotiana which turned out to be a true tobacco plant, maybe a throwback.  It grew so big that it always looked as though someone were either climbing in or out.  I was nervous for a while because there was a young man who kept climbing in windows and stealing.  Then he added rape to his repertoire and then they caught him.  He was the son of the Portland plumbing inspector’s department head, a short black man with powerful shoulders.  He was a devout Muslim.  He looked totally wiped out, disgraced.

On impulse, sort of like my Japanese friend, I stopped by his desk and said,  “I’m sorry that your son turned out to be a Jaguar Man, but God is not finished with him yet.  Maybe things will change.”  Then I walked off while he stared at me, wondering what had just happened.  I was wondering whether I ought to have said Allah instead of God.

In my own department, which was Site Development — mostly about soils — we had a few builders who were getting more and more frustrated by our limitations.  I was behind a counter, but one of the engineers slipped me a spray canister of Mace, just in case.  I kept it in my desk drawer as though it were a gun.  I guess it was a concealed weapon.

There was another reception desk at the foyer where the elevators opened and the woman there had orders never to let angry and demanding people get past her.  She weighed five hundred pounds and people didn’t talk to her because they were embarrassed.  She told me, “I’d never be able to stand up fast enough to stop anyone!”  She was getting her stomach stapled and I tried to encourage her, but I don’t think much of the procedure.  I have no way to know how it turned out.  The stapling is only the beginning of years of consequences.

One of the newer inspectors was a woman from Nigeria.  We had a bomb threat and — as was usual — everyone trooped outside to the park between the Portlandia building and the Justice Center to wait for clearance.  The woman had been out for coffee, didn’t register the people in the park, came back to an empty floor, and when someone brisk with a flashlight arrived, asked what had happened.  “Oh, just another bomb threat,” the person said, not much concerned.  She quit in a few days.  In her country bombs were real.

Portland Oregon Justice Center

These last few years I hadn’t heard about demonstrations in front of the Justice Center just across the small park from us.  Our office was on the 6th floor so we had a good view of the upper floor basketball court that was open except for wire mesh.  The prisoners played with great verve and emotion.  Once I stood at the window and spotted a raccoon peacefully sleeping in the top of an elm down below. 

Once I looked out just as a young white cop parked right in front and almost tenderly helped his prisoner, also young but black, up the stairs — I assume to the jail.  The captive was staggering, nearly collapsing, and totally naked, but the cop had wrapped him in a painter’s clear plastic drop cloth.  Probably his clothes were putrid and he was, too.  But the cop wasn’t yelling at him or hitting him — just holding him up and moving him along.  I often think about that.

And the raccoon.

COPS

The apartment had been classy, sort of French.  I rented the front one, which had a second across a tiny hall and a third up some stairs.  Another three went along the side of the lot back to the line, all crowded over to the side to make room for what was once a garden.  We each had a set of French doors on one side and floor-to-ceiling windows in the front room.  There was a basement under the front apartment with outside stairs doing down under my bedroom window to the laundry room.

This apartment was so small that the only way I could get everything inside was to build a bed high enough to put stuff under.  In fact, it was so high that the windowsill was even with the top of the mattress.  My little dog thought this was an excellent idea, though I had to arrange boxes as stairs so she could get up there.

One night -- actually very early morning -- the dog and I had a conversation with the cops.  This was 1975, Portland,OR -- a time period when things were mostly calm.  Cops had college degrees and at a reading featuring Ken Kesey one of them who was a poet had been invited to be part of the warmup.  In spite of clouds of pot there was a brief dog fight.  Kesey was pretty drunk and there were no outdoor lights but a lot of flashlights.  It was in Washington Park, a natural ampitheatre high enough in the West Hills to look out over the city.  

I only tell you this to establish that the baseline for cops was peaceful.  It had nothing to do with me sitting up in bed, visiting with a young guy in uniform while his colleagues ventured down the basement stairs and my dog snuffled beside me with her head poked under the curtains.  I had covered the windows with metal mesh.

The problem was that the cops had chased a burglar down under my apartment.  He was a handsome black guy I had seen packing various electronics up and down the stairs.  It turned out that he had found the hatch to the crawl space that went under all the rest of the apartments and was stashing his loot back in there.  It was a long way to crawl.  Today the officer left to monitor the top of the stairs would have his gun drawn and would have been against the wall instead of in front of the window where I could have shot him.  I could easily have been armed, a co-conspirator.

In a sense I was a cop myself, newly promoted from a street beat as a sort of deputy sheriff.  That is, I was the first female animal control officer, but management wanted us to look harmless, like humane society people.  We were not armed, we had no communication except the truck radio, but we wore county sheriff badges and had to qualify on a gun range.  There was no way to predict what we might encounter.  The rumor was that Patty Hearst was being held in town.  The Black Panthers were active and scary.  Still, in those days pit bulls were rare and it was college professors with a taste for defiance of authority and a belief that righteousness justified force (theirs) that were potentially lethal.

Laurelhurst Park

In the field I had once started a riot on one of the first days of summer.  There was no meth yet but a lot of beer.  Laurelhurst Park is the remnant of what was once a gentleman’s farm, with a big pond in the middle meant for livestock and now hosting waterfowl.  Park shrubbery (mostly rhodies) was a point of assignation for gays.  The foreman of the park was a closeted gay I knew from the Unitarian church where we both attended.  (I’m not gay, I’m not black, I’m a little overweight, I have have naturally-curly hair and in those days no one ever suspected me of anything except getting in the way.)

The foreman asked me to drive through the park now and then, not to arrest anyone but just to keep traffic moving.  I had finished my handful of complaints for the day so I parked near the pond and started carrying a pad of dog license applications around, handing them out to people who might have been the owners of the many loose dogs.  I didn’t try to impound any until a poodle ran up and I could see he meant to pee on my leg -- a favorite poodle comment on authority figures.  So I picked him up and tucked him under my arm.  

By that time the hippie crowd had tried to liberate the dogs in the truck, which meant that the animals would be scattered around far from home, without ID or GPS.  No one ever grasps that the point of impounding loose dogs is to centralize them where their owners can find them.  Anyway, the door to the back was locked.  The dog-lovers wrenched off the handle, but it stayed secure.  I had the truck keys in my pocket so they could not drive off with it.  So they let all the air out of my tires.

When the cops came, I was sitting on the hood, holding the poodle, and lecturing everyone.  It was sort of like teaching seventh grade.  No one claimed the collarless poodle.  I had called on the truck radio for someone with a tank of air so I could come back to home base.  Though I was talking to AC, the sheriff’s radio was monitoring and called PPD.  Squad cars converged from every direction.  It had been a boring day.

Penny Harrington, PPD

The crowd didn’t disperse -- things were just getting interesting.  Pretty soon the radio reports to PPD meant that the sergeant on duty arrived.  When they spotted her (she was one of the early PPD female cops, a tall redhead), everyone dove into their squad cars to get their “lids,” their hats, which they weren’t ever supposed to take off.  She called a wrecker and we were soon outta there.  She was NOT pleased with me.

My boss, an old cop, had been monitoring from the shelter.  He laughed. “Mary, you may have to put leashes on those dogs and walk them out here!”  Troutdale was maybe 12 miles east.  Then aside to the shelter people, “If she had to do it, she could!”  Many jokes.

KOIN Tower

The world has changed.  In the middle Nineties there were often shots fired downtown because of Hispanic drug gangs.  Someone freaked out and held the KOIN- TV station two blocks away hostage, all televised until the cops shut it off because they were showing the SWAT team’s tactics.  We had a bomb threat, cleared the building, and when one employee who had been at Starbucks returned with to-go cups for friends, she found the building deserted.  She was only puzzled until the reason was explained, then terrified.  In the country she had left behind, the bombs actually exploded.  She quit as soon as she could find another job.  A man was shot to death while he walked down the street holding his little daughter’s hand.  It was an accident.  The shooter was blocks away.  Portland had invested in well-designed tempered-glass bus stop shelters.  When bullets hit them, they shattered around you.

I would never challenge a cop now, not even the friendly sheriff’s deputies here in this village where their grandmother might live across the street.  Nor would I try to help unless asked.  I’d get invisible but watch carefully.  And I couldn’t be a cop now -- I can’t handle that much adrenaline anymore.  I can’t interpret what’s really going on.  I’m much too inclined to give upset people too much room.  Too many people have lethal reflexes.  On BOTH sides.

IS YOU IN OR IS YOU ODD?

The Cinematheque boys have scattered for the summer, some hiking the many walking paths of Europe and others doing special projects. Tim is posting short talks from the TED organization on the vlog to keep it alive. I told him TED folks are very much like Unitarians at their best.

One of the talks included a story that caught my attention. A girl was so impossibly hyper, constantly on the move, that her folks were going crazy and she was not doing well in school They were upscale so they made an appointment with a very good psychologist. He sat with the girl and the parents for a little while, listening and observing. Then he said he’d like to speak to the parents alone in the other room.

Before he left, he flipped on his little office radio. The “other room” was the observation post behind one-way glass. As soon as they were gone, the girl was up and bopping to the music. She was GOOD. The psychologist said, “There’s nothing wrong with this child. She’s just in the wrong place. Put her in a dancing school!” They did and it worked. She became a happy star.

I also liked Sir Ken’s remark that if this girl were doing exactly the same thing now, she’d have been diagnosed with ADD and smothered with drugs. He quipped, “Attention Deficit Disorder" hadn’t been 'discovered' yet in those days. It wasn’t available for use. They didn’t know they had that option.” When I briefly taught in Cut Bank, teachers were handed two typed pages of students being medicated for ADD.

If authorities define a syndrome, suddenly it crops up everywhere. Soon there’s a support group, a newsletter, an a lucrative practice for a specialist. The one that always rivets me when I see the ad in the Great Falls paper is “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.” This is the syndrome that justifies dads who beat their sons half to death. “Disrespect,” you know. It is also the syndrome that got me into trouble with school administrators, though the diagnosis wasn’t available at the time. The guy who vows to “cure” it in the ad, looks to me like someone who would beat a son half to death. Or me.

Burgwin used to tell us about his training as a rookie cop in California. His sergeant took him along on graveyard tours of the tough little port town and taught him a lot of valuable skills. Once they stopped a man for some small offense and the guy had this “oppositional defiance disorder.” He lipped off to the sergeant and resisted everything. The sarge told Burgwin to take the guy in for observation as a psychotic. (California law allows a limited arrest like that.) “But he’s not crazy, he’s just a jerk!” objected Burgwin.

“Anyone who opposes me is crazy,” said the Sarge and lit a cigar. At least he didn't beat the guy up. Authority affects a lot of people that way, though it’s supposed to be the other person who has the problem. Of course, at the time ODD was not an available syndrome in the formal sense.

There are a lot of odd people in the world, some of them valuable contributors to the world, some of them just quiet wallpaper people, and some of them big pains in the butt. Sometimes “oddness” becomes a punishable offense. Esp. in small rural communities around the planet, “oddness” is noted. (In Montana they say, “well, he’s just different.”) Conformity and group solidarity are the highest value. China comes to mind. Being “different” can be a free pass if the community likes you, or it can earn you ostracism at best and attack at worst. In high school did you read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson? Jackson was a writer, which made her different right off the bat. Or just being an outsider can make you "odd." Did you see "The Wicker Man?"

It’s not just in small rural communities that people are threatened by oddness. Manhattan publishing functions pretty much the same way. If the group sets out to stigmatize a specific writer, that person will have to find another context. It’s good in a way -- a lot of fine talent is always migrating out to other nations, other categories, maybe even other media -- like from print to video. But eventually Manhattan starves. One of the high values of reservations used to be that they tolerated difference, and now that's paying off.

Academics have a category they call “border studies,” for instance, studying the historical or sociological border between the US and Canada. So far as I know, no one has done many studies of borders around reservations, “Skins,” Adrian Louis’ and Chris Ayres’ very fine but shocking novel and movie might be an example. It’s about the Sioux boundary that creates destructive difference based on alcohol: dry inside, wet outside.

The New York Times yesterday took on “Borderline Personality Disorder” or BPD, a kind of junk category that’s back in the news because a therapist claims she has an effective way to treat people who have it. Most therapists won’t have anything to do with BPD people because many of them have Oppositional Defiance characteristics and therapists consider themselves authorities.

Anyway, “experts” can’t decide whether the syndrome is about the borderline between being neurotic and psychotic, or the borderline between being compliant and “oppositional,” or the borderline around the identity of the person that keeps getting lost, or -- in the current formulation -- the borderline between being in control and out of control. This new therapist claims to be able to teach borderline people how to stay in control.

I’m always interested in this particular syndrome because it was pinned on me in seminary. I was not obedient, I did not tell the professors what they wanted to hear, and when I was elected as the student rep for the Board of Trustees, I was not positive. (I was also a forty-year old divorced female who had been doing law enforcement for years. They were used to nice boys.) When I was an intern minister in Connecticut, where they value oddballs so long as they’re male, my minister labeled me a “stormy petrel.” That’s a seabird that flies on high winds. He was one, too, which is probably why he was encouraged to go into the ministry. “Odd,” you know. But women aren't supposed to be "odd."

It used to be that we valued the oddballs, thought they might be geniuses or at least see into unknown country. Remember Szasz? I’ll quote Wikipedia : “He is a prominent figure in the antipsychiatry movement, a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as of scientism. He is well known for his books, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1970) which set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated.

“His views on special treatment follow from classical liberal roots which are based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from others, although he criticized the "Free World" as well as the Communist states for its use of psychiatry and "drogophobia". He believes that suicide, the practice of medicine, use and sale of drugs and sexual relations should be private, contractual, and outside of state jurisdiction.

“In 1973, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.”

The whole movement lasted just long enough to justify turning true brain-damaged psychotics out into the street without any protective care on political grounds. Then law enforcement went back to arresting them for being crazy. And all those ODD people, too, of course.

EMERGENCY RESPONDER BLOGS

The original idea of the “web blog,” from which the term “blog” evolved as a contraction, was to keep a record of websites one visited. In a sort of cross between bookmarking and reviewing, one used the new ability to use a pre-formatted website (free!) to suggest other places to visit. Since then there has been an explosion of these new “blogs,” all commenting on each other. It was a can of worms -- in a good way. So keeping a log with url bookmarks was a way of sorting worms and recommending them to your “fishing” friends.

This is a blog in the classic mode: a list of blogs that I like to visit, though lately I’ve been so busy turning out print for its own sake that I’ve not been visiting these “places” as much as I once did. And I’ve bookmarked so many url’s that I’ve rather lost track of what’s what. Still, I had a few categories that I kept better maintained, mostly because I visited them often. Below is the bookmark list from my category of emergency responders.

Working as an animal control officer put me right up against the whole issue of damage to mammals, including humans. The first question you get at 911 is “are there any injuries?” In Montana that includes livestock. To humans, suffering flesh is the ultimate emergency and we respond to calls for help as quickly as we can. Which sort of answers part of the question about why there is pain -- it’s because people will respond to it with help.

Law enforcement is the main emergency responder, with the fire department a close second. In my childhood there were no EMT’s because the doctor lived a few blocks away and he just came over with his black bag. But by the time my mother died in 1999 there were two different EMT companies standing at the front door fighting over who got to take the call. Animal control officers grew out of sheriff’s departments, a rural entity, and have run headlong into humane society investigators, an urban entity. Very awkward.

I’m sure the Superman/Clark Kent model of hero came out of emergency response. Most of the time the responder is Clark Kent, a desk jockey trying to keep order through bureaucracies like traffic monitoring, licenses, inspections, and so on. But now and then the responder must become Superman, able to outwit murderers, bank robbers, and all kinds of violence. Death itself. This combination of demands is pretty hard on most humans, who have a hard time switching from one mode to the other.

The list below is certainly not definitive, or even indicative, but they are writers I really enjoy reading. I’ve never found an animal control blog nor have I picked up any veterinarians nor have I looked for fire departments. After all, I’m hard-pressed to keep up with my own self-imposed blog goals and it would be easy to wander off into these real life narratives and opinions.

I think I enjoy the ones that are quite different in politics and culture from myself more than the ones who might be like me, but the truth is that not so many people like me go into emergency responder jobs. It was only an accident that I did. It’s just that there ARE some people well-suited for these jobs who, thankfully, are willing to reflect on what happens to them, what strategies worked, what it told them about human beings. At the very least there are a zillion stories here.

In the end these blogs are more interesting and useful than J.G. Ballard’s poeticizing and philosophizing of violence in a book like “Crash.” His experience of the reality was, after all, just one war and a few car accidents. For most of these bloggers, the war and the accidents never end.

http://thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com/
This is a down-south lawman who loves his gun and is waaaaay to the right politically. He’s full of piss ‘n vinegar, opinions and cop jargon. I love him.

http://medicscribe.blogspot.com/
Here’s a member of a community of EMT’s who respond to life-threatening emergencies and occasionally accidentally kill someone, which really pisses this guy off. He lists a lot of the books by EMT’s. How come ACO’s (Animal Control Officers) aren’t turning out the books? All we ever get is bleeding heart humane society stuff -- which sells exceedingly well.


http://phillydan.spaces.live.com/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c02_owner=1
A big part of the fascination of this EMT stuff is the gizmos. This guys knows all about gizmos and gives lots of recommends.

http://aflightmedicsjournal.blogspot.com/
Closed to intruders. The other fascination about emergency responders is the sense of a tight community that doesn’t let just anyone in.

http://shrinkette.blogspot.com/2005/07/grand-rounds-42.html
Written by a female psychiatrist who stopped posting years ago, but it’s still intriguing to see behind the curtain.

http://www.defrance.org/
Big commercial aggregator. Yawn.

http://www.crustyambulancedriver.blogspot.com/
This guy has a mordant sense of humor and a bigger heart than he gives himself credit for.

http://gruntdoc.com/
Short and snappy -- a Texas former military guy.

http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog
A sophisticated English version, remarkably similar to Yanks.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
Quite sophisticated biology blog. You’ll find out what a pharyngula is.

http://blog.vitummedicinus.com/
Brisk and thoughtful doctor at war with gadgets and homeopaths.

http://injectingsense.blogspot.com/
About Autism Spectrum Disorders. Not medical -- just discussion.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/
This appears to be to be a medical columnist giving overviews. You can sign up to get emails.

http://blueridgemedic.blogspot.com/
A mellow guy who lives in a gorgeous place and is just beginning to teach EMT stuff.

http://www.rockymountainmedic.blogspot.com/
A Denver EMT who writes “purple” but intriguingly. He’s evidently stopped.

http://surgeonsblog.blogspot.com/
I actually know someone who knows this guy, who’s in Seattle. He’s stopped posting here, but there’s a link to his new blog. This old one really suits me and I don’t even mind rereading old posts. What does it feel like to put your hand into someone’s guts? He’ll tell you.

http://ambulancedriverfiles.blogspot.com/
This guy’s life is part sit-com, part stand-up comic, and often quite a lot of romantic tragedy. But he HAS lost a lot of weight.

http://urbanparamedic.blogspot.com/
Here’s a Boston liberal military guy. How many of THOSE can there be?

http://distractible.org/
The kind of thoughtful guy I’d love to have for a doc.