Strollerderby : Iraq War

Mothers Pimping Daughters for Cash

Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:31:00 GMT

A Time Magazine has a horribly depressing article on a long held Iraqi custom that only seems to be growing worse, with the country still unstable: Child sex slavery. In many cases, it's their mothers who force them into it.

Clearly the parenting books are different over there, as I have yet to see a stateside copy of "What the Expect When You're Pimping Your Daughter, You Heartless (Fill in the Blank)."

Girls as young as 11 and 12 are fetching anywhere from $2,000 to $30,000 on the "human cattle market," and oftentimes it's their mothers who are looking to score the money, according to the article.

Take the case of 15-year-old Atoor. She married her husband, 19, but when he was killed, her mother tried to sell her into prostitution. The girl told authorities, who put her in prison for two years.

"I wanted to go to prison, I didn't want to be sold," she says. "I didn't think it would happen to me. My mother used to spoil me. Yes, she sold my sisters but she regretted that. I though that she loved me."

Wasn't this one of the 5,000 reasons given for the invasion of Iraq, improving human rights? Especially women's rights? How much are we culpable for this rising trend, and do we have an obligation to make this right -- not just for girls over there but so we can look our own in the eyes and say we tried?

[photo: Time]

Morning News: Are You Living in a Designated 'Miserable' City?

Madeline Holler — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Forbes magazine has come out with a list of the most miserable cities in America. Judges looked at factors like weather, economy, commutes, crime and tax rates to make their decisions.

So which city ranked first (or, dead last, depending on how you look at it)? Stockton, Calif. The housing bust really doomed this city, as did its income tax rate and commute times. Plus, it's Stockton! Still, No. 3 though came as a surprise ...

... Chicago. Here's the rest of the list.

A Louisiana man is being held at the U.S. Capitol for attempting a delivery to President Obama while also having a rifle in his truck. Did he really think that was going to work? When questioned by security, the man admitted he had a rifle in the back. Police also found several rounds of ammunition.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered the Pentagon to review a policy forbidding news organizations from running pictures of flag-draped coffins and the remains of American service members. The policy is supposed to protect the privacy of service members' families. But it also give Americans a chance to feel any of the impact of war. Think they should lift this ban?

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had been the headliner act at the Conservative Political Action Conference, but she's got too much business to attend to in her home state so she's has pulled out. Good news, though, Rush Limbaugh will still attend.

Dust off your tinfoil hats! A guy in Rose Hill, Kan., may have captured a UFO on camera. He said the dark object came out of a cloud really fast and sounded like a jet. Interesting, because we happen to know there's an Air Force base and a Boeing plant and a commercial airport not too far from Rose Hill. A spokesman for Boeing's Integrated Defense System said they were unable to identify the aircraft. Well, what's he gonna say?

Finally, Vitamin D, people, Vitamin D. Not only will it prevent rickets and soft bones, but it's gonna help your little girl grow up to Kick. Ass.

Photo: orlandorealty.com

Mark Your Calendars: Sesame Street Supports Military Parents Coming Home

Shannon LC Cate — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

In its ongoing project to assist military families and help children adjust to the changes wartime military deployments bring, the Children's Television Workshop will be airing a Sesame Street prime-time special called "Coming Home." April has been declared the month of the military child and the show will air April 1 (check your local listings for times).

Sesame Street's production company, the Children's Television Workshop has already aired an earlier special about parents leaving for deployments abroad. In this special, the focus is on returning parents. The show will cover the special concerns of families with a returning military member who has been injured--either visibly or invisibly--and the best ways to adjust to a "new normal."

Sesame Street's military family initiative, Talk, Listen, Connect: Deployments, Homecomings, Changes, also offers an extensive web resource for military families with young children.

Jolie-Pitts Give $1M to Iraqi Children

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:01:00 GMT

They may be ridiculously pretty, but you can't say they are soulless. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt recently donated $1 million to children impacted by the war in Iraq.

The gift, given through the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, is part of an effort spearheaded by the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict, to bring aid to children who have lost parents, schools, and homes as a result of war.

Ms. Jolie is the co-chair of this worthy cause and hopes their gift will encourage others to donate as well.

While this may be the equivalent of you or I donating about $100, it is meaningful nonetheless.

Parody of Mother's Plea to John McCain

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:16:00 GMT

Moveon.org posted a video of a mother entreating John McCain to reconsider his stance on the Iraq War (he wants to stay there for "one hundred years"). It's got the usual blather about hearts beating fast and a mother's tears. It clearly deserves to be made fun of.

The following video is a parody of the original. What do you think? Is it funny?

What Keeps us from Being a Great Society?

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:35:00 GMT

44 years ago, President Lynden B. Johnson delivered a speech describing a Great Society where equality, civil rights, elimination of poverty and quality education for all children as a way of life. Great Society programs include Medicare, Medicaid, and federal funded education.

This vision of a caring helping society has long since been replaced by a culture of blame and a determination to look the other way when faced with the suffering of others.

Part of this ignoring is a failure to acknowledge the lives of soldiers and Iraqi citizens that have been lost since the Iraq War began 5 years ago. On the cusp of Memorial Day Day weekend, what will you tell your children about the war?

This is the first year I face Memorial Day with children old enough (6) to understand something about war and peace and the price we pay for our prosperity. I've talked to them about our duty as a family to help out others, but this weekend, I'm going to talk to them about why people go to war, what happens there, and what we can do to thank them. If we fail to care for each other, we'll continue to create a world nearly impossible to inhabit.

President Johnson was hated as the architect of the continued failure in Vietnam yet his legacy of social programs and a vision for the future of our country is quite beautiful:

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

Is it possible to aspire this greatness again? Somehow I think it is linked to honoring those who've given their lives fighting for our country, regardless of our views of the rightness of those wars.

Marines Looking for (More than a Few) Good Women

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

In a sharp departure from its traditional machismo advertising, the Marines are now targeting readers of women’s magazines like Shape and Self. Featuring photos of female marines, the ads include messages such as, “True strength lies not in self, but in unity.” (The “pain is weakness leaving the body” brand of marine recruiting remains prevalent in men’s magazines.) Although clerical jobs in the Marine Corps have been open to women since 1918, this is the first time the Marines have systemically geared their recruitment efforts toward young women.

Let’s hope the Marines’ new platform of gender equality includes serious efforts to fight military sexual harassment. According to a 2006 Defense Department report, 60 percent of enlisted women have experienced military sexual trauma and 23 percent have experienced military sexual assault. The branch with the highest percentage of women reporting sexual assaults is (you guessed it) the Marine Corps.

Drawing on its 2008 advertising budget of $157.4 million, the Marines are also specifically targeting Latinos and Arab Americans. This level of demographically oriented advertising is unprecedented in the Marines. With the percentage of high school graduates willing to enlist dropping sharply each year of the Iraq War, the Marines and other branches of the U.S. military have moved away from the generalized recruitment practices of years passed.

This change in advertising underlies a dire situation facing our military. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the unsustainable demands on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Richard A. Cody recently stated, “If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.”

When a four-star general makes a plea like this, our country had better respond, and fast. But I don’t think record military spending in chick mags was the response General Cody was hoping for.

Photo: New York Times

Elmo's Dad Gets Sent to Iraq

Cole Gamble — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Sesame Workshop, the people behind Sesame Street, is helping military families with young children cope with the deployment, redeployment and homecoming of their mommies and daddies. Would you like to see something a little surreal this morning? How about watch a music video in which Elmo’s dad tells Elmo he’s being shipped off to Iraq?

I must be a little behind, I didn't know Elmo had a dad and that his dad knew how to really rock the goatee/track suit combo Oh, and apparently he's southern? Kidding aside, I think this is a wonderful thing Sesame Street is doing. It’s the kind of thing they were created for. The program is called Talk, Listen, Connect and if you are a family with young kids and a loved one at war, you may want to check out this kit at www.sesameworkshop.org/tlc/. There is information and advice for both the child and the parent in dealing with this difficult time.

What depresses me is that this program is still needed. The reality for military familes is that mommies and daddies go to war, they come home from war, but then they get sent back to Iraq again. It’s just tragic. Once the kid has seen the video when mommy went off to Iraq the first time, what are we supposed to do when mommy goes back to Iraq a second or third time? Show them the video again? Some day this war will end and it will be up to families, not politicians, to pick up the pieces.

Iraq War Takes Its Toll on Officers’ Marriages

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Facing problems of recruitment and retention, the Army has turned to unorthodox measures to keep its soldiers happy. At the end of March, 18 military couples (in all but one case, the husband was the soldier) gathered at an Army-hosted retreat in an effort to bring one of the less talked about casualties of war—stable marriages—into the open. In the wake of 15-month deployments, divorce rates among officers shot up from 2.9 percent to 3.9 percent in 2004. And studies show that war puts a deep strain on the couples who decide to stay together as well.

Delicately termed “marriage education” (to avoid the touchy-feely connotation with the words “therapy” or “counseling”), the weekend’s discussions, which were facilitated by marriage therapists, aired marital stress stemming from soldiers’ emotional distance, guilt, decreased interest in parenting, and temper control problems. One wife complained that her husband spoke to her as if he were still issuing commands to his troops. “I am your wife, not someone working under you,” she said.

According to the New York Times, many of the officers seemed uncomfortable and even resentful being asked to openly discuss their emotions—which is precisely what many of their wives hoped to change. Several of the women expressed frustration that their husbands are so private about their experiences in Iraq, and welcomed the therapists’ suggestion that talking openly is essential to a happy marriage after war. But these 17 men, a tiny fraction of the soldiers whose family lives have been disrupted by the war in Iraq, seemed to remain unconvinced.

Achtung! German Hausfraus are Actually Men

Madeline Holler — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:02:00 GMT

The big news in this report is supposed to be that way more fathers are becoming temporary stay-at-home dads in Germany than officials expected. By the third quarter of a new maternity leave incentive program -- which is intended to encourage more Germans to procreate and reverse their declining population -- nearly 10 percent of the applicants were fathers.

That's great, love to see it, equal time, blah, blah.

But what I'm sitting in a depressed puddle of my own ruggedly independent, red, white and blue urine about is the program. Get this:

Whichever parent takes advantage of it, they get a subsidy of up to a little more than $36,000 for a year. The parent taking the year off gets two-thirds of his or her salary for 12 months up to $2,600 per month. Another parent can take an additional two months also getting two-thirds pay. Tax free for both.

And I know someone's going to write in and say something to the effect that people have to be responsible for their own children, etc., and go head and make your case, whoever you are. But also keep reading, because you're going to love what one German guy who took advantage of the program said:

"The politicians act as if it's a huge gift, but actually it's not -- it's an improvement, but I think even more would stay at home if they could afford it," said Dommer, from Berlin.

Damn, culture shock! Here I felt grateful to cobble together vacation time, sick days and some shitty 50 percent pay for six weeks deal at my employer to get three months of maternity leave. And this German guy thinks up to nearly $37,000 in a year is not enough! God I love Europeans!

And sure, even the full 36,000 doesn't go so far in Germany, especially in the cities. And I can't help but wonder whether single parents even bother with this, or if there's something else out there to help support them. But you just know that after babyhood, there are all kinds of playgroups and childcare centers and Kindergartens and all that, probably pretty cheap, probably pretty good.

386,000 people signed up for the 1.4 billion Euro program, so officials have had to cook the books a little to come out on budget. Next year, they're allotting 4 billion Euros. I think Americans spend that much in a weekend of light-fighting with insurgents in Iraq.

Photo: Bilderbox

Babble Talk: The Military Wife

aprilpeveteaux — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:58:00 GMT

Korinthia Klein’s essay The Home Front is a continuation of her earlier essay on Babble , when her husband’s deployment to Iraq coincided with her third pregnancy. Brace yourself for the tears. Happily, Klein’s husband has returned to help out with the laundry, tantrums and rearing of three children, age six and under. Yet instead of acting as the standard issue military wife, thrilled to have her family back together, Klein’s confusion and perhaps a defense mechanism or two, kicked in to create a tension previously absent from the relationship.

It’s overwhelming for me to even think about taking this journey without my husband, but men and women do this every day. And Klein’s story isn’t one of the short business trip your spouse takes, leaving you free to control the TV for the night. Or even a divorce, where at least the other parent of your children is still living, and presumably able to take on some of the responsibility. Getting used to the idea that your husband might not come home, while the two of you have essentially been living separate lives, could leave the best of us ambivalent when the 'joyous' family reunion finally takes place. Klein’s description of the not-so-perfect airport reunion is familiar to those of us who have been in the position of alternately missing a spouse who is away from home, and cursing them for the extra load they have left behind. But add anxiety about whether your spouse will survive to the day-to-day stress of laundry, work and potty-training and it’s easy to see why the divorce rate among military families has been steadily rising during the war in Iraq.

For Klein, her quandary of, “I need him home with me to help raise our kids; he needs to use his talents to make a difference in the world. I don't know which one of us is being selfish,” is too heart-breaking to comprehend. Luckily for most of us, we won’t have to navigate such issues. Not knowing when, or if, her husband could be redeployed, Klein is creating a new way of living and appreciating her family. And that is something we can all relate to, while being grateful that we don’t have to know what it’s like to be so completely left behind.

A Different Kind of Hero: U.S. Soldier Adopts Disabled Boy

Karen Murphy — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:24:00 GMT

Knowing first hand what the challenges can be in raising a child with special needs, I was interested in the story of Scott Southworth and his son Ala'a. In this CNN video clip (which you may have seen because it's been around for a bit but that makes it no less compelling) you can see Scott speak of the things that were against him in his bid to adopt Ala'a. Discouraged in his plans by friends and family, Scott struggled with the fact that he was single, had little money and didn't have a stable career, and wasn't educated in caring for a child with cerebral palsy. Ala'a was an orphan living in a war-torn country with few prospects.

One look at the interaction between father and son tells you how the story went. Ala'a is now about 14, near as I can tell from this 2005 article which also details some of his history before meeting Scott. Taking Ala'a to the U.S. from his orphanage in Iraq was no easy task. But there they are, laughing and playing together in the home Scott was able to buy because of his new and quite good job. And Ala'a is walking. Knowing what it's like having a child who has severe delays and you wonder when he will walk if ever, I know how huge this is for them.

So what possessed a single American soldier to connect so deeply with a disabled Iraqi orphan that they became a family is rather a beautiful mystery to me. It seems like they both chose well.

Prince Harry Not Going to Iraq with Army Unit

Alisyn — Thu, 17 May 2007 13:04:00 GMT

Prince Harry, the youngest son of Princess Diana and Prince Charles and a tank commander in the British Army, will not be joining his regiment, The Blues and Royals, in Iraq this spring. Though the prince was hand picked by the head of the army for a six month tour of duty with an elite combat unit, the amount of press his imminent deployment has attracted has put his life, and those of his fellow soldiers, in jeopardy.

People is reporting that Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of General Staff, has rescinded his decision to deploy Harry, who is third in line to the British throne, because "There have been a number of specific threats, some reported, and some not reported, which relate directly to Prince Harry as an individual. These threats place not only him but also those around him a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable. I know Prince Harry will be extremely disappointed and his soldiers will miss his presence in Iraq."

Somewhere, Princess Diana is smiling. No mother ever wants to send her baby off to war, and I'm sure she would be no exception. Though he must be disappointed, even Prince Harry must agree that it's safer for all involved if he wasn't there to attract attention to himself and his unit. Crisis averted. Now, how 'bout pulling some strings for the rest of those dudes?

Hipster Parents on Nightline

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:02:00 GMT

Neal Pollack, AlternaDad, appeared on Nightline recently to weigh in again on the anti-anti-anti-hipster parenting debate that has long since made us all weary, including him.

After watching this, I feel proud of our generation of parents. We're trying to do things well (and differently) than generations before. We just happen to also enjoy writing about it.

Family-Friendly Peace March on the Pentagon This Saturday

Patti — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:35:00 GMT

Anti-war protestors have scheduled a peace march on the Pentagon this Saturday, March 17. That day will be the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq, and 2007 marks the 40th anniversary of the 1967 march to the Pentagon in protest of the Viet Nam conflict. Along with demanding an end to the war, the march will include rallies calling for the impeachment of the President.

Peace marches are often anything but peaceful and not necessarily a safe place for children, but organizers will be setting up special children's activities including sign-making stations, and anti-war balloons will be available (the war on bird-killers, apparently, will have to wait). Several student and other youth groups are expected to have a presence at Saturday's march, which is projected to draw hundreds of thousands of participants.

So if you're in the hood and you're so inclined, check it out and let us know how it goes.

(via, in a delicious spirit of irony, The Free Republic)

Britain's Prince Harry Headed For Iraq

Alisyn — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 00:31:00 GMT

CNN reports today that Prince Harry of Wales, the younger son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, is heading to Iraq with his military unit. The 22 year-old prince, who is third in line to the British throne, recently graduated from the Royal Military Academy, and has spoken openly about his desire to go on active duty.

Prince Harry continues a family tradition of military service, started by his grandfather, Prince Phillip, who was a Royal Navy officer, his uncle, Prince Andrew, a Royal Navy pilot, and his father, Prince Charles, a former member of the Royal Air Force.

The young prince told reporters he is ready to go: "There's no way I'm going to ... sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country," he said.

Are the Childless Unfit To Implement Foreign Policy?

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Senator Barbara Boxer is under fire for comments she made during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding proposed troop expansion in Iraq. Boxer pointed out that neither she nor Secretary of State Condolleezza Rice would "pay a price" for increased troop deaths in Iraq - Boxer because her kids and grandkids are the wrong age, and Rice because she's childless and unmarried.

Ironically, it is the political Right that has labeled Boxer's remarks a "low blow," inappropriately correlating Rice's marital/parental status and her inability to make proper policy choices regarding troop size in Iraq.

While I disagree with Boxer's approach, she raises an excellent point. Isn't it absolute nonsense to have those in power (with little or nothing to lose) making policy decisions that will increase the Iraqi and American death toll?

But neither childlessness nor marital status counts here. American military personnel in Iraq continues to be vastly overrepresented by poor and minority populations, only 5 of whom have parents serving in Congress or the Senate (and none with parents in the President's Cabinet). It's rare that anyone in power ever suffers personally because of our country's war mongering.