When You Know It’s Unjust

One of the challenges of charity is that there are all sorts of nebulous aspects to supporting worthy causes. Among the most common are the many ways they can have unintended consequences. There is also the question of fraud – from non-profit institutions that spend too much on themselves, to those that don’t do all of what they say they do, to those that donate money, intentionally or not, to liars and scamsters.

I have an abiding interest in charitable giving. Not because I think it is virtuous, but because I see it as a contributing factor to being a happy person. I also believe that it exists in everyone as a species survival instinct. It’s part of our DNA.

Of the various causes I contribute to, one that I feel strongly about is reversing wrongful convictions that result in incarceration or capital punishment. As a result, I’ve been interested in the Innocence Project since it was created about 30 years ago. I’ve also worked directly with incarcerated felons, which smartened me up in several ways. For example, it opened my eyes to the fact that for every unjustly convicted and imprisoned innocent person, there are probably ten that claim to be innocent but are not.  Twice, I’ve had the disappointment of spending considerable time and money trying to reverse a conviction that I eventually realized was just.

Which is to say that when you get into the business of charity, good intentions are not enough. You want to be doing the right thing for the right people.

The good news is that when DNA is involved, the chance of being wrong is reduced to nearly zero. And that’s why, however much I would prefer to work directly with individuals, I am giving to non-profits like the Innocence Project that have the resources to bring to court cases that have DNA evidence. (You’d be amazed at how many innocent people sit in jail today for whom there is DNA evidence that exculpates them, except that the DAs don’t want to reopen their cases.)

DNA plays a key role in the work of the Innocence Project. The founders, young lawyers at the time, realized that if DNA technology could be used to convict people guilty of crimes, it could also be used to prove that people that had been wrongfully convicted were innocent.

If you’d like to support the work of the Innocence Project’s DNA efforts, you can read more here.

“Poor Wreck That I Am”

Over the past 22 years, I’ve written a fair amount about my experiences with clinical level depression and anxiety, as well as the normal range of self-doubts and self-recriminations that any former altar boy is heir to. I’m proud to say that these pieces have been helpful to many, if I can extrapolate from the dozens of positive comments I’ve received.

I was talking to RT, a friend, teacher, and student, this morning. We were talking about how having a fundamentally negative view of oneself becomes a sort of emotional spring that is always trying to pull one back to negative thoughts and expectations of failure. Even years after one has achieved great success.

Later, this afternoon, I came across the journal entry below. It was written by John L’Heureux, an American novelist and poet that spent the first part of his career as a priest. Just days before his ordination, he writes about how unworthy he feels about the challenge before him. I thought it was a particularly good – and oddly comforting – articulation of that state of mind.

“Thinking about ordination as I do all the time, I find only one thing disturbs me and I don’t know how to formulate it so that it doesn’t sound like the old ‘I’m not worthy’ plea. (Of course you’re not worthy; it would be impertinent of you to wonder if you were.) I have no doubts that I want to be a priest, no uncertainty as to why. But it pains and embarrasses me more than I can say that what I will bring to that altar for ordination is this nauseating sack of guts: selfish, small, lecherous; a mind like a whorehouse; a tongue like a longshoreman’s; a soft mousy body that seeks always its own comforts, a will deluded by hyperactive desires. Poor wreck that I am. Can I give over to God’s service only so little, and that so badly damaged, so in and out of sin and desire? I shall have to let my grotesqueness testify to his mercy. God help me.”

 Aww, Isn’t That Cute!

I know what you are thinking… Ford is reading a bedtime story to his grandkids.

Not exactly. It was lunchtime. We are at a hotel in LA. The kids were acting up and the adults had not yet finished their food. So, I entertained them with one thing I was sure they would be interested in. I am commentating on an animated, made-for-children short movie on the many varieties and purposes of poop.

The Open-Carry Question

Yesterday, in downtown Pasadena, I saw a fight break out between two Hispanic “parking enforcement” officers and a young Asian man. The young man, someone said, had flicked a lit cigarette at one of them after he found that his car had been ticketed.

The fight was short-lived. Three rounds at 30 seconds each. At one point, the official-looking duo had wrestled the aggressor to the ground. But lacking any apparent martial arts skills, they allowed him to wrestle himself up to a standing position, which allowed him to continue fighting.

Passersby stopped to watch. Someone from across the street was shouting. I wasn’t sure what he was saying, but he seemed to be rooting for the Asian kid. Closer to the action, people stood and watched, mute, trying to figure out what was going on or, like me, just observing. Two more rounds ensued, and then the brawl came to an uneventful end. The ticket police brushed themselves off and the kid walked away.

This morning, I read that last week at a Burger King drive-through in Ellenwood, GA, a customer who received the wrong sauce with his order barged into the restaurant and started beating people. A 16-year-old employee gunned him down.

All of it got me thinking. If California was an open-carry state, would that fight over a parking ticket have turned into a gun battle? If Georgia had more gun controls, would that sauce-crazed bully have escaped with his life?

These questions come to mind because Florida is about to become an open-carry state. Will that result in fewer crimes, as the NRA says? Or will it mean more shootouts at our fast-food restaurants?

I believe the rationale behind open-carry laws is that the presence of guns on hips will reduce the likelihood of violent confrontations. Reasonable people, seeing a gun on the hip of someone they have a problem with, will tend to talk it out, rather than get into a scuffle. But is that a fact? What does the evidence say about it?

More on this on Friday, after I’ve done some research.

When Police Pull You Over

I bought the house several years earlier and rented it to one of the maintenance guys that works for me. It was in what some might call the iffy part of town. I had been to it only once. To discuss the improvements needed with our partner in the local real estate business. This time, since the tenant had moved out, I was returning to see what kind of shape it was in. I was in my BMW 760 and was cruising around the neighborhood, trying to remember where the hell it was!

A cop in an unmarked police car pulled me over. He was young, and he looked uneasy. He peered furtively inside the car as he asked me for ID.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I told him the truth.

“You are looking for a house you own. But you don’t know the address?”

“Yeah, I know how it sounds. I own a few houses in this area. But I don’t personally manage them.”

He gave me the “Oh, sure” look.

He told me to step out of the car and put my hands on the hood. Then he patted me down. That felt wrong. But in an odd way, it was exciting. “I’m getting frisked,” I thought. “That’s sort of cool.”

Then he asked if he could check the contents of the car. Again, that felt wrong. But I thought, “Why not? He won’t find anything incriminating, and he’ll realize that I’m an upstanding citizen.”

It finally dawned on me that the poor guy had figured I was some sort of drug dealer, cruising around my neighborhood in my $150,000 car. And that made me nervous. Because I’d read enough to know that planting evidence on innocent people is not all that rare. If he wanted to, he could do it!

I had a thought. I asked him if I could call Giovanna. She would be able to tell him the exact address of the house I was looking for and verify that I was the owner. He said okay. I made the call. She conveyed the information. And after that, his tone of voice changed from suspicious to mildly apologetic.

There are two lessons I took away from this.

One (which I should have known): It’s not a good idea to cruise iffy neighborhoods in an expensive car. Two: If and when you are pulled over by a cop for no obvious reason, you should be very careful about what you say to him. It was foolish of me to be so cooperative with this cop. It worked, because he was a good cop. But it could have gone the other way.

Here is a brief explanation of the rules.

And here are some clips of people following the rules. Click here and here and here.

Let’s Change the Subject and Talk About… Killer Bees

Sunday afternoons, various members of the Ford and Fitzgerald clans gather at the Swamp House (K’s term for our cottage at Paradise Palms) for coffee and conversation. We do our best to avoid politics because… well, I don’t have to explain how that can go these days.

The usual topics range from updates on siblings and cousins to books and movies, sports, and what’s new in the gardens. What was new in the gardens this week was Uncle R’s campaign against a recent influx of bees.

Apparently, the two owl houses R and I had put high up in a copse of melaleuca trees several years ago had been taken over by the bees when, for whatever reason, the owls decided to relocate. There were, according to R, thousands of them. But they are not sweet little honeybees.

They are a dangerously aggressive species called Africanized honeybees – or, as some prefer to refer to them, “killer bees.”

Africanized Honeybee (Apis mellifera scutellata)

Killer bees! Finally, the whole family had something we could fear together! A threat that was frightening to all of us equally, regardless of what we thought of Trump or Biden or DeSantis!

And, oh, what a marvelous conversation it was, all of us united against a common enemy!

Here’s a sampling of some of what I learned from that conversation (most of it from R), fact-checked on Wikipedia for your edification:

* The killer bee is a hybrid species. It is the result of a 1956 effort in Brazil to mate bees from southern Africa with Brazilian bees to increase honey production.

* Apparently (and this is documented, although it sounds like the plot of a bad movie), a handful of those hybrid bees escaped quarantine, then quickly spread throughout Central and South America and then to Mexico and the US.

* Killer bees are meaner than “regular” bees. Much meaner. Melittologists (scientists specializing in the study of bees) don’t like using terms like “mean.” They point out that all the little fellers are doing is protecting their turf. So they prefer to describe them as “highly defensive.”

R explained what that means in practice. He told us that when he had an exterminator take down their nest, a band of several hundred escaped. Somehow aware that he was behind the attack on their headquarters, they set up an encampment in the eaves of a nearby barn and proceeded to launch vicious attacks against him whenever he came within twenty yards of their bivouac.

Sounds farfetched. And, indeed, R, an Irishman like yours truly, is not entirely loath to dressing up a story now and then. But when I fact-checked him, I discovered that it was probably true. Killer bees have even been known to chase people they consider to be their enemies for more than a quarter of a mile. And according to one source, they have killed “more than 1,000 humans and an unknown number of horses and other animals over the years.”

If you want to enjoy a surprisingly good movie about killer bees, I can recommend The Swarm (French, with subtitles).

Watch the trailer here.