"Each year thousands of lives are injured or shattered by inadvertently opening supernatural portals of evil and destruction. Almost always these invisible doors are unlocked by people who have good intentions but are looking for answers in the wrong places. How does this happen? Are there things that we or family members have done that have invited negative forces into our home? If so, what would the signs be? Is there something we might be unknowingly doing that open them? And more importantly, how can we safely close and lock down these demonic connections?
When we make a free will choice to receive information outside of our own self, it is imperative that we have accurate discernment to know who we are contacting. Often people accept any supernatural communication as if it is from God or someone who is trying to help us. When this supposition is wrong, it ends up in destroying the innocent, infecting homes and families, and creating a string of problems that continually harasses and follows the person, their loved ones, an item or their home.
We live in a world where what is seen with our eyes and heard with our ears is not hardly as much as the eyes and ears that see and hear us. What does this mean? There is a vast invisible world of good and evil around us every moment of every day. There are those who are good: Christ, the Holy Angels, our personal guardian Angel, loved ones who have passed on and are now in spirit form, and guides that were once alive on earth and have been sent by God to help us in an area that they are experts in. And the highest good of all, God - the Father of Divine Love himself; who desires beneficial communication with us so that we may have guidance, protection and peace in our lives.
Truly, we were not created to know everything ourselves, but to look outside of ourselves for higher wisdom - we were created with an empty God-spot that only heavenly spiritual connection can fill. Our spiritual nature is part of the great three balances that we need to attain and maintain a happy life - physical, emotional and spiritual health. Although we may try to put fame, fortune, relationships or material possessions into that spot, nothing will fill it but what it was made for - spiritual connection. So the problem is not that we are looking; the problem is how and from whom.
Not all that is invisible is there to scare us, but not all are there to help us either. There are unHoly Angels (demons) and manipulated ghosts who are all too willing to pretend to be someone they are not, and to mislead and ruin us if left unchecked. Our free will is a shield that can get holes in it, and holes open us up to attack and manipulation by these entities. This can create suffering from unexplainable, prolonged, repetitive or unusual health problems, severe depression, constant assaults on finances, physical health or family and relationships and many other debilitating problems; even to the point of wanting to commit suicide. This is the ultimate goal of evil - wanting the person to feel separated from God, their loved ones, even themselves - that they are ""crazy"" and hopeless and lost, so that they will ultimately destroy themselves. This is not what God wants, and there are Deliverance prayers and things we can do to become whole and free again (find the prayer in the article Are You Being Attacked? Deliverance and Exorcism).
What is the difference between being attacked and opening a portal? An attack can be a one-time thing, or occur several times through places of damage in our shield of free will. A portal is where an invitation has been made through use of a material object which now becomes a touchstone or channel for unHoly Angels to move through as they please, as many as they want, for constant attacks. This can happen on purpose, as when an object or place is dedicated to a demon by a ritual of various kinds. The object may then be given or sold to another person, thus passing the connections on with it. Whether the person receiving it knows about it or not they have just made a binding contract to the demons by agreeing to accept the gift. Or if a person bought it, to the demon world that contract is still as binding to the person who now owns it, as it was from the beginning by the person who first dedicated it through ritual. Not all dedicated items become portals, but the incidence is high. Can you see now the importance of knowing from who and where your items come? Be especially careful if items have come from out of the country, or are very old. Many portal items are considered expensive, so the person owning them may shy away from getting rid of them. But some are simple and basic to not raise undue attention.
Please note that because of individual free will, God also allows touchstones of good to be utilized as aids to help people (crucifixes, pictures of Jesus, prayer cards, the Bible, etc.) but a channel is never allowed to open as a portal through material items. For example, a person may hold a crucifix in their hand while praying for an Angel to help them, and it will be done. But the channel of connection and sending an Angel occurred because of the prayer, not because it was inherent in the item that was held. Even in places where apparitions of Mary have been seen, a high energy may be felt (all high energies leave a dusting on surrounding areas) but there is no portal. The same may be said for a religious or beloved item that has been passed down through family lines - we may feel the energy on it of love and comfort, but it has no power of its own.
A material item will never be utilized by God to create a portal for Holy Angels to have free will to go back and forth through. However, through the simple process of prayer, Angels can be given the ability to have continual authority and free will interaction to protect, guide and interact in behalf of us, the earth, and those that we pray for. In fact, special prayers called The Divine Decrees have been given for those who are living at this time of world shift, and one of the blessings they provide is the ability to call for the Holy Angels to use their own discernment to intervene in our lives at any time that they think best. And even these prayers must be repeated again within a few days - our free will interaction is needed to continue it.
UnHoly Angels have been around for thousands of years, they know the history of mankind, and have watched all the choices and interactions of your life too. So they also know what kind of things people have used as aids to contact them. These touchstone items are closely monitored by the unHoly Angels. And any new ways that people start using are also placed on the list. Some of these things are everyday items that we may not even realize have a history of divination behind them, but can be triggered as portals if we make an intention, even accidentally, to do so. Even if it is not in our culture or knowledge of how it was previously used, we can damage ourselves that easily.
For example, candles have been used as centuries, for good and for bad. Holy candles are a common thing, and every church has a good supply of them, including various traditions in using them, such as lighting one in memory of a loved one who has passed. But they have also have been/are being used in ceremonies to contact the dead (who may not be the actual loved ones), worship ancestors, pay homage to demons and to ask questions of the future. Does that mean lighting a candle or having it in your home is a bad idea? No. But be aware of how you use it, since it is an item monitored high on the list. If you find yourself staring into a candle while the thought ""if only I had a sign that Sunny really loves me,"" or ""I wish I could see grandma again"" goes through your head, you might inadvertently get answers from someone you will soon wish you had never met, and it may open a portal through that item, especially if your emotion about the question is very high at the time.
A good rule of thumb is to preface all your important questions in a prayerful manner. Spend time in communication with God, and ask for the Holy Angels to have free will to interact in your life. Setting time aside to do this will give you peace of mind and help you not have your most pressing questions at the forefront of your mind all the time. ""Be joyful always, pray continually."" (1 Thessalonians 5:16) In this way, you are asking for spiritual connection in the right way and to the right person, God. And he will provide the answers and what you need at the right time for it. You can count on it.
Similar to the candle, cards of all forms have been used throughout history for good and for bad. This is also why cards in the form of Tarot are a place of real danger, because the prospect of connecting to the wrong word of advice is very real. The same danger can be triggered by dowsing, numerology, palmistry, Wicca, astrology, past life regressions, séances, and Ouija boards, to list a few. These are all places where good and bad can end up getting mixed up very easily, no matter what the intention of the person might be. Surrounding yourself with white light does little good when you are saying that with one side of your mouth and the demons hear you calling them with the other. It is a mixed signal, and the Holy Angels will not answer you this way.
Think of it this way - if a person wants you to drink poison, he will not put it in water - you would taste the bitterness right away and spit it out. But if it is mixed in a sweet drink, it is more difficult to recognize, and there is a good chance you might swallow it right down, to your own demise. It is the same with information given through unclean sources. Yes, they are real connections who might have built a strong relationship with you by being 95% accurate - but watch out for that 5%, for it will kill you. We have a tendency to believe all that is said to us when most has made sense to us or been proven to be right. That is exactly where the manipulation will now come in. And the outcome the demons want is our destruction. When we have built up a place of trust with these beings through methods of divination, it is only a matter of time before they turn on us - because after all, we have chosen and made a contract.
Portals can also be caused by people dabbling in the occult, whether they are just kids reading something out of a book or a small group intent on making a supernatural link. Demonic haunting of homes and graveyards often happen in this way, and it can become a portal on the land or the building itself. What some may start out as simple curiosity can bring into the home evil that will follow and attack the person(s) or house for years and years. What can happen? Inability to think clearly, seeing dark shapes or running shadows, hearing scratching, footsteps, screaming or other voices, difficulty with prayer (especially when using the name Jesus), oppressive thoughts, being touched or shaken at night, dizziness, seeing visions of disturbing or violent images, severe aggressive or depressive mood changes, smelling rotting flesh, receiving bodily scratches, items being thrown or smashed against walls or the floor, images of demons or contorted faces in gaseous form or in window or mirror reflections, severe headaches, nausea, unexplained electrical problems, physical gagging and not being able to breathe, being pushed or tripped, feeling like you are underwater or in a wave of heaviness, and even possession itself. And if the demon has been invited through a portal, it is not just about getting rid of the current offending demon(s), but also closing the door so no more come.
How do you cleanse an unclean item? Bless it with Holy Water, and any negative energy dusting will disappear. If the item is still dark, bust it up, put it in the ground, burn it in a safe place, and cover it back up. It must be totally destroyed so no one else could ever use it. How do you close a portal? Find the offending item, the trigger - whether it is a room in the house or the object. Prayer is essential, for this is a war you are fighting, and you must cleanse the area by the authority and confidence you have by faith. Your winning team is God, his Holy Angels, and his son, Jesus Christ. It is by the name of Christ that you can cast the demons out, and close the portal. It is not a time for fear. This means if you are afraid, call in those who have a stronger faith than you. When you ask another to do it for you and they agree, a new contract now exists for good, and the cleansing can occur in your behalf. ""Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.""(Zechariah 4:6)
A house blessing is essential, a dedication of all things to the God of Love, and a choice of turning away from the things that caused the problems to begin with. ""Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you."" (James 4:7) Sprinkle Holy water in each room, and anointing oil over each window while reading prayers and scriptures out loud. It is similar to doing a Deliverance on a house instead of a person, so adjust the Deliverance prayer and use it. Be specific about where you are casting out the demons to - do not simply cast them out of your area, or to the desert or back where they came from - send the demons to God to deal with as he sees fit. Put a crucifix over each door that leads to the outside, and one over each bed. Also be specific in your wording that you know you have the authority as a child of God through the name of Jesus Christ to close the portal and that it will be done. Whether you are a Christian or not, all the demons know who Jesus is and the authority he has over them (read Why Jesus' Life is Important Beyond Religion). Gather a group of friends and sing uplifting religious songs and call in the Holy Spirit for physical, emotional and spiritual healing on all participants. Receive an offering of communion in the house, and continue to arrange occasions for celebration and joy such as birthdays and anniversaries. Cultivate a prayerful attitude and make a sacred space or altar in the home where you go daily to pray, also making it a place where you arrange things that remind you of wonderful times in your life; for love, joy and happiness are Godly things. Make the darkest places the lightest, both spiritually and with physical lights and lamps.
And remember that no matter how bad it may seem, you are already a child of God and have the authority as his child to call on him whenever you like, and he will send Holy Angels to fight for you and protect you. But you must take action to do so. ""Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened."" (Matthew 7:7,8) And this door, happily, is one you can open any time, and can trust with your life."
Portals of Evil - Opening and Closing Them Are Your Good Intentions Opening the Wrong Doorways?
Prison Food - Past and Present
"The Best of British - prison food
A short article on past and present prison cuisine
I have always had an interest in food and cooking and it came as a particular delight when in my last five years of service, I became head of an Investigation and Audit team in one of London's biggest prisons. Part of the team's task was to inspect and report on conditions in prison kitchens.To enable me to undertake the work, I had to do a great deal of research and knowledge gathering to enable me to carry out this function. Food handling and hygiene being just one of the basic areas to cover. Food preparation techniques, balanced diets, specialist medical diets are all part of the daily life of a prison, or indeed any other type of institutional kitchen.
Every prison in Britain is inspected by an independent body, HM Prison Inspectorate, on an irregular basis. Therefore, it is essential that every prison kitchen is organized, maintained and managed at the very highest standard at all times. In the late 1980's, HM Prison Service lost the safety of, ""Crown Immunity"". This prevented any form of prosecution through the courts for any infringements of the law. The 'Crown' could never prosecute itself - The Crown verses Crown. In effect, it meant that a prison could now receive severe sanctions for poor performance in any area, particularly Health & Safety and catering. It could also mean that the prison kitchen could even be closed down if found to be in a poor state of management, maintenance or hygiene. This was highlighted very clearly in September of 2009 when 370 prisoners at London's largest prison, HMP Wandsworth were struck down with salmonella poisoning. If a prison kitchen were suddenly ordered to close down, you can imagine the chaos this would cause. HMP Wandsworth is the largest prison in Western Europe and holds over 1,600 prisoners. How do you provide over 4,800 meals a day at very short notice? The only hope of keeping the roof on the jail is to ensure that the Emergency Contingency Planners have done their homework and an alternative system can be brought on line with immediate effect.
How it used to be
Wandsworth Prison was built in 1851. It was one of the earliest London prisons and was originally called the Surrey House of Corrections. Mayhew & Binney, in their 1868 edition of, ""Criminal Prisons of London"", describe vividly the life inside the London prisons in the 1800's. Food did not seem very high on the agenda of the prison system at this time. Containment seemed to be the priority. The Surrey House of Correction was indeed built to help to reduce overcrowding at the Houses of Correction at Brixton, Guildford and Kingston, where ""jail fever"" was rampant and prisoners were dying. When inspecting the Surrey House of Corrections in 1862, Mayhew and Binney noted the menu and diets of the various classes of prisoners held at the prison. Convicted prisoners employed at 'hard labour' for terms exceeding 21 days were allowed the following meals:
Breakfast 1 pint of oatmeal gruel and 6 oz of bread Dinner Sunday & Thursday 1 pint of soup and 8 oz of bread Dinner Tuesday & Saturday 3 oz of cooked meat without bone 8 oz bread ½ lb potatoes Dinner Monday, Wednesday & Friday 8 oz bread and 1 lb of potatoes Supper Same as breakfast
As you may well imagine, the low calorific and nutritional values of such a diet would lead to serious health problems - jail fever.
When I worked at High Down High Security prison in Surrey, we presented the Lord Lieutenant of the County with a framed copy of the recipe for Gruel. The Governor of the prison at the time, Stephen Prior, took the Lord Lieutenant and his wife home for dinner, and guess what was first on the menu - prison gruel. He actually loved it! So much so that he instructed his own chef to add it to his dinner party menus to impress his guests (I bet it did!).
This is the original recipe from the Surrey House of Corrections kitchen circa. 1862: Ingredients for Soup and Gruel: The soup to contain, per pint, 3 ounces of cooked meat, without bone, 3 ounces of potatoes, 1 ounce of barley, rice, or oatmeal, and 1 ounce of onions or leeks, with pepper and salt. The gruel to contain 2 ounces of oatmeal per pint. The gruel on alternate days to be sweetened with three quarter ounces of molasses or sugar and seasoned with salt.
In seasons when the potato crop has failed, 4 ounces of split peas made into a pudding may be occasionally substituted; but the change must not be made more than twice in each week. Boys under 14 years of age to be placed on the same diet as females.
The female diet was the same as the male prisoner diet with the exception that where the male received 8 oz of bread the female would receive 6 ounces.
For those prisoners serving less than seven days, the menu was very basic: Breakfast 1 pint of gruel Dinner 1 lb of bread Supper 1 pint of gruel
These prison diets lasted well into the 1900's and bear no comparison to today's prison food. Modern prisoners wouldn't stand for it and the authorities could never allow it. Even the punishment diet of bread and water was removed from the Prison Rules in the 1960's. The term, ""Doing Porridge"" still remains an avid description of someone who is in prison, referring of course, to the old diet of oatmeal gruel.
How it is now
Modern man requires around 2,500 calories each day to maintain body weight, women require slightly less. In the prisons of the 1800's, a prisoner was lucky to obtain 500 calories per day without any opportunity to increase his intake. Overcrowding - three to a cell built for one and hard labour, soon consumed what little energy the prisoner had. Poor health, body lice and unsanitary conditions all led to the onset of jail fever - epidemic typhus.
Today, as well as obtaining a balanced and healthy prison diet, a prisoner can supplement his diet from the prison shop. Many prisoners are housed in single cells or dormitories and the overcrowding problems of the 1800's no longer exist in our modern prisons. Modern health care programmes, physical fitness programmes and modern sanitatary conditions have all been introduced in recent years.
In the UK, a prison catering manager has about £1.87 ($4) to provide food for each inmate every day. Young offender institutions are allowed double this amount at £3.81 ($8) per day. The modern prison service of day has placed an emphasis on rehabilitation, although how successful this has been is debatable. Part of the rehabilitation process is to teach prisoners how to eat healthily and look after themselves on release. For the prison service's part, new dietary regulations have been introduced in recent years which avoid the onset of health problems which ultimately reflect in the prisons health care budget. Long term prisoners are particularly at risk by poor diet and poor health care regimes. Diabetes, stroke and obesity-related illnesses are of particular concern.
Special diets are catered for now and include Muslim, kosher, Caribbean, diabetic and other medical diets are also provided. Catering managers are now specially trained to prepare these special diets. In many of the establishments I worked in, we even had Muslim and Jewish prisoners working in the kitchen to ensure that the food was cooked and prepared in the appropriate way. For the feast of Eid, the local mosques would deliver specially prepared food as a gift for Muslim prisoners. Likewise, the rabbi would arrange for kosher food to be delivered whenever Jewish feast days were celebrated. This would never have happened fifty years ago. It is also curios to note, the number of prisoners who convert to Islam when Ramadan is approaching.
So how have the diets and menus changed over the years. Health and nutrition remain a high priority in today's prison kitchen. There has been a vast reduction in fried foods over recent years. Chips with everything no longer applies. An increase in fresh fruit and vegetables, wholegrain products and an increase in fish products, including oily fish have been introduced into prisons not only in Britain but in European and American prison establishments as well.
One of the best fed prisons in the world is in Italy, where prisoners work to produce organic fruit and vegetables, including olive oil. The prison has its own state of the art food production areas for manufacturing wine and orchard management. The whole operation is supervised by a professional management team. The prisoners benefit by eating all their own home grown food and are even allowed a small wine allowance to help reduce cholesterol levels and may even increase the ability to prevent some forms of cancer. Now, is that progress or what?
There seems to be some confusion as to what exactly prison food entails. As far as the general public is concerned, some of them still believe that gruel, bread and water is still the main prison diet. There are still many more who say that it should be.
They could not be further from the fact. As we have already stated, vast improvements have already been made to the prison diet. In most prisons in England and Wales, the supply of catering facilities has been privatised. Prisoners now have a choice which they can preselect on a weekly basis, usually with a choice of three or more main courses. The Christmas menus have improved immensely over the years and now provide prisoners with a much better Christmas dinner than they ever would eat outside prison. In many of the lower security prisons, local pensioners are invited into the prison to eat Christmas dinner with the inmates. After all, prisoners are still human beings and many take great pains to ensure that 'granny' and 'granddad' have a nice Christmas dinner.
So how might a modern prison menu look? First, the breakfast menu. In all English prisons each prisoner receives a breakfast pack which is issued the evening before for use the next morning. This will include a breakfast cereal, milk, tea bags, coffee whitener, sugar, brown or white bread, jam and margarine or butter type spread. They will also receive a weekly allowance of teabags and sugar to make themselves a cup of tea whenever they want to. Each cell will have its own kettle. The daily issue will also include special packs for vegans, vegetarians and various religious groups
For the midday and evening meals, nearly every prison now uses a pre-select system where a list of different meals are displayed for each day and every prisoner can order whatever meal he prefers. There are usually five or six alternatives to choose from. Fresh vegetables and fruit are served separately when each meal is collected. The following is just a sample obtained from the London prisons where the pre-select system has successfully been in operation for nearly ten years: Day one Midday meal Evening meal Vegetarian Pasta Bake Vegetable supreme Chicken & Mushroom pie Chicken Supreme Halal Jamaican Beef Patti Halal Chicken Curry Corned beef & Pickle Roll Grilled Gammon Jacket Potato & Coleslaw Pork pie salad
Day Two Vegetable Pancake roll Bean & Vegetable curry Breaded fish Chicken Chasseur Cheese & Beano Grill Halal Beef Casserole Cheese & Tomato Roll Fish in Parsley Sauce Jacket Potato & Tuna Vegetable Quiche Salad
Day Three Vegetarian Sausage & Egg Soya Lasagne Bacon, Sausage & Egg Minced Beef Lasagne Halal Sausage & Egg Halal Beef Italienne Turkey Salad Roll Rice & Bean Stuffed Pepper Salad Jacket Potato and Curried Beans Cheese Salad The pre-select system has progressed a long way since its introduction. Prisoners now have the opportunity to select from a range of choices. In the early days if you were not a registered vegetarian, you could not have a vegetarian meal. If you were not a Muslim, you couldn't select a halal dish. Now, things have changed Prisoners can select whatever dish they prefer. They may eat vegetarian one day, halal the next. Its their choice. In general, all prisons have now attempted to embrace the Balance of Good Health model (Food Standards Agency 2001) and are providing a nutritionally balanced, and healthy diet. We have progressed a long way from the days of bread and water and a cup of gruel. Prisoners are not dying of typhus and malnutrition any more and prisons are much more comfortable and healthy paces to work in - both for prisoners and staff.
What will be the next phase? Will we see the introduction of self catering for prisoners? Each prison having its own supermarket. All prisons have there own version of the 'corner shop' where they can purchase food supplements and little luxuries to make life more bearable. It is not too much of a step to provide a supermarket and the means for prisoners to prepare their own food. Most of the catering facilities and prison shops are already privatised. I am sure that ASDA or Sainsbury's or Walmart would jump at the chance of having an in-prison store with a captive clientele of nearly 2000 every day.
LATEST BREAKING NEWS: How about a gourmet restaurant with rock bottom prices, excellently reviewed by the financial times food critic Charles Campion? Well, it's happened. High Down Prison near London has become the first prison establishment to open a gourmet restaurant inside a prison - and its open to the public. All the kitchen staff are prisoners under training to be chefs ready for release and finding employment in the catering trade. Check it out. You will be surprised.
http://www.billandsheilascookbook.com/TheClink.html
By Bill Robinson M.I.Mgt. HM Prison Governor (retired)
© Bill Robinson 2010"
A short article on past and present prison cuisine
I have always had an interest in food and cooking and it came as a particular delight when in my last five years of service, I became head of an Investigation and Audit team in one of London's biggest prisons. Part of the team's task was to inspect and report on conditions in prison kitchens.To enable me to undertake the work, I had to do a great deal of research and knowledge gathering to enable me to carry out this function. Food handling and hygiene being just one of the basic areas to cover. Food preparation techniques, balanced diets, specialist medical diets are all part of the daily life of a prison, or indeed any other type of institutional kitchen.
Every prison in Britain is inspected by an independent body, HM Prison Inspectorate, on an irregular basis. Therefore, it is essential that every prison kitchen is organized, maintained and managed at the very highest standard at all times. In the late 1980's, HM Prison Service lost the safety of, ""Crown Immunity"". This prevented any form of prosecution through the courts for any infringements of the law. The 'Crown' could never prosecute itself - The Crown verses Crown. In effect, it meant that a prison could now receive severe sanctions for poor performance in any area, particularly Health & Safety and catering. It could also mean that the prison kitchen could even be closed down if found to be in a poor state of management, maintenance or hygiene. This was highlighted very clearly in September of 2009 when 370 prisoners at London's largest prison, HMP Wandsworth were struck down with salmonella poisoning. If a prison kitchen were suddenly ordered to close down, you can imagine the chaos this would cause. HMP Wandsworth is the largest prison in Western Europe and holds over 1,600 prisoners. How do you provide over 4,800 meals a day at very short notice? The only hope of keeping the roof on the jail is to ensure that the Emergency Contingency Planners have done their homework and an alternative system can be brought on line with immediate effect.
How it used to be
Wandsworth Prison was built in 1851. It was one of the earliest London prisons and was originally called the Surrey House of Corrections. Mayhew & Binney, in their 1868 edition of, ""Criminal Prisons of London"", describe vividly the life inside the London prisons in the 1800's. Food did not seem very high on the agenda of the prison system at this time. Containment seemed to be the priority. The Surrey House of Correction was indeed built to help to reduce overcrowding at the Houses of Correction at Brixton, Guildford and Kingston, where ""jail fever"" was rampant and prisoners were dying. When inspecting the Surrey House of Corrections in 1862, Mayhew and Binney noted the menu and diets of the various classes of prisoners held at the prison. Convicted prisoners employed at 'hard labour' for terms exceeding 21 days were allowed the following meals:
Breakfast 1 pint of oatmeal gruel and 6 oz of bread Dinner Sunday & Thursday 1 pint of soup and 8 oz of bread Dinner Tuesday & Saturday 3 oz of cooked meat without bone 8 oz bread ½ lb potatoes Dinner Monday, Wednesday & Friday 8 oz bread and 1 lb of potatoes Supper Same as breakfast
As you may well imagine, the low calorific and nutritional values of such a diet would lead to serious health problems - jail fever.
When I worked at High Down High Security prison in Surrey, we presented the Lord Lieutenant of the County with a framed copy of the recipe for Gruel. The Governor of the prison at the time, Stephen Prior, took the Lord Lieutenant and his wife home for dinner, and guess what was first on the menu - prison gruel. He actually loved it! So much so that he instructed his own chef to add it to his dinner party menus to impress his guests (I bet it did!).
This is the original recipe from the Surrey House of Corrections kitchen circa. 1862: Ingredients for Soup and Gruel: The soup to contain, per pint, 3 ounces of cooked meat, without bone, 3 ounces of potatoes, 1 ounce of barley, rice, or oatmeal, and 1 ounce of onions or leeks, with pepper and salt. The gruel to contain 2 ounces of oatmeal per pint. The gruel on alternate days to be sweetened with three quarter ounces of molasses or sugar and seasoned with salt.
In seasons when the potato crop has failed, 4 ounces of split peas made into a pudding may be occasionally substituted; but the change must not be made more than twice in each week. Boys under 14 years of age to be placed on the same diet as females.
The female diet was the same as the male prisoner diet with the exception that where the male received 8 oz of bread the female would receive 6 ounces.
For those prisoners serving less than seven days, the menu was very basic: Breakfast 1 pint of gruel Dinner 1 lb of bread Supper 1 pint of gruel
These prison diets lasted well into the 1900's and bear no comparison to today's prison food. Modern prisoners wouldn't stand for it and the authorities could never allow it. Even the punishment diet of bread and water was removed from the Prison Rules in the 1960's. The term, ""Doing Porridge"" still remains an avid description of someone who is in prison, referring of course, to the old diet of oatmeal gruel.
How it is now
Modern man requires around 2,500 calories each day to maintain body weight, women require slightly less. In the prisons of the 1800's, a prisoner was lucky to obtain 500 calories per day without any opportunity to increase his intake. Overcrowding - three to a cell built for one and hard labour, soon consumed what little energy the prisoner had. Poor health, body lice and unsanitary conditions all led to the onset of jail fever - epidemic typhus.
Today, as well as obtaining a balanced and healthy prison diet, a prisoner can supplement his diet from the prison shop. Many prisoners are housed in single cells or dormitories and the overcrowding problems of the 1800's no longer exist in our modern prisons. Modern health care programmes, physical fitness programmes and modern sanitatary conditions have all been introduced in recent years.
In the UK, a prison catering manager has about £1.87 ($4) to provide food for each inmate every day. Young offender institutions are allowed double this amount at £3.81 ($8) per day. The modern prison service of day has placed an emphasis on rehabilitation, although how successful this has been is debatable. Part of the rehabilitation process is to teach prisoners how to eat healthily and look after themselves on release. For the prison service's part, new dietary regulations have been introduced in recent years which avoid the onset of health problems which ultimately reflect in the prisons health care budget. Long term prisoners are particularly at risk by poor diet and poor health care regimes. Diabetes, stroke and obesity-related illnesses are of particular concern.
Special diets are catered for now and include Muslim, kosher, Caribbean, diabetic and other medical diets are also provided. Catering managers are now specially trained to prepare these special diets. In many of the establishments I worked in, we even had Muslim and Jewish prisoners working in the kitchen to ensure that the food was cooked and prepared in the appropriate way. For the feast of Eid, the local mosques would deliver specially prepared food as a gift for Muslim prisoners. Likewise, the rabbi would arrange for kosher food to be delivered whenever Jewish feast days were celebrated. This would never have happened fifty years ago. It is also curios to note, the number of prisoners who convert to Islam when Ramadan is approaching.
So how have the diets and menus changed over the years. Health and nutrition remain a high priority in today's prison kitchen. There has been a vast reduction in fried foods over recent years. Chips with everything no longer applies. An increase in fresh fruit and vegetables, wholegrain products and an increase in fish products, including oily fish have been introduced into prisons not only in Britain but in European and American prison establishments as well.
One of the best fed prisons in the world is in Italy, where prisoners work to produce organic fruit and vegetables, including olive oil. The prison has its own state of the art food production areas for manufacturing wine and orchard management. The whole operation is supervised by a professional management team. The prisoners benefit by eating all their own home grown food and are even allowed a small wine allowance to help reduce cholesterol levels and may even increase the ability to prevent some forms of cancer. Now, is that progress or what?
There seems to be some confusion as to what exactly prison food entails. As far as the general public is concerned, some of them still believe that gruel, bread and water is still the main prison diet. There are still many more who say that it should be.
They could not be further from the fact. As we have already stated, vast improvements have already been made to the prison diet. In most prisons in England and Wales, the supply of catering facilities has been privatised. Prisoners now have a choice which they can preselect on a weekly basis, usually with a choice of three or more main courses. The Christmas menus have improved immensely over the years and now provide prisoners with a much better Christmas dinner than they ever would eat outside prison. In many of the lower security prisons, local pensioners are invited into the prison to eat Christmas dinner with the inmates. After all, prisoners are still human beings and many take great pains to ensure that 'granny' and 'granddad' have a nice Christmas dinner.
So how might a modern prison menu look? First, the breakfast menu. In all English prisons each prisoner receives a breakfast pack which is issued the evening before for use the next morning. This will include a breakfast cereal, milk, tea bags, coffee whitener, sugar, brown or white bread, jam and margarine or butter type spread. They will also receive a weekly allowance of teabags and sugar to make themselves a cup of tea whenever they want to. Each cell will have its own kettle. The daily issue will also include special packs for vegans, vegetarians and various religious groups
For the midday and evening meals, nearly every prison now uses a pre-select system where a list of different meals are displayed for each day and every prisoner can order whatever meal he prefers. There are usually five or six alternatives to choose from. Fresh vegetables and fruit are served separately when each meal is collected. The following is just a sample obtained from the London prisons where the pre-select system has successfully been in operation for nearly ten years: Day one Midday meal Evening meal Vegetarian Pasta Bake Vegetable supreme Chicken & Mushroom pie Chicken Supreme Halal Jamaican Beef Patti Halal Chicken Curry Corned beef & Pickle Roll Grilled Gammon Jacket Potato & Coleslaw Pork pie salad
Day Two Vegetable Pancake roll Bean & Vegetable curry Breaded fish Chicken Chasseur Cheese & Beano Grill Halal Beef Casserole Cheese & Tomato Roll Fish in Parsley Sauce Jacket Potato & Tuna Vegetable Quiche Salad
Day Three Vegetarian Sausage & Egg Soya Lasagne Bacon, Sausage & Egg Minced Beef Lasagne Halal Sausage & Egg Halal Beef Italienne Turkey Salad Roll Rice & Bean Stuffed Pepper Salad Jacket Potato and Curried Beans Cheese Salad The pre-select system has progressed a long way since its introduction. Prisoners now have the opportunity to select from a range of choices. In the early days if you were not a registered vegetarian, you could not have a vegetarian meal. If you were not a Muslim, you couldn't select a halal dish. Now, things have changed Prisoners can select whatever dish they prefer. They may eat vegetarian one day, halal the next. Its their choice. In general, all prisons have now attempted to embrace the Balance of Good Health model (Food Standards Agency 2001) and are providing a nutritionally balanced, and healthy diet. We have progressed a long way from the days of bread and water and a cup of gruel. Prisoners are not dying of typhus and malnutrition any more and prisons are much more comfortable and healthy paces to work in - both for prisoners and staff.
What will be the next phase? Will we see the introduction of self catering for prisoners? Each prison having its own supermarket. All prisons have there own version of the 'corner shop' where they can purchase food supplements and little luxuries to make life more bearable. It is not too much of a step to provide a supermarket and the means for prisoners to prepare their own food. Most of the catering facilities and prison shops are already privatised. I am sure that ASDA or Sainsbury's or Walmart would jump at the chance of having an in-prison store with a captive clientele of nearly 2000 every day.
LATEST BREAKING NEWS: How about a gourmet restaurant with rock bottom prices, excellently reviewed by the financial times food critic Charles Campion? Well, it's happened. High Down Prison near London has become the first prison establishment to open a gourmet restaurant inside a prison - and its open to the public. All the kitchen staff are prisoners under training to be chefs ready for release and finding employment in the catering trade. Check it out. You will be surprised.
http://www.billandsheilascookbook.com/TheClink.html
By Bill Robinson M.I.Mgt. HM Prison Governor (retired)
© Bill Robinson 2010"
"Save the World, a Letter to the President - I Think We Must Get Together and See the Light Soon"
"Save ""The World""
It started as a game. I was thinking about an idea for a new video game. What would you do if you were suddenly saddled with the responsibility of saving the world? Your call, your decision, your baby, what would you do? And then it progressed into a more serious thought into virtual reality. Where would you start? In Iraq? Or some other trouble spot around the world? I watch a lot of news. News is basically depressing and often riling. It seems everyone has the same major stories and every station has a different view of the meaning. You have to watch them all and read between the lines to get the truth, and then you can never be sure.
I listened to the politicians, the Senators and the Congressmen and the Radio mouths and the TV clever comedians and each of them had a different idea. It seems they each have their own individual take on how to get rid of and punish, and destroy the other bad guys. The truth is seldom spoken and never popular. Then with a quick glance around the world (something we poor folks could not do before TV), and I see a world of turmoil. Everyone mad at each other and every individual on this earth has a different solution. The problems are uncountable with many wrong answers for each problem. People are frustrated because we are losing hope.
It seems if we are ever to find the answer we must leave this place where we are blinded by this turmoil and confusion. So let us leave this little hideout where we live and maybe go for a journey outside of the political cage, let's go look in from the outside. Like maybe from a spaceship circling the globe at high altitude, and try to see the world as a whole. We can look down through the clouds and see the oceans and the mountains and then we zoom in and there are all of those tiny people shooting at each other and tearing things up beneath a haze of smoke. And this space ship will allow us to see through ""time"" also. As far back as we can see Human Beings have fought and warred with each other. We have to fight each other if we want to fight because we Human Beings really have no enemy other than ourselves. In the whole of the universe so far we have no other enemies. Yet we struggle to survive in a world where we can feel that if we continue on this course with this ideology we will soon destroy everything that we have today. We all know this is not working.
But there may still be a way.
There may be a way to save the world, not easy, but fast and sure. We could change our minds and try speaking the truth. Is there such a thing as the truth these days? My people say, ""Oh Ya, big deal, like your truth is better than mine?"" I realize that we live in a world with an ideology that insists that we each have a different opinion about everything these days and where the truth seems to be hidden and politically incorrect. It seems that in order to be heard we must lie. Now I know that sounds pretty pessimistic, but the state of affairs that we face today requires some pretty heavy words and we must be able to speak the hard words if we are ever to be free, ""Only the truth can set us free.""
Have you ever thought how it is that words of deceit have brought us here to the brink of destruction? Our words and our choice of words that we use to communicate will guide us through the course of our future. How many words does it take to express our frustration with our leadership, is it because we all know through and through that something is basically wrong? We are so restricted by words, we dare not say the wrong word or we are bad.
Let me say some heavy words that will explain my thoughts;
Men and Women have walked hand in hand through time.
In the mind of Men;
""I must go fourth and crusade and conquer the world!""
In the mind of Women;
""I will follow but why must you sacrifice our children?""
It has always been words of ""deceit"" that have brought destruction to Mankind and for that matter destruction of the whole of our world. This is June, 2010, the oil spill, the upheavals in our Congress, our Churches and leadership around the world are proof positive where ""deceit"" can lead us, now we can see ""in lights"" in front of the whole world.
""Without the truth, we have absolutely nothing!""
Up until now I don't think we could handle the truth. I remember when Jack Nicholson snarled that in a Movie. And it is true, we used to burn people at the stake if we thought they were too different than what we understood, and we are greatly bound by the books and the politically accepted interpretation. We demand that our children grow up with our understanding of the truth. It is our duty of course to guide our children into this world as best we can as long as we can. But what if we have been lied to? What if some people have systematically lied to Mankind for centuries, what if Man has been lied to by other men since the beginning of time? What if God would much rather that we get along and worked together to save ourselves and this world?
There is a story I remember in the Bible about how Man started to build a tower to the Heavens and God gave them all a different language that separated them or something. I can see such an event with a reasonable answer; it was a bad idea and they all quit and separated, you know went off there own way. Likely to gather with and follow with those who agreed on why it was a bad idea. Today we could reverse that incident and turn it in our favor. We could all turn and look back at God and see what He really intended and offered us?
We, Mankind must get together and see the reality of our present and our future. We must recognize the basic needs and commonalities that God has given us for survival and try to abolish the many choices that we make to go against God, choices that destroy and diminish Mankind and our world.
The fact is if we intend to leave something, anything good for our children, we must get together. Around the world, today we could do that. It is no good unless we all agree to understand. We need to see what separates us and what brings us together. I mean we don't have to sleep together, but we could come together with a realization and a focus. Today we spend our life's worth and our hard earned money devising ways to separate each other and create high-tech weapons to destroy each other. We school our young to know who to hate and how to destroy others. It will take an event of meteor strength to get the attention of the people, maybe this oil disaster? When we do, we better have the right answers. The right answer could simply be ""the truth.""
The fact is that we have been separated since the beginning of time by differences of opinions. A difference of opinion created and promoted by men. Rooted deep in our history are endless tales of deceit created by some who feel that they will benefit in some way. Like maybe; ""Here ye, here ye, my fellow Man, let it be known and written in stone that from now and forever, God wills that I and my family and friends shall be considered Saintly, and you are all to bow and pay toll and know that my family is better than you and we are never, ever to be doubted nor held accountable as Human Beings."" Would you go for that? We do, we have for centuries. Our leaders deem themselves saintly and above Human scrutiny, it shackles our future to doom.
We grown-ups play a deadly game of; ""My God is Better than Your God so That Makes Me Better than You, game."" There is a different vision of God in the mind of every Human Being in the world, and none is the exact same, but none is better than any other. There is only one God, but we will ""choose"" to see Him in many different lights.
We cannot continue destroying each other and our world believing that it is God's will. We fight because we think we are all different. We all think we are pretty special and we are. But maybe not better than other Human Beings in Gods eyes. My uncle once told me ""always remember you are better than no one, but no one is better than you."" (I had no idea what he meant) It's like a pecking order in the chicken pen, in our case it is who ever has the most money has the biggest beak. I believe that God intended for Mankind to walk this earth in health and in peace forever. And I believe that He is counting us to figure out how we can do that. It is obviously going to have to be on a different path than this one. We cannot continue to trust Man's judgment and words of deceit; we must look to God for the TRUTH.
We most all of us know God exists. But have we really questioned where and how? Also, we must realize that God never wrote anything. I flat out ask God one time when I was recovering from my cancer operation in 1996, I ask;
""God where are you really? I have heard about you from my first memories, and they tell me you are in the heavens, in the sea and everywhere and I don't see how you can do that? I want to show you how much I appreciate. I can feel that you are here somewhere but?""
Maybe we can all feel in our heart that there really is a God, but? The thought that sort of came back to me from somewhere was, ""hey don't worry about it, just trust that I am here because you might not understand anyway."" Well I do trust that God exists but I need to know more now.
Just recall for a second how good if feels to gather in church and sing, when you are shoulder to shoulder with your fellow Man? You can actually feel the vibrations from each other, vibes, and your heart warms and your head tingles and you just want to hug somebody because you are all there in that place in that moment reaching for God. I believe that He is very much there and very much here at this moment.
I believe that we can ask God when we are in need of guidance. Seriously and in total reality, as if He was standing right here beside us, ask God what He thinks you should do, how you should see things. I know that sounds old, plain and empty, but let me tell you why I believe that.
I am not a scholar of religion or politics so I cannot speak in those terms, but I believe I have good common sense. Actually I believe that it is indeed religion and politics, one in the same, I believe it is religion and politics that have separated Mankind since the beginning of time... So let us for a moment put the Bible and the Political Deceit on the shelf, and everything that we have been told about mystery history. Let us take a non-biblical look at the world and try to find some answers;
Number One, God, where is He and what is He?
Number Two, let's go hunting for the Devil and kick his ass! Let's go in through the thorny bushes into that molten den and drag his red butt scratching and clawing out by that stupid looking tail and stomp him good. What do you say?
Oh yes lets use some fitting words. I believe that God is our creator, in the beginning I believe that God created us maybe of His own image, maybe so maybe not, but the fact is that He created this ""masterpiece"" of the Human Body with such great intricacies and complexities, that modern Man is just beginning to discover how far, far beyond our science fiction this body really is. Man will never be able to take a handful of dirt and make even one Human Body cell. God does it many times each day.
Science has proven that we are 99.9% the same inside. Now how can they prove that if we don't even have 99 parts? I can only count about 20 parts or so. But actually there are more, quite a few more, about Three Billion more actually.
That's right; science says that we have over Three Billion parts... all working... together... in real time. When you stub a toe, how long does it take to cuss? Now that is a phenomenon. Imagine, we can only see these tiny cells with a microscope, and guess what, inside of each one of these cells is a DNA Ribbon that contains over Three Billion segments that only show as tiny shadows on our most powerful computerized scope, one for each cell in our body. Science says that it is in this world so tiny, in these segments, inside of each cell, this is where ""ALL OF OUR GROWTH AND ALL OF OUR REPAIR TAKES PLACE, period!""
I know we boast about our modern technology but ""WOW"" compared to God's work we are babies.
We take our bodies greatly for granted. They say we are the same as Adam, the very first Man. The numbers prove that. When God created Adam, at that very instant Man became his own ""Entity"" like no other. The heart beat in your chest as in mine has been handed down from generation to generation like the ""Olympic Torch of Life"" all the way from Adam according to science.
We all know that evolution has occurred and all of those strange bones of monkeys and apes that they dig up are obviously simply those of Species that did not survive. There are no monkeys in Man's tree. The evolution of Man is what we see around the world today, what we see is what we got. We joke about the resemblance to other creatures but we all know the reality.
It is obvious that God installed a lot of instructions to go along with this masterpiece, which so far have worked wonders. Most of our instructions are set on automatic, but there are many others that we must recognize as instincts, because they require us to act upon them. So let us look at what we know God installed and how important it is to us.
God installed the instinct to live as the number one highest priority. We instinctively struggle till the last breath to live. Secondly we may have a toss-up between food and sex; we have to eat, but sometimes it can wait till after sex for a short time. I believe that God gave us the ultimate pleasure of sex for all the good reasons. Then next would be of course the instinct to love and be loved and to procreate and protect and do something good for our own and our future. We all feel the same pain in our flesh and in our heart for our losses. It is the ""protect"" instinct that generally brings us to fight each other, usually because we fear what the other bad guys might do or say or are doing. We will ""protect"" what we believe in to the death!
So let us make sure that what we believe in is, maybe what God intended for us? I suggest that God intended for us to walk this earth in health and in peace forever, and He gave us the brain power to figure out how to do that.
Would it be fair to say that God gave every Human Being on earth these gifts? Let us take a look at how it seems to me that Mankind has accepted these wonderful gifts from God.
#1 God gave us life and the ultimate instinct to live.
Man has decided. (Killing other Humans is OK if we want)
#2 God offers us His second most precious gift of sex and love.
Man decides. (We demean sex and marriage, celibacy is Holy)
#3 We all want to do something good for and procreate and protect our own and our future.
Man decides (only those ""chosen"" are deserving of fulfillment)
#4 It is wrong to cheat, and deceive your fellow Man in God's name.
Man Decides (God is nothing. It is noble and good and respectable to Lord over other Human Beings, and commit and promote crime and deceit, and to horde and waste while others struggle to survive. It is saintly to flaunt and brag about un-Godly thinking and actions. Today we can justify just about anything we want to do and have done.)
It seems to me that Mankind has deliberately been led away from God's obvious intentions for our survival.
Today our leaders have collectively teamed up to perpetrate and perpetuate the biggest crime in the history of Mankind. In all of our history and all of our principles the one single most dangerous entity to Mankind is ""The Corporate Monopoly!""
It is not the worst of it that the Drug Corporation Monopoly money controls our health system and our Congress with the influence of lobbyist, not the worst of it at all. I believe it is a corporation that has nearly taken our world with blatant and dastardly ungodly crimes.
I'm talking about a Corporation that wants the whole world, like a one-world government. OPEC surfaced shortly after JFK was removed; he was the last to openly defy corporate monopolies. If we study the history, this is a dastardly handful of people with a long history of deceit as a tradition; they are somehow involved in or are the direct cause of literally every political conflict around the world today and in history. Anyone who wants to sell oil outside of OPEC control is deemed ""black market"" and gets the axe. Our military is assigned to protect the OPEC Monopoly. We have to fire on those Human Beings over there in the sand because they want to sell us their gas for a ""quarter"", like they used to before OPEC and still do everywhere else in the so-called evil world. Our leaders have forced this monopoly upon their own people and in so doing not only made us the world villains but they have sucked the life-blood out of our economy. Our cost of energy is at the base of our economy, when the cost of Energy disproportionately outgrew our means we began to fall. When the economy forced our moms to go out and work it broke up our most precious foundation, the family. We have sent our future to die to protect the OPEC Monopoly Agenda...
We must change the Energy Policy and allow open competition at the gas pumps. It would seem to be much safer for the people of the world to pay a quarter for gas to those people over there in the sand and stop the wars and quit that off-shore drilling? What if we can't stop that leak? How long will we survive if our oceans turn to oil? This situation is a direct result of ""Blind Greed!"" A thought of ""hogs at the trough"" comes to mind when I think about the oil people. Have you noticed, most of their effort has been to ""capture"" the oil?
Oil has deceived and damaged our world since the 1960s because of some short sighted Human Beings who decided to go against God's principles. Let's face it, crime pays today.
If we can see that everything that God has given us is totally positive all the way from the Three Billion tiny segments inside each one of our Three Billion tiny cells along with total automatic operating instructions for all to work in positive real-time unison. Plus, the biggie; A mind of our own, to plan and prepare to survive and a multitude of natural positive instincts. We can survive if we can learn how!
Where ever else we may find God, in the Bible, in the oceans, in the sky, I believe that the new DNA testing proves that God is our Original Father in a real physical sense, and that God lives on in the DNA of every Human Being on earth and that He tries so hard to communicate with us through our heart, our conscience. That would explain how He has been with us everywhere always. He would be in the physical part of our Being crying out, trying to guide our mental part, maybe? Everything about God is positive and everything that God has provided is positive, so what is the problem?
The problem could be the Devil. Let's go hunting for the Devil! Let's go hunting for the negative, the part of our world that we see destroying Man's achievements and realistically destroying Mankind and our wonderful world. Do we believe that he is red with a tail, and lives in Hell? He shouldn't be too hard to spot, unless we have been lied to about that also? Actually maybe that is why he has been so elusive through the centuries? To go with the entire picture of the hot molten cavern and the pitchfork etc., we are told that he is also very dangerous, ""don't think about him or he will get you!"" That is all Bull Stuff and we all know it when we hear it and we have wondered throughout our life why Man cannot come up with a better more realistic lie than that? We don't think about it or we don't want to, is probably a good reason why we don't have the slightest idea what the Devil really is? It is easy enough to see that he really does exist by the dastardly bloody destruction that he leaves behind. If we are going to hunt him we better know what he looks like. If everybody knows then he will have no where to hide.
A thought exists only in our own mind; we cannot see it or touch it, because it is actually nothing and yet it guides our actions. The Devil is only an evil thought conjured from within our own mind that we Human Beings act upon. Obviously it would be a thought that would lead Man away from God and God's intentions for us Human Beings. Man uses the Devil as an excuse to go against God and to believe that we are above Mankind...
Let's drag the Devil out by that stupid tail and stomp him! The Devil is ""nothing"", nothing more than a choice to act upon an ungodly thought...
""Things are different now, today we are a lot smarter than they were in the old days, you just wouldn't understand."" I can remember hearing my older sister tell that to my Dad back in1946. Of course everything is changing... except ""The Human Body"", and our needs to survive and thrive...
I believe that if we can see the truth and turn back to God and what He had in mind to preserve His masterpiece we might recognize the things that we have known all along?
May God Bless All"
It started as a game. I was thinking about an idea for a new video game. What would you do if you were suddenly saddled with the responsibility of saving the world? Your call, your decision, your baby, what would you do? And then it progressed into a more serious thought into virtual reality. Where would you start? In Iraq? Or some other trouble spot around the world? I watch a lot of news. News is basically depressing and often riling. It seems everyone has the same major stories and every station has a different view of the meaning. You have to watch them all and read between the lines to get the truth, and then you can never be sure.
I listened to the politicians, the Senators and the Congressmen and the Radio mouths and the TV clever comedians and each of them had a different idea. It seems they each have their own individual take on how to get rid of and punish, and destroy the other bad guys. The truth is seldom spoken and never popular. Then with a quick glance around the world (something we poor folks could not do before TV), and I see a world of turmoil. Everyone mad at each other and every individual on this earth has a different solution. The problems are uncountable with many wrong answers for each problem. People are frustrated because we are losing hope.
It seems if we are ever to find the answer we must leave this place where we are blinded by this turmoil and confusion. So let us leave this little hideout where we live and maybe go for a journey outside of the political cage, let's go look in from the outside. Like maybe from a spaceship circling the globe at high altitude, and try to see the world as a whole. We can look down through the clouds and see the oceans and the mountains and then we zoom in and there are all of those tiny people shooting at each other and tearing things up beneath a haze of smoke. And this space ship will allow us to see through ""time"" also. As far back as we can see Human Beings have fought and warred with each other. We have to fight each other if we want to fight because we Human Beings really have no enemy other than ourselves. In the whole of the universe so far we have no other enemies. Yet we struggle to survive in a world where we can feel that if we continue on this course with this ideology we will soon destroy everything that we have today. We all know this is not working.
But there may still be a way.
There may be a way to save the world, not easy, but fast and sure. We could change our minds and try speaking the truth. Is there such a thing as the truth these days? My people say, ""Oh Ya, big deal, like your truth is better than mine?"" I realize that we live in a world with an ideology that insists that we each have a different opinion about everything these days and where the truth seems to be hidden and politically incorrect. It seems that in order to be heard we must lie. Now I know that sounds pretty pessimistic, but the state of affairs that we face today requires some pretty heavy words and we must be able to speak the hard words if we are ever to be free, ""Only the truth can set us free.""
Have you ever thought how it is that words of deceit have brought us here to the brink of destruction? Our words and our choice of words that we use to communicate will guide us through the course of our future. How many words does it take to express our frustration with our leadership, is it because we all know through and through that something is basically wrong? We are so restricted by words, we dare not say the wrong word or we are bad.
Let me say some heavy words that will explain my thoughts;
Men and Women have walked hand in hand through time.
In the mind of Men;
""I must go fourth and crusade and conquer the world!""
In the mind of Women;
""I will follow but why must you sacrifice our children?""
It has always been words of ""deceit"" that have brought destruction to Mankind and for that matter destruction of the whole of our world. This is June, 2010, the oil spill, the upheavals in our Congress, our Churches and leadership around the world are proof positive where ""deceit"" can lead us, now we can see ""in lights"" in front of the whole world.
""Without the truth, we have absolutely nothing!""
Up until now I don't think we could handle the truth. I remember when Jack Nicholson snarled that in a Movie. And it is true, we used to burn people at the stake if we thought they were too different than what we understood, and we are greatly bound by the books and the politically accepted interpretation. We demand that our children grow up with our understanding of the truth. It is our duty of course to guide our children into this world as best we can as long as we can. But what if we have been lied to? What if some people have systematically lied to Mankind for centuries, what if Man has been lied to by other men since the beginning of time? What if God would much rather that we get along and worked together to save ourselves and this world?
There is a story I remember in the Bible about how Man started to build a tower to the Heavens and God gave them all a different language that separated them or something. I can see such an event with a reasonable answer; it was a bad idea and they all quit and separated, you know went off there own way. Likely to gather with and follow with those who agreed on why it was a bad idea. Today we could reverse that incident and turn it in our favor. We could all turn and look back at God and see what He really intended and offered us?
We, Mankind must get together and see the reality of our present and our future. We must recognize the basic needs and commonalities that God has given us for survival and try to abolish the many choices that we make to go against God, choices that destroy and diminish Mankind and our world.
The fact is if we intend to leave something, anything good for our children, we must get together. Around the world, today we could do that. It is no good unless we all agree to understand. We need to see what separates us and what brings us together. I mean we don't have to sleep together, but we could come together with a realization and a focus. Today we spend our life's worth and our hard earned money devising ways to separate each other and create high-tech weapons to destroy each other. We school our young to know who to hate and how to destroy others. It will take an event of meteor strength to get the attention of the people, maybe this oil disaster? When we do, we better have the right answers. The right answer could simply be ""the truth.""
The fact is that we have been separated since the beginning of time by differences of opinions. A difference of opinion created and promoted by men. Rooted deep in our history are endless tales of deceit created by some who feel that they will benefit in some way. Like maybe; ""Here ye, here ye, my fellow Man, let it be known and written in stone that from now and forever, God wills that I and my family and friends shall be considered Saintly, and you are all to bow and pay toll and know that my family is better than you and we are never, ever to be doubted nor held accountable as Human Beings."" Would you go for that? We do, we have for centuries. Our leaders deem themselves saintly and above Human scrutiny, it shackles our future to doom.
We grown-ups play a deadly game of; ""My God is Better than Your God so That Makes Me Better than You, game."" There is a different vision of God in the mind of every Human Being in the world, and none is the exact same, but none is better than any other. There is only one God, but we will ""choose"" to see Him in many different lights.
We cannot continue destroying each other and our world believing that it is God's will. We fight because we think we are all different. We all think we are pretty special and we are. But maybe not better than other Human Beings in Gods eyes. My uncle once told me ""always remember you are better than no one, but no one is better than you."" (I had no idea what he meant) It's like a pecking order in the chicken pen, in our case it is who ever has the most money has the biggest beak. I believe that God intended for Mankind to walk this earth in health and in peace forever. And I believe that He is counting us to figure out how we can do that. It is obviously going to have to be on a different path than this one. We cannot continue to trust Man's judgment and words of deceit; we must look to God for the TRUTH.
We most all of us know God exists. But have we really questioned where and how? Also, we must realize that God never wrote anything. I flat out ask God one time when I was recovering from my cancer operation in 1996, I ask;
""God where are you really? I have heard about you from my first memories, and they tell me you are in the heavens, in the sea and everywhere and I don't see how you can do that? I want to show you how much I appreciate. I can feel that you are here somewhere but?""
Maybe we can all feel in our heart that there really is a God, but? The thought that sort of came back to me from somewhere was, ""hey don't worry about it, just trust that I am here because you might not understand anyway."" Well I do trust that God exists but I need to know more now.
Just recall for a second how good if feels to gather in church and sing, when you are shoulder to shoulder with your fellow Man? You can actually feel the vibrations from each other, vibes, and your heart warms and your head tingles and you just want to hug somebody because you are all there in that place in that moment reaching for God. I believe that He is very much there and very much here at this moment.
I believe that we can ask God when we are in need of guidance. Seriously and in total reality, as if He was standing right here beside us, ask God what He thinks you should do, how you should see things. I know that sounds old, plain and empty, but let me tell you why I believe that.
I am not a scholar of religion or politics so I cannot speak in those terms, but I believe I have good common sense. Actually I believe that it is indeed religion and politics, one in the same, I believe it is religion and politics that have separated Mankind since the beginning of time... So let us for a moment put the Bible and the Political Deceit on the shelf, and everything that we have been told about mystery history. Let us take a non-biblical look at the world and try to find some answers;
Number One, God, where is He and what is He?
Number Two, let's go hunting for the Devil and kick his ass! Let's go in through the thorny bushes into that molten den and drag his red butt scratching and clawing out by that stupid looking tail and stomp him good. What do you say?
Oh yes lets use some fitting words. I believe that God is our creator, in the beginning I believe that God created us maybe of His own image, maybe so maybe not, but the fact is that He created this ""masterpiece"" of the Human Body with such great intricacies and complexities, that modern Man is just beginning to discover how far, far beyond our science fiction this body really is. Man will never be able to take a handful of dirt and make even one Human Body cell. God does it many times each day.
Science has proven that we are 99.9% the same inside. Now how can they prove that if we don't even have 99 parts? I can only count about 20 parts or so. But actually there are more, quite a few more, about Three Billion more actually.
That's right; science says that we have over Three Billion parts... all working... together... in real time. When you stub a toe, how long does it take to cuss? Now that is a phenomenon. Imagine, we can only see these tiny cells with a microscope, and guess what, inside of each one of these cells is a DNA Ribbon that contains over Three Billion segments that only show as tiny shadows on our most powerful computerized scope, one for each cell in our body. Science says that it is in this world so tiny, in these segments, inside of each cell, this is where ""ALL OF OUR GROWTH AND ALL OF OUR REPAIR TAKES PLACE, period!""
I know we boast about our modern technology but ""WOW"" compared to God's work we are babies.
We take our bodies greatly for granted. They say we are the same as Adam, the very first Man. The numbers prove that. When God created Adam, at that very instant Man became his own ""Entity"" like no other. The heart beat in your chest as in mine has been handed down from generation to generation like the ""Olympic Torch of Life"" all the way from Adam according to science.
We all know that evolution has occurred and all of those strange bones of monkeys and apes that they dig up are obviously simply those of Species that did not survive. There are no monkeys in Man's tree. The evolution of Man is what we see around the world today, what we see is what we got. We joke about the resemblance to other creatures but we all know the reality.
It is obvious that God installed a lot of instructions to go along with this masterpiece, which so far have worked wonders. Most of our instructions are set on automatic, but there are many others that we must recognize as instincts, because they require us to act upon them. So let us look at what we know God installed and how important it is to us.
God installed the instinct to live as the number one highest priority. We instinctively struggle till the last breath to live. Secondly we may have a toss-up between food and sex; we have to eat, but sometimes it can wait till after sex for a short time. I believe that God gave us the ultimate pleasure of sex for all the good reasons. Then next would be of course the instinct to love and be loved and to procreate and protect and do something good for our own and our future. We all feel the same pain in our flesh and in our heart for our losses. It is the ""protect"" instinct that generally brings us to fight each other, usually because we fear what the other bad guys might do or say or are doing. We will ""protect"" what we believe in to the death!
So let us make sure that what we believe in is, maybe what God intended for us? I suggest that God intended for us to walk this earth in health and in peace forever, and He gave us the brain power to figure out how to do that.
Would it be fair to say that God gave every Human Being on earth these gifts? Let us take a look at how it seems to me that Mankind has accepted these wonderful gifts from God.
#1 God gave us life and the ultimate instinct to live.
Man has decided. (Killing other Humans is OK if we want)
#2 God offers us His second most precious gift of sex and love.
Man decides. (We demean sex and marriage, celibacy is Holy)
#3 We all want to do something good for and procreate and protect our own and our future.
Man decides (only those ""chosen"" are deserving of fulfillment)
#4 It is wrong to cheat, and deceive your fellow Man in God's name.
Man Decides (God is nothing. It is noble and good and respectable to Lord over other Human Beings, and commit and promote crime and deceit, and to horde and waste while others struggle to survive. It is saintly to flaunt and brag about un-Godly thinking and actions. Today we can justify just about anything we want to do and have done.)
It seems to me that Mankind has deliberately been led away from God's obvious intentions for our survival.
Today our leaders have collectively teamed up to perpetrate and perpetuate the biggest crime in the history of Mankind. In all of our history and all of our principles the one single most dangerous entity to Mankind is ""The Corporate Monopoly!""
It is not the worst of it that the Drug Corporation Monopoly money controls our health system and our Congress with the influence of lobbyist, not the worst of it at all. I believe it is a corporation that has nearly taken our world with blatant and dastardly ungodly crimes.
I'm talking about a Corporation that wants the whole world, like a one-world government. OPEC surfaced shortly after JFK was removed; he was the last to openly defy corporate monopolies. If we study the history, this is a dastardly handful of people with a long history of deceit as a tradition; they are somehow involved in or are the direct cause of literally every political conflict around the world today and in history. Anyone who wants to sell oil outside of OPEC control is deemed ""black market"" and gets the axe. Our military is assigned to protect the OPEC Monopoly. We have to fire on those Human Beings over there in the sand because they want to sell us their gas for a ""quarter"", like they used to before OPEC and still do everywhere else in the so-called evil world. Our leaders have forced this monopoly upon their own people and in so doing not only made us the world villains but they have sucked the life-blood out of our economy. Our cost of energy is at the base of our economy, when the cost of Energy disproportionately outgrew our means we began to fall. When the economy forced our moms to go out and work it broke up our most precious foundation, the family. We have sent our future to die to protect the OPEC Monopoly Agenda...
We must change the Energy Policy and allow open competition at the gas pumps. It would seem to be much safer for the people of the world to pay a quarter for gas to those people over there in the sand and stop the wars and quit that off-shore drilling? What if we can't stop that leak? How long will we survive if our oceans turn to oil? This situation is a direct result of ""Blind Greed!"" A thought of ""hogs at the trough"" comes to mind when I think about the oil people. Have you noticed, most of their effort has been to ""capture"" the oil?
Oil has deceived and damaged our world since the 1960s because of some short sighted Human Beings who decided to go against God's principles. Let's face it, crime pays today.
If we can see that everything that God has given us is totally positive all the way from the Three Billion tiny segments inside each one of our Three Billion tiny cells along with total automatic operating instructions for all to work in positive real-time unison. Plus, the biggie; A mind of our own, to plan and prepare to survive and a multitude of natural positive instincts. We can survive if we can learn how!
Where ever else we may find God, in the Bible, in the oceans, in the sky, I believe that the new DNA testing proves that God is our Original Father in a real physical sense, and that God lives on in the DNA of every Human Being on earth and that He tries so hard to communicate with us through our heart, our conscience. That would explain how He has been with us everywhere always. He would be in the physical part of our Being crying out, trying to guide our mental part, maybe? Everything about God is positive and everything that God has provided is positive, so what is the problem?
The problem could be the Devil. Let's go hunting for the Devil! Let's go hunting for the negative, the part of our world that we see destroying Man's achievements and realistically destroying Mankind and our wonderful world. Do we believe that he is red with a tail, and lives in Hell? He shouldn't be too hard to spot, unless we have been lied to about that also? Actually maybe that is why he has been so elusive through the centuries? To go with the entire picture of the hot molten cavern and the pitchfork etc., we are told that he is also very dangerous, ""don't think about him or he will get you!"" That is all Bull Stuff and we all know it when we hear it and we have wondered throughout our life why Man cannot come up with a better more realistic lie than that? We don't think about it or we don't want to, is probably a good reason why we don't have the slightest idea what the Devil really is? It is easy enough to see that he really does exist by the dastardly bloody destruction that he leaves behind. If we are going to hunt him we better know what he looks like. If everybody knows then he will have no where to hide.
A thought exists only in our own mind; we cannot see it or touch it, because it is actually nothing and yet it guides our actions. The Devil is only an evil thought conjured from within our own mind that we Human Beings act upon. Obviously it would be a thought that would lead Man away from God and God's intentions for us Human Beings. Man uses the Devil as an excuse to go against God and to believe that we are above Mankind...
Let's drag the Devil out by that stupid tail and stomp him! The Devil is ""nothing"", nothing more than a choice to act upon an ungodly thought...
""Things are different now, today we are a lot smarter than they were in the old days, you just wouldn't understand."" I can remember hearing my older sister tell that to my Dad back in1946. Of course everything is changing... except ""The Human Body"", and our needs to survive and thrive...
I believe that if we can see the truth and turn back to God and what He had in mind to preserve His masterpiece we might recognize the things that we have known all along?
May God Bless All"
Smoking and Global Warming
"From a hotel room in Central Jakarta, Indonesia news agency Pena's final report describes the development of the tobacco industry today. This report in the form of 65 pages thick magazine with the headline on the front page ""Hypocrisy & Myths Behind the Tobacco Industry"".
Pena Indonesia claims this report is based on investigative reports on various search tobacco industry documents. Also includes two CD or compact disk that contains thousands of documents multinational industries in Indonesia. As the documents from British American Tobacco or BAT, Philips Morris and others.
The workshop was attended among journalists and health activists. Aim to provide insight into the existence of secret documents related to the coming of the giants of the world tobacco industry and its relationship with Indonesia.
This workshop also received support from the world health agency WHO's Indonesia representative, IAKMI-Public Health Specialist Association of Indonesia and SEATCA-The Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance.
Pena Indonesia to work for three months and glared through the computer. Digging thousands of documents online from seven giant cigarette recorded in the period 1960 until the early 2000s. At least there are about 28,000 of thousands more documents from British American Tobacco or BAT Indonesia is stored in digital libraries of the University of California, San Francisco, United States.
Walk through also take place in the site's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library that contains an internal document of Philips Morris, RJ Reynolds, Lorillard and Brown & Williamson. The result is reported and written by Farid Gaban and Alfian Hamzah from Pena Indonesia news agency and Mardiyah Chamim of Tempo Magazine. Coverage and support in the form of grant funding from Essential Action Global Partnership for Tobacco Control, based in Washington.
This story began in 1998. This year may be spelled out in the most unfortunate for the cigarette industry in America. Attorney General State of Minnesota, United States, Hubert Humphrey III blew the whistle loud warning to cigarette industry. Attorney General asked the seven smoking industry giants to open all their secret documents to the public. Aim to find the truth.
These documents are internal documents containing various letters to the authorities, scientists, media tricks to boost the tobacco business. Seven giant companies, among others, from Philip Morris Incorporated, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, British American Tobacco (BAT), Brown and Williamson, the Ligget Group and The Tobacco Institute and The Council for Tobacco Research and the Lorillard Tobacco Company.
American courts have six million documents with 35 million pages. Each page is a seal and code number of lawyers the industry to ensure its authenticity. The court also requires the tobacco industry parties in order to deposit the documents until the year 2008.
While in England, the mountains of British American Tobacco documents typically stored in the warehouse Guilford, Surrey, England. BAT archiving online documents is done by the University of California, San Francisco, United States.
There are seven million documents in the form of scanned documents. And spent about four years to make efforts for their hard work. Unfortunately, according to Duncan Cambell, an American investigative journalist who helped search smoking industry documents, the claim that there are about 181 file that contains thousands of pages of documents had been lost. These missing documents are not clear and it is possible rimbanya associated with regions of other countries, like Indonesia.
One of the investigations of this American smoking industry had contrived movie ""The Insider"" that tell about the search an American television journalist uncover fraud in the levels toxins. Media in the United States to encourage and influence the people that smoking is a threat. Cigarettes became citizen issues and then encouraging the birth of a strict smoking regulations and basic.
Tobacco industry should be controlled and strictly controlled. For owners in the U.S. tobacco industry is not a condition of a good climate. And ask the American government to the strict rules that only apply in the United States alone. And does not apply to international business networks in different parts of other countries. Post-1998 invasion was in progress. And objectives that cigarette owners are the countries that enter the third country groups.
How to countries in the region, especially Indonesia in association with the document? Indonesia belonged to a third country is not it? Indonesia is a land tender and a haven for the global tobacco industry of the world. Tobacco industry in Indonesia incarnate and was like a ""kingdom"" of its own. He played many roles and automatic movements do not get a lot of obstacles and barriers.
Either statutory, economic, social to the political path. The smoking industry in Indonesia grew rapidly and slippery. Borrowing the term's largest daily newspaper in West Java, the People's Mind, the tobacco industry as ""Spreads and entrenched"". Not a lot of media in Indonesia to criticism, preaching especially to make a profound statement relating cigarette industry is. Indonesia received with open field every movement, ideas, and the influence of the tobacco industry in developing its business extensively.
We can learn many things from the tobacco industry documents. Learn how they work, determine the position and influence policy makers, economic, media until the ""buy-sell"" research. The document gives a clear and detailed. We just need to work hard, carefully detailing, and built of sheets of documents to obtain a complete picture of the building of the world tobacco industry as a whole.
According to the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA)-based institutions in Thailand, in its report Profiting from Death: Exposing the Tobacco Industry Tactics in ASEAN Countries, October 2007, explained that until now the region cigarette consumption of about 50 per cent of world tobacco consumption. And Asia considered as an important market future of the world tobacco industry.
While 10 countries joined to the ASEAN approximately 31 percent or 125.8 million ASEAN youth population are smokers. Or about 10 percent-1, 25 billion-from the number of young smokers smokers of the world continue to increase and the country joined ASEAN contributed to the death rate from smoking as much as 20 percent!
SEATCA is a partnership network of state agencies that merged into the ASEAN which undertakes research, advocacy and capacity building in each of its members. SEATCA work and build advocacy mission to its members who have made ratification of the WHO convention, tobacco control over the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) - including Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam. While Indonesia is the only country in Asia which until this moment has not ratified these conventions.
WHO convention on tobacco control is essential to apply in the cigarette industry in Indonesia. This Convention will regulate and control the tobacco industry. There are about 38 articles in the convention and aims to improve the quality of global health.
Business development to move the tobacco industry is not in the form of a single strategic one. Business strategy will follow the situation in each area of development. He worked to organize and determine the target groups, facilitate the political policies that support good business that comes from the government or the people's representatives, to work with anyone to make promotional efforts and form a fully market.
Tobacco industry to build its image through a variety of ways. From the ad creates a direct communication with consumers by placing cigarette products through billboards, print ads and electronic media, posters, accessories, colors and logo outlets that causes the image of tobacco products.
Promotional activities by distributing free cigarette samples, offers coupons, contests, lotteries, tickets to watch sports games and racing, music concerts, fund a film, talk shows, street party to its activities in the form of corporate social responsibility or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR ) which supports scholarships, environmental aid projects and other activities under the company name or the name of the tobacco industry products. Including providing scholarships to journalists and school children are achievers.
SEATCA survey research on the control status of the rules about promotion, advertising, CSR and sponsorship in seven ASEAN countries in 2007. Including in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Five countries have quite strict rules to regulate the issue ads, prmosi, sponsorship and CSR.
These five countries include Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Of these five countries, Thailand has very strict rules against tobacco industry and conduct strict limits. Two of the most free, no rules, no control and no restrictions are Cambodia and Indonesia!
Cambodia and Indonesia is a paradise for the tobacco industry. The two countries are relatively poor country is not it? Indonesia is estimated to have poverty rates of 49 percent with the cost of living average of two dollars per day for America. Both do not have rules and restrictions governing tobacco control issues closely.
For the tobacco industry is the most profitable opportunities. Cigarette industry has any power and capital to boost its business and profit maximization. The industry offers a dream potion and promotional advertising to the public to climb out of poverty.
And offer words suggestive ads and interesting success. This is a dream and the dream for all people. Tobacco industry's success by offering a cigarette. Giving up tobacco are one of the main way for each person to climb out of poverty and live success quickly.
Poverty became the land for profit. And the industry was well aware of this condition. Poverty, lack of regional representation and the role of government, lack of political consciousness, and the role of the media who are helpless in cigarette advertising.
AC Nielsen figures show the year 2006 tobacco sector advertising expenditure of Rp 1.6 trillion. Which moron media would lose and the offer of money for it? One media in Indonesia may be conscious and choose not to accept tobacco ads. But the question is the extent to which the power of this medium will survive? And refrain from the onslaught of cigarette advertising.
Cigarettes became the main consumption for the poor. Cigarette consumption throughout the year reached 225 billion sticks. Cigarettes have a 4000 toxic chemicals. And cigarettes are the leading cause of cancer-causing disease, heart and other diseases that cause death in the long run. Every year people die as indicated by the cigarette causes as many as 400 thousand in Indonesia!
The number of smokers Indonesia increased sharply. Based on the national economic survey Statistic The Central Bureau in the period 2001-2004, there has been surge in novice smokers and under the age of 10 years rose 0.4 percent to 2.8 percent. National Commission on Child Protection also get a number that 90 percent of teenagers smoke because of advertising Indonesia. Teenagers became the main target for the tobacco industry.
This figure is worrying, and then in February 2007 several members of the legislature moved to make some rules to restrict smoking. These rules are expected to restrict, control and restrict tobacco issues involving the activities of young children. This rule also requires an increase in cigarette excise tax by 60 percent to minimize people buy cigarettes. And encouraged to expand research on the impact of smoking on health.
In 1999, Indonesia has issued Government Regulation 81 / 1999 concerning Security Cigarettes For Health, Government Regulation 38/1999 on Procedures for the Tobacco Product Advertising Media and Government Regulation 19/2003 regarding the obligations of cigarette manufacturers to include warnings on product packaging.
Indonesia also benefited from this condition. From the cigarette industry sector contribution in the form of tax revenue amounting to Rp 38.5 trillion last year. And this year is expected to increase to Rp 42 trillion.
Cigarette business in Indonesia is very sweet. Two Indonesian families who do business in the ranks of cigarettes in the world's richest list of Forbes Magazine. Rachman Halim family including Gudang Garam owners with assets of U.S. $ 1.9 billion and occupies 538 warning. Budi Hartono and family of the order of Djarum 664 with assets of U.S. $ 1.5 billion.
Indonesia's cigarette tax mostly cheap compared with other countries. Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore set the cigarette tax by 70 percent. While in Indonesia, just set the highest cigarette tax by 40 percent. With this tax rate retail price of cigarettes in Indonesia is the fifth of the price compared to the price of cigarettes in Malaysia.
The price of cheap cigarettes is boosting consumer smokers in Indonesia. Access to cigarettes is very easy. Based on the last survey the WHO and the American Cancer Society, about 70 percent of Indonesian smokers are male. And 3 percent of women smokers Indonesia.
Indonesia plays a dual role misleading. One side of the income he earned from cigarette but on the other hand many of Indonesia will lose its human resources because of damage caused by cigarettes. But health insurance companies in Indonesia which would warranty his client about the consequences of smoking?
Anti-smoking campaign world continues to strengthen. Rich countries and educated aware of the dangers from smoking. Anti-smoking movement harder and try to campaign on this issue at the level of the global movement. Federation of Football Association (FIFA) and even signed an agreement with WHO to regulate and prohibit tobacco sponsorship in the football field.
MTV supports anti-smoking campaign and urged teenagers not to smoke. Countries in Europe and other Asian and ratify the convention followed tobacco control (FCTC).
But resistance to the cigarette industry in Indonesia is still very weak. Anti-smoking movement both from citizens, communities, doctors, including from the media yet strong. WHO Indonesia chose a few names of artists and athletes for the national sports anti-smoking campaign. Among tennis champion Angelique Widjaja, bodybuilder Ade Rai, and model Tracy Trinita.
But not enough to represent all three and move the people of Indonesia to establish anti-smoking movement. Indonesia needs a great figure and steady for anti-smoking movement. Not just a slogan anti-smoking course. But the anti-smoking movement is broad and strategic.
In short, the anti-smoking movement in Indonesia is still classified as impotent. He needs power and a strong force to stem the solid and aggressive opposition from the tobacco industry. And the journalist is to write the movement and continue to oversee the expansion of logging from the cigarette industry.
Advertising and propaganda war going on in the struggle of black smoke world. And Indonesia is a powerful combat areas to map the world of today's global cigarette. This is also related to the local cigarette industry in Indonesia. As the local industry in the Spirit, Malang, Jember and Kediri. Local cigarette industry in Indonesia has also played an important role in influencing the smoking community.
In Indonesia, known as clove cigarettes while smoking outside the product known as white smoke. Local cigarette industry is small kings tobacco and many are in Java. Expansion of the world tobacco industry bosses squirm with aggressive and strong and try to master the current market share. White cigarettes clove cigarettes fight.
Who is most powerful? The smoking industry to build myths, facts and misleading research about smoking. And we know that the victims of the battle is the health of everyday citizens will decline. Indonesia and countries allow their citizens health downfall.
The facts of the dangers of cigarettes and dark tobacco industry's propaganda is clear. Cigarettes are not for compromise but should be controlled and regulated by the government and the legislature. Indonesian society should be aware that cigarettes are now become an alarming epidemic.
The event will end in 2007 Indonesia was elected to conduct a global discussion about global warming. Took place in December in Bali. Global discussions is very important to discuss and take strategic steps related to the issue of global warming and the environment. Indonesia is also classified as bad in the environmental area.
Indonesia, including the red-prone areas in environmental issues such as illegal logging, mining, industrial pollution and waste emissions from motor vehicles. This global discussion will produce decisions and policies are very important. The result will encourage each state leaders and citizens to support and implement strategic measures to curb global warming today.
I was shocked when he read a daily newspaper, the National Journal. At the bottom of the column main page newspaper ads plastered on the implementation of a global warming in Bali later. With a dominant ads with light green color close to the color icon environmental issues.
This print ad includes a statement or countdown days in December 2007. These ads also put the name of a cigarette company, Sampoerna and have the word ""Green"" which could also be interpreted to refer to one of the main products of the Sampoerna cigarette.
I am sad to see the discussion of global warming will have to obtain sponsorship from the tobacco industry. The business and its profits are the majority coming from Indonesia's poor. Perhaps the sadness I continue to dissolve and be a voice lost and forgotten in the noisy turmoil of global warming event later.
This should be an important note, the mirror itself and becomes a question of us all. Environmental issues are common issues. He departed from his conscience and our common sense. What is worthy of global warming event comes from a tobacco company? Cigarettes, however, the toxin and one of the main causes of death. Is not nothing wrong that the global warming program would come from the tobacco industry?
A pile of tobacco industry internal documents they provided a clear answer. Problem tactics, plans, strategies, political lobbying and build awareness about the error and dirty cigarettes.
I am very sorry critical discussion of global warming there are stains and thorns. This becomes a wedge and a slap on the cliches of the world. As if life and life is going on and started from a cigarette.
Cigarette slogan is not lip service. And strength in the cigarette industry in Indonesia indicate that fact. And this is not true. Tobacco industry is seen to make traps and myths. Cigarettes are an important issue of humanity. Life of the cigarette world full of compromise power, deceit and dark strategy.
And it is probably true in the world struggle of cigarettes, as he had been written by Ben Jonson long ago in The Alchemist (The Alchemist) that ""Alchemy was a kind of game, Like a card trick, to deceive man, with great charm""."
Pena Indonesia claims this report is based on investigative reports on various search tobacco industry documents. Also includes two CD or compact disk that contains thousands of documents multinational industries in Indonesia. As the documents from British American Tobacco or BAT, Philips Morris and others.
The workshop was attended among journalists and health activists. Aim to provide insight into the existence of secret documents related to the coming of the giants of the world tobacco industry and its relationship with Indonesia.
This workshop also received support from the world health agency WHO's Indonesia representative, IAKMI-Public Health Specialist Association of Indonesia and SEATCA-The Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance.
Pena Indonesia to work for three months and glared through the computer. Digging thousands of documents online from seven giant cigarette recorded in the period 1960 until the early 2000s. At least there are about 28,000 of thousands more documents from British American Tobacco or BAT Indonesia is stored in digital libraries of the University of California, San Francisco, United States.
Walk through also take place in the site's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library that contains an internal document of Philips Morris, RJ Reynolds, Lorillard and Brown & Williamson. The result is reported and written by Farid Gaban and Alfian Hamzah from Pena Indonesia news agency and Mardiyah Chamim of Tempo Magazine. Coverage and support in the form of grant funding from Essential Action Global Partnership for Tobacco Control, based in Washington.
This story began in 1998. This year may be spelled out in the most unfortunate for the cigarette industry in America. Attorney General State of Minnesota, United States, Hubert Humphrey III blew the whistle loud warning to cigarette industry. Attorney General asked the seven smoking industry giants to open all their secret documents to the public. Aim to find the truth.
These documents are internal documents containing various letters to the authorities, scientists, media tricks to boost the tobacco business. Seven giant companies, among others, from Philip Morris Incorporated, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, British American Tobacco (BAT), Brown and Williamson, the Ligget Group and The Tobacco Institute and The Council for Tobacco Research and the Lorillard Tobacco Company.
American courts have six million documents with 35 million pages. Each page is a seal and code number of lawyers the industry to ensure its authenticity. The court also requires the tobacco industry parties in order to deposit the documents until the year 2008.
While in England, the mountains of British American Tobacco documents typically stored in the warehouse Guilford, Surrey, England. BAT archiving online documents is done by the University of California, San Francisco, United States.
There are seven million documents in the form of scanned documents. And spent about four years to make efforts for their hard work. Unfortunately, according to Duncan Cambell, an American investigative journalist who helped search smoking industry documents, the claim that there are about 181 file that contains thousands of pages of documents had been lost. These missing documents are not clear and it is possible rimbanya associated with regions of other countries, like Indonesia.
One of the investigations of this American smoking industry had contrived movie ""The Insider"" that tell about the search an American television journalist uncover fraud in the levels toxins. Media in the United States to encourage and influence the people that smoking is a threat. Cigarettes became citizen issues and then encouraging the birth of a strict smoking regulations and basic.
Tobacco industry should be controlled and strictly controlled. For owners in the U.S. tobacco industry is not a condition of a good climate. And ask the American government to the strict rules that only apply in the United States alone. And does not apply to international business networks in different parts of other countries. Post-1998 invasion was in progress. And objectives that cigarette owners are the countries that enter the third country groups.
How to countries in the region, especially Indonesia in association with the document? Indonesia belonged to a third country is not it? Indonesia is a land tender and a haven for the global tobacco industry of the world. Tobacco industry in Indonesia incarnate and was like a ""kingdom"" of its own. He played many roles and automatic movements do not get a lot of obstacles and barriers.
Either statutory, economic, social to the political path. The smoking industry in Indonesia grew rapidly and slippery. Borrowing the term's largest daily newspaper in West Java, the People's Mind, the tobacco industry as ""Spreads and entrenched"". Not a lot of media in Indonesia to criticism, preaching especially to make a profound statement relating cigarette industry is. Indonesia received with open field every movement, ideas, and the influence of the tobacco industry in developing its business extensively.
We can learn many things from the tobacco industry documents. Learn how they work, determine the position and influence policy makers, economic, media until the ""buy-sell"" research. The document gives a clear and detailed. We just need to work hard, carefully detailing, and built of sheets of documents to obtain a complete picture of the building of the world tobacco industry as a whole.
According to the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA)-based institutions in Thailand, in its report Profiting from Death: Exposing the Tobacco Industry Tactics in ASEAN Countries, October 2007, explained that until now the region cigarette consumption of about 50 per cent of world tobacco consumption. And Asia considered as an important market future of the world tobacco industry.
While 10 countries joined to the ASEAN approximately 31 percent or 125.8 million ASEAN youth population are smokers. Or about 10 percent-1, 25 billion-from the number of young smokers smokers of the world continue to increase and the country joined ASEAN contributed to the death rate from smoking as much as 20 percent!
SEATCA is a partnership network of state agencies that merged into the ASEAN which undertakes research, advocacy and capacity building in each of its members. SEATCA work and build advocacy mission to its members who have made ratification of the WHO convention, tobacco control over the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) - including Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam. While Indonesia is the only country in Asia which until this moment has not ratified these conventions.
WHO convention on tobacco control is essential to apply in the cigarette industry in Indonesia. This Convention will regulate and control the tobacco industry. There are about 38 articles in the convention and aims to improve the quality of global health.
Business development to move the tobacco industry is not in the form of a single strategic one. Business strategy will follow the situation in each area of development. He worked to organize and determine the target groups, facilitate the political policies that support good business that comes from the government or the people's representatives, to work with anyone to make promotional efforts and form a fully market.
Tobacco industry to build its image through a variety of ways. From the ad creates a direct communication with consumers by placing cigarette products through billboards, print ads and electronic media, posters, accessories, colors and logo outlets that causes the image of tobacco products.
Promotional activities by distributing free cigarette samples, offers coupons, contests, lotteries, tickets to watch sports games and racing, music concerts, fund a film, talk shows, street party to its activities in the form of corporate social responsibility or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR ) which supports scholarships, environmental aid projects and other activities under the company name or the name of the tobacco industry products. Including providing scholarships to journalists and school children are achievers.
SEATCA survey research on the control status of the rules about promotion, advertising, CSR and sponsorship in seven ASEAN countries in 2007. Including in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Five countries have quite strict rules to regulate the issue ads, prmosi, sponsorship and CSR.
These five countries include Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Of these five countries, Thailand has very strict rules against tobacco industry and conduct strict limits. Two of the most free, no rules, no control and no restrictions are Cambodia and Indonesia!
Cambodia and Indonesia is a paradise for the tobacco industry. The two countries are relatively poor country is not it? Indonesia is estimated to have poverty rates of 49 percent with the cost of living average of two dollars per day for America. Both do not have rules and restrictions governing tobacco control issues closely.
For the tobacco industry is the most profitable opportunities. Cigarette industry has any power and capital to boost its business and profit maximization. The industry offers a dream potion and promotional advertising to the public to climb out of poverty.
And offer words suggestive ads and interesting success. This is a dream and the dream for all people. Tobacco industry's success by offering a cigarette. Giving up tobacco are one of the main way for each person to climb out of poverty and live success quickly.
Poverty became the land for profit. And the industry was well aware of this condition. Poverty, lack of regional representation and the role of government, lack of political consciousness, and the role of the media who are helpless in cigarette advertising.
AC Nielsen figures show the year 2006 tobacco sector advertising expenditure of Rp 1.6 trillion. Which moron media would lose and the offer of money for it? One media in Indonesia may be conscious and choose not to accept tobacco ads. But the question is the extent to which the power of this medium will survive? And refrain from the onslaught of cigarette advertising.
Cigarettes became the main consumption for the poor. Cigarette consumption throughout the year reached 225 billion sticks. Cigarettes have a 4000 toxic chemicals. And cigarettes are the leading cause of cancer-causing disease, heart and other diseases that cause death in the long run. Every year people die as indicated by the cigarette causes as many as 400 thousand in Indonesia!
The number of smokers Indonesia increased sharply. Based on the national economic survey Statistic The Central Bureau in the period 2001-2004, there has been surge in novice smokers and under the age of 10 years rose 0.4 percent to 2.8 percent. National Commission on Child Protection also get a number that 90 percent of teenagers smoke because of advertising Indonesia. Teenagers became the main target for the tobacco industry.
This figure is worrying, and then in February 2007 several members of the legislature moved to make some rules to restrict smoking. These rules are expected to restrict, control and restrict tobacco issues involving the activities of young children. This rule also requires an increase in cigarette excise tax by 60 percent to minimize people buy cigarettes. And encouraged to expand research on the impact of smoking on health.
In 1999, Indonesia has issued Government Regulation 81 / 1999 concerning Security Cigarettes For Health, Government Regulation 38/1999 on Procedures for the Tobacco Product Advertising Media and Government Regulation 19/2003 regarding the obligations of cigarette manufacturers to include warnings on product packaging.
Indonesia also benefited from this condition. From the cigarette industry sector contribution in the form of tax revenue amounting to Rp 38.5 trillion last year. And this year is expected to increase to Rp 42 trillion.
Cigarette business in Indonesia is very sweet. Two Indonesian families who do business in the ranks of cigarettes in the world's richest list of Forbes Magazine. Rachman Halim family including Gudang Garam owners with assets of U.S. $ 1.9 billion and occupies 538 warning. Budi Hartono and family of the order of Djarum 664 with assets of U.S. $ 1.5 billion.
Indonesia's cigarette tax mostly cheap compared with other countries. Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore set the cigarette tax by 70 percent. While in Indonesia, just set the highest cigarette tax by 40 percent. With this tax rate retail price of cigarettes in Indonesia is the fifth of the price compared to the price of cigarettes in Malaysia.
The price of cheap cigarettes is boosting consumer smokers in Indonesia. Access to cigarettes is very easy. Based on the last survey the WHO and the American Cancer Society, about 70 percent of Indonesian smokers are male. And 3 percent of women smokers Indonesia.
Indonesia plays a dual role misleading. One side of the income he earned from cigarette but on the other hand many of Indonesia will lose its human resources because of damage caused by cigarettes. But health insurance companies in Indonesia which would warranty his client about the consequences of smoking?
Anti-smoking campaign world continues to strengthen. Rich countries and educated aware of the dangers from smoking. Anti-smoking movement harder and try to campaign on this issue at the level of the global movement. Federation of Football Association (FIFA) and even signed an agreement with WHO to regulate and prohibit tobacco sponsorship in the football field.
MTV supports anti-smoking campaign and urged teenagers not to smoke. Countries in Europe and other Asian and ratify the convention followed tobacco control (FCTC).
But resistance to the cigarette industry in Indonesia is still very weak. Anti-smoking movement both from citizens, communities, doctors, including from the media yet strong. WHO Indonesia chose a few names of artists and athletes for the national sports anti-smoking campaign. Among tennis champion Angelique Widjaja, bodybuilder Ade Rai, and model Tracy Trinita.
But not enough to represent all three and move the people of Indonesia to establish anti-smoking movement. Indonesia needs a great figure and steady for anti-smoking movement. Not just a slogan anti-smoking course. But the anti-smoking movement is broad and strategic.
In short, the anti-smoking movement in Indonesia is still classified as impotent. He needs power and a strong force to stem the solid and aggressive opposition from the tobacco industry. And the journalist is to write the movement and continue to oversee the expansion of logging from the cigarette industry.
Advertising and propaganda war going on in the struggle of black smoke world. And Indonesia is a powerful combat areas to map the world of today's global cigarette. This is also related to the local cigarette industry in Indonesia. As the local industry in the Spirit, Malang, Jember and Kediri. Local cigarette industry in Indonesia has also played an important role in influencing the smoking community.
In Indonesia, known as clove cigarettes while smoking outside the product known as white smoke. Local cigarette industry is small kings tobacco and many are in Java. Expansion of the world tobacco industry bosses squirm with aggressive and strong and try to master the current market share. White cigarettes clove cigarettes fight.
Who is most powerful? The smoking industry to build myths, facts and misleading research about smoking. And we know that the victims of the battle is the health of everyday citizens will decline. Indonesia and countries allow their citizens health downfall.
The facts of the dangers of cigarettes and dark tobacco industry's propaganda is clear. Cigarettes are not for compromise but should be controlled and regulated by the government and the legislature. Indonesian society should be aware that cigarettes are now become an alarming epidemic.
The event will end in 2007 Indonesia was elected to conduct a global discussion about global warming. Took place in December in Bali. Global discussions is very important to discuss and take strategic steps related to the issue of global warming and the environment. Indonesia is also classified as bad in the environmental area.
Indonesia, including the red-prone areas in environmental issues such as illegal logging, mining, industrial pollution and waste emissions from motor vehicles. This global discussion will produce decisions and policies are very important. The result will encourage each state leaders and citizens to support and implement strategic measures to curb global warming today.
I was shocked when he read a daily newspaper, the National Journal. At the bottom of the column main page newspaper ads plastered on the implementation of a global warming in Bali later. With a dominant ads with light green color close to the color icon environmental issues.
This print ad includes a statement or countdown days in December 2007. These ads also put the name of a cigarette company, Sampoerna and have the word ""Green"" which could also be interpreted to refer to one of the main products of the Sampoerna cigarette.
I am sad to see the discussion of global warming will have to obtain sponsorship from the tobacco industry. The business and its profits are the majority coming from Indonesia's poor. Perhaps the sadness I continue to dissolve and be a voice lost and forgotten in the noisy turmoil of global warming event later.
This should be an important note, the mirror itself and becomes a question of us all. Environmental issues are common issues. He departed from his conscience and our common sense. What is worthy of global warming event comes from a tobacco company? Cigarettes, however, the toxin and one of the main causes of death. Is not nothing wrong that the global warming program would come from the tobacco industry?
A pile of tobacco industry internal documents they provided a clear answer. Problem tactics, plans, strategies, political lobbying and build awareness about the error and dirty cigarettes.
I am very sorry critical discussion of global warming there are stains and thorns. This becomes a wedge and a slap on the cliches of the world. As if life and life is going on and started from a cigarette.
Cigarette slogan is not lip service. And strength in the cigarette industry in Indonesia indicate that fact. And this is not true. Tobacco industry is seen to make traps and myths. Cigarettes are an important issue of humanity. Life of the cigarette world full of compromise power, deceit and dark strategy.
And it is probably true in the world struggle of cigarettes, as he had been written by Ben Jonson long ago in The Alchemist (The Alchemist) that ""Alchemy was a kind of game, Like a card trick, to deceive man, with great charm""."
The Parenthood Career
"The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965
Parenthood involves more than childrearing. It is the legal and physical custody of a child as child and parent grow together. Most parents successfully raise their children without consciously experiencing parenthood's developmental phases. They enhance their coping skills, altruism and self-respect as they work through their own unresolved developmental issues. For example, being a parent activates both positive and negative memories of relationships with one's own parents.
People who successfully master these challenges achieve new levels of psychological and emotional maturity along with their children.
Carolyn Newberger, professor of psychology at Harvard University, described how parenthood moves from egoistic to integrative phases:
Phase 1: Egoistic
Parents are self-focused and see their children as extensions of themselves.
Phase 2: Conventional
Perspectives shift from self-centeredness to childrearing practices drawn from traditions, experts and age-related norms.
Phase 3: Individualistic
Children are viewed as unique individuals.
Phase 4: Integrative
Parents learn and mature with their children in their families, communities and society.
Most parents intuitively meet their challenges. Many need help learning how to grow with their children. Some need education and clinical treatment to function competently. A comparatively small percentage but critically large number is unable to function competently. Typically these are adolescents and dependent adults.
We Need a Paradigm Shift
The family is the most fragile of all human institutions, yet it is the bedrock of civilization. Its strength lies in the cohesion and loyalty of the parent-child relationship from which the larger world of kin, community and nation evolves. Our moral stature and our social organization flow from parenthood. It is the source of the work ethic as well as our human capital. Self-assertive social and integrative cultural values are blended in the crucible of parenthood.
Families produce future generations. They protect members against ill health, old age, unemployment and other hazards. Especially in the United States, family relationships are strained by the tension between self-assertive social values and integrative cultural values. Is a child a parent's private property? Or is a parent a child's temporary legal and physical custodian?
Both the extreme political left and the right espouse self-assertive values that regard children as private property. The far left stresses the freedom of parents to do as they wish. The far right stresses the privacy of the family. Both extremes assert that parenthood is outside the public domain. Both avoid holding parents responsible for their children's behavior. To do so is ""parent blaming,"" they say.
These extreme self-assertive views need to be balanced by integrative values. But the act of balancing them creates friction between competing personal interests as well as between ""the world as it is"" and ""the world as it ought to be."" Like the encircling polarities of the Chinese yin/yang symbol, the world that is and the world that ought to be are intertwined.
The World That Is
Self-assertive capitalism regards the family as a unit for generating money that will be spent on goods and services. It creates winners and losers and undermines reciprocity, altruism and mutual obligation... vital ingredients for the common good. Ironically, self-assertive capitalism weakens the civil society without which the marketplace itself cannot survive.
All wealthy nations, including the United States, are welfare states... that is, they are primarily capitalist states with large, selective doses of socialism. In Wealth & Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or Leader?, Irwin Garfinkel, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding point out that by its nature, capitalism produces too much economic insecurity. The objective of state welfare institutions is, therefore, to reduce economic insecurity.
Certain institutions families, congregations, service clubs, athletic groups, parent-teacher associations and social organizations offset self-assertive capitalism. They hold our society together, but they are under pressure.
Families have become money machines that generate income to pay off debts. Work schedules are more important than family schedules. Undisciplined consumption is encouraged. Television pumps out images that oppose cultural integrative values. The desire for status is so strong that children attempt to display their worthiness through material things others want or envy. Low-income families struggle to provide these items so their children can achieve some degree of status in school. In contrast, if children are involved in extracurricular, family or community-oriented activities, they don't need to consume to achieve status.
If we were a true materialistic society, we would value making, using and keeping material things for functional and aesthetic purposes. We would value and enjoy natural and manufactured goods. Instead we are a consumer society in which commodities are sold and discarded. Our economy depends upon planned obsolescence, a throw away orientation.
Unfortunately, promoting consumption of disposable commodities carries over into human relationships. People are viewed as means to an end. They are only consumers of goods and services. Producers and service providers have no commitment beyond satisfying the needs and pleasures of consumers.
This attitude leaks out to color all kinds of relationships. It's most obvious in the temporary ""hook-up"" sexual affairs seen today, but it also permeates family relationships. Cohabitation avoids the legal obligations of marriage. Marriage is seen as disposable when one partner no longer meets the other's needs. Children can be designed through technical procedures and gestated by surrogates. They can be adopted if an individual has enough money to pay others to obtain them. Children have become commodities.
In Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, Rebecca Asher describes how women who set off on a footing of equality with their partners are betrayed by them when babies arrive. Mothers become ""foundation parents"" and de facto ""household drudges,"" condemned to professional sidelining and part-time jobs because fathers fail to pull their weight. Mothers feel victimized, fathers feel guilty. The pair that started out on an equal-opportunity journey through life ends up sniping at each other, or scoring weary points. Many split up.
Internationally, the commodification of children is blatantly obvious. Worldwide, 1.2 million children are abducted, bought and sold each year. Every day children as young as nine are abducted or taken under false pretenses from their villages by human traffickers. These girls and boys are promised good jobs and good pay but they end up working in brothels, mines and sweatshops. For example, more than 200,000 Nepalese girls are believed to be victims of this international trade.
In the United States, the commodification of children is less obvious, but here are some examples:
• A Texas Senator proposed a bill that would permit a $500 payment to each woman who places a child for adoption rather than have an abortion. The intention was to provide an incentive to avoid abortion and make an adoption plan. Such a proposal implies that a value can be set on a newborn baby $500 in this case. It ignores the costs of pregnancy, pre-natal care, childbirth and any complications thereof.
• Rebecca Taylor tried to sell her 5-month-old boy for $10,000. Taylor never bonded with the child and needed the money to get another apartment. She was charged with offering the sale of a child.
• Through Fertility Choices Worldwide the cost of hiring a surrogate mother to produce a baby can range from $103,000 to $165,000, although she receives a fraction of the cost.
Challenges for Parents
Parenthood is an economic burden for too many parents. In the United States, our society expects parents to rear their children without adequate resources. The lack of childcare, health care and effective education saps the rewards of parenthood and is detrimental to our society. Parents are distracted by:
• The decline of committed, sacrificial relationships that results in weak family bonds;
• Viewing children as extensions of themselves rather than as life companions;
• Pleasing children rather than expecting them to contribute to family wellbeing;
• Guilt for being imperfect parents; and
• Stress that makes employment away from home attractive and that strains parental relationships.
Efforts to integrate childrearing and employment demonstrate the consequences of delegating parenting functions. After sixty years, the Israeli kibbutzim modified the care of babies and toddlers in separate children's houses because of its negative effects on parent-child relationships and on adult outcomes. The inability of Kibbutz-raised children to engage in intimate personal relationships was traced to early environments lacking cohesion and continuity because of transient, superficial interactions with caregivers. Virtually all kibbutz babies now receive maternal care at home during their first year of life as their mothers gradually return to the workplace. In the United States, it will take years to assess the long-term effects of today's delegated childcare of babies and toddlers on child development and adult outcomes.
The World That Ought To Be
Commercial marketing uses world as it ought to be symbols. Slogans such as Be all that you can be, Reach out and touch someone, and Own a piece of the rock focus on appealing cultural values.
John Maynard Keynes concluded in the 1930s that unchecked ""animal spirits"" emotions, human impulses, enthusiasms and misperceptions drive the economy into booms and busts in a market system that fails to govern itself. On the other hand, tempered by government and safely channeled into healthy capitalism, these same animal spirits can be a source of entrepreneurial energy and benefit everyone.
Most modern social and environmental problems like ill health, lack of community, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours and large prison populations are more likely to occur in a society with large gaps between classes. Addressing inequality in our society would benefit everyone, the well-off as well as the poor.
Our young people's social, economic, health and educational problems require integrative community and social efforts that include racial and cultural diversity. Still our service systems often view children and youth separately from their families and communities. Programs for different categories of problems treat children as freestanding units and focus on school, peer, social class, racial, neighborhood and societal factors rather than on their homes.
These problems could be minimized if our society recognized that parenthood is a career with economic and social value and that it is our society's foundation. This would shift the balance from self-centered consumerism to a friendlier and more integrative society.
Because competent parents are essential for our society's survival, minimum legal standards should be set for determining a person's readiness to assume these responsibilities.
Readiness for Parenthood
In most states, minors over sixteen can obtain a marriage license with the consent of parents or guardians. Kansas and Massachusetts specify twelve for females and fourteen for males. New Hampshire specifies thirteen for females and fourteen for males. If there is no parent or guardian, or if the guardian is an agency or department, consent can be given by a court. Marriage and military service can be regarded as acts of emancipation from minority status.
In contrast, most European nations make eighteen the minimum age for marriage. In Malta, people may marry from the age of sixteen, although paradoxically the age of consent for sexual intercourse is eighteen. In Turkey, the legal age for marriage is seventeen for girls and boys. In Ireland, a court can authorize the marriage of minors less than eighteen under certain conditions.
Decision-making that leads to adolescent parenthood can be flawed and is an appropriate concern for public policy. In reality, immaturity renders a minor incapable of truly informed consent about marriage or becoming a parent. State laws governing marriage age and emancipation need to be updated to conform with the physical and psychological realities of adolescent development.
In spite of the rhetoric against adolescent pregnancies, our society does little to prepare parents for their new responsibilities. Dependent adult and young adolescent childbirths from unplanned and planned pregnancies are generally considered inevitable. These vulnerable parents, it is assumed, will somehow learn to handle parental responsibilities after the children are born.
Most of the literature about adolescent pregnancy and parenthood doesn't distinguish between minor and legally adult adolescents. Late adolescent 18 to 21-year-olds are usually considered adults.
Giving birth to a baby doesn't produce an adult brain or eliminate adolescent developmental issues. John Mitchell, a developmental psychologist, calls attention to romanticized notions that can hide elementary facts:
Romanticizing adolescence blinds us to the adolescent's capacity for life-diminishing choices. Romantics refuse to tally the teen suicides, runaways, juvenile sex trade, prisoners, broken mothers, damaged infants, and abusive fathers. In order to mature, the natural talent of youth must be aimed and trained.
Many adolescents are wishful thinkers who lack a future orientation because of their sense of invulnerability and their attraction to risk. They are easily swayed by the belief ""it can't happen to me."" This flavor underlies the attitude ""I don't care about that now"" despite knowing that cigarettes, drugs, noise and steroids produce diseases, addiction and hearing loss while shortening lifespans. Babies and young children must be protected from these characteristics.
Adolescents who become pregnant have difficulty envisioning alternatives and reasoning through the consequences of childbirth. I had the following conversation with a fifteen-year-old white girl from a middle-class family:
Doctor: I'm told that the test results show that you are pregnant.
Patient: My boyfriend and I knew it because the condom broke.
Doctor: What do you plan to do?
Patient: I'm going to have my baby and keep it. My boyfriend will drop out of school to support us.
Doctor: Do you think that you are old enough to raise a child?
Patient: No. I certainly wouldn't try to get pregnant.
Doctor: Then how is it that you plan to raise this baby?
Patient: Oh, it was an accident. Besides, I don't like school, and I can get money to live on. I know a lot of kids who are doing it.
Adolescents who become pregnant are unprepared for the decision-making and responsibilities involved in parenthood. Mature adolescents recognize that they are not ready for parenthood and terminate their pregnancies or make an adoption plan.
Does the Biological Right to Procreate Extend to Persons of Any Age?
The progress of our society has been based on the rule of law, the tangible repository of our cultural values. We are able to transact business with checks and credit cards rather than cash because of the trust we have in the enforcement of our laws. Yet we are still reluctant to legislate standards for competent parenthood. The prime example is our failure to deal with the crisis of adolescent childbirth.
In the United States, there is a strong emphasis on reproductive freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court described the right to procreate as a basic liberty in 1942 in Skinner v. Oklahoma. This has been interpreted as establishing the right to procreate. The political right might oppose the termination of any pregnancy and urge girls on to childbirth. The political left might hold that minor adolescents have the right to procreate when physically able to do so.
GirlMom.com describes itself as a ""politically progressive, left-aligned, pro-choice, feminist"" website that supports young mothers in their struggle for reproductive freedom and social support. It holds that adolescents are socially conditioned to believe they are irresponsible. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which adolescent parents believe they can't parent well and therefore don't. For GirlMom.com adolescent parenthood is not a crisis; the crisis is that adolescent parents do not receive enough public support.
Kristin Luker, a professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, points out that adolescents have raised healthy children throughout human history. She overlooks the fact that the average onset of menstruation has dropped from sixteen to twelve years of age. She holds that when good prenatal care and nutrition are available, the adolescent years are the best time to have babies from a physical point of view. Luker believes that ""the jury is still out on whether or not adolescents make 'bad' parents.""
Sara Ruddick, professor emeritus at New School University, hopes that the youngest mothers will have the resources to which all mothers are entitled. These viewpoints reflect a widely held belief that parenthood, as with procreation, is a right rather than a privilege.
These views conflict with the moral and legal principle that a child is not the property of the genetic parent. From the moral point of view, parenthood is not a right awarded by procreation. As adoptive parents well know, it is earned by nurturing a child. From the legal point of view, genetic parents hold legal and physical custodian rights that are defined and can be revoked under child neglect and abuse laws. People who require legal and physical custodians themselves cannot be the legal and physical custodians of other persons... and newborn babies are other persons.
The Double Standard
Franklin Zimring, professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley, points out how accepting low-income adolescent parenthood while encouraging middle-class adolescents to terminate pregnancies or create adoption plans reveals a double standard. Ageism, sexism and racism are all contributing factors as pointed out previously in this book.
Most adolescents who become pregnant realize that it is unwise to enter parenthood. But this wisdom often is not reinforced by their families, professionals or society. To deprive adolescents of informed consent the most important part of which is to ensure that they fully understand the responsibilities and consequences of parenthood is an abrogation of parental and professional obligations. It violates the responsibility of professionals to do no harm.
Title XX of the Public Health Service Act specifies necessary services for Adolescent Family Life Demonstration Projects. These include adoption counseling and referral services; education on the responsibilities of sexuality and parenting; and counseling for immediate and extended family members. This model should be available to all pregnant adolescents and their families as proposed in the next chapter.
The Interests of Society
Our society generally regards preventing teen pregnancy as an important priority. Adolescent pregnancy doesn't stop being a social and personal crisis when a baby is born. Adolescent parenthood is an even greater crisis with additional health, welfare and legal entanglements.
From society's point of view, should adolescent childbirth be approached reactively with damage control that might amplify its effects or thoughtfully with holistic planning that can dampen its effects? We have enough knowledge and opportunities to prevent damage if we connect adolescent parenthood to social problems. We don't need to feel helpless when an adolescent girl gives birth. We can apply the knowledge and problem-solving skills we already have.
Articulating cultural values that discourage premature sexual intercourse and parenthood can dramatically change adolescent behavior. Our country had success with this method in the early Twentieth Century, and the same success is evident in other countries today. The media's contemporary promotion of sexual behavior could be counteracted by a public health campaign highlighting the disadvantages of adolescent sexual intercourse and pregnancy just like those mounted against smoking, drug abuse and drunk driving. Civic groups, churches and celebrities could articulate standards for sexual behavior and parenthood just as they have to promote educational achievement. Mayor Michael Bloomberg initiated a teen pregnancy prevention campaign in New York City in March of 2013. As might be expected, it stirred up criticism reflecting juvenile ageism that treats adolescent parents as adults and that ignores the right of newborn babies to have competent parents.
The Interests of Adolescents
Generally a genetic parent is in the best position to raise a child. This principle guides family preservation in social work. It's affirmed by fetus-mother bonding throughout pregnancy and by breastfeeding after childbirth. But possessing the judgment, skills and economic resources for parenthood is more important than the ability to conceive, give birth and breastfeed. Genetic mothers and fathers who recognize they don't possess these qualities make adoption plans.
In 1983, Marie Winn called attention to children who were growing up without childhoods. This is even more prevalent today. One symptom of the denigration of parenthood is the private and public support offered adolescent parents. It presumes that young people who can't handle the responsibilities of their own lives can handle the responsibilities of parenthood despite our increasingly complicated world.
If we recognize adolescence as a developmental stage and if we define parenthood as an adult responsibility, we can restore childhood for children and adolescence for adolescents. Our society must realize that it can't cut short the years of nurturing and protection its young need by allowing them to assume adult responsibilities prematurely in any venue.
We need to understand that the developmental characteristics of adolescence and the influences, or the lack thereof, of parents cause more adolescent pregnancies than ignorance and socioeconomic disadvantage. Antipoverty measures alone don't address parent-child relationships. In their book A Mentor, Peer Group, Incentive Model for Helping Underclass Youth, Ronald Mincy and Susan Weiner noted that poverty is less important than the parents' behavior in influencing an adolescent girl's chance of becoming pregnant.
Most importantly, we need to recognize that the charitable impulse to support adolescent parents can have unintended consequences. We need to shift from damage control to offering hope and empowerment.
State statutes use age-grading to protect minors from activities beyond their abilities as well as to protect society from minor's inappropriate actions. Valuing parenthood enough to set minimum standards could be a tipping point that shifts our society from self-assertive values to integrative cultural values. The most important issue facing us today is whether we value children and our nation's future enough to value parenthood as a career for adults who can handle its responsibilities.
Governmental Interventions in Family Life
If every citizen respected the rights of others, we wouldn't need law enforcement. We wouldn't need welfare if every individual was capable of, and had the opportunity to, lead an economically self-sufficient life. Unfortunately, everyone does not have these qualities or opportunities. We will always need law enforcement and some form of welfare.
We will always face the repercussions of incompetent parents if we do not set standards for parenthood. Currently, all parents are assumed to be competent until they damage their children by neglect or abuse. A more accurate assumption is that the vast majority of parents are competent but children and society need protection from the millions who are not.
We cannot assume competence in parenting any more than we can assume competence in any other activity that affects others. Licensing is intended to ensure that persons who do important things for others are competent and responsible. Irresponsible people conceive and bear children. For this reason, children and society now could have protection from incompetent parents by refining the prevention provisions of child neglect and abuse statutes. When parents are unable or unwilling to become competent, these statutes currently require that parental rights be terminated and the children be adopted.
Parents' abdication of their responsibilities necessitated laws that mandate parental participation in school conferences; the liability of grandparents for the children of their children; the liability of non-custodial parents for financial support; and the liability of parents for their children's actions. However, because of the subtle but powerful juvenile ageist assumption that children are property, a belief concealed by the emphasis on family privacy and individual freedom, we intervene only after children have been damaged by their parents.
If all parents were competent, the government wouldn't need to be involved in family life. Because the neglect, abuse and exploitation of children damage the next generation and create financial burdens for the present generation, government has a clear-cut role in preventing neglect and abuse by setting standards for parenthood. All of us are paying an ever-larger share of the cost of rearing, educating and treating children. Consequently, we all have a financial stake in preventing child neglect and abuse.
Around the world, governments are defining and regulating parenthood in response to conflicts between adult rights and children's needs. Underlying those conflicts is the erosion of the nuclear family. Children also are increasingly being viewed as commodities in the IVF and adoption marketplaces. A new paradigm is needed. The assumption that anyone regardless of age or capacity has legal and physical custodianship until a child is damaged must be challenged.
Our standards for responsible adulthood include supporting yourself legally and abiding by society's laws and regulations. Standards are set for foster parents, adoptive parents, divorce custody and visitation arrangements, childcare, preschools, schools and others who are responsible for children's lives. Minimum standards for parenthood would protect children from neglect and abuse and all of us from the consequences. Standards won't create optimal childrearing scenarios but will identify the worst scenarios. What's good for children may be controversial but what's bad for them is not as is clearly outlined in our child neglect and abuse laws.
Too many of our children are growing up in families that prevent them from becoming responsible, productive citizens. The repetitive cycle of adolescent and dependent adult parents followed by child abuse and neglect is the most preventable source of habitual crime and welfare dependency.
Our society needs a paradigm shift from our dominant self-assertive social values toward integrative cultural values. We can protect our nation's future by ensuring that all children have competent parents. We would then value parenthood as a career with as much economic and social value as paid employment. Parents would be able to compete economically with adults without children.
Because our society doesn't articulate expectations for parents, child neglect and abuse have reached epidemic proportions. Rates in the United States exceed that of all other developed nations. We only intervene after neglect and abuse have occurred, and often then ineffectively. Enormous public expenditures on treatment, rehabilitation and incarceration result. This would change dramatically if our vision for America was that all our children will be raised by competent parents.
By failing to recognize a newborn baby's right to competent parents with adequate resources, our society will continue to be anti-child and anti-parent. If we go on this way, we will ensure that America continues to decline. By addressing the basic needs of families, we can correct our course one child and one parent at a time. We need a system that sets standards for parenthood and that includes in-home and community guidance for new parents along with ensuring that all families have adequate family resource systems.
What Do We Know?
Two vital aspects of parenthood are often overlooked. The first is that readiness for parenthood follows the adolescent stage of life. The ability to assume responsibility for one's own life is a prerequisite for assuming responsibility for the life of another person. The second is that parenthood is a developmental stage in life. Parents progress though egocentric, conventional, individualistic and integrative phases of parenthood.
Controversies arise over whether pregnancy and childbirth themselves promote maturity; whether everyone has a right to parenthood regardless of age; and whether genetic parents are always the best person to raise a child. In the past, preparation for parenthood occurred within families. With loosening family ties and family strife in the United States, preparation for parenthood now often must come from educational and clinical sources.
By entering parenthood, adolescents gain financial benefits in the form of Temporary Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, counseling, educational accommodations, and childcare in addition to increased status with their peers and possibly families. Adoption is not appealing because it means parting with their babies and these benefits. Making an adoption plan also might evoke disapproval from relatives and peers. All these factors encourage adolescents to become parents despite the likelihood of unfavorable outcomes.
The best time for decision-making about parenthood and adoption plans is when a pregnancy first becomes known. The more mature adolescent parents are, the more likely they will choose not to enter parenthood. The overall evidence indicates that children who were adopted as babies fare as well as children reared in genetic families.
To ensure that children have competent parents, parenthood must be recognized as a developmental stage that follows adolescence and as an essential complement to childhood. Struggling parents also need access to collaborative systems of care."
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965
Parenthood involves more than childrearing. It is the legal and physical custody of a child as child and parent grow together. Most parents successfully raise their children without consciously experiencing parenthood's developmental phases. They enhance their coping skills, altruism and self-respect as they work through their own unresolved developmental issues. For example, being a parent activates both positive and negative memories of relationships with one's own parents.
People who successfully master these challenges achieve new levels of psychological and emotional maturity along with their children.
Carolyn Newberger, professor of psychology at Harvard University, described how parenthood moves from egoistic to integrative phases:
Phase 1: Egoistic
Parents are self-focused and see their children as extensions of themselves.
Phase 2: Conventional
Perspectives shift from self-centeredness to childrearing practices drawn from traditions, experts and age-related norms.
Phase 3: Individualistic
Children are viewed as unique individuals.
Phase 4: Integrative
Parents learn and mature with their children in their families, communities and society.
Most parents intuitively meet their challenges. Many need help learning how to grow with their children. Some need education and clinical treatment to function competently. A comparatively small percentage but critically large number is unable to function competently. Typically these are adolescents and dependent adults.
We Need a Paradigm Shift
The family is the most fragile of all human institutions, yet it is the bedrock of civilization. Its strength lies in the cohesion and loyalty of the parent-child relationship from which the larger world of kin, community and nation evolves. Our moral stature and our social organization flow from parenthood. It is the source of the work ethic as well as our human capital. Self-assertive social and integrative cultural values are blended in the crucible of parenthood.
Families produce future generations. They protect members against ill health, old age, unemployment and other hazards. Especially in the United States, family relationships are strained by the tension between self-assertive social values and integrative cultural values. Is a child a parent's private property? Or is a parent a child's temporary legal and physical custodian?
Both the extreme political left and the right espouse self-assertive values that regard children as private property. The far left stresses the freedom of parents to do as they wish. The far right stresses the privacy of the family. Both extremes assert that parenthood is outside the public domain. Both avoid holding parents responsible for their children's behavior. To do so is ""parent blaming,"" they say.
These extreme self-assertive views need to be balanced by integrative values. But the act of balancing them creates friction between competing personal interests as well as between ""the world as it is"" and ""the world as it ought to be."" Like the encircling polarities of the Chinese yin/yang symbol, the world that is and the world that ought to be are intertwined.
The World That Is
Self-assertive capitalism regards the family as a unit for generating money that will be spent on goods and services. It creates winners and losers and undermines reciprocity, altruism and mutual obligation... vital ingredients for the common good. Ironically, self-assertive capitalism weakens the civil society without which the marketplace itself cannot survive.
All wealthy nations, including the United States, are welfare states... that is, they are primarily capitalist states with large, selective doses of socialism. In Wealth & Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or Leader?, Irwin Garfinkel, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding point out that by its nature, capitalism produces too much economic insecurity. The objective of state welfare institutions is, therefore, to reduce economic insecurity.
Certain institutions families, congregations, service clubs, athletic groups, parent-teacher associations and social organizations offset self-assertive capitalism. They hold our society together, but they are under pressure.
Families have become money machines that generate income to pay off debts. Work schedules are more important than family schedules. Undisciplined consumption is encouraged. Television pumps out images that oppose cultural integrative values. The desire for status is so strong that children attempt to display their worthiness through material things others want or envy. Low-income families struggle to provide these items so their children can achieve some degree of status in school. In contrast, if children are involved in extracurricular, family or community-oriented activities, they don't need to consume to achieve status.
If we were a true materialistic society, we would value making, using and keeping material things for functional and aesthetic purposes. We would value and enjoy natural and manufactured goods. Instead we are a consumer society in which commodities are sold and discarded. Our economy depends upon planned obsolescence, a throw away orientation.
Unfortunately, promoting consumption of disposable commodities carries over into human relationships. People are viewed as means to an end. They are only consumers of goods and services. Producers and service providers have no commitment beyond satisfying the needs and pleasures of consumers.
This attitude leaks out to color all kinds of relationships. It's most obvious in the temporary ""hook-up"" sexual affairs seen today, but it also permeates family relationships. Cohabitation avoids the legal obligations of marriage. Marriage is seen as disposable when one partner no longer meets the other's needs. Children can be designed through technical procedures and gestated by surrogates. They can be adopted if an individual has enough money to pay others to obtain them. Children have become commodities.
In Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, Rebecca Asher describes how women who set off on a footing of equality with their partners are betrayed by them when babies arrive. Mothers become ""foundation parents"" and de facto ""household drudges,"" condemned to professional sidelining and part-time jobs because fathers fail to pull their weight. Mothers feel victimized, fathers feel guilty. The pair that started out on an equal-opportunity journey through life ends up sniping at each other, or scoring weary points. Many split up.
Internationally, the commodification of children is blatantly obvious. Worldwide, 1.2 million children are abducted, bought and sold each year. Every day children as young as nine are abducted or taken under false pretenses from their villages by human traffickers. These girls and boys are promised good jobs and good pay but they end up working in brothels, mines and sweatshops. For example, more than 200,000 Nepalese girls are believed to be victims of this international trade.
In the United States, the commodification of children is less obvious, but here are some examples:
• A Texas Senator proposed a bill that would permit a $500 payment to each woman who places a child for adoption rather than have an abortion. The intention was to provide an incentive to avoid abortion and make an adoption plan. Such a proposal implies that a value can be set on a newborn baby $500 in this case. It ignores the costs of pregnancy, pre-natal care, childbirth and any complications thereof.
• Rebecca Taylor tried to sell her 5-month-old boy for $10,000. Taylor never bonded with the child and needed the money to get another apartment. She was charged with offering the sale of a child.
• Through Fertility Choices Worldwide the cost of hiring a surrogate mother to produce a baby can range from $103,000 to $165,000, although she receives a fraction of the cost.
Challenges for Parents
Parenthood is an economic burden for too many parents. In the United States, our society expects parents to rear their children without adequate resources. The lack of childcare, health care and effective education saps the rewards of parenthood and is detrimental to our society. Parents are distracted by:
• The decline of committed, sacrificial relationships that results in weak family bonds;
• Viewing children as extensions of themselves rather than as life companions;
• Pleasing children rather than expecting them to contribute to family wellbeing;
• Guilt for being imperfect parents; and
• Stress that makes employment away from home attractive and that strains parental relationships.
Efforts to integrate childrearing and employment demonstrate the consequences of delegating parenting functions. After sixty years, the Israeli kibbutzim modified the care of babies and toddlers in separate children's houses because of its negative effects on parent-child relationships and on adult outcomes. The inability of Kibbutz-raised children to engage in intimate personal relationships was traced to early environments lacking cohesion and continuity because of transient, superficial interactions with caregivers. Virtually all kibbutz babies now receive maternal care at home during their first year of life as their mothers gradually return to the workplace. In the United States, it will take years to assess the long-term effects of today's delegated childcare of babies and toddlers on child development and adult outcomes.
The World That Ought To Be
Commercial marketing uses world as it ought to be symbols. Slogans such as Be all that you can be, Reach out and touch someone, and Own a piece of the rock focus on appealing cultural values.
John Maynard Keynes concluded in the 1930s that unchecked ""animal spirits"" emotions, human impulses, enthusiasms and misperceptions drive the economy into booms and busts in a market system that fails to govern itself. On the other hand, tempered by government and safely channeled into healthy capitalism, these same animal spirits can be a source of entrepreneurial energy and benefit everyone.
Most modern social and environmental problems like ill health, lack of community, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours and large prison populations are more likely to occur in a society with large gaps between classes. Addressing inequality in our society would benefit everyone, the well-off as well as the poor.
Our young people's social, economic, health and educational problems require integrative community and social efforts that include racial and cultural diversity. Still our service systems often view children and youth separately from their families and communities. Programs for different categories of problems treat children as freestanding units and focus on school, peer, social class, racial, neighborhood and societal factors rather than on their homes.
These problems could be minimized if our society recognized that parenthood is a career with economic and social value and that it is our society's foundation. This would shift the balance from self-centered consumerism to a friendlier and more integrative society.
Because competent parents are essential for our society's survival, minimum legal standards should be set for determining a person's readiness to assume these responsibilities.
Readiness for Parenthood
In most states, minors over sixteen can obtain a marriage license with the consent of parents or guardians. Kansas and Massachusetts specify twelve for females and fourteen for males. New Hampshire specifies thirteen for females and fourteen for males. If there is no parent or guardian, or if the guardian is an agency or department, consent can be given by a court. Marriage and military service can be regarded as acts of emancipation from minority status.
In contrast, most European nations make eighteen the minimum age for marriage. In Malta, people may marry from the age of sixteen, although paradoxically the age of consent for sexual intercourse is eighteen. In Turkey, the legal age for marriage is seventeen for girls and boys. In Ireland, a court can authorize the marriage of minors less than eighteen under certain conditions.
Decision-making that leads to adolescent parenthood can be flawed and is an appropriate concern for public policy. In reality, immaturity renders a minor incapable of truly informed consent about marriage or becoming a parent. State laws governing marriage age and emancipation need to be updated to conform with the physical and psychological realities of adolescent development.
In spite of the rhetoric against adolescent pregnancies, our society does little to prepare parents for their new responsibilities. Dependent adult and young adolescent childbirths from unplanned and planned pregnancies are generally considered inevitable. These vulnerable parents, it is assumed, will somehow learn to handle parental responsibilities after the children are born.
Most of the literature about adolescent pregnancy and parenthood doesn't distinguish between minor and legally adult adolescents. Late adolescent 18 to 21-year-olds are usually considered adults.
Giving birth to a baby doesn't produce an adult brain or eliminate adolescent developmental issues. John Mitchell, a developmental psychologist, calls attention to romanticized notions that can hide elementary facts:
Romanticizing adolescence blinds us to the adolescent's capacity for life-diminishing choices. Romantics refuse to tally the teen suicides, runaways, juvenile sex trade, prisoners, broken mothers, damaged infants, and abusive fathers. In order to mature, the natural talent of youth must be aimed and trained.
Many adolescents are wishful thinkers who lack a future orientation because of their sense of invulnerability and their attraction to risk. They are easily swayed by the belief ""it can't happen to me."" This flavor underlies the attitude ""I don't care about that now"" despite knowing that cigarettes, drugs, noise and steroids produce diseases, addiction and hearing loss while shortening lifespans. Babies and young children must be protected from these characteristics.
Adolescents who become pregnant have difficulty envisioning alternatives and reasoning through the consequences of childbirth. I had the following conversation with a fifteen-year-old white girl from a middle-class family:
Doctor: I'm told that the test results show that you are pregnant.
Patient: My boyfriend and I knew it because the condom broke.
Doctor: What do you plan to do?
Patient: I'm going to have my baby and keep it. My boyfriend will drop out of school to support us.
Doctor: Do you think that you are old enough to raise a child?
Patient: No. I certainly wouldn't try to get pregnant.
Doctor: Then how is it that you plan to raise this baby?
Patient: Oh, it was an accident. Besides, I don't like school, and I can get money to live on. I know a lot of kids who are doing it.
Adolescents who become pregnant are unprepared for the decision-making and responsibilities involved in parenthood. Mature adolescents recognize that they are not ready for parenthood and terminate their pregnancies or make an adoption plan.
Does the Biological Right to Procreate Extend to Persons of Any Age?
The progress of our society has been based on the rule of law, the tangible repository of our cultural values. We are able to transact business with checks and credit cards rather than cash because of the trust we have in the enforcement of our laws. Yet we are still reluctant to legislate standards for competent parenthood. The prime example is our failure to deal with the crisis of adolescent childbirth.
In the United States, there is a strong emphasis on reproductive freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court described the right to procreate as a basic liberty in 1942 in Skinner v. Oklahoma. This has been interpreted as establishing the right to procreate. The political right might oppose the termination of any pregnancy and urge girls on to childbirth. The political left might hold that minor adolescents have the right to procreate when physically able to do so.
GirlMom.com describes itself as a ""politically progressive, left-aligned, pro-choice, feminist"" website that supports young mothers in their struggle for reproductive freedom and social support. It holds that adolescents are socially conditioned to believe they are irresponsible. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which adolescent parents believe they can't parent well and therefore don't. For GirlMom.com adolescent parenthood is not a crisis; the crisis is that adolescent parents do not receive enough public support.
Kristin Luker, a professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, points out that adolescents have raised healthy children throughout human history. She overlooks the fact that the average onset of menstruation has dropped from sixteen to twelve years of age. She holds that when good prenatal care and nutrition are available, the adolescent years are the best time to have babies from a physical point of view. Luker believes that ""the jury is still out on whether or not adolescents make 'bad' parents.""
Sara Ruddick, professor emeritus at New School University, hopes that the youngest mothers will have the resources to which all mothers are entitled. These viewpoints reflect a widely held belief that parenthood, as with procreation, is a right rather than a privilege.
These views conflict with the moral and legal principle that a child is not the property of the genetic parent. From the moral point of view, parenthood is not a right awarded by procreation. As adoptive parents well know, it is earned by nurturing a child. From the legal point of view, genetic parents hold legal and physical custodian rights that are defined and can be revoked under child neglect and abuse laws. People who require legal and physical custodians themselves cannot be the legal and physical custodians of other persons... and newborn babies are other persons.
The Double Standard
Franklin Zimring, professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley, points out how accepting low-income adolescent parenthood while encouraging middle-class adolescents to terminate pregnancies or create adoption plans reveals a double standard. Ageism, sexism and racism are all contributing factors as pointed out previously in this book.
Most adolescents who become pregnant realize that it is unwise to enter parenthood. But this wisdom often is not reinforced by their families, professionals or society. To deprive adolescents of informed consent the most important part of which is to ensure that they fully understand the responsibilities and consequences of parenthood is an abrogation of parental and professional obligations. It violates the responsibility of professionals to do no harm.
Title XX of the Public Health Service Act specifies necessary services for Adolescent Family Life Demonstration Projects. These include adoption counseling and referral services; education on the responsibilities of sexuality and parenting; and counseling for immediate and extended family members. This model should be available to all pregnant adolescents and their families as proposed in the next chapter.
The Interests of Society
Our society generally regards preventing teen pregnancy as an important priority. Adolescent pregnancy doesn't stop being a social and personal crisis when a baby is born. Adolescent parenthood is an even greater crisis with additional health, welfare and legal entanglements.
From society's point of view, should adolescent childbirth be approached reactively with damage control that might amplify its effects or thoughtfully with holistic planning that can dampen its effects? We have enough knowledge and opportunities to prevent damage if we connect adolescent parenthood to social problems. We don't need to feel helpless when an adolescent girl gives birth. We can apply the knowledge and problem-solving skills we already have.
Articulating cultural values that discourage premature sexual intercourse and parenthood can dramatically change adolescent behavior. Our country had success with this method in the early Twentieth Century, and the same success is evident in other countries today. The media's contemporary promotion of sexual behavior could be counteracted by a public health campaign highlighting the disadvantages of adolescent sexual intercourse and pregnancy just like those mounted against smoking, drug abuse and drunk driving. Civic groups, churches and celebrities could articulate standards for sexual behavior and parenthood just as they have to promote educational achievement. Mayor Michael Bloomberg initiated a teen pregnancy prevention campaign in New York City in March of 2013. As might be expected, it stirred up criticism reflecting juvenile ageism that treats adolescent parents as adults and that ignores the right of newborn babies to have competent parents.
The Interests of Adolescents
Generally a genetic parent is in the best position to raise a child. This principle guides family preservation in social work. It's affirmed by fetus-mother bonding throughout pregnancy and by breastfeeding after childbirth. But possessing the judgment, skills and economic resources for parenthood is more important than the ability to conceive, give birth and breastfeed. Genetic mothers and fathers who recognize they don't possess these qualities make adoption plans.
In 1983, Marie Winn called attention to children who were growing up without childhoods. This is even more prevalent today. One symptom of the denigration of parenthood is the private and public support offered adolescent parents. It presumes that young people who can't handle the responsibilities of their own lives can handle the responsibilities of parenthood despite our increasingly complicated world.
If we recognize adolescence as a developmental stage and if we define parenthood as an adult responsibility, we can restore childhood for children and adolescence for adolescents. Our society must realize that it can't cut short the years of nurturing and protection its young need by allowing them to assume adult responsibilities prematurely in any venue.
We need to understand that the developmental characteristics of adolescence and the influences, or the lack thereof, of parents cause more adolescent pregnancies than ignorance and socioeconomic disadvantage. Antipoverty measures alone don't address parent-child relationships. In their book A Mentor, Peer Group, Incentive Model for Helping Underclass Youth, Ronald Mincy and Susan Weiner noted that poverty is less important than the parents' behavior in influencing an adolescent girl's chance of becoming pregnant.
Most importantly, we need to recognize that the charitable impulse to support adolescent parents can have unintended consequences. We need to shift from damage control to offering hope and empowerment.
State statutes use age-grading to protect minors from activities beyond their abilities as well as to protect society from minor's inappropriate actions. Valuing parenthood enough to set minimum standards could be a tipping point that shifts our society from self-assertive values to integrative cultural values. The most important issue facing us today is whether we value children and our nation's future enough to value parenthood as a career for adults who can handle its responsibilities.
Governmental Interventions in Family Life
If every citizen respected the rights of others, we wouldn't need law enforcement. We wouldn't need welfare if every individual was capable of, and had the opportunity to, lead an economically self-sufficient life. Unfortunately, everyone does not have these qualities or opportunities. We will always need law enforcement and some form of welfare.
We will always face the repercussions of incompetent parents if we do not set standards for parenthood. Currently, all parents are assumed to be competent until they damage their children by neglect or abuse. A more accurate assumption is that the vast majority of parents are competent but children and society need protection from the millions who are not.
We cannot assume competence in parenting any more than we can assume competence in any other activity that affects others. Licensing is intended to ensure that persons who do important things for others are competent and responsible. Irresponsible people conceive and bear children. For this reason, children and society now could have protection from incompetent parents by refining the prevention provisions of child neglect and abuse statutes. When parents are unable or unwilling to become competent, these statutes currently require that parental rights be terminated and the children be adopted.
Parents' abdication of their responsibilities necessitated laws that mandate parental participation in school conferences; the liability of grandparents for the children of their children; the liability of non-custodial parents for financial support; and the liability of parents for their children's actions. However, because of the subtle but powerful juvenile ageist assumption that children are property, a belief concealed by the emphasis on family privacy and individual freedom, we intervene only after children have been damaged by their parents.
If all parents were competent, the government wouldn't need to be involved in family life. Because the neglect, abuse and exploitation of children damage the next generation and create financial burdens for the present generation, government has a clear-cut role in preventing neglect and abuse by setting standards for parenthood. All of us are paying an ever-larger share of the cost of rearing, educating and treating children. Consequently, we all have a financial stake in preventing child neglect and abuse.
Around the world, governments are defining and regulating parenthood in response to conflicts between adult rights and children's needs. Underlying those conflicts is the erosion of the nuclear family. Children also are increasingly being viewed as commodities in the IVF and adoption marketplaces. A new paradigm is needed. The assumption that anyone regardless of age or capacity has legal and physical custodianship until a child is damaged must be challenged.
Our standards for responsible adulthood include supporting yourself legally and abiding by society's laws and regulations. Standards are set for foster parents, adoptive parents, divorce custody and visitation arrangements, childcare, preschools, schools and others who are responsible for children's lives. Minimum standards for parenthood would protect children from neglect and abuse and all of us from the consequences. Standards won't create optimal childrearing scenarios but will identify the worst scenarios. What's good for children may be controversial but what's bad for them is not as is clearly outlined in our child neglect and abuse laws.
Too many of our children are growing up in families that prevent them from becoming responsible, productive citizens. The repetitive cycle of adolescent and dependent adult parents followed by child abuse and neglect is the most preventable source of habitual crime and welfare dependency.
Our society needs a paradigm shift from our dominant self-assertive social values toward integrative cultural values. We can protect our nation's future by ensuring that all children have competent parents. We would then value parenthood as a career with as much economic and social value as paid employment. Parents would be able to compete economically with adults without children.
Because our society doesn't articulate expectations for parents, child neglect and abuse have reached epidemic proportions. Rates in the United States exceed that of all other developed nations. We only intervene after neglect and abuse have occurred, and often then ineffectively. Enormous public expenditures on treatment, rehabilitation and incarceration result. This would change dramatically if our vision for America was that all our children will be raised by competent parents.
By failing to recognize a newborn baby's right to competent parents with adequate resources, our society will continue to be anti-child and anti-parent. If we go on this way, we will ensure that America continues to decline. By addressing the basic needs of families, we can correct our course one child and one parent at a time. We need a system that sets standards for parenthood and that includes in-home and community guidance for new parents along with ensuring that all families have adequate family resource systems.
What Do We Know?
Two vital aspects of parenthood are often overlooked. The first is that readiness for parenthood follows the adolescent stage of life. The ability to assume responsibility for one's own life is a prerequisite for assuming responsibility for the life of another person. The second is that parenthood is a developmental stage in life. Parents progress though egocentric, conventional, individualistic and integrative phases of parenthood.
Controversies arise over whether pregnancy and childbirth themselves promote maturity; whether everyone has a right to parenthood regardless of age; and whether genetic parents are always the best person to raise a child. In the past, preparation for parenthood occurred within families. With loosening family ties and family strife in the United States, preparation for parenthood now often must come from educational and clinical sources.
By entering parenthood, adolescents gain financial benefits in the form of Temporary Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, counseling, educational accommodations, and childcare in addition to increased status with their peers and possibly families. Adoption is not appealing because it means parting with their babies and these benefits. Making an adoption plan also might evoke disapproval from relatives and peers. All these factors encourage adolescents to become parents despite the likelihood of unfavorable outcomes.
The best time for decision-making about parenthood and adoption plans is when a pregnancy first becomes known. The more mature adolescent parents are, the more likely they will choose not to enter parenthood. The overall evidence indicates that children who were adopted as babies fare as well as children reared in genetic families.
To ensure that children have competent parents, parenthood must be recognized as a developmental stage that follows adolescence and as an essential complement to childhood. Struggling parents also need access to collaborative systems of care."
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