Supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal march down JFK Blvd. past the Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice and City Hall, in Philadelphia, Friday, December 16, 2022.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Results of Mumia Abu-Jamal's Court Hearing
December 16, 2022
In October, Common Pleas Court Judge Lucretia Clemons strongly signaled in a 30-page opinion that she is leaning toward dismissing the defense appeal.
However, she gave the two sides one last chance Friday, Dec. 16, 2022 to argue their positions. The lawyers did so in a courtroom filled with about 50 Abu-Jamal allies, as well as Faulkner’s widow, Maureen, and a smaller number of her supporters. Mumia Abu-Jamal was not present.
Clemons said she would rule within three months. Before ending the hearing, the judge asked the prosecutors and defense lawyers to make sure that Abu-Jamal’s lawyers had reviewed every scrap of evidence that the District Attorney’s Office could share.
“I do not want to do this again,” she said.
Mobilization4Mumia
Watch the live-stream of the Dec. 16 Court Rally at youtu.be/zT4AFJY1QCo.
The pivotal hearing follows a hearing Oct. 26 at which the Judge said she intended to dismiss Abu-Jamal’s appeal based on six boxes of evidence found in the District Attorney’s office in Dec. 2018. Clemons repeatedly used procedural rules – rather than allowing for an examination of the new evidence – in her 31-page decision dismissing Mumia Abu-Jamal’s petition for a new trial. (https://tinyurl.com/mtvcrfs4 ) She left the door open on Abu-Jamal’s appeal regarding the prosecution’s selection of jurors based on race.
Abu-Jamal’s attorneys Judith Ritter, Sam Spital and Bret Grote filed a “ Petitioner’s Response to the Court’s Notice of Intent to Dismiss PCRA Petition” (https://tinyurl.com/mvfstd3w ) challenging her refusal to hold a hearing on the new evidence.
Just this week, the UN Working Group on People of African Descent filed an Amicus brief, a friend of the court document that reinforced the facts and arguments in Mumia's attorney's PRCRA filing. (https://tinyurl.com/587r633p ) They argued that no judicial time bar should be applied when the defendant is a victim of historic racial bias that may have tainted the possibility of a fair trial and due process.
At a press conference Dec. 13 announcing the Amicus brief, the Hon. Wendell Griffen, Division 5 judge of the 6th Judicial Circuit Court for Pulaski County, Arkansas said, “Clemons is only the second Black judge to hear any aspect of Abu-Jamal’s case. Will she have the courage to say that there are too many factors here that compel for Mumia to justify dismissing the motion? This evidentiary hearing is required, because exculpatory evidence was concealed.” (https://youtu.be/Xh38IKVc_oc )
Griffen clarified his statement on Dec 14 during a Democracy Now interview (https://youtu.be/odA_jjMtXQA): “Under a 1963 decision that every law student knows about, and every lawyer that does criminal law practice, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court of the U.S. held that due process of law is violated when the prosecution conceals evidence relevant to guilt or punishment from the bench. In this country, that kind of precedent should have required Mumia to be released and the Commonwealth decide whether or not to prosecute him based upon having revealed the right evidence. That hasn’t been done.”
More details on Abu-Jamal’s case can be found at
https://tinyurl.com/ymhvjp8e and https://tinyurl.com/34j645jc.
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Urgent support needed for cancer-stricken, imprisoned writer/artist, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson’s Legal Fund!
Fundraiser for an attorney to represent Rashid’s struggle for medical careA campaign is underway to hire an attorney to represent Kevin Rashid Johnson’s struggle for medical care. The prison has denied this care to him, despite a cancer diagnosis discovered over one year ago for which no treatment has yet been provided.
Here is the donation link for Rashid’s legal fund: Please be as generous as you can.
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Sign the petition:
https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/
If extradited to the United States, Julian Assange, father of two young British children, would face a sentence of 175 years in prison merely for receiving and publishing truthful information that revealed US war crimes.
UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled that "it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America".
Amnesty International states, “Were Julian Assange to be extradited or subjected to any other transfer to the USA, Britain would be in breach of its obligations under international law.”
Human Rights Watch says, “The only thing standing between an Assange prosecution and a major threat to global media freedom is Britain. It is urgent that it defend the principles at risk.”
The NUJ has stated that the “US charges against Assange pose a huge threat, one that could criminalise the critical work of investigative journalists & their ability to protect their sources”.
Julian will not survive extradition to the United States.
The UK is required under its international obligations to stop the extradition. Article 4 of the US-UK extradition treaty says: "Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense."
The decision to either Free Assange or send him to his death is now squarely in the political domain. The UK must not send Julian to the country that conspired to murder him in London.
The United Kingdom can stop the extradition at any time. It must comply with Article 4 of the US-UK Extradition Treaty and Free Julian Assange.
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Dear friends,
Recently I’ve started working with the Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee. On March 17, Ruchell turned 83. He’s been imprisoned for 59 years, and now walks with a walker. He is no threat to society if released. Ruchell was in the Marin County Courthouse on August 7, 1970, the morning Jonathan Jackson took it over in an effort to free his older brother, the internationally known revolutionary prison writer, George Jackson. Ruchell joined Jonathan and was the only survivor of the shooting that ensued. He has been locked up ever since and denied parole 13 times. On March 19, the Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee held a webinar for Ruchell for his 83rd birthday, which was a terrific event full of information and plans for building the campaign to Free Ruchell. (For information about his case, please visit: www.freeruchellmagee.org.)
Below are two ways to stream this historic webinar, plus
• a petition you can sign
• a portal to send a letter to Governor Newsom
• a Donate button to support his campaign
• a link to our campaign website.
Please take a moment and help.
Note: We will soon have t-shirts to sell to raise money for legal expenses.
Here is the YouTube link to view the March 19 Webinar:
https://youtu.be/4u5XJzhv9Hc
Here is the Facebook link:
https://fb.watch/bTMr6PTuHS/
Sign the petition to Free Ruchell:
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/governor-newsom-free-82-year-old-prisoner-ruchell-magee-unjustly-incarcerated-for-58-years
Write to Governor Newsom’s office:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/free-82-year-old-prisoner-ruchell-magee-unjustly-incarcerated-for-58-years?source=direct_link
Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=GVZG9CZ375PVG
Ruchell’s Website:
www.freeruchellmagee.org
Thanks,
Charlie Hinton
ch.lifewish@gmail.com
No one ever hurt their eyes by looking on the bright side
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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale
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Laws are created to be followed
by the poor.
Laws are made by the rich
to bring some order to exploitation.
The poor are the only law abiders in history.
When the poor make laws
the rich will be no more.
—Roque Dalton Presente!
(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]
[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.
Poems:
http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/
About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton
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“In His Defense” The People vs. Kevin Cooper
A film by Kenneth A. Carlson
Teaser is now streaming at:
https://www.carlsonfilms.com
Posted by: Death Penalty Focus Blog, January 10, 2022
https://deathpenalty.org/teaser-for-a-kevin-cooper-documentary-is-now-streaming/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=1c7299ab-018c-4780-9e9d-54cab2541fa0
“In his Defense,” a documentary on the Kevin Cooper case, is in the works right now, and California filmmaker Kenneth Carlson has released a teaser for it on CarlsonFilms.com
Just over seven months ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an independent investigation of Cooper’s death penalty case. At the time, he explained that, “In cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate punishment of death, I need to be satisfied that all relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined.”
That investigation is ongoing, with no word from any of the parties involved on its progress.
Cooper has been on death row since 1985 for the murder of four people in San Bernardino County in June 1983. Prosecutors said Cooper, who had escaped from a minimum-security prison and had been hiding out near the scene of the murder, killed Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 10-year-old Chris Hughes, a friend who was spending the night at the Ryen’s. The lone survivor of the attack, eight-year-old Josh Ryen, was severely injured but survived.
For over 36 years, Cooper has insisted he is innocent, and there are serious questions about evidence that was missing, tampered with, destroyed, possibly planted, or hidden from the defense. There were multiple murder weapons, raising questions about how one man could use all of them, killing four people and seriously wounding one, in the amount of time the coroner estimated the murders took place.
The teaser alone gives a good overview of the case, and helps explain why so many believe Cooper was wrongfully convicted.
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Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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The Moment
By Margaret Atwood*
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
*Witten by the woman who wrote a novel about Christian fascists taking over the U.S. and enslaving women. Prescient!
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
- Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
- San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
- Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
Know Your Rights Materials
The NLG maintains a library of basic Know-Your-Rights guides.
- Know Your Rights During Covid-19
- You Have The Right To Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Encounters with Law Enforcement
- Operation Backfire: For Environmental and Animal Rights Activists
WEBINAR: Federal Repression of Activists & Their Lawyers: Legal & Ethical Strategies to Defend Our Movements: presented by NLG-NYC and NLG National Office
We also recommend the following resources:
Center for Constitutional Rights
Civil Liberties Defense Center
- Grand Juries: Slideshow
Grand Jury Resistance Project
Katya Komisaruk
Movement for Black Lives Legal Resources
Tilted Scales Collective
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By Megan K. Stack, Dec. 22, 2022
Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer.
Zak Arctander for The New York Times
Christmas is upon us. Candy season is about to reach its peak. It won’t end, though; it never ends.
Valentine hearts already nudge against the dwindling supply of Santas in the candy aisle, and Easter isn’t far behind. Here in the suburbs, the ancient agrarian moons of plant, harvest, store, survive have been supplanted by Target’s merchandise and marketing flows. My family is awash in this dubious bounty. Since returning from overseas assignments to America, with two elementary-school-age children, we’ve been wading year-round in sweets and treats, almost none of which we bought or even wanted.
Because I have happy memories of being a chocolate-smeared U.S. kid and because I started raising my kids in Asia before bringing them back to the United States, I can testify that American childhood has become hopelessly, almost unrecognizably glutted with candy. The pandemic, it seems, supercharged a national confectionery addiction, handing an unmitigated triumph to corn syrup peddlers who brag that American candy sales have reached an all-time high.
The 2022 report of the National Confectioners Association says the quiet part out loud, boastfully chalking up record-breaking sales to the “incredible permissibility” fostered by “the strong connection between emotional well-being and confectionery.”
Indeed. My kids are surrounded by so many sweets, it presents a parenting conundrum: how to let them enjoy treats (because I’m not a monster) but prevent them from eating even half the candy they are given (because that would be insane) without shaming them or fetishizing candy as a forbidden fruit.
Somewhere along the way, between the Sisyphean pantry purges and tiresome negotiations, I’ve started to see a quieter and more sorrowful story in our national predilection for sweets.
It’s no surprise that children love candy. They are watchers and apprentices, drawn to bright and flimsy trifles, bits of the world they can touch and taste. They are also growing, often ravenous, hankering for a tingle of sweet.
The adult role, though, is more ambiguous. I often hear grumbling and lamentations from other parents, always tinged with resignation. As if candy simply existed in circulation, like air or water or money, and there were nothing we can do about its omnipresence, which, of course, we ourselves are creating.
Which bitterness are we trying to sweeten? What groundswell of despair are we seeking to contain?
All over the world, all through history, there has been the dichotomy of sweet and sour and folklore in which a child’s want for sweet stands as a metaphor for adult desire. A Russian friend told me about midwives who placed sugar between laboring women’s legs to tempt the babies out. This perhaps apocryphal anecdote sent me nearly to the ground laughing, hysterical with the image of an infant prowling from the womb like a fox from its den. But this is what we do — sugar to cut pain, sugar to shorten hardship, sugar to coax our children forth into a difficult world. But always mixed with danger: The gingerbread house in the woods is a trap.
If America’s candy culture is a symptom, then we adults must be the disease — frightened for the future, harried by daily cares, snatching up a cheap simulacrum of happiness that’s already melting once it hits the tongue.
Maybe this looks bad to me because, coming home after many years gone, I’m frequently taken aback by the indifference our culture shows to children. Americans lash out with stinging judgment against parents who fail to “control their kids,” as if a spirit-crushing harshness were the main criteria for raising a child.
My family lives in an American suburb of relative wealth and red-hot ambition. Long before our eldest son reached an age of double digits, I’d gotten many earfuls of unsolicited strategy about sports, college and scholarships. After moving here, the boys started coming home with anxious questions about whether we’ve saved for their education and what they should do to get into college.
I spent my own childhood reading novels in the grass or rambling in the woods, worries shushed by bygone parental mantras: “Don’t worry.” Or “Just do your best.” And especially “It’ll all work out,” often accompanied by a dismissive wave or a sigh of cigarette smoke. That was the general philosophy of my upbringing. Some things would go well, and others wouldn’t, and I should be strong and keep faith that, one way or the other, something good would emerge from the process. It’s just life.
These blandishments, today, sound close to negligence. There is, instead, a lot of talk about therapy and anxiety and pharmaceuticals. We load kids down with dire climate warnings and apocalyptic visions. We push them to compete fiercely and express shock and confusion as childhood rates of depression and suicide keep climbing. Then we cheer things up by giving them enough candy to ruin their health forever.
My kids and their classmates are the lucky ones. (Knock wood.) American children regularly die by gunshot, although there is no war going on. American children — especially if they are not white — regularly get prosecuted as adults in violation of international human rights convention. Hundreds of American children sleep in adult jails or prisons every night.
Some American men are so eager to exploit children sexually that federal law enforcement acknowledges that it simply does not have the resources to investigate child pornography at scale.
Meanwhile, Halloween has bloated from a single, thrilling evening of spooky-sweet revelry into a monthlong worship of sugar. It was still a warmish September when we first hung plastic skeletons from our car trunk and drove to a packed church parking lot for the season’s first Trunk or Treat. That kicked off weeks of tailgates, school parties, neighborhood parties and the town parade, each of which sent the kids home with enough candy to fill a pillowcase. In between there were birthday parties, class rewards and countless spare lollipops and chocolate bars from bowls that materialized everywhere from the doctor’s office to the Sunday school classroom.
By this time of the year, candy has overtaken our house like some particularly vigorous mildew. We have tried to control the invasion — donating bulging sacks to the local firehouse and shrugging off cries of protest as we tossed load after load into the trash — but goody bags and forgotten sweets stashes are still, somehow, tucked away all over the house.
And more every day! Christmas candy is already arriving by mail. Homemade cookies and my cousin’s trademark fruitcake arrive in ribbons. These homemade goodies would be gladly received in an environment of moderation, but under the circumstances, I greet each package with the woozy bewilderment of a drowning person offered a glass of water.
For example, our 9-year-old just came home from a night of sports and crafts at the community center with a jumbo box of sugar-encrusted sour watermelon candy, most of which he’d eaten. “I won bingo,” he crowed. I wasn’t surprised, because our other son won the raffle at the same event a few weeks earlier, netting a massive platter of thickly iced sugar cookies.
The following morning, my husband took both kids off to lay wreaths on veterans’ graves with the Scouts. They came tripping back rosy-cheeked and exhilarated. “There was a bar!” the youngest announced.
“What?”
“Not an alcohol bar,” the eldest jumped in. “There was hot chocolate and, like, 10 different kinds of cookies.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And marshmallows and candy canes.”
“Oh.”
But the weekend debauchery still wasn’t done. Hours later, I picked up one of the kids from a friend’s house, where he’d watched the World Cup final. “Wasn’t that game amazing?” I enthused, backing out of the driveway.
“We didn’t watch all of it,” he admitted. “We were eating candy.”
“Really?”
“Do you know who Bob Ross is?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“He makes this candy that’s, like, the paint is like sugar, and you dip the paintbrush in and then eat it.”
These moments spin me out in various unhappy directions. I haven’t mentioned this yet, because it’s somewhat controversial, but the childhood obesity rate in the United States sits at just under 20 percent. Given the risks of diabetes and heart problems and asthma, I’d prefer my children not become obese.
But that’s not my only — or even my main — health concern. What really bothers me is adopting overindulgence as a lifestyle.
I know how this works. I, too, crave little rushes. When I was a child, it was candy. I especially loved a sneaky piece — pilfered from an elderly relative’s porcelain dish or bought with scraped-together change on a surreptitious bike ride to the store. Something I wasn’t supposed to have. The ritual of it. The secret.
Later I smoked cigarettes with the same vaguely illicit thrill.
I don’t smoke anymore, but I still savor a glass of wine and go to bed every night already looking forward to the rush of that first cup of coffee in the morning. But if I multiply our children’s candy consumption into an analogous quantity of some adult vice, it doesn’t look good.
And what do I tell them — I, who stumbles along in a state of temptation, wanting a cigarette for 20 years, buying them candy and throwing it away in illogical spasms of indulgence and restraint?
And maybe, in the end, this is the silent, instinctive wisdom behind the madness of candy. Our children will always be forced to walk a line between their appetites and their higher mind.
From the very start, this exhausting dynamic: We will surround you with the thing you crave. Leave it alone.
Zak Arctander for The New York Times
Christmas is upon us. Candy season is about to reach its peak. It won’t end, though; it never ends.
Valentine hearts already nudge against the dwindling supply of Santas in the candy aisle, and Easter isn’t far behind. Here in the suburbs, the ancient agrarian moons of plant, harvest, store, survive have been supplanted by Target’s merchandise and marketing flows. My family is awash in this dubious bounty. Since returning from overseas assignments to America, with two elementary-school-age children, we’ve been wading year-round in sweets and treats, almost none of which we bought or even wanted.
Because I have happy memories of being a chocolate-smeared U.S. kid and because I started raising my kids in Asia before bringing them back to the United States, I can testify that American childhood has become hopelessly, almost unrecognizably glutted with candy. The pandemic, it seems, supercharged a national confectionery addiction, handing an unmitigated triumph to corn syrup peddlers who brag that American candy sales have reached an all-time high.
The 2022 report of the National Confectioners Association says the quiet part out loud, boastfully chalking up record-breaking sales to the “incredible permissibility” fostered by “the strong connection between emotional well-being and confectionery.”
Indeed. My kids are surrounded by so many sweets, it presents a parenting conundrum: how to let them enjoy treats (because I’m not a monster) but prevent them from eating even half the candy they are given (because that would be insane) without shaming them or fetishizing candy as a forbidden fruit.
Somewhere along the way, between the Sisyphean pantry purges and tiresome negotiations, I’ve started to see a quieter and more sorrowful story in our national predilection for sweets.
It’s no surprise that children love candy. They are watchers and apprentices, drawn to bright and flimsy trifles, bits of the world they can touch and taste. They are also growing, often ravenous, hankering for a tingle of sweet.
The adult role, though, is more ambiguous. I often hear grumbling and lamentations from other parents, always tinged with resignation. As if candy simply existed in circulation, like air or water or money, and there were nothing we can do about its omnipresence, which, of course, we ourselves are creating.
Which bitterness are we trying to sweeten? What groundswell of despair are we seeking to contain?
All over the world, all through history, there has been the dichotomy of sweet and sour and folklore in which a child’s want for sweet stands as a metaphor for adult desire. A Russian friend told me about midwives who placed sugar between laboring women’s legs to tempt the babies out. This perhaps apocryphal anecdote sent me nearly to the ground laughing, hysterical with the image of an infant prowling from the womb like a fox from its den. But this is what we do — sugar to cut pain, sugar to shorten hardship, sugar to coax our children forth into a difficult world. But always mixed with danger: The gingerbread house in the woods is a trap.
If America’s candy culture is a symptom, then we adults must be the disease — frightened for the future, harried by daily cares, snatching up a cheap simulacrum of happiness that’s already melting once it hits the tongue.
Maybe this looks bad to me because, coming home after many years gone, I’m frequently taken aback by the indifference our culture shows to children. Americans lash out with stinging judgment against parents who fail to “control their kids,” as if a spirit-crushing harshness were the main criteria for raising a child.
My family lives in an American suburb of relative wealth and red-hot ambition. Long before our eldest son reached an age of double digits, I’d gotten many earfuls of unsolicited strategy about sports, college and scholarships. After moving here, the boys started coming home with anxious questions about whether we’ve saved for their education and what they should do to get into college.
I spent my own childhood reading novels in the grass or rambling in the woods, worries shushed by bygone parental mantras: “Don’t worry.” Or “Just do your best.” And especially “It’ll all work out,” often accompanied by a dismissive wave or a sigh of cigarette smoke. That was the general philosophy of my upbringing. Some things would go well, and others wouldn’t, and I should be strong and keep faith that, one way or the other, something good would emerge from the process. It’s just life.
These blandishments, today, sound close to negligence. There is, instead, a lot of talk about therapy and anxiety and pharmaceuticals. We load kids down with dire climate warnings and apocalyptic visions. We push them to compete fiercely and express shock and confusion as childhood rates of depression and suicide keep climbing. Then we cheer things up by giving them enough candy to ruin their health forever.
My kids and their classmates are the lucky ones. (Knock wood.) American children regularly die by gunshot, although there is no war going on. American children — especially if they are not white — regularly get prosecuted as adults in violation of international human rights convention. Hundreds of American children sleep in adult jails or prisons every night.
Some American men are so eager to exploit children sexually that federal law enforcement acknowledges that it simply does not have the resources to investigate child pornography at scale.
Meanwhile, Halloween has bloated from a single, thrilling evening of spooky-sweet revelry into a monthlong worship of sugar. It was still a warmish September when we first hung plastic skeletons from our car trunk and drove to a packed church parking lot for the season’s first Trunk or Treat. That kicked off weeks of tailgates, school parties, neighborhood parties and the town parade, each of which sent the kids home with enough candy to fill a pillowcase. In between there were birthday parties, class rewards and countless spare lollipops and chocolate bars from bowls that materialized everywhere from the doctor’s office to the Sunday school classroom.
By this time of the year, candy has overtaken our house like some particularly vigorous mildew. We have tried to control the invasion — donating bulging sacks to the local firehouse and shrugging off cries of protest as we tossed load after load into the trash — but goody bags and forgotten sweets stashes are still, somehow, tucked away all over the house.
And more every day! Christmas candy is already arriving by mail. Homemade cookies and my cousin’s trademark fruitcake arrive in ribbons. These homemade goodies would be gladly received in an environment of moderation, but under the circumstances, I greet each package with the woozy bewilderment of a drowning person offered a glass of water.
For example, our 9-year-old just came home from a night of sports and crafts at the community center with a jumbo box of sugar-encrusted sour watermelon candy, most of which he’d eaten. “I won bingo,” he crowed. I wasn’t surprised, because our other son won the raffle at the same event a few weeks earlier, netting a massive platter of thickly iced sugar cookies.
The following morning, my husband took both kids off to lay wreaths on veterans’ graves with the Scouts. They came tripping back rosy-cheeked and exhilarated. “There was a bar!” the youngest announced.
“What?”
“Not an alcohol bar,” the eldest jumped in. “There was hot chocolate and, like, 10 different kinds of cookies.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And marshmallows and candy canes.”
“Oh.”
But the weekend debauchery still wasn’t done. Hours later, I picked up one of the kids from a friend’s house, where he’d watched the World Cup final. “Wasn’t that game amazing?” I enthused, backing out of the driveway.
“We didn’t watch all of it,” he admitted. “We were eating candy.”
“Really?”
“Do you know who Bob Ross is?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“He makes this candy that’s, like, the paint is like sugar, and you dip the paintbrush in and then eat it.”
These moments spin me out in various unhappy directions. I haven’t mentioned this yet, because it’s somewhat controversial, but the childhood obesity rate in the United States sits at just under 20 percent. Given the risks of diabetes and heart problems and asthma, I’d prefer my children not become obese.
But that’s not my only — or even my main — health concern. What really bothers me is adopting overindulgence as a lifestyle.
I know how this works. I, too, crave little rushes. When I was a child, it was candy. I especially loved a sneaky piece — pilfered from an elderly relative’s porcelain dish or bought with scraped-together change on a surreptitious bike ride to the store. Something I wasn’t supposed to have. The ritual of it. The secret.
Later I smoked cigarettes with the same vaguely illicit thrill.
I don’t smoke anymore, but I still savor a glass of wine and go to bed every night already looking forward to the rush of that first cup of coffee in the morning. But if I multiply our children’s candy consumption into an analogous quantity of some adult vice, it doesn’t look good.
And what do I tell them — I, who stumbles along in a state of temptation, wanting a cigarette for 20 years, buying them candy and throwing it away in illogical spasms of indulgence and restraint?
And maybe, in the end, this is the silent, instinctive wisdom behind the madness of candy. Our children will always be forced to walk a line between their appetites and their higher mind.
From the very start, this exhausting dynamic: We will surround you with the thing you crave. Leave it alone.