Roy Huggins Says Stuff

I have something to confess.

It’s hard to say it… But I’m not really convinced that having our troops just leave Iraq in six months is necessarily a good idea.

What I do know is that our Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad President has gotten us into exactly the kind of nasty mess that war opponents were screaming about way back before the “Mission Accomplished” debacle went down. I also know that cleaning up after him is going to be drastically painful.

But if we just up and leave I’m not sure things will be any better. One thing I’ve learned about Iraq from all the screen time they’ve been getting is that they were never a “people” like we think of that word around these parts. It seems it’s a lot of “peoples”, some of which would be perfectly happy to see some of the other “peoples” take a long walk off a short pier, and was previously glued in place by a powerful despotic warlord¹. It seems we’ve replaced said local despotic warlord with a foreign almost-despotic warlord. Funny enough, many locals seem upset about that.

Yes, the American people are really unhappy about being in this position. I imagine most of the people living in Baghdad are pretty bummed about it, too. Whether we wanted to be dragged into it or not, we’re there now. I can’t help but feel that a plan in which we simply leave would make for a serious case of abandonment. I think the most healthy plan is a lot more difficult than that. I think it would take a lot more “hard work” to get us out of President Warbucks‘ special little hole.

I don’t have an alternative plan to contribute, however. Just my opinion.

1. That we put there for that purpose [↩]

From a report on the autopsy of Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who committed the murders at Va. Tech:

Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho was as mysterious in death as he was in life, leaving behind few clues for medical examiners.

…

Psychologists and criminologists have suggested in recent days that Cho suffered from a mental illness, but Massello said such disorders are usually neurological or chemical in nature and unlikely to be identified during an autopsy, even if Cho’s brain had been intact.

Um. Duh?

Among all the scrambling to find someone at fault, the scramblers seem to have largely settled on gun enthusiasts and the mental health industry. I feel a desire to make some things clear:

• Putting a suicidal person on a hold and taking them to the hospital is not the same as arresting them and taking them to jail. When Cho was released it was because he was no longer highly likely to go kill himself. In other words, “he no longer appeared to be a threat to himself.”
• No one in the mental health system has a crystal ball, not even psychiatrists and psychologists. They always say “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”¹ Cho did not have a list of past behaviors including “shooting rampage.” Therefore, ipso facto, no one leapt to the conclusion that he would commit such an atrocity.
• Mental health workers can’t put someone away for “suspicion of being screwed up.” To be truly put away in the United States, one has to commit a crime.² I can’t imagine a judge taking too kindly to prosecutors claiming that a kid should be locked up for the long haul because “This here psychiatrist said he should.”

Of course his “mental illness” won’t show up in the autopsy. There’s no Anxiety Virus. Depression is not the result of damage to your “happy neurons.”³

Looking for some concrete, easy-to-identify sign of what was wrong with this kid and trying to figure out who screwed up won’t work. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t heal anyone’s injuries. And it won’t do anything to stop this from happening again.

It’s absolutely horrendous what this kid did. And it’s worth spending the time and energy to see what lessons we can learn from it. But unfortunately we’ll likely never know the “why” of it, no matter how advanced and enlightened our society may be.

1. And it’s a poor one at that [↩]
2. There aren’t really even places where people suffering full-blown psychosis are “put away” anymore. In Oregon, a mental health commitment will only get you into the state hospital for up to 180 days. [↩]
3. There are, of course, neurochemical components to mood disorders. But the debate over chemistry vs. circumstance is often circular and typically results in chicken-and-egg impasses. [↩]

This morning I awoke to a wonderfully uplifting story on NPR news: a region of southwest China¹ has recently forced hundreds of women to go to the hospital and have abortions. Many of these abortions are late-term and one report included a woman who was due to give birth in just a few days.

Government-coerced abortions are not news in China. But this incident is different because China recently passed new laws that relax their family planning restrictions and supposedly make these kinds of atrocities a thing of the past. The report stated that this is likely happening because local officials need to lower the population growth rate for the year or risk being fired. I guess they figure their jobs are more important than the lives of hundreds of families.

China talks very nice. But they absolutely must step up to the plate of humanitarian reform. The United States is supposed to be a powerful nation that believes in the welfare of the little man. We put ourselves out as an example of human rights and democracy. And yet we do so very little to hold China accountable.

Yes, the State Department may occasionally make statements and toothless demands. That, however, is little more than politics and diplomacy. It’s like telling the school bully that it wasn’t cool to stuff the nerd in his locker but then going and playing basketball with him all afternoon anyways.

If we as a nation had as much integrity as we claim, we wouldn’t stand for this. We would place severe sanctions on China and ask other UN members to do the same. We would make it clear that China’s policy of treating human life like garbage is unacceptable. The US has the power to do this. China is certainly powerful and, to a great extent, quite scary. But they aren’t stupid or suicidal. If the US and the EU stood together on a human rights issue then China would not be able to ignore it.

Since the creation of the new family planning laws, China has ostensibly been punishing people who coerce abortions. That’s a good thing. But in this case, the likely reason why these things are happening is a government quota regarding population growth that carries with it a risk of job loss for local bureaucrats. That sounds to me like things still aren’t quite working at the national level. And the Chinese government needs to be held accountable for atrocities that occur in their nation.

1. I couldn’t make out how to spell the name and I can’t find any written references to it this morning on the Net [↩]