Finneran: Heartache and Nonsense in Auburn

Friday, August 21, 2015

 

View Larger +

There’s a little two year old girl lying dead on a cold metal coroner’s table. There’s a little 22 month-old girl lying in critical condition. And the blame game unfolds once again. Let’s blame Charley Baker. Let’s blame Deval Patrick. Let’s blame Mitt Romney. What the heck, let’s go all the way back and blame Governor Bradford.

To be crystal clear, Governor Charley Baker is not responsible for the gross and criminal neglect and abuse of children. Rather, that award goes to the parents of those beaten and starved children. Adults in age only, the parents are an utter disgrace, mired in drugs, criminality, and sexual irresponsibility. The children these alleged adults bring into the world are not even an afterthought in the degraded choices and lifestyles that their parents embrace.

The news stories paint a chilling picture---an addict mother, a missing father, a chaotic house full of young children and not a single responsible adult anywhere in sight.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

The state can try to fill some of these voids but let’s face facts honestly:

Fact 1: Being a good foster parent is not easy. It is brutally difficult work. You are assuming responsibility for really messed-up children, children who have only known disorder and violence for their entire lives. Yes, you are doing God’s work and certainly there’s a particular joy in that hard journey. But it’s expensive, it’s heartbreaking, it’s frustrating, and it’s frequently thankless. I confess that I could not and would not do it. Having raised our own children, my wife and I know how very difficult that task can be, even with both parents fully and soberly engaged, 24/7, year after year after year. Try finding and recruiting good foster parents. What’s the enticement beyond a call to the human heart? How much should the state commit to the support of foster parents? And, if we are to really step it up financially, how do you protect the children from the mercenaries whose love is one of money, not lives?

Fact 2: Messed up parents are cunning creatures. They know how to fool over-worked over-loaded social workers. They can create certain appearances of normalcy in the same way that they fool drug counselors, probation officers, employment officers, and even police officers. Add to that the fact that the social workers often battle a “family-first”, “family-unification” bias which seems to confer inexhaustible rights upon extremely dysfunctional people. Platitudes about “family life” should not be given traction where the parents have shown repetitive reckless endangerment of children. The child’s DNA should not be a death sentence.

Fact 3: Social workers are undervalued. We do not appreciate the danger and difficulty of their work. We do not pay them well. They work in the land of lousy choices. They are second-guessed by a lazy and lurid press. They are thrust into the middle of 15 or 20 or 25 “cases”, each case being a household of misfits, often in the throes of frightening addictions. Try figuring out what’s “best” for these families when resources are extremely limited and emotions run extremely high. It’s an arena of chaos and turmoil and violence. Good luck.

Fact 4: The press. See Fact 3 above. Lazy yes. Lurid yes. Here’s what gets my goat---in the aftermath of the child’s death the press does a highly sympathetic interview with the biological mother and father standing side-by-side telling the world how inconsolable they are. How touching. Somehow someway these two fools, who were never concerned enough about their daughter to put down the crack pipe, to get a job, and to grow up, are rendered inconsolable at the loss of the little girl that they neglected for the two long years of her entire life.

View Larger +

Yes, it’s a pity that they lost their daughter. Anyone who has buried a child knows the agony and the pain. It does not fade. But their daughter was lost twice, once at her birth when her parents chose the drug and party scene and again last week in a cold and frightening foster home. Now, finally, the mother stirs to action and wants to hold someone “accountable”. She should look in the mirror.  

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.

 

Related Articles

 

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

 
 

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast

I want to follow on Twitter

I want to Like on Facebook