QH’s – freedom, teaching and foster care

More Quick Hitters (QH’s):

  • Here’s your quote of the day: “There is no absolute freedom: You can free from vice and bound to virtue or you can be free of virtue and bound to vice.” -Radio Replies. A profoundly true statement and one that reminds me of Mark Shea’s Axiom “Sin makes you stupid”.
  • Jaime Escalante died yesterday (3/30/10). In addition to saying a quick prayer for a safe passage to heaven, I wanted to share a link to a very interesting article about him: http://reason.com/archives/2002/07/01/stand-and-deliver-revisited. We all know the dramatized story in the movie “Stand and Deliver” but the truth is always more complicated than the drama and very few know the story of how it all came crashing down not long after the movie was released. To me, it’s a story of everything that is wrong with public education and worth reading.
  • There was an article yesterday in the Sacramento Bee about a new state rule limiting the number of children in a foster home, both natural and foster, to 6. As a believer in big families, it’s somewhat disappointing, but from a practical perspective, it’s hard to argue with. The foster system is a disgrace and a tragedy. The social workers are overloaded and can’t monitor the families properly and a lot of the foster parents aren’t really interested in being foster parents but just taking the $660 a month (or more for kids with additional needs) for each kid and using them for themselves. The real tragedy is the dismantling of the orphanage system, particularly the Catholic system of orphanages. While it’s not perfect, it was more efficient and actually prevented the level of abuse that kids today are receiving in the foster system (and I say that even aware of the sexual abuse issues that have rocked the Church).

Added at 2:42 PM PDT:
Oh, one additional one for the day. Today is the 5th anniversary of Terri Schiavo’s death: 3/31/05. So much is misunderstood about her condition by the general public. She wasn’t on life support, only a feeding tube. She didn’t have a will or medical statement asking to die, only her husbands word versus her parent’s word. And then there’s the details of her husband’s conflict of interest (new girlfriend with whom he’d had children, wanting to get married to her in the Catholic Church, medical account for which he’d get the balance after Terri died, etc.) that never seemed to rise to the level of public consciousness. Also, Terri wasn’t “brain dead”. She was profoundly cognitively disabled and perhaps in a persistent vegetative state (a horrible medical term if there ever was one), but not dead. Let’s pray that Terri intercedes on our behalf to ask God to guide those in her former husband’s position, that they not abuse the responsibility they have to care for, not kill, those who are profoundly disabled and in their care, so that an injustice like this may never happen again, to stop the injustices that go on every day around the country but don’t receive the publicity of Terri’s plight.

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