Hidden Hurt
Desperate for medical care, the uninsured flock by the hundreds to a remote corner of Virginia for the chance to see a doctor
By Mary Otto
Sunday, November 9, 2008; W08
Pain hides in these green mountains. Diseased hearts and clouded lungs, aching teeth and anxious minds.
But for three days a year, more than 800 volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and other health-care workers come from all over Virginia and beyond to this isolated place in Appalachia to provide free medical care to those who cannot afford it. Sick and hurting people by the hundreds gather and wait for the gates of the Wise County Fairgrounds to swing open -- their presence a testament to the country's health-care crisis.
Every year now, it happens like this. On a Thursday afternoon in late July, trucks filled with thousands of dollars' worth of medical supplies and equipment wind through coal country and up the steep roads to the tip of southwest Virginia, just a few miles from the Kentucky border. Then a small army of health-care professionals, along with hundreds of community volunteers, get to work. In tents, in barns, in exhibition halls, they use clotheslines, hospital sheets and medical clamps to separate examination rooms, surgeries, a vast open-air dental clinic, a laboratory, eye and ear clinics and a pharmacy. Moving with swift efficiency, following a model used to respond to natural disasters, they create a vast field hospital out of thin air in just a few hours.
By sunset outside the gates of the fairground, a field that normally serves as the parking lot is filling up with people -- elderly men and women, young laborers, worn-out coal miners, extended families -- setting up camp. "This is a gift from God," says Joyce Waddell as her daughter and small grandchildren settle in for the night.
An elderly woman limps across the field to the row of portable toilets. A young man lights an oil lantern in the darkening sky.
A tall, sinewy, razor-straight man dressed in khaki walks through the campsites, up the dusty road. He's Stan Brock, the British-born adventurer who sets this mammoth effort in motion each year through his nonprofit Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps. The clinic is now in its ninth year at Wise, and a number of the campers recognize Brock. They wave and nod in gratitude. "The original Crocodile Hunter," says Mike Mullins, a Clintwood, Va., retiree, nearly blind, who is waiting for eye care. "I think the world of him."
Now in his 70s, Brock gained fame four decades ago as the anaconda-wrestling co-star of the popular television series "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom." But he has spent the last 23 years flying to some of the poorest places on the planet, bringing free medical care to those who desperately need it. And people rely on that care in rural Virginia, just a day's drive from the U.S. Capitol, he says, just as much as they do in Africa or Latin America.
"The need is massive," Brock says. "We pick up everything from brain tumors to lung cancer to cervical cancer to breast cancer."
Brock takes great pride in the economy and efficiency of the Wise clinic, which costs just $26,000 this year because the doctors, dentists, optometrists, nurses and other workers donate their time. But even as the clinic saves lives and alleviates suffering, Brock knows it amounts to slapping a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. There are approximately 47 million Americans who lack health insurance and another 25 million who are underinsured, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that supports research on health-care issues. Hospitals on county fairgrounds, Brock says, are not the answer.
Brock found the inspiration for a volunteer medical relief corps dedicated to bringing free care to the isolated and impoverished long before his "Wild Kingdom" days, during a 15-year sojourn in the savannahs and rain forests of South America, running a huge cattle ranch in the former British colony of British Guiana.
Working and living among the Wapishana Indians, Brock says, he witnessed epidemics of influenza, measles and whooping cough sweep through the communities. Common and treatable in the urban areas from which they spread, the diseases devastated the Wapishana, who had no resistance to them and no traditional remedies. When he left South America in 1968 to join "Wild Kingdom," Brock promised himself he would return someday with a volunteer medical corps.
After his stint on the show ended in 1971, Brock continued to work in television and film for more than a decade before founding the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps in 1985. Since then, Brock's organization has conducted more than 540 medical relief missions worldwide with little fanfare and limited funds. About a quarter of the group's $300,000 budget for the past year came from grants from private foundations, and the rest from public donations.
Brock often pilots crucial supplies himself in a donated World War II vintage C-47 cargo plane. He and his volunteers brave extreme conditions, civil unrest and piranha-infested waters to bring basic medical treatment, dental and eye care, and even veterinary services to remote towns and villages in Haiti, Guatemala, Nepal and Guyana. He says he can't count the number of nights he's spent away from his home in Knoxville, Tenn., a 90-year-old schoolhouse he rents from Knox County for $1 a year that also serves as the volunteer corps' headquarters.
Because he lives in Tennessee, Brock has become increasingly focused on the plight of the poor in his own back yard -- Appalachia -- where many people in places such as Wise County go for years without seeing a doctor or dentist.
This is coal country, with an economy that has ridden a boom-and-bust cycle from the arrival of the railroads in the 1880s to the passage of the Clean Air Act almost a century later. The richest seams of coal have dwindled, and many of the remaining jobs have been replaced by mechanization. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, the poverty rate in Wise County is 19.2 percent -- more than twice that of the rest of Virginia. The per capita income is only about $14,000 a year.
Life is tough here. "I don't want to say it's harder here than any place else," says Sister Bernadette Kenny, a nun from the Medical Missionaries of St. Mary, "but it's damned hard. Pain is pain."
Kenny is a registered nurse who has been ministering to the needs of the people in these hills and hollows for years. Her mobile Health Wagon, which treats more than 2,400 people a year with funding from private foundations and patient donations, is a welcome sight as it trundles along the local roads.
It was Kenny and a fellow Health Wagon nurse, Teresa Gardner, who persuaded Brock to bring his volunteer medical corps to Wise after helping him at a clinic in Tennessee in 2000. They told him how badly their patients needed access to specialists, dentists and eye doctors. From the early 1980s to 2000, the Harvard School of Public Health has found, life expectancies in Appalachia have dropped for both sexes.
In Wise County, "there are patients literally dying of diabetes," says Gardner. The specialists who can help them are a two-hour drive away in Kingsport, Tenn., she says, "if you have insurance."
But many don't, which is why the three-day clinic at the county fairground has become such a huge event. On Thursday night, after the volunteers have finished setting up, Gardner peers out of the fairground office command center. Darkness has settled over the mountains. Hundreds of patients have lain down to sleep. Others continue arriving throughout the night.
Linda Yates, a compact woman of 60, gets here at 2 a.m. She's looking for answers.
She's the daughter of a coal miner, the mother of seven children and a grandmother. She is also a day-care provider and foster mother to countless children, who come to her from the Dickenson County social services department, often with special needs, sometimes without even a change of clothing. She feeds them and dresses them and teaches them for however long they stay with her. She speaks of each with a fierce maternal protectiveness. "If they come into my home," she says, "they will be loved."
Yates and her husband, Lonnie, a disabled mine supervisor, left their small house in the tiny community of Birchleaf, Va., at midnight. They wanted to get here before the clinic opened so Linda Yates would be able to see the doctors on Friday. To make the trip, they had to line up two babysitters to care for the 11 children in their house. They rarely go anywhere overnight.
Yates looks around at all the tents and people camping, grateful to be here. Her foster children all have Medicaid. Her husband, a 61-year-old military veteran who has survived two kidney transplants, and who is battling skin cancer, gets much of his care through Veterans Affairs benefits. But she has no health insurance, and three years ago, she was diagnosed with diabetes at a free screening event.
Yates tried to control the disease by carefully watching her diet. But that strategy didn't work. Because the Yateses live on pension, Social Security and day-care income amounting to about $38,000 a year, she worries about the cost of insulin, more than $70 a month, and the test strips for blood sugar, $70 more.
Teresa Gardner and the Health Wagon have helped Yates manage her disease. But her blood sugar has remained dangerously high, in spite of medical counseling, her careful eating habits, and her regular use of insulin.
"I told Teresa: 'I can take five units or 50 units. It doesn't help,' " Yates says. Gardner, too, has been mystified. Yates knows about the terrible toll of diabetes. "There is a lot of diabetes in our family," she explains. "My uncle was a diabetic. He lost his legs; he lost his eyesight."
Then there was one of Lonnie's cousins, Yates says. "She lost her legs, her arms, her eyesight. She just had a torso left."
In the dark moments before dawn, as the three-day torrent of humanity begins, the volunteers prepare themselves. "Please, God, give us the knowledge to help these patients," prays the Health Wagon's operating director, Karen O'Quinn.
Brock is waiting at the gate of the fairground. He begins calling out numbers that people have been given as they have arrived. There are about 1,500 people today, seven or eight abreast, drowsy, almost ghostly, as far as the eye can see.
One of an army of Lions Club volunteers, barrel-chested Greg Hart from Winchester, Va., keeps the line moving with his clear voice: "Don't let anybody charge you for anything. Everything here is free. Ladies, if you are here for the first time, we have a mammogram van. If you haven't had a mammogram, have one. My mother, who is up there," he says, gesturing to the dark sky, "would recommend you have one. She would be down here if she'd had one. If you've got a bump that might be skin cancer, or a pain you don't want to tell anybody about, there is a doctor here who wants to hear about it."
By daybreak, people are moving into a barn to check in at long rows of tables. Volunteers at computers ask questions and take vital signs, creating charts for each patient, determining what tests they will need.
"The object is to diagnose and solve as much as we can, because we only have this one shot at them," says Claudette Dalton, the medical director at Rockingham Memorial Hospital in Harrisonburg, Va., who helps run the Wise event.
Linda Yates sits down at one of the check-in tables.
"Do you see a doctor?"
"The Health Wagon."
"When was the last time you saw a regular doctor?"
"It's probably been 12 years."
She discusses her diabetes and gets a stick test for her blood sugar. She hasn't eaten since the previous night, but at 263, her blood sugar is far above the normal level -- about 100. "It was 400 last night," she says. "I took the insulin, but nothing works."
Last year, the Health Wagon nurses started urging Yates to come to the 2007 clinic, to see specialists and get the tests she needed to better understand her problem. But she had to put off the trip when Lonnie became seriously ill. "I ignored myself for a long time," Yates says. Now she realizes that too many people are counting on her for her to falter. "I've got to be there for my children, my grandchildren and my husband."
When Yates arrives at the medical barn and sees the makeshift examination rooms partitioned off with sheets, a smile of admiration spreads across her face. This is a place after her own heart: "It shows you can make do with less and get it done."
In a surgical tent behind the medical barn, Vincent Voci, a plastic surgeon from Charlotte, removes a disfiguring cyst from a man's cheek.
The cyst is the size of a large egg, but it is not what brought Chester White here from Bristol, Tenn., an hour away. He actually came to see a dentist but learned he could see a dermatologist while he was waiting. The cyst comes cleanly out of the shell of skin where it had been growing for eight years. Then White's adult son comes from the dental tent and also has a cyst removed from his face.
Voci stitches up the torn and bleeding finger of a young man who was working on a tin roof. And he removes what appears to be a slow-growing basal cell carcinoma from a woman's face.
Patients who learn they have cancer, heart disease or diabetes often face major barriers getting the follow-up care they need, even with the ongoing help of the volunteers. Some patients are sent to local doctors who agree to provide the care for free. But area hospitals and health-care providers are already overwhelmed by the number of sick and uninsured people who need treatment but cannot pay, Claudette Dalton says. "We can't stretch resources any thinner," she says. "You can't keep your office or hospital open without some paying patients."
Follow-up care is often available through the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, home to the largest contingent of medical volunteers here. But Charlottesville is about a six-hour drive from Wise.
"These folks still have a lot of large cracks to fall through in getting follow-up care," says Karen Wilson, the executive director of Brock's organization. "Sometimes it's an easy task. Sometimes it's difficult. Sometimes you fail. That's the reality."
Out in the field, Joseph Smiddy, a pulmonologist from Kingsport, is doing chest X-rays in the trailer of a truck he customized to serve as a mobile clinic for the early detection of lung cancer. He went to truck driving school to learn to drive the 18-wheeler. Now he visits remote areas, such as Wise, where he grew up.
Smiddy is studying the X-ray of a patient he just saw. The man's lungs are spotted with granulomas, small areas of inflammation that are benign but can resemble cancer. With its high concentration of major lung diseases, often only recognized in late stages, this region is known as a lung belt. "We're in a lung belt because of the coal work and smoking," says Smiddy, "and histoplasmosis, a soil fungus that causes lung disease." Histoplasmosis is a common cause of granulomas.
The state of health in the region has been historically dismal, with cancers, tuberculosis, black lung and mining accidents. The coal camps had small clinics, though. And mine workers got medical coverage through the United Mine Workers of America.
Then, in 1988, a turn of events rocked the little coal towns through this region. The United Mine Workers contract with the Pittston Coal Co. expired, and widows, pensioners and disabled miners were informed that the company would no longer contribute to their health insurance. The miners' ensuing strike against Pittston and its subsidiaries enveloped southwest Virginia in one of the most searing labor confrontations of the latter 20th century. Hundreds of miners and their families were arrested in sit-down protests and blockades.
During the Pittston Coal strike, Kenny, in her Health Wagon, provided care to the miners whose benefits had lapsed. She was arrested and jailed. "The charges were impeding traffic and giving health care in an unorthodox manner," she recalls. On Kenny's day in court, a group of supporters stood up and sang "Amazing Grace." The charges were dismissed, Kenny says.
The benefits were eventually restored. But the memory of Pittston -- and the impact that the sudden loss of health-care benefits can have on a community -- lingers. It's an impact shared by an increasing number of Americans as companies attempt to control costs by reducing or eliminating health-care coverage.
The number of uninsured Americans has climbed by 12 million since 1990, according to a 2007 report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of underinsured Americans has risen 60 percent since 2003, according to the Commonwealth Fund. Those who are uninsured or underinsured can't afford a catastrophic illness or even visits to the dentist or eye doctor, Stan Brock told a congressional subcommittee exploring the nation's health-care crisis in April.
"We could fix this problem," Brock says. "It's just a question of priority."
It's Friday afternoon, and the mammogram van is doing a brisk business. As with the chest X-rays, about one-third of the mammograms done here reveal something that requires further testing.
"Getting each patient to follow-up care is so individually difficult; it can be a real thrash," says Dalton. "It's case by case, and it involves the U-Va. social workers, the Health Wagon nurses and the local health department often scrounging resources locally and just persisting with the patients."
One year, three women from one town all had suspicious lumps in their breasts, but the volunteers could not find a local radiologist who would see them for the follow-up exams.
"We finally scraped up enough money to get them to Charlottesville, but they were so far from home, and it was hard on them," says Dalton. Two had cancer and underwent lumpectomies.
Linda Yates decides she should get a mammogram. "My grandmother died of breast cancer," she tells the volunteer adding to her medical chart outside the van.
"When was your last breast exam by a doctor?"
"Eighteen years ago."
"How many pregnancies?"
"Three."
"How many children?"
"Seven."
The volunteer looks up, puzzled. Some are adopted, Yates explains.
"Are you pregnant?"
"Not so far this morning," the grandmother answers with a chuckle.
Yates spends 12 hours waiting in various lines, getting tests that would have cost thousands of dollars if she were paying for them. When she emerges from the medical barn, it is 6 p.m., and the clinic is closing down for the day. Her husband, Lonnie, her sweetheart since high school, finds her in the crowd.
"Were you worried about me?" she asks him with a smile.
"I haven't seen you since 6 a.m."
"Well, you couldn't have found me," she says. "It was a whole different world back there."
In the half light of Saturday morning, it all begins again, with about 1,000 people waiting at the fairground gates.
Though smoking is forbidden inside the field hospital, many patients are smoking while they wait outside. Along with obesity, smoking is termed a major behavioral risk factor in the area. About 30 percent of adults in the area smoke. Even many of the very poor spend the little money they have on cigarettes. They often started smoking as children.
Patricia Pleasant, 47, from Lee County, Va., is one of them. "I started at 9, rolling for my father," she says between drags. Disabled by a nervous condition, she says, she smokes to try to calm herself. "If I get nervous or anything, I smoke."
"Nerves" are a recurring complaint in this region, according to research by the Southwest Virginia Graduate Medical Education Consortium, based at U-Va.'s College at Wise. "A frequently reported cause of nerves was having too many problems and few solutions," the report observed. According to the consortium, residents of the region are 70 percent more likely to commit suicide than those elsewhere in the state.
Saturday afternoon is hot, and people are getting tired and testy. A brief argument breaks out in one tent over a place in line. Out in the parking lot, a stout woman pauses, then slowly crumples to the earth. Three medics hurry over. One plucks a burning cigarette from between the fingers of the prone woman. Every year, there are "downers," people who collapse from fatigue, hunger, illness. The volunteers gently revive the woman and administer first aid.
In an oral surgery trailer, Melanie Locke, a 31-year-old school custodian from Martinsburg, W.V., gets to smile normally for the first time in her life. She is speechless as she studies herself in a mirror.
She was born with a cleft palate. As a child, she received a series of operations to correct the condition. But as an adult, she has not been able to get proper dental care because of the complexities of her case and her family's lack of insurance.
"We had a tooth pulled once, and it was more than I make in two weeks," says her husband, Kevin Kilmer, a carpenter.
Charlottesville dentist Michael Clark and Roanoke dental technician Greg Gray took Locke's case at one of Brock's clinics in West Virginia, extracting her diseased teeth and tackling the challenging job of designing custom dentures to fit her mouth. The care would have cost thousands of dollars. She and her husband have come to the Wise clinic for the final fitting.
"This is like waking up in heaven" says Kilmer, taking in his wife's smile. She has suffered so much pain and worry, he says. "This is going to change her life."
Yates is also back. Her face is alight as she picks up a small package from the pharmacy tent. "I don't have to take the insulin anymore," she announces. A diabetes specialist has prescribed a medicine that stimulates the pancreas. Yates gets a starter supply from the clinic. In the coming weeks, the Health Wagon will locate more free samples for her. Yates knows the medicine is expensive, but Teresa Gardner won't tell her exactly how much it costs. "I guess she doesn't want to shock me."
Yates's mammogram reveals a possible problem, however. The Health Wagon will work with a Virginia program called Every Woman's Life, which helps provide eligible women with screening and follow-up care for breast and cervical cancer.
Yates's daughter Connie Skeens, 40, is also here today. She's a tall, coltish blonde. "Dad says it takes somebody graceful to be as gawky as I am," Skeens says with a wry smile.
When her health was better, she worked as a waitress. Now she often helps her mother with the foster and day-care children. Skeens has been battling diabetes since she was a little girl. Her parents were told she would probably die young.
"Love her while you can," Skeens said the doctor told them. With vigilance, she has survived, though diabetes has not been easy. She lives daily with dry mouth and confusion, as her blood sugar rises and falls. "It's something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy," says Skeens.
For eight years, she escaped her troubles through addiction. "I'm a recovering oxycontin addict," she says. "It's a painkiller. They call it the poor man's heroin."
She started taking the medication, like many people in this region, after a doctor recommended it for back pain. She couldn't stop. "Eight years of using and selling," she recalls.
Her parents agonized. They tried to help her stop, but without success. "The way it makes you feel when you are using," says Skeens, "it just makes you giddy."
She finally overcame the addiction in a halfway house after serving 11 months in the local detention center for using her parents' credit card to support her drug habit. "We had to press charges," recalls her mother, the pain audible in her voice. For awhile, Skeens was furious with her parents, but now she is grateful.
Yet she still speaks about "the OC" with a touch of nostalgia, describing the little round pills and the colors that indicate their strength in milligrams:
"The 10s are white.
"The 20s are pink.
"The 40s are gold.
"The 80s are green.
"They had the 160s . . . That was the prettiest blue I have ever seen in my life," she says, "just about the color of that guy's scrubs over there."
Today, her teeth, which have long troubled her, are infected. And her kidneys are infected, she suspects, the infection perhaps spreading from her teeth. She registers at the dental tent and gets a plastic orange bracelet that bears the word "extraction."
She also needs an eye exam, but her blood sugar plays havoc with her plans. She can't have an eye exam until she can get her blood sugar into the normal range. "It's going to be one of those days," she sighs. The volunteers send her to lie down in the medical barn.
A tiny sliver of moon hangs in the dark sky. Then the fog lifts up from the hills, and the long sheets of white paper are lifted from the instruments in the blue dental tent.
It's Sunday morning. Everyone is tired.
In the medical barn, Ross Isaacs, a Charlottesville nephrologist, is still seeing patients, and marveling at the depths of the troubles here. "There are 20 million diabetics in this country. That's about 9 percent of the population. In southwest Virginia, in this clinic, it's 50 percent.
"Then there's hypertension. Fifty million cases in the United States -- about 18 percent. At this clinic in Wise, it's 70 percent."
So much need, so little time.
Meanwhile, Connie Skeens, terrified of the ordeal, gets her 22 remaining teeth, all infected, extracted. Richmond oral surgeon Kimberly Swanson is reassuring as she goes about the difficult work. "You'll never have to do this again -- does that help?" Swanson asks her. "I hope you get some teeth fast."
Skeens steps out into the Sunday sunlight gripping bloody gauze between her gums. She is put on a waiting list to get free dentures next year, when the clinic returns to Wise. She'll have to eat soft food until then.
Meanwhile, this year's clinic is winding down. All over the fairgrounds, volunteers are busy packing up. It's nearly noon, and 2,670 people have received medical treatment worth more than $1.7 million. Hundreds of tests have been administered. More than 1,000 pairs of eyeglasses have been made. More than 4,000 teeth have been extracted.
In the medical barn, medical students are taking down the sheets that divided the examination rooms. Cardiologist Bill Harris, the son of a coal miner, pauses from his work to consider the gap between his own life and those of the patients here. "I'll go home in a nice car," says Harris, who lives in Pikeville, Ky., "and have a glass of chardonnay." The people he cared for will drive winding roads back to hard lives. Harris won't be able to see their pain, but he won't be able to forget it, either.
Mary Otto is a former Washington Post staff writer who is now editor in chief of Street Sense, a biweekly D.C. newspaper largely produced and sold by the homeless and formerly homeless. She can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.
Don't Read His Lips -- You Might Be Offended The Supreme Court Hears a Challenge to the FCC's Crackdown on 'Fleeting Expletives'; Says Bono, 'I Genuinely Blew It' By JESS BRAVIN and AMY SCHATZ Article
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The rock star Bono's campaigns against poverty and disease have won acclaim from the Bush administration. The U2 frontman's language is another matter.
When a U2 song won a Golden Globe award in 2003, Bono, on a live broadcast, blurted out, "This is really, really f-ing brilliant!" The Federal Communications Commission declared his remark "shocking and gratuitous," a threat to "the well-being of the nation's children," because it employed "one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit" words "in the English language."
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Weighing the 'Bono Rule' See some of the incidents that have drawn criticism from the FCC.
Reversing a decades-old policy in which isolated or fleeting expletives generally went unpunished, the FCC started a crackdown on vulgar language in 2004. Under the Bono rule, the commission found programs violated indecency rules, including the ABC detective series "NYPD Blue," the CBS News "Early Show" and a PBS documentary on blues musicians. The rule applies only to broadcasts -- neither the Internet, cable nor satellite channels are subject to FCC content regulation.
Broadcasters (including Fox Television, a unit of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal) challenged the policy, and a federal appeals court struck it down. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear the Bush administration's plea to reinstate the Bono rule. A key issue is whether the FCC had a "reasoned basis," as federal law requires, for its change in course.
To justify the Bono rule, the commissioners found that the F-word describes "sexual or excretory" functions and is "patently offensive" to "contemporary community standards." Courts should defer to the FCC, the administration's brief says, because the commissioners "studied" the "connotations of language" before determining that the word "invariably invokes a coarse sexual image."
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Getty Images Bono in 2003 after his band, U2, won an award and he uttered the fateful word at issue in the Supreme Court.
The FCC says, however, that it conducted no formal study beyond the opinion it published announcing the expletive rule. A spokesman says the commission can't comment further while the case is pending.
At least one commissioner who voted for the Bono rule has since reconsidered. Michael Powell, who was chairman when the Bono rule was adopted, says he now regrets voting for it. "No reasonable person would believe" such an exclamation is "meant to titillate or be sexual in nature," he says.
Those who study language tend to agree. The FCC's finding is "absolute rubbish," says Jesse Sheidlower, North America editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary and author of its entry for f-. "You can ask people if they think Bono is talking about sex, and I will guarantee you they will say no," says Mr. Sheidlower, whose book, "The F-Word," is a "historical glossary" of the word that provoked the Bono rule.
"Words change focus over time," he says. The word, which was used as far back as Elizabethan poetry, became "increasingly more acceptable" through the 20th century, Mr. Sheidlower says, particularly in war stories, such as Norman Mailer's first novel, "The Naked and the Dead" (published in 1948, it used the term "fug") and the 1970 motion picture "MASH," whose screenplay, by Ring Lardner Jr., won the Oscar.
"When we hear a word we briefly consider all of its possible meanings," says Bart Geurts, a semanticist at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. "One famous example is the English word 'bug.' If you hear that in context of a spy story, even if you're not aware of it, you consider an insect, you briefly consider that meaning and immediately reject it," says Prof. Geurts, whose scholarly essay, "Really F-ing Brilliant," takes its title from Bono's exclamation. He says that those who hear the vulgarism subliminally consider the literal meaning very briefly, "but then ignore it," he says.
Extras FCC's "fleeting expletive" rule
Lower court opinion striking down FCC rule | FCC brief
Fox Television brief | ABC/CBS/NBC brief
Center for Creative Voices in Media brief | FCC reply
Supreme Court's 1978 opinion on George Carlin's "Filthy Words"
Even so, he says, "whenever you have an ambiguity, the word's other senses may resonate."
Indeed, the current FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, said in a statement last year that the appeals court was "divorced from reality" in concluding that the word "does not invoke a sexual connotation."
Christopher Potts, a linguist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, observes that the FCC does not consider indecent other words that also can refer to sexual or excretory activity. The words the FCC singled out as inherently indecent "have their own magic," he says, that defies reasoned analysis.
"These words are taboo, and we as a society have invested ourselves in treating these words as taboo," he says, unlike other words that may have the same literal meaning. "It sounds very circular, but the underlying logic is that because it is taboo it should remain taboo."
Because the Supreme Court has found that adults have a First Amendment right to indecent materials, the Bono rule is predicated on protecting children from what the commissioners consider "the most objectionable, most offensive language." While the FCC asserted that use of such diction has increased over the airwaves, it cited no data suggesting the harm it causes children justifies government suppression of speech.
"There's no scientific evidence that children are harmed by fleeting expletives," says Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, whose books on language include "Cursing in America."
A 2005 study of 200 college-age students asked how they learned to swear, and "the overwhelming majority said it was from their parents, other children or peers," says Prof. Jay, who has conducted research on children's use of vulgar language in playgrounds, baseball fields and other public places.
The lack of such data for children, researchers say, is because universities are unlikely to approve laboratory experiments that involve confronting kids with vulgar language. "That's not something you can measure," says Dale Kunkel, a University of Arizona communications professor who has researched the effect of televised violence and sexual content on children. The Bono rule seems based more on "moral-value issues than concern about harmful psychological affects that might be amenable to empirical evaluation," he says.
The Bush administration argues that the lack of such data for children is irrelevant. The FCC had no duty "to amass evidence that the broadcast of isolated expletives would be harmful to children," it says in its brief. "Courts have long recognized that exposure to indecent material risks harm to a child's psychological and moral development to an extent that makes it the proper subject of regulation."
Mr. Powell, the former FCC chairman, isn't so sure. "These indecency cases go way, way back," he says, "back to a time when there probably was a very, very different view about a lot of this content, and stuff that we would say everyday today that in the '50s or '60s you might not."
Federal law exhibits some tension, simultaneously prohibiting broadcast of "indecent language" while barring FCC interference with "free speech."
Indecency regulations only apply when children are likely to be in the audience, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Broadcasters are not sanctioned for expletives after 10 p.m., though in practice few do so for fear of upsetting advertisers.
In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the FCC could sanction a radio station for its afternoon broadcast of "Filthy Words," a George Carlin routine that, ironically, lampooned television censorship. In a concurrence, Justice Lewis Powell distinguished Mr. Carlin's "verbal shock treatment," which the majority found intentionally indecent, from "the isolated use of a potentially offensive word."
That distinction shaped FCC policy for the next three decades. A single, unrepeated expletive wasn't enough to trigger the indecency prohibition -- a depiction of "sexual or excretory organs or activities" that is "patently offensive" to "contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium." Since then, the FCC has cited mounting complaints to explain its crackdown.
As for Bono, he regrets he used the word at the time. "It's an uncool thing to do. I genuinely blew it," he wrote in an email to the Journal. "It was a truly joyful moment, where I regressed." But, he added, "I still think freedom of speech is more important than the risk that some idiot -- i.e. me on that occasion -- might abuse it."
Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Amy Schatz at Amy.Schatz@wsj.com
A Question for Sarah Palin
By Amy Schalet
Thursday, October 9, 2008; A21
Sarah Palin faced a variety of questions at last week's debate, but not the one I would have asked: "Should public school students be taught that contraception and condoms can prevent unintended pregnancy and disease?"
Palin has referred to her teenage daughter's pregnancy as a normal "up and down" of family life. Sympathetic politicians and commentators, including Bill Clinton, have concurred, attributing teenage pregnancies to "raging hormones" and saying that since the couple plans to marry, Bristol Palin's pregnancy is really an early awakening to adult responsibilities.
But left obscured by the raging-hormones explanation is the fact that teen pregnancy is far from inevitable. Like some other controversies at the heart of the culture wars, this problem -- which, after receding nationally since the early 1990s, appears to be worsening again -- need not exist. High teen pregnancy rates result in part from our inability to talk honestly and wisely about teen sexuality. And they are exacerbated by policies that prohibit such talk.
American teenagers grow up in environments that inhibit them from making conscious choices about sex and using contraception effectively. Sarah Palin supports programs that contribute to that environment, favoring policies that prohibit teachers from explaining the benefits of contraception and condoms and that require teaching that sex outside of marriage is unacceptable.
Such "abstinence-until-marriage" policies are built on the myth of a past when people did not have sex until they were married and, this thinking goes, prevented many of the troubles that plague society today. But for more than half a century, the majority of Americans have been having premarital sex. In the 1950s, one in three teenage mothers conceived out of wedlock. And many "shotgun" marriages ended in divorce.
Teenage parents face an even taller order today; it is no longer as easy for a man without a college degree to get a well-paying job to provide for a family, and young women rightly expect to pursue their talents both inside and outside the home, a challenge to pull off without higher education.
Simply put, the circumstances and aspirations of young people have changed since the 1950s, but our society's narratives about the place of sexuality and the nature of relationships do not reflect these changes. And we pay a price for that inability to talk realistically about teenage sexuality and love.
Just how steep, and unnecessary, that price is becomes clear when we look at countries where teenagers do not pay it. In the Netherlands, young people become sexually active at the same age as their American and other counterparts across the developed world -- around 17 -- but teenage pregnancy rates are six times lower than they are here.
In 1950s Dutch society, most young people began having sex when they were in their 20s and were married or engaged. During the 1960s, unintended teenage pregnancies rose alarmingly. Seeing this, family physicians and clinics were quick to make contraceptives easily accessible to youth. Dutch teen pregnancy and abortion rates are now among the lowest in the developed world.
National surveys show that most Dutch parents accept that young people choose to have sex in committed relationships during their later teens. Research I conducted found that a majority of Dutch parents are even willing to permit such couples to spend the night together in their homes, but only when they see that they have formed a loving relationship, feel ready for sex and understand how to use contraception responsibly. By accepting teen sexuality within these parameters, Dutch parents can stay involved, monitor relationships and urge proper contraceptive use.
This shift from a "marriage-only" to a "love-only" sexual ethic happened because parents, aided by honest and informative public conversations about sex, grappled with how to marry their aspirations -- about the children they wanted to raise and the relationships they wanted to foster -- to times that were changing. The result is an environment in which young people receive support from parents and other adults as they learn about relationships and wise sexual choices.
American teenagers lack such an environment. All too often, they feel sex is a secret that can ruin their lives. Bristol Palin's pregnancy does little to dispel the fear that the risks of sex cannot be controlled. With impending parenthood a surely unintended byproduct of her youthful experiences, at age 17 hers is a life constrained in ways that few of us would want for ourselves or our loved ones.
The Palins, of course, deserve credit for their public embrace of their eldest daughter, which shows that, ideology notwithstanding, parents still love their daughters even if they have sex. If that embrace allays fears that prompt girls to keep sex a secret from their parents, then the Republican Party may have, inadvertently, facilitated the honest conversations we need to move beyond the myth-only approach to adolescent sexuality.
The writer is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
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Day Cares
Research Has Eased Some Fears About Having Children Spend Their Days Away From Home
By Sandra G. Boodman
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 26, 2008;
For Jennifer Bright, the director of a medical society headquartered in Rosslyn, the decision about day care wasn't whether, but what kind. With each of her three children, the youngest of whom was born in March, Bright returned to work after a few months' maternity leave.
"My husband and I felt strongly that we wanted our children to be in a social environment," said Bright, 35, who decided against enrolling them in family day care or hiring a nanny. "We liked the oversight and accreditation of a center and thought it would be a lot more stable" than relying on one person. Her goal, she said, was finding child care she regarded as "the next best thing to me."
Bright's matter-of-fact explanation about the kind of care she wanted and the reasons why is a stark contrast to the roiling uncertainties that prevailed as recently as 15 years ago when parents, especially mothers, agonized about whether day care was acceptable in any form.
In those early years of the Mommy Wars, questions abounded: Would day care produce a generation of kids who had trouble feeling attached to their parents and were cognitively stunted as well as overly aggressive? Should mothers heed the advice of influential child development experts such as British psychologist Penelope Leach and stay home, at least for the first few years? Just how essential was a constant maternal presence in the lives of babies and young children?
Temple University developmental psychologist Nora Newcombe, whose children are now in their early 20s, vividly recalls those years when she spent "the scant time I had alone in my office worrying about child care, fretting about whether my children would grow up to feel unloved and abandoned" because she had returned to full-time work when they were babies. In an article last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Newcombe recalled turning to her profession for guidance and finding a near-total absence of studies that could "allay or confirm" her doubts.
But now, she says, there are answers. Beginning in the late 1990s, results of the federally funded study widely considered to be the gold standard of day care research began appearing. The largest and longest-running investigation into the impact of day care in the United States, the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development was launched in 1991, involved more than 1,300 children at 10 sites and was sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
Among its largely reassuring findings: There were few significant differences between children cared for exclusively by their mothers and those in any form of day care. The most important predictor of children's attachment, as well as their cognitive and social development, researchers found, was the sensitivity of their mothers and the characteristics of their families, such as parental income and educational levels. The influence of these factors trumped any effects of day care.
"There's a sense that some of the big questions [about day care] have been answered," said Barbara Willer, deputy executive director of the Washington-based National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), which accredits day-care centers and preschools. "The concerns that you're doing a horrible thing that could harm your children are lessened."
No Longer a Minority
"In 1991 our main question was, 'Is out-of-home child care bad?' " recalled James A. Griffin, deputy chief of NICHD's Child Development and Behavior Branch and chief science officer for the national study. "The scientific evidence is that parents and families have much more influence than child-care arrangements on children."
The study found that children in higher-quality care had somewhat better language and cognitive development and were more cooperative than those in lower-quality day care; those who spent more hours in day care had somewhat more behavior problems than those who logged fewer hours; and those in higher-quality care showed better cognitive development before kindergarten.
Because the study is observational and not a controlled experiment in which children are randomly assigned to one group or another, it is impossible to determine cause and effect, researchers caution.
Although many of the scientific questions appear to be largely settled, what hasn't changed much, in Griffin's view, are the intensely emotional debates day care inspires.
"It is still a very hot-button issue," he said.
Ellen Galinsky has been an influential participant in the debate for the past two decades as president of the Families and Work Institute, a New York-based think tank.
Parents still worry about "whether they're doing the right thing for their children," Galinsky said. But what has changed is that mothers with children in day care "no longer feel like pioneers" as they did in the early 1990s when they were in the minority. Currently, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 50 percent of mothers of infants work, as do about 75 percent of women with school-age children.
Day care has become mainstream: In 2005, 61 percent of children younger than 6 and not in kindergarten spent time in some form of care, more than a third in centers.
"People now know kids who've grown up and had employed mothers," Galinsky said, allowing real-life glimpses of the day-care generation.
"It was never a simple matter, but I do think the research has brought more clarity to the complexity," she added. "But I don't think the guilt and questions will ever change -- or that the studies have found all the answers."
Griffin and other experts say that researchers would like to know more about the impact of care on children younger than 2, who need the most intensive and expensive services, which are hardest to find.
NAEYC's Willer agrees. "Child care continues to be highly undercapitalized and families are really responsible for the cost," she said. "We still need to improve the quality of child care available to most families."
Better Than a Nanny?
Parents wait months -- or longer -- for a place at St. Anthony's Day School in Alexandria, one of 125 child-care centers and preschools in Virginia accredited by the NAEYC. One of the factors that distinguishes quality care from the merely custodial, experts say, is curriculum. The best programs emphasize the use of language, foster a sense of curiosity and a love of learning, and provide children with frequent, warm interactions with supportive adults.
Unlike many area centers, St. Anthony's accepts infants beginning at 3 months. The for-profit school, founded 10 years ago by Patricia Hall, a former Roman Catholic nun turned foreign service officer, is housed in a squat, orange-brick building that was once a warehouse, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a luxury condo development in the north end of Old Town. The school is open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays. Most of its 92 children live in the Alexandria area.
Many parents say they are drawn to its instruction in art, classical music, computers and Spanish, the language native to most of its 25-member staff. Many of those staffers, all women, have been at the school five years, according to director Janet Cochran, who has worked at the school since its inception.
Starting salaries for teachers hover around $25,000; classroom assistants who don't have college degrees make $10,000 less than that, not much more than minimum wage. After a year, employees are eligible for health insurance and begin accruing personal leave. High turnover is a problem at many day-care centers, experts say, and child-care workers are among the lowest paid of any profession.
Weekly costs range from $255 for preschoolers to $325 for infants (there is a discount for siblings), which makes St. Anthony's considerably less expensive than hiring a full-time nanny, which can range from $400 to $700 per week in the Washington area.
Parents are invited to drop by anytime and can watch their children on the Internet via closed-circuit TV cameras mounted in every classroom; a video feed plays continuously in Cochran's office. "I can see if a child's having a meltdown" and offer assistance if necessary, said Cochran, who is called "Miss Janet" and projects an unflappable, businesslike patience.
Although St. Anthony's has a Christian orientation, it accepts children of all faiths. "We don't get into a lot of doctrine," Cochran said, adding that the school has included several Jewish families. Classroom staff wear red smocks and students wear red and blue uniforms (T-shirts and shorts in the summer), "so all the children feel the same, and it helps us ID them" on outings, such as daily trips to the park across the street, Cochran said.
Nearly all St. Anthony's students are white and comfortably middle-class. Cochran said that the school has sponsored three children on scholarship and that officials are seeking to expand its racial and ethnic diversity.
The clean, spacious classrooms; the quiet; and the sense of order appealed to Jennifer Bright when she toured St. Anthony's several years ago looking for a spot for her firstborn son, then an infant.
"In every room there was classical music playing, and it seemed happy and the whole environment seemed positive," she recalled.
"One center I saw had six swings lined up in the infant room, which told me my kid was going to be in one 90 percent of the time," she said. "At St. Anthony's there was a lot of interaction with staff and kids."
Each week one of the most eagerly anticipated events in the 3-year-old classroom is "Show and Share," in which students bring in an object to discuss with the class.
On one recent Friday, lead teacher Claudia Melendez squeezed her eyes shut and plunged her arm into a large blue plastic bin, extracting the first toy.
Arrayed around her in a circle on the floor were a dozen 3-year-olds, who stopped wriggling momentarily while they watched to see whose item would be first.
Melendez, who has worked at St. Anthony's for six years and commutes from her home in Germantown, plucked an Elmo's Hot Tomato toy from the bin. Its owner proudly announced his name to the group, identified his prized toy and then passed it around, watching somewhat warily as his classmates giggled and squeezed it.
"Nice sharing," Melendez told him, plopping the toy back into the bin. She turned to quickly break up a brief scuffle before extracting the next object, a glittery purse.
In Cochran's view, one advantage of day care is socialization. "If they're home by themselves with a nanny, they don't get that good problem solving," she said.
Bright agrees. At a recent kindergarten orientation at her neighborhood public school, her oldest son, a St. Anthony's graduate, marched up to the teacher and introduced himself while most of his classmates hung back or looked fearful.
"I was very proud," Bright said.
Comments:boodmans@washpost.com.
Calling Fathers and Voters
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008; A15
Will everyone dismiss Barack Obama's Father's Day call to responsible parenting as a simple political ploy?
After all, the man who would be our first African American president is struggling for support from white working-class voters, many of whom have traditional views of family life and some of whom harbor deep suspicions about black men.
What could be more reassuring to them than his flat statement that "too many fathers . . . have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men"?
"You and I know how true this is in the African American community," Obama said, speaking at a Chicago church more theologically conservative than the Trinity United Church of Christ he recently left. "We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled -- doubled -- since we were children."
For a campaign that wants to fight Republican claims that Obama is a down-the-line liberal, here is a theme he has been talking about for a long time that simply doesn't fit into anyone's parody of liberalism.
Yes, he spoke of what government could do to meet responsible fathers "halfway." But Obama's emphasis was not on programs but on the personal responsibility of fathers to "be there for their children, and set high expectations for them, and instill in them a sense of excellence and empathy."
Moreover, Obama told his own story as the son of a single mother. She "struggled at times to pay the bills; to give us the things that other kids had; to play all the roles that both parents are supposed to play." Yet he was devoid of self-pity. "I was luckier than most," Obama acknowledged.
For a guy accused of being an elitist, he didn't sound like one in this sermon, a perfect volley in that phase of the campaign when his imperative is to reintroduce himself to an electorate that still doesn't know much about him.
This is all true. But it would be unfortunate if Obama's words were read only as an attempt to win white votes. It actually matters that a presidential candidate is taking the costs of fatherlessness seriously.
Every social problem is made much, much worse by the abandonment of children by their fathers. Yes, social justice depends upon what government does. Yes, government should do far more to relieve the burdens on those who struggle economically and work hard for little pay. And, yes, racism is a damaging reality that explains many of the problems faced by African Americans -- including family breakdown itself.
But government simply cannot replace absent fathers. Government cannot do all the things that parents ought to do. The reason Obama's speech is important beyond all of the short-term political calculations and analysis is that it reflects a hard-won consensus that family structure matters.
When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about "the deterioration of the Negro family" in 1965, he was denounced for "blaming the victim." This was a misreading of what Moynihan was saying and also of the purpose of his words. Moynihan's view was vindicated years later when many of the most important African American advocates of equality came to see strengthening the black family as essential to the civil rights agenda.
All politicians should be required to read Moynihan's 1986 book, "Family and Nation." It makes his essential point that "no government, however firm might be its wish, can avoid having policies that profoundly influence family relationships." He continued: "The only option is whether these will be purposeful, intended policies or whether they will be residual, derivative, in a sense, concealed ones." It augurs well that Obama clearly stands with Moynihan.
·Another of Moynihan's good deeds was to discover the talents of a young man from Buffalo named Tim Russert, who died Friday at 58. Not enough can be said about Tim's many random acts of kindness (which our family experienced) or his down-to-the-precinct-level love of politics.
There were two things about Tim I particularly admired: his devotion to his roots in Buffalo's working class, which included a loyalty to his religious faith, and his devotion to fatherhood, as both a dad and a son. It made perfect sense that someone who took fatherhood so seriously got his first big break working for Pat Moynihan. It is an accident of timing that Tim's passing received so much attention on a Father's Day. That is a great sadness because he should have been granted so many more of them. But the honor was wholly right and just.
postchat@aol.com
I ordered this 1992 book and it is excellent. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0907631509/sr=8-3/qid=1206672683/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&qid=1206672683&sr=8-3&seller=
It presents 15 essays by 15 different authors that make the case for virtue as necessary for social order. Fascinating.
Chris
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/28/AR2008032803350.html
We condemn all violence and specifically in this case, that which is perpetrated against those who hold different opinions.
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