Hold Your Breath—for about a Year

Great news, Dear Readers! I’m giving you total permission to start chain smoking! Oh, and you can drink all you want, starting with a pitcher of martinis before breakfast. Red meat, all you can eat! Put a lot of salt on, and then have an extra piece of cheesecake. Oh, you can also skip going to the gym, bothering to drop in at the office, and contributing to that 401K plan….

Why the good life, all of a sudden?

Well, consider the state of affairs at Fukushima reactor four. The reactor, you remember, was down for maintenance when the earthquake / tsunami struck, which meant that the radioactive rods were not in the core of the reactor, but in a cooling pool.

Einstein said it best: nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water. So here’s my physics-for-poets of how this process works.

Small pellets of radioactive fuel are placed in rods, which are encased in zirconium alloy. Important—that zirconium alloy is highly explosive, and can ignite on contact with air. Anyway, during the reaction process, enormous heat is generated, which goes to heat the water, which produces steam, which drives turbines, which in turn produce electricity. The problem?

Well, the fuel in the rods is only 95% consumed, so those rods—logically called “spent rods”—need to be cooled. For how long? Five years, minimum. So the spent rods are put in cooling pools, which circulate cool water constantly.

Now, where did the rocket scientists decide to put the cooling pools for the Fukushima plants? Five or six storeys up, on the roofs! Oh, and there’s no containment up there, as there is in the reactor. So if something blows the roof off, the cooling pool is exposed.

You know what happened—initially, the plants were cooling down after the earthquake. The tsunami hit, and guess where the generators were? Yup, right there in the basement.

Guys?

But before you start raising you eyes in disgust at the Japanese, I should point out that we have 23 of the buggers in the US. Oh, and they were designed by General Electric.

Nor is that all—the generators flooded, the power was off, but it wasn’t “just” spent rods up there, because the operators of the plant had emptied the core, and had put 202 unspent, reactor-ready rods up in the cooling pond on the top floor. And they are side by side with the 1331 spent rods. (Note—in fact, the sharp-eyed Miss Taí pointed out that it’s really 202 unspent and 1331 spent rod assemblies. Why? Because up to 80 rods are packaged together in one unit. So the actual number of rods is something over 120,000….)

Now then, here’s what the building looks like:

Two things—minimally—happened: the earthquake damaged the structure, and the there was an explosion / fire at the plant. Think it can’t get worse? Think again, because the operators of the plant made the decisions to pour seawater into the cooling tanks. And that seawater is corrosive.

Fasten your seat belts—we’ve barely begun….

Because the water from the cooling pool, you see, is leaking, and that leaking is making the ground very soggy. So what do we have? A sinking building with 1500-plus spent and unspent rod assembies of radioactive fuel in a leaky pool 100 feet in the air in a building that might collapse.

Oh, did I mention that the pool may have had debris from the explosion, and that that debris may have damaged the integrity of the pool?

And I probably forgot as well to tell you that there are 80 damaged fuel rods up there? Here’s what one source had to say:

In an 11-page information sheet released in August, TEPCO said one of the assemblies was even damaged as long ago as 1982, when it was bent out of shape during a transfer. … The damaged racks were first reported by a Fukushima area newspaper on Wednesday, as TEPCO is preparing to decommission the plant and remove the spent fuel assemblies from Reactor No. 4. 

I should note, by the way, that the “August” referred to is August of 2013, two years after the disaster took place.

Or rather, started. Because let me tell you—it’s by no means over yet. Yes, they have installed a crane, and work started in November of last year to remove the fuel rods from the pool. As of 30 March of this year, 983 rods were still in the cooling pool—the process is expected to last all year.

Now then—time for today’s vocabulary enrichment—“criticality.” And here, I bring you one source on the issue.

Arnie Gunderson, a veteran US nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, told Reuters that “they are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” especially given their close proximity to each other, which risks breakage and the release of radiation.

Gundersen told Reuters of an incredibly dangerous “criticality” that would result if a chain reaction takes place at any point, if the rods break or even so much as collide with each other in the wrong way. The resulting radiation is too great for the cooling pool to absorb – it simply has not been designed to do so.

“The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it. There are no control rods to control it,”Gundsersen said. “The spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”

Simply put, for the next year, we are all going to have to hope that nothing, absolutely NOTHING happens out of the ordinary—not one fuel rod dropped, not one rod corroded significantly, not one rod stuck in the pool, not one rod bumping into each other.

Oh, and keep your fingers crossed, Readers, that there isn’t another earthquake of 7 or above on the Richter scale since that…?

I know you’re asking—so what happens if one rod breaks, releasing radiation? Well, take a look at this headline:

Fuel Removal From Fukushima’s Reactor 4 Threatens ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenario. Radiation Fuel Rods Matches Fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima Bombs

Potentially, there could be a huge cloud of radiation drifting over the Pacific Ocean, and reaching the West Coast in a week.

Now you see why I was up at four in the morning?

Japan—and the World—Melts Down

Who knows if they’re telling the truth?

Katsutaka Idogawa, the mayor of a town close to the disabled nuclear reactor Fukushima says the Japanese government is lying, and that children are at particular risk; here’s what one source had to say:

“They believe what the government says, while in reality radiation is still there. This is killing children. They die of heart conditions, asthma, leukemia, thyroiditis… Lots of kids are extremely exhausted after school; others are simply unable to attend PE classes. But the authorities still hide the truth from us, and I don’t know why. Don’t they have children of their own? It hurts so much to know they can’t protect our children.

“They say Fukushima Prefecture is safe, and that’s why nobody’s working to evacuate children, move them elsewhere. We’re not even allowed to discuss this.”  

In fact, Idogawa was concerned about the safety of the plant even before the tsunami hit:

“I asked them about potential accidents at a nuclear power plant, pretending I didn’t know anything about it, and it turned out they were unable to answer many of my questions,” he said. “Frankly, that’s when it first crossed my mind that their management didn’t have a contingency plan. It was then that I realized the facility could be dangerous.”

And if Idogawa doesn’t trust the government, well, doesn’t he have good reason to? Because according to the video below, it’s now known that there was 100% core meltdown of three reactors. Oh, and the radiation released was equivalent to that of Chernobyl. But what was the official announcement, hours after the tsunami? That everything was fine, that all the reactors had been shut down, no problem, no worries!

Idogawa trusted his gut, not his government, and so the next day he gave the order: get the hell out. But did anybody in the government tell him to do that? Nope!

In fact, the government was lying to the people, even as the company that ran the plant was lying to the government. Here’s a quote from The New York Times:

In the darkest moments of last year’s nuclear accident, Japanese leaders did not know the actual extent of damage at the plant and secretly considered the possibility of evacuating Tokyo, even as they tried to play down the risks in public, an independent investigation into the accident disclosed on Monday.

In fact, the calls to evacuate Tokyo have not stopped: here’s a headline from 14 February 2014:

Japan Physician: Parents should evacuate children from Tokyo; Danger from Fukushima radiation — “The threat has seemed to be spreading” — “I’ve seen a lot of patients badly affected”

Nor was it just physicians speaking out; here’s a recent New York Times article:

In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Michio Aoyama’s initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Ok—so now what’s happening? Here’s Sunday’s New York Times:

Ever since they were forced to evacuate during the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant three years ago, Kim Eunja and her husband have refused to return to their hilltop home amid the majestic mountains of this rural village for fear of radiation.

But now they say they may have no choice. After a nearly $250 million radiation cleanup here, the central government this month declared Miyakoji the first community within a 12-mile evacuation zone around the plant to be reopened to residents. The decision will bring an end to the monthly stipends from the plant’s operator that have allowed Ms. Kim to relocate to an apartment in a city an hour away.

Think the situation can’t get worse? Well, ponder this New York Times headline:

Unskilled and Destitute Are Hiring Targets for Fukushima Cleanup

Given that large amounts of radioactive water is spilling into the Pacific Ocean, isn’t it time we faced facts? This is not an issue for a local company, not an issue for one country, it’s a world issue.

And somehow, somebody has got to take charge of it, globally….

And if that wasn't depressing enough…

Our Chatty Pope

So the question of the moment is: does this guy know what he’s doing?

The word is that Pope Francis is a dab hand at managing the press, but is he? Or are we simply seeing what we saw with John Paul II—which was the collective decision of the media to adore what was a staunchly conservative, repressive theologian who never admitted that there was a sexual abuse scandal in the church. So he got a free pass, as he has even in death, since he was allowed to pass the miracle test with a 50% score. Under church rules, two miracles are needed to establish sainthood. But either Pope Francis or Benedict waived this rule, and allowed John Paul II to be declared a saint based on only one miracle.

So from the beginning, the press has liked this pope. Confession—I generally regard likable popes as more dangerous than disagreeable popes, so Benedict was my man: a completely prissy, probably-way-closeted pope who drove people out of the church faster than sounding a fire alarm. Perfect!

Second confession: though I think it‘s completely nutty, I appreciate theological conservatism on logical grounds. Consider the policy, as my friend Harry once told me, about getting a sperm sample, when needed for infertility counseling. Normally, guys go into a room, in which usually there are some well-thumbed and hopefully not too sticky men’s magazines. But how can a good Catholic give a sperm sample, since absolutely every sexual act must be undergone—considered using the word “endured”—for the sake of procreation?

Right—there’s a procedure: the man goes to bed with his wife, but using a condom, into which a pin has been pricked. There is thus the theoretical chance of procreation, and you get the sample. See?

I love this sort of lunacy—who wouldn’t? But I find it seriously screwy when a pope drifts back to talk to reporters, on the way home from Rio, and sends people’s eyebrows an inch north and their jaws several inches south. Because the five words that everybody associates with this pope is, “who am I to judge?”

Answer—you’re the pope.

It occurred to me, just now—I know what the problem is. Having worked in Human Resources for Wal-Mart for seven years, the answer came to me with my first sip of double espresso. Here goes:

The pope doesn’t have a job description!  

That’s gotta be the problem, because if he did, there would probably be some sort of nonsense in it, on the lines of:

Consistently and rigorously articulate, uphold and champion key components of the Catholic faith, as defined by scripture, tradition, and the entire canon of the faith.

In short, the pope is supposed to get up in the morning and sit down and make moral judgments. That’s why people are dropping the bills in the collection plates.

OK—so the most recent controversy? The pope apparently made a 10-minute call to an Argentinian, Jaquelina Lisbona, who is legally married to a divorced man, and who has been told that she cannot take communion. Why not? Because she is living in sin with her husband of 20 years, since he has divorced, and his first marriage has not been annulled. So the pope grabbed the phone, called her up, and told her, in essence, to shop around for a more sympathetic priest. And that it would be fine to take communion.

One of the most bizarre things about the Catholic Church is how little its faithful know about it. Nor do I, but this much I know—and to make sure, I googled “state of grace communion.” Try it, and you’ll get your answer.

What’s weird is that this is Catholicism 101—and the pope is saying it doesn’t matter?

Predictably, the millions of divorced Catholics went wild—the pope was signaling that the Church was changing! There were winds of modernity galling through the now open doors of the medieval church! Did the pope plan to announce major changes when the meeting of bishops occurred later in the year?

Just as predictably, the conservatives were howling, and here I have to say—who can blame them? Because the church’s teaching on marriage is bedrock.

Of course, it’s also bogus, since a suspiciously high number of marriages are getting annulled, nowadays: a byzantine procedure that requires two tribunals to decide that, no, a marriage never existed at all. Some of it anyone can go along with—if papá is standing over you with a gun, there’s not much consent involved. But life is messier, in general, and the church is increasingly willing to nullify a marriage because, well, your husband turned out to be a drunk. Oh, and guess what? It doesn’t hurt to throw a little money at the problem, and pay for “advocates” who can…well, advocate.

So how many marriages are getting annulled? Here’s Wikipedia:

Diocesan tribunals completed over 49000 cases for nullity of marriage in 2006. Over the past 30 years about 55 to 70% of annulments have occurred in the United States. The growth in annulments—at least in the US—has been substantial. In 1968 338 marriages were annulled. In 2006 27,000 were.[17]    

In fact, both JPII and Benedict repeatedly called for crackdowns on giving annulments, especially at a meeting of the Roman Rota, which typically hears cases for annulment. Here’s what one source said:

In 1991, when Pope John Paul II wanted to defend marriage against what he perceived to be emerging threats, he used his speech to the Rota to lay out a natural-law case for marriage. He acknowledged that marriage is shaped by culture, but contemporary secular culture, he warned, had now become hostile to marriage. Freedom had become "absolutized," and the pontiff wished to make clear where the boundaries lay.

Three years later, in 1994, Pope John Paul II admonished the Rota against the ease with which annulments were being granted. Judges must know the truth, and the truth "is not always easy." Avoid "the temptation to lighten the heavy demands of observing the law in the name of a mistaken idea of compassion and mercy."

Ah, for the good old days!

Right, so what did Francis do? Well apparently he drifted in and gave a seven-paragraph address. Here again is Charles J. Reid on the subject:

What he delivered was a beautiful meditation on Jesus and the qualities of the good judge. The judge, he began, must be fully and maturely human. He or she (and canon law permits women to exercise the judicial office) must never be legalistic, must avoid dry abstractions, and must instead serve the ends of real justice. And justice, he stressed, required full awareness of the needs of the persons before the court. Attend to the person, he emphasized, in his or her "concrete realities."

As Reid writes, the most important message—the take-home, as we used to say at Wal-Mart—was the judges must be pastoral, not judicial. Which leaves me wondering—if the judges are not to be judicial, well, who is? The answer, as I read the article, is nobody: since Jesus had focused his life on the pastoral, everybody within the church is supposed to be pastoral.

Well, the Vatican press office, who must be salivating for the days of Pope Benedict, came out and said that a private call was not a policy shift, not a realignment on doctrine. Which is probably true; there’s an old Roman saying: popes come and go, the curia remains forever.

And this pope needs to be careful, because if he puts out all these hints, and then doesn’t come through? If his bishops hang tough and say, “sorry, but divorced Catholics cannot take communion?” Look at the trouble in the Anglican Church over the ordination of a gay bishop—it would look like Queen Elizabeth’s tea party in comparison to the fight over remarriage of divorced Catholics.

I’m an old atheist, so I tend to scoff at the whole thing. Still, I do sort of wonder…

…should somebody yank the telephone out of the Holy Father’s office?

On Sisters and Ticks

OK, Dear Readers, we have a serious problem, since what happens to a blogger without Internet? The same thing that happens to surgeons without scalpels…

Right, the son of a newspaperman am I, so, was I going to be defeated by what never existed until the last years of my father’s life? Shouldn’t I be able to find something, anything, to write about?

He would have been 105, three days before that day (Wednesday,) and he died nearly twenty years ago, but here’s today’s secret, Dear Readers: it gets better, yes, but never to the point of best. Which means that, yes, I no longer weep when I see a wok (Jack was an excellent Chinese cook), and I’m glad that he got out of the world as he did: fast and painless, with not too much deterioration. Life makes you philosophical, and the icon giving the option to go on indefinitely can’t be found on the desktop. So you might as well go when you still have most of your faculties, and life isn’t too onerous. But that said, his absence turns up, once in a while, and then I miss him.

Wednesday, for example, he showed up at The Poet’s Passage, the café / craft shop where I work, and where the Internet had decided to take a prolonged cigarette break. I was delivering rice and beans to Naïa, the daughter of the owner, whom I had seen and who was going off to get her child the rice and beans. Since I myself was going for rice and beans, it was no problem to get an extra order.

Naïa, of course, is completely unfazed by Marc arriving with the food instead of her mother. And also completely in character, she has a joke:

“What do you call a mad flea?”

I know it’s going to be bad.

“OK—tell me.”

“A lunatic!”

I’m about to protest that a tick is hardly a flea, but guess what? The damage is done, and Naïa is a girl who has never once ventured down the doll aisle of a toy store. Instead, she heads straight for insects—in which I believe—or dinosaurs—in which I don’t. So that means that not only is she twelve, but she’ll probably win.

“How can you not believe in dinosaurs,” she said, when I presented my belief.

“Never seen one,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable.

“And have you ever seen a tick, “ I said, hoping to deflect the argument, and she professed that she had—one had been venturing across the inner landscape of Lorca’s ear. (Lorca being the toy Chihuahua…)

So we talked about that, and discussed proper tick-removal schemes: you can’t pull them out if they’re embedded. Then I asked what she had done with the tick.

“Flushed it down the toilet,” she said.

“A singularly uncreative thing to do with a perfectly good tick,” I said.

“Yeah? What would you have done with a tick?”

“In fact, there is a long history of inventive uses of ticks in my family,” I told her, since first it was true, and anyway, there was no Internet.

Eric walks into the café.

“There was my brother Eric, who was engaged to an genteel lady from Pittsburgh: her father was a cardiologist, her mother hung out with the Carnegies and the Mellons. So what happened when Eric found a tick on him, one weekend after having been out in the woods? Well, he went to the jewelry store, got a ring box, deposited the tick on the cotton, and then had them wrap it up. Then he left it on her desk at the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper where they both worked.”

The marriage ended in divorce.

Naïa, of course, doesn’t see that. Eric definitely picked the wrong girl….

“Then there was my father, who had also been out in the woods, and who had to interview the president of the Bank of Madison.”

Historical note—there was a time, Dear Reader, when banks had perfectly sensible names, before they began to call themselves MadBank, or whatever.

Jack walks into the café.

“Well, the president of the bank was young, and very pompous, and treating Mr. Newhouse with great formality, which generally tended to be wasted on Jack. So the prez left the room, which was a good thing, since Jack had begun to feel that really awful feeling: something strolling across his scalp. So there my father was, holding the tick in his hand. And then he heard footsteps.”

“So what did he do?’ asked Naïa.

“He must had had Mercury blossoming all over his astrological chart,” I told her, “since he knew immediately what to do. He leaned forward and dropped the black tick on a white piece of paper on the president’s desk.”

“Then what happened,” asked Naïa.

“Well, he waited for the situation to evolve. And then he saw the president start, and reach out to grab the paper. But Jack wasn’t having any of that!”

“So what did he do?”

“He leaned forward and said, ‘is that a TICK on your desk?’ So then the president got really nervous and said ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know!’ He should just have laughed, of course, but he got rattled. So Jack leaned farther forward and said, “well, any damn fool can see that that’s a TICK!” And now, Jack couldn’t help it, and began saying things like, ‘do you mean to tell me your bank has TICKS!’ and ‘have you ever had an infestation of TICKS before?!’ So of course the president got completely rattled.”

“So then what happened,” Naïa wants to know.

“Well, Jack finished the interview and went across the street to have a cup of coffee behind the front window of the diner. And guess what happened, twenty minutes later?”

“What?”

“Three trucks from Oliver Exterminating roared up in from of the bank. And the guys came out running, like HazMat guys going after a bomb!”

Naïa is completely unimpressed. Right, I realize it wasn’t much of a story.

Unless, of course, you had known Jack….

Family is funny, I thought. People come in and out, die, turn up unexpectedly, and go away again. And then, sometimes, people just turn up.

“Marc, I don’t know how to say this,” said Lady, Naïa’s mother.

This is rarely a good sentence to hear.

“You’re one of my closest friends,” she says simply.

“You’re my sister,” I say, without thinking. That’s when you know it’s true.

We kiss. Then I head off to the café.

Naïa has to have her rice and beans.

Soccer, Anyone?

Well, the news out of Washington—or anywhere else in the world, it seems—is so abysmal, so frightening…well, wait. Stop using these puny adjectives: Barack Obama said it in two words in his most recent email to me—we’re finished.

Right—so what’s happening on the island? All going well in the Isle of Enchantment?

Doesn’t seem so. Though there is good news: the children of San Juan, in an imaginative plan, will have a place to play soccer!

Critics sniff at the proposal, of course, saying that the idea of renting out a couple of acres in a park to a developer, who will install three soccer fields and two beach volleyball courts, as well as provide a “deli juice bar” that also has beer—craft beer, that is—and wine is going to benefit only those people (hint, we don’t know them) who can pay 80 bucks an hour. In short, all of the kids in the projects are going to be left playing kick-the-ball in the parking lot.

There’s also a little question about the rent, which according to El Nuevo Día, would be only 2,500 bucks a month. But wait, cried the mayoress of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the developer has promised to give the first weekend of the month, as well as one weekday night, free! This she deems “services in kind,” and so the real sum is a respectable 8,690 bucks a month. Great deal, right?

Predictably, the argument leaves some cold; here’s one critic:

González Costa señaló que en 25 años la empresa “habrá pagado apenas un millón de dólares y lo que va a generar Ecofútbol en un año es cinco  veces lo que generará el Municipio en 25 años”.

(González Costa pointed out that in 25 years the business would have paid scarcely a million dollars, and Ecofútbol would have generated five times in one year what the Municipality earned in 25 years.”)

“Ecofútbol,” you say? What’s so “eco” about soccer?

The plot, as it seems to in the tropics, thickens….

Ecofútbol sprang into existence in—no surprise here—July of last year, and was awarded the contract without a public auction. Why? Well, according to the paper, the matter was in “the public interest.” And the developer behind the project? A father / son team of guys named Víctor González Serrallés and Víctor González Barahona.

The first impression was good; here’s what Wharton School’s alumni magazine had to say about the father, Víctor González Barahona:

Gonzalez’ business ventures are grouped into three companies. Puerto Rico Land and Fruit Co. produces and sells organically grown coffee, manages ecological restoration projects and is involved in setting up a mitigation bank. The concept behind a mitigation bank, says Gonzalez, is to establish an inventory of restored and created wetlands which are then sold as credits to developers whom regulatory agencies allow to impact environmentally sensitive areas.

“No one else in Puerto Rico is doing this, although it is becoming more common in the U.S.,” he adds. “These mitigation banks are seen as a way of resolving the main conflict between the business and environmental communities by offering companies a way to both make money and protect our environment.”

But González is no stranger to controversy. There was the brilliant scheme to put a wind farm in Culebra, a plan that riled the residents, since the turbines…well, consider this source:

This project involves the construction of five wind turbines 390 feet high, four residences, an office structure, a maintenance shop, an electrical substation, and a water storage tank of 10,000 gallons, among other facilities, which are all visible from Flamenco Beach.

Flamenco Beach, by the way, routinely makes the ten-best-beaches-in-the-world list in travel magazines. Here, take a look….

Happily, the residents prevailed—not without a good deal of struggle—and González withdrew the project. But now, he’s back at it, because guess what? According to the print edition of El Nuevo Día of 24 April 2014, the son, Víctor González Serrallés is going to operate Ecofútbol, but papa is going to have “a part” by using solar and wind power to generate electricity.

Wonderful scheme, right?

There is, as always, a problem. We might have the sun, but do we have the wind? Because González put up twenty-five or so wind mills in a fertile valley of Puerto Rico, with the expectation of generating enough energy to sell back to the power company, and now…

…well, I’ve looked, and I can’t tell you. The last thing I remember is that the whole thing was shut down, and the contracts were being “renegotiated.” Oh, and that the whole affair was such an environmental mess that González Barahona had to cede 623 cuerdas (one cuerda is roughly an acre) of land to the Department of Natural Resources. What did he do? He gave up only 427 cuerdas, and then turned around and asked for a million dollar tax credit from the treasury department. Why? He claimed the land was a “donation,” when in fact it was part of a settlement…..

So the news about the wind project is scarce.  What I can tell you is that the company website is, well, unimpressive, and curiously incomplete. I have just spent—what’s time to a blogger?—ten minutes going through the site, and guess what? The Guayanilla project doesn’t appear there. What does? Photos of solar panels on private residences.

Guys? According to the print version of El Nuevo Día, Windmar was awarded six contracts worth 524.6 million dollars, and your company is showing me solar panels on rooftops? Somebody out there, tell me if there isn’t something just a bit screwy about this….

“Windmar has acquired extensive experience with the local government permitting process and has received several PPOA’s for wind and solar projects from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (“PREPA”).”

That’s from the home page of the company website.

And it seems it’s not just “extensive experience with the local government permitting process” that Windmar has acquired. They also seem to know how to bamboozle the municipality of San Juan….

An alternative for the municipality….

Purpose-Driven Deaths

It was called ABC and it made perfect sense. Well, the B and the C, certainly—to me, the A is a bit of a stretch.
 

A is for abstinence

B is for be faithful

C is for condoms

See? Anybody who has progressed through the very first books of their lives can get this. And it seemed to be working, down there in Uganda; here’s what one writer had to say:

By 2003, Uganda’s AIDS rate plummeted 10 percent. The government’s free distribution of the “C” in ABC—condoms—proved central to the program’s success, according to Avert, an international AIDS charity.

So—a nice little success story! But before cracking open that bottle of champagne, consider this quote, from the same source:

On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Janet Museveni, who had become born-again, convened a massive stadium revival in Kampala to dedicate her country to the “lordship” of Jesus Christ. As midnight approached, the First Lady summoned a local pastor to the stage to anoint the nation. “We renounce idolatry, witchcraft, and Satanism in our land!” he proclaimed.

What had happened? Well, at least some of it had to do with Rick Warren, who teamed up with a Ugandan preacher, Martin Ssempa, whom Kay Warren, speaking through tears, called “my brother.” And Ssempa, among other things, was the driving force behind a Ugandan paper publishing the photos of…well, here it is:

Warren, you see, had been to Uganda in 2008 to declare that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and so not a human right. This, of course, was the message that our old villain Scott Lively had been pouring into their ears. In addition, it was the message, according to Rachel Maddow, that The Family, a mostly secretive group of fundamentalists who have been infiltrating our government for years now, had given David Bahati, the sponsor of the most recent law.

It wasn’t, therefore, enough to go after homosexuals. What else had to be done? Obviously, the message that condoms would prevent AIDS had to go, since that was a direct contradiction to the message that the fundamentalists wanted to get across. Here comes our born-again first lady again:

Two years later, Janet Museveni flew to Washington at the height of a heated congressional debate over PEPFAR. She carried in her hand a prepared message to distribute to Republicans. Abstinence was the golden bullet in her country’s fight against AIDS, she assured conservative lawmakers, denying the empirically proven success of her husband’s condom distribution program. Like magic, the Republican-dominated Congress authorized over $200 million for Uganda, but only for the exclusive promotion of abstinence education. Ssempa soon became the “special representative of the First Lady’s Task Force on AIDS in Uganda,” receiving $40,000 from the PEPFAR pot.

How involved was Warren with Uganda? Well, involved enough that Ssempa, when Warren finally was forced to denounce the Uganda anti-gay law, published an open letter to Warren. Here’s what he had to say:

When you came to Uganda on Thursday, 27 March 2008, and expressed support to the Church of Uganda’s boycott of the pro-homosexual Church of England, you stated; “The Church of England is wrong, and I support the Church of Uganda”.  You are further remembered to say, “homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus (it’s) not a human right. We shall not tolerate this aspect at all”

Warren, according to The New York Times, is starting a new program within his church to reach out to people suffering mental illnesses, an issue important to him since his son committed suicide a year ago. I hope it works but…

…why am I so unconvinced?

Where We Cannot Go

What happened to him should never happen to any parent. Because however difficult it might be to lose a child in an accident, or through disease, how much more difficult would it be to lose a child through suicide?

Nor was it the case that they hadn’t tried everything, hadn’t gone to the best hospitals, hadn’t gotten the finest doctors. But a decade before he took his life, Matthew had gone sobbing to his father. “It’s pretty clear,” he had said, “I’m not getting better and I’m never going to get better. So why shouldn’t I kill myself? I know I’m going to heaven, Dad. So why not kill myself now?”

His father was a minister; his answer reflected that.

“Sometimes we don’t know why we’ve been given such great pain, Son. But there is a reason, and we’ll find out in the end. But I am never, ever, as a father going to give up looking for a solution to your problem….”

And it had gone on for years. Matthew, their third child, had been a remarkable child; since birth, he had been different. Shy, sensitive, he could sense in a moment the person in the room who was hurting the most, and would make a beeline for him or her. For the rest of the evening, he would stay by that person’s side, laughing, joking, trying to cheer him or her up.

“He had an amazing ability to help people, and he knew it,” his father said. “He once told me, ‘the only person I can’t help is me….’”

Yes, different; different almost from birth. The father had feared something was wrong from the very beginning; indeed, almost from the day Matthew had been born, his father had started to dread that his son would kill himself. There was that sensitivity, the inability to shrug off pain, a softness that wasn’t like other boys’. He played different, he acted different, he…well, was different.

And so they had prayed, yes, but they also knew—they had to get help. It all came clear after the first suicide attempt; then there was no choice. Matthew had swallowed the Tylenol and had left the bottle on the bed when they found him. It was, as the doctor said, the classic call for help.

Help that, despite their best efforts, they could not give him. They tried—they lost count of the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, family counselors, pastors, prayer groups, professionals, friends…  It was numbing, after a while, and in itself depressing, as well.

“We had pulled him off from the edge more than once,” said his mother. “And the night before, Matthew and I were in his bedroom, and I was begging for him not to kill himself. And he was crying and sobbing and rocking on his bed, and all I could do was hold him, and beg him to go on, and tell him that it would get better, and he just cried harder, and started pounding on the bed and shouting that I didn’t understand. That it was never going to get better and that he was in so much pain and he couldn’t go on—and it was so unfair of me to ask him to take this pain, he couldn’t bear it. He was screaming in my face that no mother would want her child in so much agony. And I was screaming back that I couldn’t let him die, I just couldn’t, no mother could. And I couldn’t bear it, seeing him in such pain and there was nothing, NOTHING I could do to help him. My son, my son, in so much pain! And I remembered when he was a child—he’d fall and cry and I’d pick him up and it would be OK. And I never imagined that there would come a day or a night when I couldn’t help him.”

“At last, he quieted down, and began to talk about going home. And something, I don’t know, something didn’t feel right. He was too calm; too collected. He had gone too quickly from utter despair to being, well, collected. We begged him to stay, we pleaded with him to stay, but he was firm. And that’s when he said it. He turned around, as he was leaving, and said, very slowly, very forcefully, ‘you know, if you ever call the police on me, or call 911 to get me help, it’s an instant suicide.’”

“I was stunned—the look in his eye was awful. But it was his voice, how cool he was, as if he had settled on something. Of course, neither of us could sleep, and we kept calling and calling. I texted him—‘just send me one word, ONE word telling me you’re OK.’ Then we drove to the house, about three in the morning. All the lights were on. That’s when I knew—but we didn’t have a key. And what should I do? Should I call 911? Was it a bluff? Would he really have the courage, or the desperation or the despair to do it? So we were sobbing, Rick and I, and holding each other in the driveway, and praying. And that’s when I knew. We left, and then got the call from the police department. We went to the house, and a cop came out, and we looked at him and he just nodded.”

All right, Readers, why have I spent 891 words telling you this story? Because I read in The New York Times last week that Rick Warren, the pastor of the mega-church Saddleback Church, and an outspoken opponent of marriage equality, was going to start a mental health outreach ministry in his church. Why? Because, with some poetic license, the story of Matthew, above, is the story of Matthew Warren, Rick and Kay’s son.

It happened just over a year ago, and if I knew about it, I had forgotten it. But what’s significant about the story—for me, at least—is that I immediately assumed Matthew was gay (which of course was why I was banging that “sensitivity” drum up there). So I turned to find a picture of him, since gaydar will—very occasionally—work with photos. Here he is, and no, it didn’t work….

Well, it’s a heart-breaking photo, this boy who seems to be telling us, ‘one day you will know, you will see, you will understand this half-smile of mine…” And it’s sad, as well, that even in death, Matthew’s photo, when I saved it just now, had “rick-warren’s-son” as the default save option. Matthew was not Matthew, but Rick Warren’s son.

Nor was I the only gay man who had wondered about the question, since apparently Twitter and the social networks erupted. And I’m sorry to report that a number of my gay brethren pounced on the death as god-or-the-devil-sent stick with which to beat up Rick Warren. Here’s one example….

Was @rickwarren's son gay? Maybe conversion therapy, condemnation and hatred towards gays was too much for matt...#ripmatt

— Samir Perez (@SamirPerez) April 7, 2013

That is by no means the most egregious; here is one of the 70 comments made to the article referenced above:

I wish I could come up with the right set of sentences that would drive this pain (if Mr. Warren actually feels such, being an experienced con man) deep, deep into Mr. Warren such that he could no longer cling to his sick delusions of god service.

The only 'god' Rick Warren serves is himself. He has poisoned the minds of millions.

He is NOT a friend to democracy.

Religion comforts...and cripples.

Or how about this:

Rick Warren's son has committed suicide // ‪#IWOULDTOOIFIWASHIM ‪#FUCKRICKWARREN ‪#UGANDA ‪#GAY ‪#EXECUTIONS ‪#LAKEFOREST

Guys? There are some places we cannot go, and just as we abhor the Phelps family—which of course came out and said the usual about Rick being an apostate and worshipping a false God and, anyway, no matter what, God hates you-know-whom—we cannot, let me say it again, we CANNOT do this to a suffering family.

That much I knew. What didn’t I know?

The skinny on Rick Warren’s celebrated AIDS program in Africa.

Drop by tomorrow, and I’ll tell you all about it….