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In Memory of Joseph Barnaba
Over the past week three deaths have had a great impact on me, so that it has taken awhile to write about them without letting all those things death does to you overcome your ability to write coherently.
The Minneapolis Bridge Disaster Report
The first one that hit me was not a single death but many and it hit me particularly hard because it came not in the form of death but in a long-overdue report. An independent team made the report for the Minnesota Legislature on the Minneapolis bridge collapse. The report found that financial considerations played a role in postponing maintenance decisions. Robert Stein, who oversaw the report prepared by the Gray Plant and Mooty law firm, told the Minneapolis StarTribune:
“Financial considerations, we believe, did play a part in the decision-making” regarding fixing the bridge. “Sometimes it’s easier just to take the least expensive alternative or just commission another study.”
The most damning sentence in the report stated:
There does not appear to have been any direct link between the observations reflected in the fracture critical inspection reports on the Bridge and maintenance and repair activities.
As readers of this blog know, I have issued two in-depth reports on the disaster criticizing flaws in the inspection methods, the decisions of the Pawlenty Administration, and infrastructure funding by the Bush Administration. Here is what I wrote:
In a report on the bridge collapse, Minnesota Public Radio pointed out:
In the legislative session that ended in May, Gov. Pawlenty vetoed a transportation funding package that included a seven-and-a-half-cent-a-gallon gas tax increase to pay for new road and road construction as well as for the maintenance of the current infrastructure.
In essence the GOP sold us the equivalent of the Titanic and now the Titanic has hit an iceberg–for the second time if you count Katrina. That is why I am angry. Those deaths did not have to happen. I am even more angry because they happened for the basest of reasons–greed. Billionaires received their tax cuts and we got Katrina and bridges falling into the river. Tax cuts don’t fix levees or bridges.
Now I am even angrier. Our state has featured a governor who has signed a pledge not to raise taxes. As a result, schools are facing financial ruin and our roads and bridges are not receiving the maintenance they need. As noted above the governor vetoed a bill that could have fixed that bridge.
With the issue of the report it is now clear that the deaths that occurred because of the bridge collapse were preventable. Had our governor not been so concerned with pinching pennies and more concerned with saving lives those people would be alive today. He will have to answer for those deaths, if not with the people of Minnesota, then with the higher power he so frequently evokes.
That report dooms his chances of becoming John McCain’s Vice-Presidential nominee. He had apparently been on McCain’s short list. Now he is on a different short list.
Murderdelphia
The death toll in Philadelphia continues to mount and no one pays much attention to it anymore as long as the gunplay stays in “that” part of town and no white folks show up in the ER or the morgue with slugs in their guts. Whenever I talk with people about this the answer usually is that they don’t know what to do. Limousine liberals may talk about the need to cure poverty and provide jobs, but folks in that part of town have been waiting for two generations for them to follow through on those ideas.
Meanwhile a provocative article in the New York Times Magazine caught my eye. It caught my eye because a couple of friends of mine, who will go nameless because I don’t want to dump a spam attack on them, and I had talked about viewing the violence from a similar perspective. In essence the article says violence is like an infection, a culture of retaliation spreads from shooter to victim whose friends avenge the shooting in what systems people term a negative reinforcing loop.
According to the Times here is what that epidemic has cost:
For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.”
According to fellow blogger Field Negro, the murder total in Murderdelphia is now 122. There were four killings this past weekend.
The most intriguing part of the Times piece was the infection model. I won’t bore you with too much System Dynamics talk; rather just remind you how an infection works. Take your standard school flu outbreak. It multiplies quickly: one person infects another, each of us then infects two more and so on. This doubling can soon shut down an entire school if someone doesn’t stop it. Other system behaviors such as rumors also follow what systems people refer to as an infection model. I tell a rumor to you, we each tell someone else and pretty soon the rumor is all over school unless someone stops it.
Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious disease in Africa, is the founder of CeaseFire and the centerpiece of the Times article:
He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source…Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).
White Americans of a certain stripe who see Murderdelphia as an “inner city,” “gang,” or “black” problem forget that the infection model has also broken out among white America, perhaps the most notable example being the infamous lawless violence of the Western frontier or the infamous feuds of Appalachia where a similar revenge mentality prevailed.
CeaseFire’s answer is a controversial one of employing “violence interrupters,” all of whom have intimate familiarity with the ways of the street. Their task is to interrupt the cycle of revenge that fuels so many killings. If someone is shot, they will go to the hospital to talk with the victim, family and friends to dissuade them from taking revenge. But like the code of the Old West, the code of the streets can be strong: victims or their friends are expected to exact retribution.
The interrupters face a tough job that puts them in harms way every time they try to break the cycle. One interrupter portrayed in the article had six stitches over his left eye where someone cracked a beer bottle when he tried to intervene in a dispute. His fellow interrupters applauded him for not taking his own revenge. For this the interrupters make $15 an hour.
To test out Slutkin’s theory I ran an infection model put together by my two friends around rumors. The model has sliders that allow you to set how many people the rumormonger tells, how long it takes to pass on the rumor, and how easy it is to convince people that the rumor is false. I set the number of people the rumormonger tells at 1, the time at one day, and how easy it was to change the rumor at a neutral 5. No problem stopping the “infection” because you convinced the one person who had heard the rumor that it was false.
In other words, if the interrupter can get to the violent person and has a 50/50 chance of stopping further violence, he has a good chance of succeeding. However, if the rumormonger talks to two people and not one–in other words if the interrupter has more than one person to deal with–the number of people “infected” by the rumor or the violence becomes over 1,000 in just eight days!
What connects CeaseFire with the Minneapolis bridge disaster is that despite Slutkin’s success, the state of Illinois cut CeaseFire’s funding by $6 million, forcing it to cut the number of interrupters from 45 to 17. If you buy the infection model that means that the potential for infections doesn’t just triple it goes up exponentially. Assuming one interrupter cannot prevent one revenge killing and the model I ran is right, the chances for further violence increase a thousand-fold!
So we have two tales of death and two stories of budget cutting that is directly responsible for deaths that did not need to happen.
The Death of Joseph Barnaba
The last death is the hardest to write about. Field wrote a post about losing his brother-in-law Joseph Barnaba, an Iraq War vet, to suicide. I don’t know how Field could write at all but what he wrote was so eloquent it needs to be quoted:
Joseph Barnaba was found dead in his home last week. A deadly combination of pills in his system was blamed for his demise. But I think Joseph died long before last week. Joseph, like so many young men before him, came home from a war that he had no right being involved with in the first place. And sadly, it took its toll on him, his family, and all the people he touched.
Readers of this blog also know that Iraq War suicide is one of my causes. As part of my most recent essay on this I posted the following chart from MHAT-V, the latest report on the psychological toll the Iraq War has taken on our troops.
One thing about such graphs and about the statistics in essays like I wrote and even about the essays themselves is that they do not tell you much about the individual human beings behind those numbers. Joseph Barnaba was one of those people. I did not know him, but that does not matter because I could have and so could you. In this way he is my brother and he is yours, for the call Field received–that call where you wish you had not picked up the phone–could be received by any of us who have friends and relatives in Iraq.
One of my son’s best friends served there. That call might have been about him. And then come the whys and the what-ifs and that numb sleepwalking through all those things that have to be done and that you do just to keep some small part of you in the real world. And all of this multiplied by the youth of the deceased and the circumstances that will always leave a hole in your life that nothing can fill up.
Like the falling of that bridge, those Iraq War suicides could be prevented. As I wrote about MHAT-V:
If troops suffer more mental health problems from multiple deployments doesn’t that make those who produced that policy decision guilty of endangering the mental health of our soldiers? If the multiple deployments were not a political decision based on the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to call for a draft to fight the war, the answer might be a bit different.
I don’t know if Joseph Barnaba was one of those on multiple deployments, but that does not diminish what happened. Unfortunately it is not just multiple deployments that are resulting in unnecessary suicides, a recent email surfaced asking VA doctors to keep costs down by giving a diagnosis of adjustment disorder instead of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Brandon Friedman, vice chair of VoteVets.org, one of the advocacy groups stated:
We hear anecdotal evidence all the time that VA is trying to cut costs by not diagnosing PTSD.
On top of that are the budget cuts the Bush Administration has made to the VA and veterans. In February Bradley Barton, national commander of Disabled American Veterans said what he thought of this policy:
Because of chronic funding shortfalls, many veterans wait longer for medical appointments, and VA hospitals are prevented from hiring additional nurses and other health care professionals to meet the growing demand for services and are forced to ration care.
The Meaning of These Deaths
The theme that runs through all these deaths is the cheapness of human life, cheapness in the sense that apparently the Republican Counterrevolution believes more in tax cuts for the rich than in saving lives. The Minnesota bridge collapse, the cuts to CeaseFire and the cuts to the VA were all made because of the cry not to raise taxes, even the taxes of the super rich.
That bridge fell into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis because Minnesota’s governor refused to raise taxes on millionaires. Ditto for all those other programs. So bridges fall, violence continues, and veterans do not get the care they need so some Wall Street wiz can have his yacht or some other toy.
At some point this country needs to ask what is wrong with this picture.
Death has the meaning we give it, because we are the living. We decide what meaning someone’s death deserves. In these cases I ask that all of you find your own way to make these deaths meaningful and find ways to make sure they do not happen to someone else.
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