Victoria Brownworth

The past week has been filled with grief and remembrance for the nation as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

I, however, was also marking another anniversary of violence.

Nine years ago, one week before the first anniversary of 9/11, I was raped outside my house in lower Germantown. As with that morning of 9/11, it was a beautiful, sun-drenched, blue-sky day. The first day of school meant that my block was deserted for the first time in months, empty of children playing.

Empty of everyone except the man who politely–yet with a sexual aside–offered to help me bring my trash cans up from the street. A man who, when I told him thanks, but I was fine, was suddenly behind me, pinning my arms behind my back and forcing me into the alleyway alongside my house and onto the ground in a neighbor’s yard where he proceeded to slap, punch, bite and threaten to kill me as he raped me.

Like many victims of sexual assault, my experience with the Philadelphia Police Department–the oldest municipal police department in the country–was problematic. The male police officer who came to my house was as sensitive as he could be, although the overall tone toward assault victims seems to be that they are lying until proven otherwise.

Sexual assault victims in Philadelphia are often treated like criminals themselves–something Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey has said ceased in 2000. Yet the first thing I was told by the male detective (there were no female detectives in the SVU) who interviewed me was that if I was lying, I would be prosecuted.

That was, however, before he saw the severity of my injuries, which could not have been self-inflicted.

Statistics show, however, that the percentage of false rape reports is actually about two percent, nationally. According to the detective interviewing me, it was “about half.” The Philadelphia Police Department actually reports ten percent false reporting–much higher than the national average.

In the nine years since I was attacked–an attack that changed my life in many ways, both significant and minor–my rapist has never been caught.

While this is not unusual in rape cases, it’s significant in my case because the man who raped me wasn’t just my rapist. According to the detective who interviewed me at SVU, four other young women had been raped by the same man with his distinctive arm-pinning M.O.

At the time I was raped, local news attention was focused on a man dubbed “the Center City rapist,” who was attacking and sexually assaulting women in the heart of upscale Center City.

A serial rapist in Germantown where all the victims before me had been African-American hadn’t garnered even a neighborhood warning, which made me wonder then and now, how many other women had been raped by the same man, but had not reported their rapes. The SVU had dozens of rapist sketches on its corridor walls, but how many of those had been circulated in the neighborhoods where the attacks occured?

According to the U.S. Department of Justice Crime Statistics and the FBI, rape is the second most common violent crime after domestic violence. One in five American women will report a rape in her lifetime, but it is estimated that one in three women is actually raped–meaning nearly half of all women who are raped are not reporting the crimes against them.

White women comprise the majority of victims overall–80 percent–but minority women are slightly more likely to be attacked with the exception of Native American women who are attacked twice as often as any other racial or ethnic group.

The highest risk for sexual assault and rape occurs between the ages of 12 and 44; 15 percent of victims are under 12, 80 percent are under 30. Young women between the ages of 16 and 19 are four times more likely to be assaulted than any other age group. Among girls under 12, over 95 percent know their attackers–a family member, a teacher, the parish priest, a neighbor. There are no statistics on how many women have been raped more than once.

According to the FBI, rape is the most recidivist violent crime after domestic violence, and it is also the least likely to convict a perpetrator. Only 50 percent of rapists are caught. Of those, 58 percent are prosecuted, but less than 20 percent of prosecutions result in conviction. So while Mayor Nutter reported last year that 70 percent of sexual assault cases “cleared,” that does not mean the perpetrators went to prison.

In 1999, while John Timoney was still Philadelphia Police Commissioner, local news investigations reported that Philadelphia was one of the least likely cities for rape kits to be processed appropriately. A subsequent CBS news investigation in May 2010 noting the tens of thousands of rape kits lying untested nationwide garnered this response: “Joseph Szarka,

Lab Manager at Philadelphia Police Department’s Forensic Science Center, tells CBS News that his department, like New York City, tests every rape kit. ‘How could we not?’ he asked in a phone interview.”

Women’s Law Project director Carol Tracy, who facilitated many of the changes in the processing, agreed with that assessment.

However, the reason that processing happening with such regularity may have a problematic side to it. In Philadelphia, there are only two hospitals certified to administer rape kits: Jefferson Hospital and the Episcopal Hospital campus at Temple University Hospital. This means the majority of women in the city must travel at least a half hour to be “processed” with a longer waiting time for “collection.” A woman raped in the Northeast or West Philadelphia or Germantown/Mt. Airy will be traveling almost an hour to a certified center–often covered in dirt, blood and semen. This could easily be one more reason for women to not report assaults.

Rape kits taken at other hospitals or at private doctor’s offices, like mine was, are not considered evidence. And while in Philadelphia rape victims are not charged for their rape kits–unlike in many cities–that only applies in the city proper and if the kit is processed at one of the two certified hospitals.

In September 2010, Carol Tracy and Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey testified at a Senate Subcommittee Hearing on The Chronic Failure to Investigate and Report Rape Cases. The hearing was chaired by former Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), long an advocate for women’s rights who as Philadelphia District Attorney, established the Special Victims Unit in the city.

Ramsey noted that significant changes had been made in the police department’s handling of rape cases in 2000.

This was certainly necessary considering that in 1999 Philadelphia police still deemed more than 50 percent of rape reports “unfounded,” SVU was called “the lying bitches unit” internally and police officers gave reasons for women reporting rape as “free abortions, revenge [this is what I was told], covering up truancy and covering up infidelity.”

At the Senate hearing Tracy said the Uniformed Crime Report definition of rape had not changed since 1927 and in her opinion this greatly impacted both reportage and prosecution. The definition–”carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will” leaves out, as Tracy testified, “anal, oral and statutory rape, incest, rape with an object, finger or fist, rape of men.” Tracy also noted that at least five percent of rape reports were deemed “unfounded” solely due to the guidelines.

Most states and municipalities have a statute of limitation on rapes that do not include kidnaping or murder. In Pennsylvania that statute is 12 years. The crimes in this category include rape, statutory sexual assault, sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault, incest and child sexual abuse.

This is why the majority of sexual assault cases linked to Philadelphia’s Catholic priests in several highly publicized grand jury reports cannot be prosecuted–the statute of limitations has expired.

Sexual assault victims in Philadelphia may also have been alarmed by recent cases of police officers alleged to have sexually assaulted women while on duty. In August, two women were allegedly forced to perform sex acts by police officers who initially–like my own rapist–offered to help them. (The officers have since been arraigned.) A series of cases of men posing as law enforcement in recent years may also have impacted victims.

Three years remain to catch the man who raped me and at least four other women before the statute of limitations runs out on his prosecution. The question for the one in five–or one in three–women in Philadelphia who have been assaulted but whose attackers have not been caught remains the same: Are the crimes against us being taken as seriously as they could and should be, or are rapists being allowed to rape with impunity, with little fear of either arrest or prosecution?

For many of us there can be no closure without an arrest–or at least the knowledge that an effort has been made to get our rapists off the streets. And for one in five women, the clock is ticking.

TV sears images into our heads on a daily basis. The fires in Texas with the victims standing in the ashes of their lives, fighting back tears, holding some small remnant in their hands. The floods in Pennsylvania with people being rescued by rowboats from the homes they’ve lived in for years, because the rivers have crested over their neighborhoods and destroyed everything, leaving only new rivers of muddy water behind. The babies dying of starvation in Somalia and Kenya with their skeletal mothers fanning the flies from their faces and harried medical people trying to save who they can. The aftermath of car bombings throughout Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya with women keening and children crying and men carrying torn-up bloodied bodies on makeshift stretchers in search of help as sirens wail and fires burn.

Yet when we turn on the tube, that’s not what we want to see–the horror and the carnage and the disasters both man-made and natural. We are usually looking for entertainment and escape–an absorbing drama, an hilarious sit-com, a compelling reality show, a surprising talent competition. We want to have a passive experience of relaxation and simple, undemanding fun. That’s what TV is for–to immerse us in languid enjoyment, like a cat sunning on a windowsill, watching the occasional bird or squirrel. Effortless and for the most part, meaningless.

But it’s those other images that stay with us–the ones where TV takes us somewhere we would rather not be, like the perimeter of those fires, or wading in the flood waters, or wondering if that baby is going to die right before our eyes.

Ten years ago we were all watching TV at the same time, watching one of the most declarative scenes of this decade, the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath, watching something we never wanted to see, never thought we’d see, wished we weren’t seeing.

But there it was, on our TVs, inescapable and horrifying in a way we really couldn’t comprehend, because it was new and different. We’ve seen the fires before, and the floods. We’ve seen the starving babies and the grieving mothers. We’ve seen the burned out cars and the shooting flames and the bits of bloodied flesh.

But we had never seen anything like this. And we couldn’t look away. This was the accident right in front of us that included all of us and we had to bear witness to it. And TV made us do that, even as it helped us through it.

I had considered ignoring this 9/11 anniversary altogether–just writing about more of the new season that is starting up over the next two weeks because some of the shows are really good and some are edgy and some are just going to give you that nice, soporific glow that fun TV is all about. I had considered retaining the editorial “we” that I have used in this space for 18 years, but realized I could not do that for this column, because for each of us, this remains both deeply personal and also compellingly collective.

The past week has been all about commemoration and memorializing and that day when we really were all one nation for just the briefest bit of time. And what made it happen was TV, because it was TV that allowed us to see all the different vantage points of that day.

I worked in New York for years at a series of publications–OutWeek, QW, SPIN, POZ. I also worked for a few publishers and mainstream newspapers for which I did a lot of investigative reporting that took me into parts of New York that most white girls don’t ever see. So New York was one of my special places. I lived there, I worked there, I loved it. I’d been to the top of the World Trade Center and had lunch with friends and stood outside on the very top deck where the wind whipped you like crazy and you could feel the building sway and it was both terrifying and exhilarating.

So on that beautiful, impossibly blue skied Tuesday morning, when the tour of the morning shows was going on, it was hard to believe what any of us was seeing. Diane Sawyer–then the host of ABC’s “GMA”–trying to ascertain what was going on. Then the second plane hit. And then it was just non-stop TV for days, because everything else ceased and you could barely stand to look away, because somehow watching TV all through the day and night and day again made you feel connected to those people in New York and that experience and what it meant to all of us.

We needed to hear those anchors as they got increasingly tired and tried not to cry and jackets came off and ties got loosened and sleeves got rolled up and suddenly we were all together in the same place–the news anchors, the street reporters of which I had been one for so many years, the witnesses. As a nation, as an audience, we were sharing this incomparable moment where we really didn’t know if our country was going to go on or not. Because none of us had ever experienced an attack on us before. That was something that happened someplace else, not here.

Seeing the planes going into the buildings over and over never seemed to lessen the eerie unreality of it all. If anything these TV images heightened our sense that something was just so awry, so wrong. We were in an episode of “Fringe” and had gone through the portal into the other world. We were watching a movie like “Tora, Tora, Tora,” or “Apocalypse Now” where the planes fly in low and fire erupts out of impossible places.

Except it was indeed real and there were the TV news people to tell us how real it was and all the things it could mean and we were just so scared and yet it was soothing to know that we could go lie down for a time, or maybe eat something, and come back and turn the TV on and they would all still be there. Holding our hands through this ungodly, ghastly, unreal time.

On that day and in the next days after, it was TV that made us feel the most safe. Because it was there, non-stop, unending, a running commentary that was almost blissfully mundane in how it explicated and deconstructed this awful event.

A decade ago I wrote here about that day and how it was TV’s finest moment, keeping us grounded and sane and soothed. For those of us who had little faith in government, we were able to have faith in TV: the news was there, evolving the story along with us, talking about the same kind of feelings we felt and why–the anger, the sadness, the confusion, the pain, the impotence. It was all there. Because the news people were Americans like us, fearful like us, hurt and appalled and shattered like us. But they also had a job to do and it took a specific kind of bravery to do that for days on end with no respite.

So this week, when the images came flooding back with some of the same people retelling the story, when they showed it all to us again–the planes, the buildings collapsing, the people standing in line with bits of DNA of loved ones, the postings of photos of the missing, the audio-tapes of the last moments and the air-traffic control people and the first responders–it was as vivid as if it had just happened.

I wasn’t sure how much of it I could listen to, actually. I’ve never understood the madness of killing innocents–or of thinking innocents are collectively guilty. I’ve never stopped being sad and angry about that day and all it has led to–the massive amount of killing that has peppered our TV news with blood over the ensuing decade, but which has not shown us a hint of resolution to either the carnage of that day or the carnage of our attempts at avenging it.

Scott Pelley, the new news anchor at CBS, was a reporter until he became the anchor. He has a lot of the embittered battle-weary tough guy about him. On the Sept. 9 evening broadcast he got a glimpse of the new memorial to the victims that was to be unveiled on the anniversary.

I’d seen a lot already in the 9/11 anniversary lead-up–interviews with the families of the dead and with first responders remembering that day. Diane Sawyer did an almost unbearably moving piece on her Sept. 9 broadcast with the children of fathers who were killed on 9/11–fathers these kids, who were born after their fathers had died, had never known. The segment ended with pictures of the kids next to pictures of the fathers and to a one–girl or boy–they looked exactly like their dead parent. Gut-wrenching.

But it was Pelley in a hard-hat, looking out over this remarkable, breath-taking memorial that reduced me to literal sobbing of the sort I had not done since that day ten years ago.

There is incomparable beauty in simplicity and this is the most simple of memorials. But that implies rudimentary or limited and it is neither. There is a wall of water and two empty spaces replicating where the towers would have been. The names of the dead are engraved behind the water and the water spills out in this ghostly fashion into the spaces that are open and empty, and the feeling of absence that the designer wanted to convey is all-too apparent. It absolutely takes your breath away.

The tributes have been many and varied and heart-breaking as only memories of loss can be. But I suppose what lingers for me as a one-time New Yorker and a reporter and a TV critic is this: What hasn’t been memorialized or paid tribute to over the last week or more has been those news anchors and reporters who in the literal minutes and then days (because remember, all TV programming was suspended on the networks for several days after 9/11) after the attacks kept us from freaking out and running amok and doing damage to ourselves and others. They kept us in front of our TVs with their calm, soothing, professional voices. Some broke down–the late Peter Jennings, talking about his kids, Dan Rather, having a moment of sheer disbelief, Tom Brokaw, posing questions for which there would never be answers. But they all hung in, they all pulled it together, they all sat there for hour after hour and made us believe that we really would get through this–that we actually could get through this. They made us feel like what had been shattered could be made whole again if we just kept remembering that we had more in common than we had dividing us and really–it worked, because with only a few highly individual exceptions, we didn’t go crazy as a nation. Instead we stayed home and watched the tube and tried to breathe.

That’s what TV is supposed to do for us in these moments that could so easily destroy us as a country: help us keep it together.

And so I wanted to pay tribute to those people who helped me and millions of other Americans get through those days to this one ten years later. There’s a lot to find fault with in our TV news media and I spend a lot of time in this space criticizing what doesn’t work about TV and where it is wanting for so many of us.

But that 9/11 reportage was a watershed moment and everyone stepped up to the challenge with a level of humanity that isn’t usually what we think of when we think of the tube. It was stark and raw and ad lib and Teleprompter-free and that’s what we needed. It was unscripted reality TV of the most devastating sort and I–and we all should–feel so grateful that we had it and that it helped to get us to where we are now. So that in the memorializing of this decade we can look at that monument to absence and know that we didn’t contribute more to the carnage, we didn’t run amok and terrorize and burn down cities and pull people from their houses. We stayed sane, even as we felt crazy. And if we hadn’t had TV and the men and women news people on it to keep us calm, to demand that we be calm, perhaps things would have been hellish from the minutes after the planes struck until today, as you read this.

For the most part this column is a paean to TV. I have said time and again in my “we” voice that I love TV, because I do. I love its immediacy and I also like being entertained in an undemanding manner. I am frequently frustrated by the news we’re not seeing, and if I have one complaint about the 9/11 tributes beyond how many tissues I have gone through in watching it, it is this: 9/11 led us directly into two wars–three if we count Pakistan, and I do–that we are still in a decade later. (And yes, I know Iraq was not about 9/11, but its architects linked that war to the attacks and a lot of TV news bought that and ran with it for years.)

The 3,000 people who were killed on 9/11 have been joined by thousands more–our own American soldiers and a huge cohort of Afghanistani, Iraqi and Pakistani civilians as well as soldiers.

That’s the part of the memorializing that’s been left out of the coverage, except it’s inextricably bound to it. The victims of 9/11 led inexorably to so many more victims, the numbers of which continue to mount.

TV has a job to do. It can create controversies where none really exist, like Chaz Bono joining “Dancing with the Stars” as the fattest contestant ever. (Oh wait, that’s not the controversy, never mind.) Or it can explore meaningful issues like the growing number of Americans dealing with hunger, as an ABC series has been investigating in vivid detail. Or it can bring us characters very like ourselves, like Bianca Montgomery, the longest-running queer character ever on the tube who leaves ABC next week when “All My Children” airs its final episodes after more than four decades. Or it can stand our elected or hoping-to-be-elected politicians up there and open them for examination.

TV has such an amazing range and we are so fortunate to have it. But as the commemoration of 9/11 starts to fade even as new fears of attacks are raised, what we should remember about TV is this: Nothing can bring us together as either nations or humanity in the way TV can. Its immediacy takes us right there–wherever right there is. And for a time we will all be right there on that sparklingly beautiful September morning, because just as TV helps us to see today, it also doesn’t let us forget yesterday.

Which is just one of the many reasons we really must be sure to stay tuned.

The irony was not lost on me. Hurricane Irene was scheduled to make a direct hit on Philadelphia on the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst disasters in American history.

No one expected another Katrina on the East Coast, but then no one expected Katrina on the Gulf Coast. But every meteorological meter put Irene as a direct hit over land in North Carolina, New Jersey/Philadelphia and New York. What’s more, the East Coast isn’t true hurricane country (no tropical waters to stir the intensity), so the scenario of an actual hurricane–not a N’oreaster or a tropical storm–hitting the most populated areas of the country was beyond worrisome for local officials. When Hurricane Floyd hit here in 1999, it did extensive damage with flooding and winds. Yet Floyd had been downgraded to a low-level tropical storm by the time it reached Philadelphia.

With six million people in the Philadelphia area, millions more in New Jersey and 19 million in New York, the prospects were grim for serious disaster with Irene, which would be the first storm to hit land as an actual hurricane here since 1903.

I used to live in New Orleans and still have close friends there, so when Katrina went from being just another hurricane in a hurricane-prone region to the disaster it became, I was frantic for my friends. And then there was the aftermath, with reporters seeming far more in tune with what was needed than local, state or federal government officials whose job it was to keep people safe.

When it became clear that Irene was not going to be just another bad, N’oreaster-type storm, those images of Katrina came back with a ferocity that was unnerving. Once again the President–a different one this time–was on vacation. But that was where the similarities to six years ago ended.

Local and state government weren’t oblivious, nor were they afraid of asking for help from all quarters, including other state and local governments and the feds. Shelters were opened, states of emergency were declared, transportation was arranged for people without cars and mandatory evacuation orders were set for areas in New Jersey and Philadelphia that are flood-prone.

Local TV news media stepped up–from Friday morning through Sunday night the local news stations were on the air with non-stop storm coverage. KYW3, 6ABC, NBC10 and FOX29 were all prepared. And at the height of the storm on Saturday and Sunday, if you still had power–or if you only had a radio–you had the information being fed to you minute by minute. Even if you were trapped, you didn’t feel alone.

Thus when the tornado warnings started coming in for Manayunk, Roxborough, Germantown and Mt. Airy late Saturday night, we knew to get to the basement. 6ABC’s longtime main anchor, Jim Gardner, noted that he and his family spent the night in their basement because of the warnings.

It’s been a dicey time in local politics. Many Philadelphians are displeased with Mayor Nutter for a variety of reasons, many of which have been beyond his control and others which have been entirely of his making, like the debacle with Superintendent of Schools, Arlene Ackerman.

But Nutter was taking no chances in Philadelphia. For the first time in Philadelphia history, disaster shelters were opened which were pet friendly, the entire public transit system was shut down including the subway and evacuations of flood-prone areas like East Falls, Manayunk and Roxborough were ordered.

No one was going to die on Nutter’s watch.

Meanwhile, Gov. Corbett ordered PEMA into place, declared a state of emergency and detailed National Guard troops for emergency evacuations and rescues. A massive number of state and local first responders were prepared for the worst.

Across the river, Gov. Christie wasn’t taking any chances with his people, either. On Thursday he began busing people out from the shore areas. By Friday mandatory evacuations were ordered, the barrier islands were closed to any traffic and the casinos were shut for only the third time in 33 years.

What was heartening for Pennsylvanians and New Jerseyans was this: Both governors are Republicans (traditionally outraged at even the thought of government intervention) and Nutter is a Democrat. And yet everyone seemed capable of a true bipartisan effort in a time of true crisis. When Irene finally ended there was going to be none of the “It was the Mayor’s responsibility!” “No, it was the Governor’s responsibility!” “No, it was the feds responsibility!”

Everyone was on the same page well in advance of the storm’s arrival.

There were some dicey moments, of course. There are always the people who put first responders in harm’s way because they know better than the meteorologists and the government about what to do in an emergency. And at Rowan University where 2,000 people were evacuated, there was anger among the evacuees that the food was just sandwiches and people had to go directly outside the building to use port-o-potties because the bathroom facilities inside could not accommodate the number of people. But at the same time, local residents brought food and games for kids and books for adults to the shelters before the storm was at its peak. There was far more of the best of people being seen than the worst.

What resonates now as the waters begin to recede and people start to assess the massive damage wrought by the largest hurricane to ever hit the East Coast–it impacted 65 million people–is how few people died and how hard local, state and federal officials worked in tandem to create a safe environment in a completely unsafe circumstance.

In Philadelphia, more than 350,000 people remain without power and are likely to for up to two weeks. Flooding has ravaged homes and businesses and public transportation is still sketchy due to blocked roads and downed wires and receding flood waters. But the loss of life was minimal.

It seems as if our elected officials did everything right, or at least made every effort to do so. Some are complaining that Corbett, Christie and Nutter over-reached. But better to over-reach than under-reach in a disaster.

What Pennsylvanians and New Jerseyans must consider for the future, however, is this: Scientists nationwide have noted that Irene was not a “natural” disaster, but one, like the blizzards of the past few winters, of man-made proportions. The role of global warming in the extremity of our seasons–the past few winters Philadelphia has had record-breaking snowfalls, and this summer we saw record-breaking heat as well as the wettest month in recorded history–can’t be dismissed.

Extremes of weather are now a commonplace in our region, which is traditionally the most temperate in the nation and not prone to tornados or hurricanes or even blizzards. The response to Irene was solid. But this storm should also be a wake-up call to local, state and federal politicians that evacuating millions of people is a heady, complicated and expensive prospect. We need to re-think and re-vamp for the future in which storms like Irene and the blizzards of the past few winters are no longer anomalies but the norm. If we don’t factor that reality into our local budgets and city and state planning, we may very well end up with a Katrina situation on our hands next time–because Irene may have been our first, but was surely not our last storm of the century.

Last night someone stole my new trash can. It’s not a big thing in the greater scheme of things, of course. But the trash can was only two weeks old and had my address on it in stick-on numbers and letters. And it was raccoon-proof, which given we have raccoons, was important.  

Oh and it had been full of trash. Maggoty trash, since it’s been over 90 degrees in Philadelphia for all but two days of July and is likely to be the hottest month ever recorded in our city. So whoever stole the trash can took all the trash out and tossed it over my walkway and front garden. Oh and peeled the numbers and letters of my address off and tossed them on the walkway as well.

As I said, not a big thing in the larger picture except that I am poor. I live at the poverty level. Last month I got a bill for oxygen–which, I remind everyone, is air–and now I have to pay to breathe because health care reform didn’t put any caps on premiums or costs because President Obama believes in bipartisanship and didn’t think that was important, but years of being a beat reporter and before that, a bartender and a waitress, and before that a child of chain smokers ruined my lungs with second-hand smoke.

So I can’t breathe and the cost of a new trash can–$25–could be put toward oxygen.

I’m thinking that this is what President Obama means when he talks about “shared sacrifice”–that I give up breathing so that some wealthy person can get a tax break. Because he’s a millionaire and Speaker of the House John Boehner is a millionaire (although unlike the President, Boehner grew up dirt poor and thus knows what poverty feels like, which his Ivy League leader does not, which makes his repetition of the “shared sacrifice” trope even more despicable and incomprehensible.)

Clearly the person who stole my trash can thought that it was about shared sacrifice, too. I sacrifice my new trash can to his crack habit.

It’s been a rough summer. I’m really sick which makes working extra hard and I really don’t have anything else to give. Not my oxygen and not my trash can.

But the President, for whom I voted, is devoted to one thing and one thing only: This concept of giving away what little the poor and working people have to those who are so rich they barely work or may not work at all, but who like himself have plenty of money and have everything they need or want.

I can’t share anymore. Not with the guys in Washington. They have everything I want and need–including trash cans and oxygen–and my taxes pay their hefty salaries. I have worked since I was 13 and have paid taxes and paid into Social Security and I think I should at least get the latter back when I reach the retirement age that was established when I started paying into that fund.

Bipartisanship seems to be more encoded language for shared sacrifice which is more encoded language for reinstituting a feudal system in which the poor pay the rich to stay rich while they, the poor, barely survive.

I can’t get my trash can back. I’ve already gotten a new one and hope it won’t be stolen. But I want the money that I paid into Social Security in good faith all these years of my working life. And I want the man I voted for and the Speaker who I did not vote for, but who was voted in by his millionaire cohort in the House to get what poverty really means. I especially want the Democratic president to school the Republican side of the aisle that he’s not going to roll back 70 years of New Deal safety nets that are all some people have between them and the streets. 

I want the Speaker, who has to remember what it felt like to sweep the floor of the local bar for quarters when he was a poor kid, to know that poverty today means we poor people  have to choose between the most mundane of things on a daily basis: oxygen or a trash can, food or the money it costs to get to work, living and just killing ourselves.

I think shared sacrifice is a good idea, actually. But I think it’s way past time the wealthy shared and those of us just barely getting by got to stop sacrificing long enough to take a deep breath.—VAB

Like many queer Americans I cried when the New York vote on marriage equality came in late Friday night. I spent years in New York, having worked at OutWeek, QW and POZ and free-lanced for the Village Voice and New York Times. New York remained my second home for many years. I’m thrilled for my friends and colleagues there.

But in Philadelphia, a mere 90 miles and an Amtrak ride away, marriage equality remains woefully out of reach. And President Obama’s disappointing statements in New York the night before the vote clarified that he intends to do nothing to facilitate marriage equality anywhere in the U.S. Unlike other presidents on civil rights issues, Obama thinks the states should decide. Which means Pennsylvania queers may never see equality.

Ironically for me, when the vote came in, I was in the hospital for the eighth time this year. As I was lying there, I remembered a column I wrote in 1994 as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. I had hand-written the column from my bed in the ICU, querying why, when I was so sick, I had to fight to have my partner with me because we weren’t–and couldn’t be–married.

Fast-forward 17 years and the NY vote later and there I was in a different hospital and the question remains the same. Why can’t I have equal rights with any straight person in Pennsylvania?

According to the President, queer civil rights is an “evolving” issue, whether it’s marriage, job discrimination or serving in the military (the very day the NY vote came in, soldiers were being discharged under DADT because until Obama signs the Congress’s repeal, it remains the law).

So what about those of us who might not have time for those like Obama with a loose grasp of how evolution tracks?

Over the years the marriage equality battle has raged, I have reported on the damage wreaked by marriage segregation. I’ve written about lesbians who have stolen their children from partners unable to prove legally that they really were partners. I’ve seen other queers lose their homes in bitter break ups for the same reasons–no legal protections. I’ve seen people kept from their sick and dying partners by doctors and hospitals and families of origin.

Marriage inequity doesn’t just deny us community approbation or the security of knowing our families and homes can’t be taken from us. We are denied the economy of marriage as well: tax benefits, family leave benefits, shared health benefits and ultimately, death and estate benefits.

I am battling serious illness. I spend just under $1,000 for my HMO every month. My partner pays half that for hers. If we were married, I would be covered as her wife. We would save $800 a month–nearly $10,000 a year. Our shared tax burden would also be significantly less. And we would be treated as a married couple–not as legal strangers.

Not being able to marry costs queers a lot both by keeping us from legalizing our commitments and from protecting us if those commitments sunder.

At present, Pennsylvania queers must engage in lengthy and expensive legal battles with former partners to acquire what marriage automatically protects. It’s an outrage and one more example of our continued second-class status.

We shouldn’t have to be community icons with 50 years together to be considered “real” couples, nor should we have to be in a hospital bed for people to get what marriage segregation means.

Happy as I am for my friends in New York, I wonder when will equality come to Pennsylvania where marriage segregation is the law, which makes every straight Pennsylvanian complicit in the second-class status of queers. Abrogating the civil rights of others is a crime when applied to race or religion. It should be a crime when applied to us as well.

Three things really bothered me today: John Edwards about to be indicted, Bill Clinton whispering to Paul Ryan about Medicare in Congress, and Obama nattering on in the UK while disaster reigns in Missouri and along the Mississippi.

I’m past pretending that I could ever vote for Obama again. He would actually have to become the person he said he was when I voted for him in 2008 for that to happen and every day he gets further away from any semblance of being a progressive and becomes more and more Republican.

And then there’s the empathy gap. Why is he in the UK drinking Guinness with his mother’s forebears when disaster is all over the Midwest? Does it actually have to be another Katrina exactly for him to notice that people are suffering and dying?

John Edwards didn’t have an empathy problem. I used to really like John Edwards and it just shocks the hell out of me that he really was arrogant enough to think that he could lie and cheat and steal and no one would find out. What’s more, he was willing to bring the entire party down with him in 2008 just for his own ambition. Imagine that he had been the candidate. Where would we be now?

And then there was Bill Clinton, who was known for his level of empathy and feeling the pain of constituents. So what was he doing  hanging out in Congress and chatting up Paul “I Hate Poor Old People” Ryan. One never knows what Clinton’s political intentions are, but chatting with Ryan is not a good thing and Clinton is far too smart a character not to know this. So what’s his agenda? Is he trying to goad Ryan into hanging himself? That would be a good thing, but with this administration and it’s consistent capitulation to the Republicans, it is a very dangerous line to walk. Then again, Clinton could be doing Obama’s dirty work yet again.

Is it so much to ask for a little transparency and a little honesty and yes, a little empathy from the people claiming to represent the left of center leadership?

That’s what the Democrats used to stand for. They used to be distinguishable from the other side.

What the hell happened?

My father died May 22 after a brief illness. “Brief” is one of those end-of-life euphemisms that implies quick, painless and uneventful. But dying is almost never like that. Dying is long, painful and beset with one set-back after another.

It also costs a fortune. Health care costs are the major reason for bankruptcies in America today. And according to industry statistics, end-of-life health care costs account for more than half of all health care costs in the U.S.

When the health care debate began in earnest two years ago, President Obama chose to retreat from the discussion, a mistake that cost him the majority in the House in the Nov. 2010 election. By allowing the right to take charge of the discourse on health care, with the drumbeat of “death panels” and “rationing,” all Americans ended up with a health care reform bill that addressed almost none of the concerns most of us have. What’s more, it handed the health-care industry–which is hardly based on altruism–everything it wanted and more. No premium caps, no single-payer, no tort reform, no cost-benefit options.

Nearly all of the changes in the Health Care Reform Act don’t even go into effect until 2014. It was a payday for the industry but one more assault on the average American who will, sooner or later, be sick and/or dying.

For my father, that time came sooner rather than later and as with every sick and/or dying person in America who is not a billionaire or millionaire (like the President and every member of Congress) or who has a great health care plan for life like members of Congress, it was a very costly final illness.

In the past four months my father was hospitalized six times. Each time he was in intensive care. Each time he required blood transfusions, IV antibiotics, visits from infectious disease specialists, cardiologists and hematologists, as well as his own physician.

Because my father was in his 70s, his health care costs were covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

Every American worker pays into the coffers for Medicare and Medicaid. So it’s only fair that we get the benefit once we are old and sick. But why is it as costly as it is?

Last month I was treated in the ER for a breathing emergency. I was there for six hours. In that time I saw an actual physician for four minutes. I was on an IV with two drugs for several hours and I was given several nebulizer treatments by a nurse. Then I was sent home with the dictate to see my regular physician within 48 hours.

The cost: $17,000. In the ER. For four drugs, saline, and four minutes of physician care.

I have no idea how much my father’s week-long stays in ICU cost in Medicare and Medicaid dollars, but given my own HMO dollars, I am sure the sum was hefty. In the last four months of his life I have no doubt that the bills for my father’s various hospitalizations were $200,000 or more. Consider how many Americans over 65 are in similar circumstances and the costs are exponential.

Watching someone die makes you very aware of your own impending mortality. It also makes you aware of what works and what doesn’t in the health care system.

There’s not a lot that works and yet it’s all costly. What’s more, there is a great deal of treatment being given that the end of life that is meaningless: It’s can’t save the patient and often prolongs suffering, but it makes family members and doctors feel as if something is being done.

Is that really what we should be doing?

In most big city hospitals, the nurse to patient ratio is well below what it should be for optimal patient care. The concept of hourly rounding has been established at most hospitals, but is almost impossible to implement. I have been told by nurses giving medication at 10:30 that “this counts as the 8:30 medication.”

Two hours late is not hourly.

When it comes to end of life care, the amount of nursing time required is exponentially greater. Does that mean that younger patients with better outcomes are being short-changed?

After watching both my parents be “saved” by doctors who felt the need to do something rather than nothing (and also protect themselves against potential lawsuits), it seems that hospice care is woefully under-utilized. Patients’ families are not told the truth about their loved ones’ actual prognoses and what all this treatment means in terms of actual extension of life.

For example, while medically speaking a dying patient’s pneumonia can be cured, it doesn’t mean that she/he will actually survive the treatment or get “better.” Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is to not treat someone who is already at the end of life and allow them to die peacefully, rather than continue to treat with drugs that impact the quality of life without actually extending life.

As clients of the health care industry, we all, regardless of our ages, need to start taking responsibility for the truth about our own health and that of those we love. Sometimes people can’t be saved or they can survive, but with such a diminished quality of life that death would be preferable. Technological advances in health care have made lots of things possible, but they haven’t always caught up to the actual issue of how we want to live and just as importantly, how we want to die.

Most of us should not die in the hospital–that’s for people who have had traumatic injury and can’t be moved to hospice care. But the rest of us should die at home, surrounded by and at peace with the surroundings that give us comfort. Those last days in a hospital don’t just cost in terms of health care dollars, they cost in terms of a peaceful death. Hospitals are loud, too bright, smell antiseptic. Despite the plethora of medical staff on hand, they rarely make us feel “safe” or comforted.

The health care debate needs re-framing on many levels, but the most defining is end of life. More than half of all health care dollars go into end of life care. But if we were all willing to accept that death is inevitable and that coming to terms with death and having a comfortable death were primary issues, then we could make hospice care pre-eminent for the last six months of life. That wouldn’t just save billions, it would also facilitate better dying for almost everyone.

None of us wants to die or watch our loved ones die. But there are good deaths and bad deaths and the current system supports doing something at all costs–literally. That isn’t the way any of us wants to die and it’s costing us more than we realize.

      Imagine your child’s school without teachers, aides, counselors, nurses and custodians.
      Imagine your child in a classroom with 33 other students and no teacher’s aide.
      Imagine your child without an early education. Or an art or music education. Or sports. 
      Imagine your child needs summer school–either because he or she is behind and needs to catch up, or because he or she is gifted and wants to skip ahead–but summer school is gone.
      Starting in next month, you won’t have to imagine any of these alarming possibilities. Due to a record $689 million budget shortfall, the Philadelphia School District–already in worrisome straits–will be cutting 1,260 teachers, 650 aides, 420 custodians, 180 counselors and 51 nurses. More than 400 office positions will also be cut.
      Then there are the program cuts. Full-day kindergarten, which is credited with preparing kids for first grade by familiarizing them with both a classroom setting and an all-day program, as well as beginning the steps toward reading and math skills, will be cut to a half day.
      Music and arts programs will be cut, as will all athletics. Among the other cuts: No summer school and curtailed special ed programs.
      These numbers are not proposals; they are definitive. Michael Masch, chief financial officer of the School District, was succinct in detailing the cuts and why they were necessary: “We have an unprecedented level of revenue decline.  There has never been a year to our knowledge in which school district revenue has declined at all, not in decades.”
       A budget shortfall was expected, but not to this degree. And unless money falls out of the sky and into the district offices, these cuts go into effect June 1. Gov. Corbett has already explained that the money issue is not Harrisburg’s problem. According to Corbett, the federal government has not provided adequate funding and the state, also running at a deficit, can’t make up the difference. The city is also strapped, having forced most workers to take a ten percent pay cut.
       What will the district cuts mean? Bad news for students. Class size will be maximized to 33 students. Fewer teachers and aides means less individualized attention, so students doing poorly are more likely to fail. Students struggling with issues from home will have fewer places to turn, with the decrease in counselors. There will be one counselor for every 400 students, whereas now it is an already untenable one for every 300.
       Students are also bound to get sick, as 30 percent of the custodian force will be cut, which will make cleaning and disinfecting schools immeasurably harder. And with the cuts in school nurses, there will now be one nurse for every 750 students, whereas it was previously one for every 650.
       The worst aspect of the cuts is what it means for kids who are on the edge. Philadelphia already has high truancy and drop-out rates. Overtaxed teachers are less able to identify students who need extra help and without the managerial help of aides to keep unruly students in line, classrooms are likely to be more easily disrupted, which cuts down on class time and makes it harder for students to focus.  

        If your child is a C student who needs reinforcement as well as classroom discipline, will that child fall through the cracks? Children with achievement issues rarely have academic support at home. Often they are the children of teenage parents and/or in single parent families. They get all their academic rigor from school.
        And what if your child is a special education student? Or has other learning disabilities? Slashing those programs leaves the most vulnerable children at the highest risk.
        The most extreme cut is kindergarten. For nearly a century it has been estalished that kindergarten socializes children in a group and gives them a foundation for their elementary education. High risk students–which is a majority of Philadelphia’s school kids–are most in need of early education intervention. Cutting the kindergarten day in half is like cutting a textbook in half.  What’s more, many parents need their children in school for the full school day because they need to work and can’t afford child care. The stress on many families will be immense.
         Art, music and athletics provide necessary creative outlets for children with little access to these things at home. Cutting these programs cuts a major lifeline for many kids at risk. Plus, given that nearly half of all public school children in Philadelphia are living at or below the poverty level, the importance of a school lunch cannot be overestimated, either.
        The idea that education is optional is simply nuts, yet increasingly both federal and state governments are making cuts in education as if it were a luxury, instead of a necessity.
         The quickest way to create an underclass in society–with all its concomitant problems–is by withholding education from a segment of the population already deprived of other basics. It’s also a fast-track to criminal behavior. Students who stay in school are less likely to get involved with gangs or other criminal behavior. But in order for many students to stay in school, the lure has to be intense. And if teachers can’t teach, that lure will fade easily and quickly.
         If the state can’t provide money for the shortfall, the federal government has to step in. The city has to demand action. School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman should be doing this, but as with all things related to Philadelphia’s schools, Ackerman’s attention appears to be elsewhere.
        Since it’s an election year, perhaps Mayor Nutter will step in. But regardless, without intervention, these cuts could destroy much of the fragile fabric of the school system in Philadelphia. Close to 4,000 jobs will be lost. But as dire as that is, the impact on the students will be that much worse.
       Philadelphia’s students are now at tremendous risk and need help. The question is, will they get it before these cuts kick in?
      
 

I read Mark Segal’s column in PGN last week with dismay. He endorsed Obama with laudatory comments and added as his rationale that Gavin Newsom and Elizabeth Birch had also endorsed him.

Early endorsements are always dicey, but early endorsements of incumbents who have done little for constituents are a mistake.

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, despite having reservations about his centrist record. But if the election were held today, I could not, in good conscience, cast another vote for President Obama. Voting for or endorsing 2011′s Obama would be a vote/endorsement for continuation of three wars and incursions into Pakistan and Yemen, torture, extraordinary rendition, civil liberties curtailment, corporate greed, environmental irresponsibility. It would be endorsement of an administration that has proven time and again that it is anti-populist, anti-poor, anti-woman and anti-queer and which feels more Republican than Democratic.

As a life-long leftist progressive, there’s no way I can support these things.

Segal calls Obama a friend to the queer community–although with no basis for comparison–and cites Gavin Newsom and Elizabeth Birch as supporters. But in the real-world queer community, outside the community of elites, disappointment with Obama is huge as the November 2010 elections proved. Newsom, a straight politician in San Francisco and Birch, a centrist capitulator, are names average queers could not care less about.

As a life-long activist, I have serious concerns about Obama’s credibility as a candidate. I would ask Segal and any other queer–or straight–American: Why does Obama deserve a second term?

Here’s why he shouldn’t. He has reneged on nearly every campaign promise he made as candidate Obama. He calls himself a fierce advocate for queers, but the only consistent advocacy during his administration has been capitulation to Republican thuggery and corporate fraud. The recent budget disaster is an indicator of Obama’s lack of leadership. The budget was due in September–when the Democrats still held a wide majority in Congress in addition to the White House. Obama was nowhere to be found. Now we have what the Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid called “Draconian cuts” to the poor and working Americans–ten percent of whom are queer.

Under Obama’s tenure military rape has escalated as a study last week noted. Rapes of lesbians and straight women in the military have gone unremarked by Obama.

Also unremarked is the detention–which Amnesty International has referred to as torture–of Bradley Manning, the gay soldier alleged to have provided Wikileaks with thousands of documents. Manning is being held in solitary confinement and must spend 12 hours a day nude. Obama said simply, “The Pentagon says there’s no problem.”

Seriously?

DADT is actually still in effect, despite the January recision of it and its implementation remains at the discretion of the President and will continue until 60 days after Obama declares it’s “safe” for the straight military to cope with queer soldiers and Marines. DOMA is still the law.

These are only a few in a long list of concerns about Obama. Telling Obama now that the slate is clean and he’s our guy is no way to get what we need and want as both queers and Americans. Obama must be held accountable; endorsements 20 months before the election are rewards for a job not done.

I myself am working with other progressives to get a real Democrat running for 2012. Russ Feingold–a long-time real friend to the LGBTQ community–is the name being floated most often.

The queer community as well as the rest of real America needs a President who is working for us, not for himself. We do not yet have that in Obama.—VAB