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islands...
Posted by beezelbub (Guest) - Wednesday, November 9 2005, 22:10:51 (CET)
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The Island...

These are things that are important from MY perspective about what happened...why each step followed the next.

At its core the island story is about someone who believes in change...believes it is always necessary and if it is to be effective and therefore positive: takes TIME. I believed I had to first understand the problem well...not from books and not even from reports made out by social workers...not even from the kids themselves...not at first. I had to form my own ideas...do my own research...

But it wasn't that clinical..there was also shock and dismay at the treatment handed out by a social system to children who'd already been crapped on...through no fault of their own...yet. Without some serious and well thought out intervention, the social system would merely become another abusive agent in their lives. But I didn't know all that at the time I decided to get my own alternate home for them...I simply saw a need for a place to live, for many kids who were being tossed here and there because there simply was no adult willing to care for them.

Even the first summer camp, before I had the Group Home, was simply an excuse to take kids out of detention for the summer...who, again, through no real fault of their own, would spend the lovely Seattle summer in jail...I don't care WHAT it was called..."Maple Lane" or "Sunshine Cottage". It would be a positive step if the adults dealing in this area stopped their OWN bullshit first.

The premise behind the group Home was simple: Give the kids as much freedom as the system would allow...and I could handle...and see how they use it. This meant, however, that I'd have to commit myself as well...that I'd have to be there with them day and night and month after month both to observe more fully and also to feel the same atmosphere of their day to day lives...and sure enough, in time I became almost as bored and listless as they were...AND desperate for a way out.

The first year was busy, dull and filled with glimpses and hints. I tried to make them deal in the actual functioning of their lives as much as possible. I cooked dinner only once a week...each boy was responsible for dinner the other nights. I did cook breakfast every morning...lunch was for each to take care of. I did the shopping but always made sure to drag a few with me...this was made easier by buyinbg the wrong things consistantly. Self-interest is a powerful stimulant...if it's in your interest to steal, you will...regardless of any punishment...if it's in your interest to make-do for yourself..you will...regardless of obstacles. A simple plan...except when you can get out from under it...for instance, if you can steal your dinner instead of being compelled to make it for yourself.

And so it turned out...my biggest problem was making sure they couldn't escape...couldn't get away from the situation I was trying to create..the new environment I was creating in a Group Home surrounded on all sides by ripe temptations...temptations to remain a crook...a welfare cheat...self-destructive...lazy...a petty criminal etc. as the prefered and habitual way of getting your minimal needs met.

If you think about it...these kids never had proper and healthy attention from anyone...we all prefer the best food...the best clothing...the best human interaction...BUT...if we can't get the best of those...we still won't settle for No food...No clothing and NO human contact...we'll take whatever we can get.

And sure enough...these kids got the best of anything that THEY had ever experienced in their lives ONCE they committed a "crime" or became "incorrigible". Whereas, before stealing a car, they had been neglected and ignored by usually a very limited circle of uncaring people too caught up in their own misery...once they had stolen the car, or whatever...they got what passed for the BEST society could offer..or, at the least, some very highly paid professionals whose duty it was to "care".

Accept your marginal existance meekly and the neglect and abuse that often goes with such a life and you got....nothing. Steal a car and you get better-than-nothing: a whole bunch of adults making appointments and standing in line to see you. There are the police, then the jailers and wardens and clerks and doctors...then comes the Social Worker and maybe a psychologist or psychiatrist or two...next you get at least TWO lawyers, one a prosecutor working for the STATE and another one working JUST for you...a judge waits over their shoulder and a court stenographer to take down your every word...where your family never cared to listen much...and if things go badly for your legal case, there are appeals to be filed..more adults.. more time and money and appointments and all along the way a fleet of cars, with driver, to take you around....Jeezuz!!!...you never HAD it so GOOD!!!

Except for one, small detail: The arena or, soon-to-be, battlefield this drama was to be played on was YOU...your body, your mind, your soul, your health, your future. And if things went really bad, your one most potent weapon, for defense AND for attack...very like a "suicide bomber's"..would be your SELF! In every existential sense of that word.

So there were, for a year and a half...me setting minimum rules, creating an environment that could lead to changes in behavior naturally...by which I mean that I, the DIRECTOR, would not be the compelling force...not my RULES but THEIR real advantage and interest would compel THEM to behave in new ways that would get whatever benefits there were to be had.

It sort of worked, sometimes...but most of the time there were ways around it or, as their fall-back position, they merely resorted to trying my patience and frustrating me so that I'd want to forget the whole thing and fall back into the old battles they were more used to and prepared for. I was determined not to give up on any of them...but most of them knew they had me over a barrel...if they got busted many more times the licensing agency could come poking around..and I was always vulnerable to secret phone calls and complaints made that I wasn't feeding them or caring for them "properly"...as my license required.

It was simple for the State...because the State cared more for its programs and budgets and personnel...the LAST thing they cared about...I mean REALLY cared about, were the kids in their charge. The State was willing to make a good show of it...to create a program that sounded good to visiting dignitaries and played out well in the press...but if it didn't work, the State was prepared to blame the kids some MORE and send them to a serious prison. That was not an option I cared for...so I HAD to find something better.

And sure enough, the answer...or rather the better place to go looking for one, came from them. It came by noticing that no matter how stoned or out of it or seemingly incapable and incompetant they might appear to the rest of us...in those few moments when something REALLY mattered to them...they could rise to the ocassion and surprise me...at least. I recall one boy was listenning to our stereo...stoned as usual..and it stopped working. Coming into the living room a few minutes later I was surprised to see him pulling at the exposed wires where he'd removed the back cover. I have no idea what he did...or if he even did...to me it was amazing that he'd even bothered, stoned or not...and that he managed to put it all back together was a sort of minor miracle...what floored me was that he FIXED it and the next minute melted back onto the sofa in an apparent stupor all over again...as the music played. There were other such incidents when I could see, because they got used to my presence, that whenever there was absolutely No way around it and THEY had to take an active hand in pleasing themselves...they could do it...do it under all sorts of handicaps...and do it WELL...or well enough. But...there would have to be NO way out...no way to force someone else to do something for them.

I'm not a camper...I don't care for sleeping in a tent...and I never did but a day or two of camping in my life till that first summer camp. Buit even then, kids had managed to slip away down to the highway and hitch a ride to trouble. I wondered where I could take them where there was no chance of escape. It came quite by accident that an island was the best place to achieve such total isolation.

The Kids:

There were common traits they shared. They were all fairly non-verbal. They didn't have developed vocabularies....when they did communicate it was in simple, linear form...there was no deep thinking...at least nothing that showed itself on the surface...whatever was going on underneath was a chaos...a storm of crossed signals...feelings without definition...raw...gross...general...unspecified. All of them had pronounced chips on their shoulders...big ones. All of them carried around a profound sense of disappointment made all the more compelling because they didn't even know what the alternative could have been...something had gone 'wrong"...that's all they knew...but they weren't sure that it didn't go wrong everywhere and with everyone...they could see that not everyone felt and acted as they did...but to them it seemed they were the more honest and natural...because they were reacting to Life as it MUST be...whereas the other's were pretending, fake, insincere or downright stupid. To be chronically depressed was "cool". Anyone evincing any sign of positivity or hope in the future with a willingness to work for it was a dope..a fool...a sell-out.

There was very little real commraderie among them...they didn't have friends in any real sense...what bound them together wasn't any common feeling of shared interests in and of themselves..it was rather a common bond forged through their RESISTANCE to all life had done to them so far. It was far easier to work together to steal a car than cook a dinner...or co-exist in relative freedom rather than team up to frustrate surveillance cameras in a jail. Every nominally positive thing was turned to a negative...yes, they were "friends" of a sort...but without any of the real benefits that come with true friendship. They'd rat each other out in a hearbeat.

They were interested only in instant gratification of primitive desires...nothing that had to be worked at was worth it...it had to be gotten EASILY and better yet WITHOUT the slightest creative effort, besides what it took to steal or cheat it out of someone or someplace, or else it was "stupid". Needless to say nothing but the cheapest of material goods and shallowest of experiences lend themselves to being gotten like that...anything deeper or conducive to character building never even entered the realm.

After a year and a half of minor scrapes with the Law..of petty thefts and drug abuse, drug dealing, some prositution, with a general attituide towards me of "go fuck yourself"...I saw no purpose in trying to change anything while everything else remained constant...at that exact moment, the real problem was being in the community at all...we already knew prisons and jails didn't work for the better...so now what? An island...that's what.

Knowing nothing about camping, I still knew better what they needed to get the most out of the experience. I turned down generous offers of the best camping gear...of good food...good support services. I wanted the island to be as close to surviving a natural disaster as possible. I didn't want them bringing drugs with them so I bought them camping clothes...Goodwill stuff...all of it too big and too old...but all the better for it became a non-issue, except for the really important stuff...like was it WARM enough.

I got healthy food...but hard food to prepare. Hundred pound sacks of brown rice, oats, wheat and beans. A five-gallon can of peanut butter with very little jelly...cooking oil...some canned tuna...noodle soup mixes...sugar...powdered milk...tomato paste and a few other unappetizing things...but good enough to keep away hunger. Where I was offered the best of sleeping bags and tents by the owner of REI and first American on Mt Everest, James Whittaker...I opted instead for army surplus down sleeping bags of ancient vintage and something called "tube tents"...a fancy word for extra long, super thick, garbage bags, open at both ends. The "tent" part came when you stuck a stick at either end...making a sort of pup tent out of it.

My plan was that we would be taken to our island by charter boat and left there for six weeks. I was the only one who knew there were people living by one end of the coast...the lake we were to draw water from was at the top of a good size hike...the island was beautiful...with all sorts of trees, plants and wildlife. If you HAD to be stranded somewhere, it too was good enough.

I didn't know what would happen..or could happen. I was content to place us there and see what developed. My theory was that if I removed myself from the role of "The Man"...if their relationship to me and my legal obligations to them were suspended or superceded by our common predicament under Mother Nature's daily influence...if Nature became the authority figure and an isolated island our community...would the kids develop new strategies for coping..and would those be any better or different than what I'd seen from them the last 18 months? I suspected they would change...because everything else had...but how?

They were awakened one morning and told to dress in clothing provided for them...they weren't allowed to take any personal items except one guitar, after I checked it closely. That included no cigarettes...I supplied each with a huge can of nasty tobacco and the sorriest dime-store corn-cob pipes fifty cents would buy. Needless to say they all quit smoking eventually. Two patrol cars waited in the dark to escort us to the dock where a boat took us and our unappetizing gear to an island far enough from the coast that you were as out to sea as I needed to be.

Once arrived the food tent was set up as the distribution center from which each week I would hand out rations for the week. There was no possibility of obtaining more food, from me, till the next week. The boys were told to get away from me...to realize that oft-stated ambition to "get away from you, you fuck". They could now be as alone as they thought they'd always wanted to be. They were allowed to come to the main tent area and sit at the fire...but each had to bring something..if not a piece of firewood, then a story or anecdote...the fire was MY fire...not "ours". There was no licensing agency...no one to complain to...no one who would believe their word over mine later. I made it clear that on the island all bets were off...that I would treat them EXACTLY as I determined they DESERVED and it was up to them, not ME...to set the standard...and I'd see how I felt about it!

From the first each boy took himself off to his own campsite...none of which were too far away from mine. Not a one of them chose to stay alone during the nights but they would come by the communal fire. I didn't ask them to sing and dance..but the number of "fuck yous" had to be kept to a minimum, or I WOULD do something about it. Mostly they were content to sit and stare at the fire...make hot milk to drink...poke the embers and be quiet. later I took out a copy of The Three Musketeers and read outloud a little each night...till they got drawn in, then I went on strike and they had to read...also out-loud.

I gave each boy a pocket-knife...but mine was much larger...I also kept the axe by me. I instituted a "silent walk" just before sunset each day up a trail to a promontory from where you could look far out to sea at the other islands and boats far below and watch the sun melt into the blue water. Bullshit and jive-talk being very important to the boys and the desire to be with the group sort of compelling them along, a few just couldn't or wouldn't keep quiet. One boy tested me once by refusing to go along...then sneaking up from behind and throwing rocks our way. It was bound to happen...testing the limits was an important part of sensing their surroundings and it was just as important to set those limits early on and well. I chased the kid down...dragged him by the hair along the ground to where the rest could see...and heaved him over the cliff nearby.

He came up much later, bruised...a shambles...a little bloodied...but no one ever tried that sort of thing again. It hadn't been MY idea to do such a thing...they "made" me do it. I should add here that under no circumstances could I have gotten away with that and much much more had they not seen me living and struggling with them and their demons for over a year. I earned the right to be that direct and foreceful with them...and a few visiting social workers who thought it was really "neat" and the stuff of a made-for-TV movie became disillusioned REAL fast when they dared attempt such things...or became too familiar. These kids were NOT fools.

Over the first three weeks the boys paired up in changing combinations....sometimes it would be two of them and then a third might join for a bit. They broke up and re-alligned with others they thought might be better or easier to get along with. It was difficult for them to learn how to get along...to develop real social skills, especially under such trying circumstances, except that the very trials and problems they faced on the island COMPELLED them to. I'd given them what hints I could...for instance if they planed to eat beans the next day I suggested they soak them the night before in water...if not, the next day would be taken up with hauling water from the lake and firewood to boil it with...and all the while you remained hungry. They realized soon enough that there was a lot of work to living by yourself...just getting water, cooking, keeping your camp area clean and so much more was so much easier when shared out...but how to do it? How to assign tasks...how to do your part...how to trust that other's will do their's...and how to solve disputes...these were things they never dealt with before...for the most part.

In the city, or in prison, it had been "us against them". It was cool to steal and get away with things when the "Man" had it all. That attitude was hard to shake free from because it really HAD been their one reliable method of survival. If your parents won't give you enough to eat...you really DO have to steal from them..or anyone else. One boy did just that...not once but reopeatedly...he was caught and tied naked to a tree in a swampy area, unbeknownst to me...they smeared peanut butter on his chest and face and left him there for four hours before he could work himself free...during that time the Horseflies fed off his flesh and he crapped his pants...when he stumbled into camp that evening he was livid and wanted them "punished". Instead he got a great lecture from the others about being so stupid as to steal from your own kind...when no one had any more than the next guy, with a warning that if he did it again they'd feed him to the fish next time. All the while I sipped tea and poked the fire...which is the way these things should be handled...in a perfect world or, barring that, an island will do nicely.

I did see behavior patterns change. Cleanliness became a real issue, not the subject of "nagging". A few serious bouts of the trots and everyone became conscious of washing with hot water AND soap. When you know you have a limited food supply...or a limited anything, you quite naturally and without a whole lot of fuss and lecturing, become responsible...at least more than you were previously when the State maintained you. At some level it is sheer madness to say each kid is on his own..at the mercy of indigent, ignorant and neglectful parents UNTIL he rapes your wife...at which time you'll provide him with benefits he never had before. Either stand every young offender up against a wall and shoot him or her the FIRST time..or find something much better to do than lock him up with worse and older or more seasoned criminals in enforced idleness or idiotic make-work...thereby pissing him off some more and THEN let him out with LESS prospects than he had going in. I mean REALLY!!!

The boys had to change the ways they interacted with one another...which was far more important than any change with me. They took more of an interest in each other...certainly for survival purposes at first but that's okay..once that door openned other good things happened all on their own. I even overheard some really good advice given...and the next step wasn't far behind: taking your OWN advice.

The entire island idea was about FORCING change on them...change they desperately needed, even though they had no way of realizing that. But...what needed changing were the circumstances...the environment...if you changed that, you MIGHT effect some change in their behavior...we know this works for prisons because they DO change when in there...it's just that it's overwhelmingly for the WORSE. On the island there wasn't a single...not a single behavior that could be negative yet be POSITIVE for you. Not one. The island ENFORCED its own sense...it forced one to be better...to be the best...because that was the ONLY way to survive...and then maybe thrive.

There was no way to change the behavior of the kids without changing their surroundings...for those behavior patterns they and we found so distressing were nothing more than the BEST survival techniques they'd learned in dealing with the very dysfunctional circumstances Life had placed them in...they were truly not yet responsible for their behavior...but without meaningful and careful intervention, I suppose they could be GOTTEN to a point when we could say, "you did this to yourself".

Our Home had a parole officer assigned to it...a good fellow too, he camped with us the first week and returned the last. He was able to see subtle changes I had missed...he told me these were not the same boys he'd left five weeks earlier. For one thing towards the end they had all moved in together. Individual tents had been cut open to be used as common walls...shutting them in TOGETHER in a sort of village they constructed. they built walls...tables...they made a common place for them to eat...they doled out chores without fuss or bother...and on our last night there they invited us all to have dinner with them. A dinner they cooked and cleaned up after.

We had many a good talk the last night...but that's another subject.



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