Tim Barrus: The New York Times
The Kind Of Cultures We Need Versus The KindOf Cultures We do Not Need. Like The One We Are Living In.
How detention for children inside the foster care monster machine (they are all monster machines designed to pubish children) became foster care is beyond my limited imagination. But there it is. Statistically it’s rhetoric and as crooked as a barrelful of fishhooks.
There are also diseases, and one particular virus that can exist, and does exist, along with Covid-19. HIV.
Last week, HIV.Gov issued alarming statistics. HIV is not declining. Numbers have plateaued. They are stationary. Numbers for teenage boys are climbing steadily. We have failed to reach the hard to reach. This paradigm could apply to Covid.
We will know soon enough. There will be geographic pockets of the disease, and those pockets will follow the same routes that HIV populations define as to who the hard to reach actually are. Poverty is real.
I mentor boys at-risk.
I no longer have the luxury of dealing with one disease.
No one is writing, documenting, or talking about these kids. Boy junkies are dying. Boy sex workers are dying. Teenagers with Hepatitis C are dying. These kids have more than one life and death issue. Runaways have few places to hide out and little access to the health care machine.
We need cities and villages and townships and schools that can recognize these kids before they fall through the cracks. Stigma must end. Programs that do outreach must be funded and not with the Republican strangulation budgets that always get cut back, and cut back again.
Republicans must recognize that these are public health issues. They are not moral issues. They are not religious issues.
There are life and death issues.
Period.