Hasta La Gadget!

On the first day of spring 2007, Francesca Giessmann, 43, a marketing executive and holistic health coach from Kirkland, Washington, was rushed to the emergency room with severe stomach pain.

After running numerous tests, doctors gave her the diagnosis of stage 3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Shocked and saddened by the news of her cancer, Giessmann’s thoughts quickly turned to her son, Leo, who’d turned 3 years old the month prior.

“Leo was very young and could not fully understand what was going on,” Giessmann said. “Our pediatrician suggested we try to keep everything normal. I spent a great deal of time in bed. Leo related to my disease based on my port. He thought I had a boo-boo.”

Giessmann, who has had an enormous amount of health complications and side effects since her cancer treatment, said that when Leo turned 6 years old, he told her he was afraid his parents were going to die and he would be left alone.

Leo is now, as Geissmann describes him, an articulate preteen who’s come to terms with his mom’s cancer.

“I’ve often heard him say how his mom had cancer and ‘she beat it,'” Giessmann said. “It is equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming. He is very protective of me. My cancer has made him grow up a bit too fast. He’s more sensitive and I think he has an understanding of the fragility of life.”

Millions with cancer

Cancer affects the entire family.

But the emotional and psychosocial impact on a child whose parent has cancer often goes unnoticed and unattended.

The American Cancer Society estimates that about 1.7 million adults will be diagnosed with cancer in 2016. That leaves 749,000 children under the age of 18 years old who will be affected this year.

It is estimated that nearly 3 million children under the age of 18 are currently living with the challenge of coping with a parent who has cancer.

For Giessmann and so many other mothers and fathers, cancer is an education not only in survival, but also in parenting.

How do you keep your children happy and make them feel safe when you are sick, and scared yourself and fighting a potentially fatal disease?

You just have be as honest as you can with your children, and try to stay strong and positive, “even during the darkest times,” said Eric Wassyng, 63, a technical writer from a northern Virginia suburb. His 26-year-old daughter was 14 when he was diagnosed with small lymphocytic lymphoma in April 2004.

“I was open about everything I went through,” Wassyng said. “My daughter is naturally curious and actually did her own research and came up with practically the correct diagnosis. I let her know that my life was definitely threatened, but I was getting the best care possible and was determined to fight it. Obviously, if she were a younger child, I may have withheld some information.”

Wassyng, who’s been in remission since he received an autologous stem cell transplant in 2005, said his daughter just wanted to be reassured that she would have a dad for a long time.

“Three years after my diagnosis, my wife also had cancer,” he said. “She is also in complete remission now. Having experienced one parent with cancer definitely helped her get through another one. Our small family has come to terms with our mortality.”

A refuge for many families

The many parents interviewed for this story who have been diagnosed with cancer agreed that it is sometimes tough to find the right words when speaking to their children about cancer and the child’s anger, sadness, confusion, and fear.

Oncologists and others on a cancer patient’s medical team are typically focused on the treatment of the patient. But a parent’s first concern is for their children — an area that parents say many cancer hospitals are still not adequately addressing.

Teresa Thorson, 48, is a school bus driver from Wisconsin who shows horses and is the married mother of two children. When she began treatment for her uterine cancer earlier this year, she didn’t want to know what stage her cancer was or what her chances of survival were.

“I just knew I had to fight for my kids,” said Thorson, who turned to Children’s Lives Include Moments of Bravery (CLIMB).

The program is the nation’s first research-based psychosocial intervention program for children who have a parent with cancer.

CLIMB helps kids deal with their feelings of sadness, anxiety, fear, and anger, and stimulates improved communication between the children and their parents.

CLIMB, which was operating at the hospital where Thorson received her treatment, is part of the Children’s Treehouse Foundation, a Colorado-based, global nonprofit organization. Its mission is to assist children who have a parent, grandparent, or guardian with cancer.

Thorson said her son Tylor, 13, and daughter Cloe, 9, started the program in April just a few days after their grandmother died from cancer and just as Thorson began her treatment.

“Tylor is quiet. He’s not a big talker. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth,” Thorson said. “The CLIMB program got through to him, he came home happier afterward. I honestly think it did wonders for both of them. It also helped when they discovered that other kids in the CLIMB group were going through the same thing. There was another family, two other kids, not a huge group, but they all got along, they clicked.”

When Thorson started to lose her hair from the chemo, she cut her son’s hair and then asked him if he wanted to cut her hair.

“He had to wrap his head around the fact that he was going to shave my head,” she said with a tear-filled laugh. “My daughter helped him cut my hair. Tylor did the top of my head and Cloe did the back.”

Thorson, who is still in the midst of her chemotherapy, said that as a parent with cancer you feel “helpless” sometimes.

“I’ve muddled through, getting the kids off to school,” she said. “I’d just fake it for a little bit then go back to bed. But there are nights when I don’t feel good and I tell them, ‘I can’t put you guys to bed, you guys have to put mom to bed tonight.'”

Grandchildren need support, too

Barb Williams, 62, who works with special needs children in Caldwell, Idaho, was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago.

She was concerned about how her three grandkids, whom she is close with, would take the news.

The children — Rosalina Zamora, 12, Analisa Zamora, 10, and Victoria Zamora, 9, — had recently suffered the loss of their father, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who died in a tragic car accident between deployments.

All three children took part in the CLIMB program, along with their mother, Ashley Zamora, and her boyfriend.

“It helped the kids a lot, especially with their fear and with the unknown,” Williams said.
Ashley Zamora said her three daughters are very close to their grandmother, and they’d already lost their father and a beloved aunt who died of cancer.

“My daughters all reacted to their father’s death, the death of their great aunt, and to their grandmother’s cancer in different ways,” Zamora explained. “My youngest daughter was afraid to go near her grandmother. She was afraid it might be contagious. And my oldest daughter just shut down completely. CLIMB helped all of them cope.”

A young child learns to cope

Losing a father to a car accident, then a great aunt to cancer, and then seeing your grandmother go through cancer treatment would seem like too much for any child to handle.

But Victoria Zamora, 9, told Healthline just how the CLIMB program has helped her get through it.

“CLIMB helped me understand what my grandma was going through, what would happen to her, and what cancer was,” she said. “For example, we made an anger cube and on the sides we wrote what we could do when you’re mad. My Aunt Christine had lung cancer and died. When I found out that my grandma had cancer my first thought was, ‘Oh no.’ I was scared that the same thing would happen to her. I felt really sad, like it wasn’t fair, why did it happen to us. I was sad and nervous. I felt scared my grandma was going to die like my daddy and my aunt.”

Victoria said she learned through the CLIMB program that, “If you felt like you wanted to cry, then just cry, because if you held it in it will build up inside you and one day you might just burst because of everything you held in.”

Victoria said that even before her grandmother lost her hair, “I was scared of her because she had cancer. I didn’t know what was happening to her, but CLIMB helped me understand what cancer was. I learned there was a lot of cancer and what kind my grandma had. She had breast cancer. We went and saw what machines they used like for radiation and chemo and that it was going to help my grandma to get better.”

Victoria concluded, “I’m happy my grandma survived and that her hair is growing back and that she is doing great. I love my grandma so much.”

Program spreading quickly

Peter van Dernoot, a former public relations executive, founded the Children’s Treehouse Foundation in 2001 after his wife was diagnosed with lung cancer in her 40s.

He said the foundation’s mission is ensuring that every child whose parent is diagnosed with cancer is given the early tools and emotional support to cope.

“Even now, 36 years after we discussed with our two young children that their mom had cancer, I still get emotionally chocked up when asked to recount my experience,” said van Dernoot, who remains chairman of the foundation’s board of directors.

While cancer centers are providing ever improving cancer treatment to their patients, he added, they are woefully negligent in providing emotional strategies for the rest of the family, especially the children.

“This is regrettable since studies show that when the stress the children have has diminished, the stress of the cancer-parent is reduced, and her/his immune system responds better,” van Dernoot noted. “It’s a win-win situation. It’s unthinkable that parents should be expected to know how to talk to their children about cancer. They need professional guidance to do this. It is our fervent hope that more cancer centers will adopt psychosocial intervention programs similar to CLIMB.”

Van Dernoot noted that the CLIMB program is now available in 77 cancer centers in the United States, including such prominent hospitals as the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Colorado Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Philadelphia.

Last year, the program, which is in 18 centers in seven other countries, served an estimated 1,560 children with its CLIMB program, representing more than 600 families.

A recent study of CLIMB by the Omni Institute reported the first quantitative analysis of the program’s effects. The study evaluated the psychobehavioral benefits of the CLIMB intervention in 45 children ages 6 to 11.

Pallavi D. Visvanathan, Ph.D. at OMNI Institute, and Amanda J. Shallcross, N.D., M.P.H. at New York University School of Medicine, led the study.

It showed that children who enrolled in the program had statistically significant improvements coping with such issues as parent-child communication, emotional symptoms, loneliness, peer problems, and positive social behavior.

Denis Murray, the Children’s Treehouse Foundation’s executive director, told Healthline, “It’s striking to me how many parents tell us that when they were diagnosed with cancer, their first concern was their children. Not their treatment, not themselves.”

Murray, a melanoma cancer survivor himself, whose father died of pancreatic cancer when he was 15 years old, said that a cancer treatment plan is not comprehensive until it includes concern for the patient’s children.

“The children will know something is wrong,” Murray said. “When they are brought into the challenge of facing a parent’s cancer, they will surprise you with their strength, their insight, and the support they can provide, even though they’re ‘just kids.’ They’ll surprise you with their bravery.”

Parents of special needs kids

Cathy Morris, 45, is married and has three boys — son Dylan, and stepsons Nick and David.
When she learned that she had cancer, Morris wasn’t sure how she was going to share this information with Dylan, who has autism and Tourette’s syndrome.

Morris said that at first she didn’t believe Dylan understood.

But as he’s gotten older, “He asks questions and I answer them as honestly and truthfully as possible. Sometimes it’s hard to know what he’s feeling. Occasionally he’ll tell me he’s sad and that he doesn’t want me to die. I just remind him I have no plans on leaving.”

Her role as a person with cancer and parent of a child with special needs has been no easy task. Morris said, “I believe that no matter what your journey is when dealing with cancer, there are just some things you can’t lose: your sense of humor, the ability to have fun, showing love to those that matter the most, being able to ask for help, and most importantly helping yourself.”

Young boy sums it up

Each of the parents interviewed for this story echoed the sentiment that while their kids do struggle, they also often triumph.

The parents unanimously agreed that children are resilient and are stronger, more courageous, and more aware of what is going on than adults sometimes think or expect.

When asked what advice he would give to other kids who have a mom, dad, or grandparent with cancer, Leo Giessmann, the 12-year-old son of survivor Francesca Giessmann, said, “I would say to stay calm. Always support them. And go to the hospital to see them, even if it is a pain. Never lose hope. There is always a chance.”

By Jamie Reno

The original article can be found on Healthline.com.

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Amid “rampant speculation” of a Hillary Clinton-Elizabeth Warren ticket to head the Democratic slate after their recent joint campaign appearances, here is another speculation:

Rather than bury her talents as Vice-President, Senator Warren—the Harvard academic whose heart is with Main Street and whose fire and financial savvy “strike fear into Wall Street”—would be far better placed as Secretary of the Treasury.

Cutting to the chase, the best argument for Warren as Treasury Secretary is this:

In the event of another Wall Street-generated financial crash, can you imagine that Elizabeth Warren—advocate of breaking up the big banks, architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—would recommend to the President that the U.S. taxpayer/consumer should bail out those same big banks, as George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson did in 2008? (No, I can’t imagine it, either.)

But then, with Elizabeth Warren as Treasury Secretary, serving the department’s chief mandate—to act as “steward of the U.S. economic and financial systems” and be responsible for “ensuring the financial security of the United States”—such a Wall Street-generated crash is less likely to happen in the first place.

Equally important, with the global economy in peril because of the Brexit vote last week (also here)—when Britain opted out of the European Union—and with the possibility of more exits and more turmoil driven by a new populism both here and abroad to “go it alone,” upending the international economic order, a cool head and strategic mind who’s also a woman of the people at Treasury’s helm would be vital.

Moreover, Warren, a peerless explainer, could make it all comprehensible to us.

Of course, Warren could remain in the Senate and burnish her watchdog credentials there, as ranking member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs’ subcommittee on Economic Policy. She is also a member of the subcommittees on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, as well as Securities, Insurance, and Investment. If the Democrats retake the Senate, her star would rise further. But, such a welter of subcommittees! Warren might relish a freer hand at Treasury.

Warren did express interest in the Treasury post, in 2014. When asked specifically about becoming Secretary of the Treasury, she said: “That’s a fun thought.”

Historically, this powerful position has been vital to the nation’s functioning in crises: Henry Morgenthau serving both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman during World War II, Salmon Chase serving Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Our most famous Treasury Secretary was our first, Alexander Hamilton, a Founding Father and author of many Federalist Papers on structuring government. As a legislator, scholar, and profile in courage for championing Main Street, Elizabeth Warren qualifies for this august company.

Back to the Vice-President issue, the subject of intense speculation: Politically, naming Elizabeth Warren, the progressives’ darling, as her Vice-Presidential pick would make Hillary Clinton more palatable to Bernie Sanders’ supporters. But with Sanders supporters slowly warming to Clinton and with the presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump, falling in the polls, that combined candlepower might not be needed. As to individual candlepower, Warren’s could overpower Clinton’s, always a detriment to the chemistry between President and Vice-President.

As Vice-President, Warren’s main responsibility would be to promote the President’s program to members of Congress, a role which Vice-President Joe Biden, himself a former Senator, does well and energetically for President Obama, but which role might not be Warren’s best suit temperamentally, nor make best use of her originality.

(Speaking of originality, Warren has a unique ability to get under Trump’s very thin skin with her Tweeted gibes. Warren serving as Clinton’s attack dog to push back at the bullying Trump will provide needed muscle as well as amusing spectacle as the campaign heats up in the fall.)

Finally, this development: Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street donors recently signaled that if Elizabeth Warren is her Vice-President, their donations will dry up (also here). That threat alone, and the implicit fear behind it, practically make the case for Warren at Treasury.

So, an appeal to Hillary: For your Vice-President, select someone else from the deep bench of Democratic talent—Sen. Tim Kaine (VA), Sen. Sherrod Brown (OH), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN), Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, et al. But make Elizabeth Warren your Secretary of the Treasury—the nation’s Chief Financial Officer—where she can take on a Wall Street that so fears her and that, if it can roll the Treasury Secretary, can cause fearsome damage on Main Street. If we know anything by now, Elizabeth Warren cannot be rolled and cannot be cowed.

Carla Seaquist’s latest book is titled “Can America Save Itself from Decline?: Politics, Culture, Morality.” An earlier book is titled “Manufacturing Hope: Post-9/11 Notes on Politics, Culture, Torture, and the American Character.” Also a playwright, she published “Two Plays of Life and Death” and is at work on a play titled “Prodigal.”

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When the shooting in Orlando happened, I was down in Alabama helping my Dad at his U-pick blueberry farm.

I saw the news on my phone and ran outside hollering. My dad lumbered up into the house and helped me navigate his TV to CNN. Initial reports and footage made at least one thing clear. “Lord have mercy, somebody did this because of hate,” my dad said quietly.

Later that day, alone on an acre of plowed dusty dirt, I drove in wooden stakes alongside cages to protect the tomato plants from wind and rain. But as my skin began to burn under the scorching sun, I began to ponder the awfulness of 49 lives snuffed out, and I stood there and cried. A few days later when I got back to New York, I reached out to a few experts in psychology, history and politics to better understand how both LGBT and straight people, can process the pain and from that place of healing, make common sense changes happen, especially with guns.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

“If you look at the long arc of American history, most of the violence against civilians by other civilians has been perpetrated by organized groups or mobs, such as lynching,” said Brian Balogh, co-host of Backstory with the American History Guys.

There was a period during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when bombs, allegedly planted by radicals or anarchists, killed large numbers of civilians. The worst act of terrorism before September 11, 2001 was the Wall Street bomb that blew up at noon on September 16, 1920, just outside J.P. Morgan’s home. It killed 30 people.

He said the bombings garnered tremendous publicity that helped further fuel the Red Scare.

“From there, you kind of have to jump to the age of the lone gunman, randomly selecting targets, sometimes for no apparent reason, other times a certain racial, ethnic or as in the case of Orlando, possibly a group chosen because of their sexual orientation,” said Balogh.

FBI statistics show active-shooter incidents are becoming more frequent in our modern era. FBI statistics show active-shooter incidents are becoming more frequent in our modern era. From 2000 to 2007, the nation averaged 6.4 incidents annually, but from 2008–2013, that increased to 16.4 annually. All totaled, the incidents resulted in 486 deaths. By both 2014 and 2015, the number of incidents reported by the FBI had increased to 20 annually. Over a two year period, 40 active shooter incidents killed 92 people and wounded 139.

ONGOING RECOVERY IN ORLANDO

Orlando based Dr. David Baker Hargrove, a psychotherapist and CEO of Two Spirit Health Services has been working non-stop in an emergency counseling center there.

When I spoke to him by phone June 20, he told me he had gone grocery shopping at Target the night before.

“It was really the first time I’d been out in public. On one level, it felt very comforting to be in this familiar busy place but on the other, it felt stark because I haven’t fully processed the event for myself,” said Hargrove.

Every individual’s response to Orlando will be different. He says a lot of how one processes what happened at Pulse nightclub has to do with your personal connection to the LGBT community. Some straight people may not fully understand how someone who is gay, but lives on the west coast, might still be deeply impacted by a shooting Orlando.

SOCIETY’S LINGERING HOMOPHOBIA

That made me think back to how I felt that afternoon in Alabama, as I moved from the tomatoes to clearing weeds from blueberry bushes. Orlando is a bleak reminder that homophobia is always lurking in the shadows. It gets sanctioned by inflammatory political rhetoric, policy positions and the doctrines embedded in many of our religions. Homophobia shows up among the truckloads of baggage hauled around daily by people who grew up in households hostile towards anything gay.

LGBT people are twice as likely to be targeted for hate crimes than any other minority group according to FBI data.

“This statistic creates a mindset of expectation. Possibly, it may not have been of question of it, but rather when. Knowing that one is a member of a group that’s hated does intensify the response to the crime,” said Melissa Singh MSW, adjunct lecturer, University of Southern California, School of Social Work.

Singh says crimes directed towards stigmatized groups can leave people feeling vulnerable and wondering, “what if I’m next?”

Jim Downs, Professor of History at Connecticut College said despite the landmark significance of marriage equality, LGBT people are still impacted by hate and harassment.

“So much of the discourse of marriage equality has also posited a brand of assimilationist politics. Many LGBT people claim we are just like everyone else. While the spirit of such sentiments make sense, the logic of such claims undermines our urgent need for a sense of community to bind us together, especially in this time of need,” said Downs.

A few days after the Orlando shooting, Downs penned a thought provoking op-ed at the “New York Times” about the Upstairs Lounge on the edge of New Orlean’s French Quarter where on June 24, 1973 someone set a fire that murdered 32 mostly LGBT individuals.

He says one big difference between New Orleans and Orlando was the way the Upstairs Lounge fire got covered by the media.

“In the 1970s, mainstream news outlets did not uniformly report on the massacre of gay people in the Upstairs Lounge. When the press did cover the event, their tone was often derogatory and dismissive. News reports did not mention that the people who died in the fire were actually members of the Metropolitan Community Church,” said Downs.

Congregants met at a bar because they did not have their own church building and the local churches in New Orleans wouldn’t even rent them a room or basement to hold services, Downs says.

That seems unthinkable today, but then there’s Orlando.

SELF CARE ESSENTIAL FOR LGBT PEOPLE

Psychotherapist Kristen Martinez says self-care is a real priority for LGBT people, their loved ones, and allies right now. People are hurting, feeling overwhelmed, scared, angry, numb, or various other feelings, said Martinez, who grew up about an hour north of Orlando but is now based in Seattle.

“Do the things that make you happy – don’t let this stop you from enjoying your moments and your life,” said Martinez, who works at private practice Pacific NorthWell in Seattle.

She says an important point here is that the racialized telling of the tragedy will try to pin Muslims and Muslim-Americans up against the LGBT community, and that is not the way to deal with this situation.

Martinez says reports hinting the shooter may have been gay, adds a layer of complexity to the narrative.

“Internalized homophobia is incredibly destructive and hurtful for everyone involved. We, as LGBT people and allies, are speaking up about the dangers of internalized hatred, and we need the larger culture to acknowledge these damaging ideas too,” said Martinez.

Recent FBI reports say there is no evidence that Mateen had any same sex affairs.

TALKING ABOUT GUN CONTROL REFORMS

Whatever Mateen’s motives, we do know that despite having been on government watch list and reports of a troubled past, he was able to acquire a high-powered killing machine almost as easily as buying a quart of milk.

The afternoon of my last day in Alabama, an old friend stopped by. Our talk turned to Orlando and then weapons, still a sticky topic in the gun-loving South.

“I just hope this doesn’t become just a gun thing,” she said.

On one level I agree with my friend: an adversarial tone that paints all guns as evil might prove simplistic and probably won’t move the needle on sensible background check reforms or even an assault weapons ban.

But a big fear among many gun lovers is that any background check expansion or ban might lead to a slippery slope.

When talking with gun lovers, it’s probably better to preface the conversation by first distinguishing between military grade weaponry and hunting rifles.

When I spoke with Brian Balogh he also suggested saying: “I think we have to get rid of the slippery slope and simply try to do something as soon as possible to assure at a minimum that mentally unstable people or people with known contact with terrorists can not get their hands on weapons capable of killing literally dozens of people in less than two minutes.”

One might assume that Orlando and cumulative outrage over past mass shootings would lead to sensible reform. But almost 13,000 people were killed in a gun homicide, unintentional shooting, or murder/suicide in 2015, and if the daily bloodshed and heartbreak hasn’t nudged Congress to act what will?

Standing in the way of reform the well-moneyed gun lobby, most notably of course, the National Rifle Association (NRA). NRA has a stealth lobbying infrastructure and pools of cash standing ready to smack down any Republican politician or incumbent who even hints they might step onto the slippery slope.

Take the 2012 Indiana Republican Senate Primary after Richard Dick Lugar who had earlier voted for the Clinton Assault weapon ban. The NRA spent $168,753 against Lugar in the primary and spent $349,327 supporting his Republican opponent Richard Mourdock. Mourdock won the primary but lost the general election according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

NRA took in over $310 million in 2014 according to tax documents.

In addition to grass roots efforts, NRA gets a big chunk of its cash from gun and ammo manufacturers such as the Italian family-owned gun company Beretta, Smith & Wesson, Brownells, Pierce Bullet Seal Target Systems, and Springfield Armory and Midway USA according to a June 27 article in Vanity Fair.

“Unfortunately, if mowing down a classroom full of kindergarteners and shooting a member of Congress in the head execution-style wasn’t enough to make Congress move on gun violence, I have a hard time imagining how shooting 100 LGBT individuals would be enough to get them to act now, ” said Daniel Penchina, a principal at The Raben Group in an email.

Penchina, who’s been working on LGBT advocacy for more than ten years said that, ” Together with gun violence prevention groups such as Everytown, I am certain the LGBT community will help move the needle and force a future Congress to act.”

GAGGING THE GUN LOBBY

One new grassroots movement in New York City founded in response to the heartbreak in Orlando, called Gays Against Guns (GAG the NRA), will partner with preexisting gun-control and LGBT groups to leverage community power against the nation’s gun lobby. I marched with the group at the annual Gay Pride Parade in New York City on June 26. Judging from the electrified reaction in the crowds that hot summer day, there is little doubt, at least in New York City, people not only support reform, they are hungry for a targeted, loud and vocal effort to expose the underlying infrastructure that supports the gun lobby’s fright based messaging and its crippling grip on Congress.

Professor Thomas Keck, the Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics at the Maxwell School said The Supreme Court has made clear that while the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, it also allows a wide range of reasonable restrictions on that right.

“Proposed legislation banning military-style assault weapons or prohibiting firearms possession by persons on the terrorist watch list would be fully consistent with existing Second Amendment doctrine,” said Keck.

Later, I spoke with a criminal defense investigator from Reno named April Higueri. She runs a private firm called ADH Investigations.

Higueri, who is gay, said it might seem surprising for a criminal defense investigator to support a ban on assault weapons.

“But the manufacturers of assault weapons did not intend for them to be used on our streets. They were built for war,” said Higueri.

A BROKEN COMMUNITY

When I asked David Baker Hargrove if Orlando might inspire LGBT activists to action on issues such as gun control reforms, he paused for a moment.

Hargrove, who has extensive experience working in trauma situations has essentially been in emergency response mode since the murders happened He hasn’t even had the chance to personally process what has occurred in his home community. He and the rest of the Orlando LGBT community are heartbroken.

“My heart was so deeply connected to those young people who were slaughtered in that bar. I know logically it was horrific, so to say that we are broken and hurting, we simply don’t know the depth of our pain yet.”

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Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence

Brock, it has been three weeks since your name scarred headlines across every publication in the nation. It has been three weeks and I still flip through the details of the Stanford rape case in my head each day. I think about the powerful statement made by Survivor and by your own parents’ public pleas. I still think about those now infamous twenty minutes.

Your dad says “twenty minutes of action” is no reason for you to go to jail. I wonder if he knows how much time you really stole. You stole moments of laughter and joy from Survivor. You stole countless well-rested nights from Survivor. You stole moments of affection from Survivor and from those she loves. You continue to steal time for every therapy session she will ever go to and for every pause she takes in believing her own self-worth.

Yes, you stole from Survivor, but in reality you stole from all Survivors.

Survivors cannot read the news or scroll through Facebook or turn on the TV or talk with friends or call home to their mother without hearing about the “baby-faced,” “All-American” Stanford swimmer who got away with stealing. You have stolen time from all Survivors’ healing. Every time they close their eyes your senior-class picture is indelibly imprinted inside their eyelids for an hour, or maybe a day, or a perhaps a whole week.

You stole time from every Survivor who painstakingly relived their “twenty minutes” and disclosed it to a peer, friend, or online community to testify that you are not an isolated incident. Because Survivors know that you are not the thing that goes bump in the night – you are the boy in their Psych class, their Freshman year hall mate, and the guy dancing behind them at the fraternity party their best friend dragged them to.

You are a culture saturated by sexual violence and a face all too familiar to the women of America. We have watched as men have pillaged our bodies through violent acts of sexual assault and rape. We have watched as these acts have been normalized and forgiven by the same system that groomed and created you.

You have grown up watching your fathers steal time. You watched men that looked like you plunder history books, claiming spaces and bodies that they never owned. You saw men that looked like you stand on the backs of women to take power. Did you see the broken spine? Did you see the broken spirit? Women break as men steal.

You now face jail time. Six months of time that your dad and your mom and your friends have sworn is being stolen from you. They think that the six months that should have been fourteen years is somehow unfair to you. They do not realize how much time you, and others like you, have stolen from Survivors. Although you can never give back the time you have taken, you should lose time from your own life for the minds and bodies your action has forever changed. Those twenty minutes could mark survivors’ lives forever, but they should mark yours.

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Industry has followed the lead of the American Legislative Exchange Council by seeking to place citizen ballot initiatives out of reach for all but the wealthy. ALEC advocates making it harder to qualify referendum language, and requiring supermajorities to pass an initiative.

Heavily promoted by Gov. John Hickenlooper and lobbied by the oil and gas industry, with sponsorship by Democrat Rep. Lois Court and Republican House Minority Leader Brian Del Grosso, HB 15-1057 represented long-standing oil and gas industry efforts to require a “fiscal impact statement” on each page of a petition ballot initiative. Such a “fiscal impact” statement is designed to enumerate loss of tax revenue to the state (and not coincidentally, loss of income to industry) if oil and gas activity is curtailed. There is no comparable consideration of social and moral impacts, or even fiscal impacts of industrial activity on people, health environment and communities.

Fracking-restrictive ballot initiatives in various communities in 2012 prompted stepped-up challenges to the citizens ballot initiative process by oil and gas front groups. HB 15-1057 was regarded a preemptive strike against anticipated 2016 ballot measures to moderate or ban oil and gas drilling. Colorado Concern is among oil & gas front groups leading the assault on citizen ballot initiatives, and was the primary force behind two 2014 Colorado pro-oil industry ballot measures – one requiring a fiscal impact statement became the model for HB15-1057.

Earlier incarnations of these ALEC proposals have been heavily lobbied by industry in Colorado. A 2014 bill also sponsored by Rep. Lois Court called for doubling the number of required voter signatures to place an initiative on the ballot, as well as a percentage of signatures from each of Colorado’s seven congressional districts.

Also in 2015, Senators Ellen Roberts (R) and Pat Steadman (D) introduced Senate Concurrent Resolution 2, requiring voter approval in two consecutive annual elections for any proposed state constitutional amendment. It also called for public hearings by state officials in each of the state’s seven congressional districts prior to the second round of voting.

Industry is advancing a similar initiative to the 2016 ballot under the rubric “Building a Better Colorado.” Following ALEC’s prescriptions, the measure calls for a 55 percent super-majority vote to pass, and signatures to include two percent of all registered voters in each of 35 senate districts. What is two percent on any particular day? “Sorry, you did not obtain 2 percent of registered voter signatures in four senate districts.” The increased cost alone excludes initiative efforts by all but the wealthy.

The citizen ballot initiative is already out of reach for most. Common wisdom holds that the cost of hiring petition gatherers to obtain sufficient signatures is a quarter of a million dollars. Not a problem, say industry high-rollers. President of the Colorado Petroleum Association Stan Dempsey laughed at the notion that anyone would lack money to pay signature gatherers.

Always invoked as reason to put the Citizens Ballot Initiative out of reach of the people, the Colorado TABOR Amendment is a complex multi-subject initiative passed in 1992, before the single-subject rule for initiatives was adopted. Such a complex mutli-subject initiative is no longer permitted on the state ballot. The various parts of TABOR each deserve to be reformed by a ballot referendum.

The legislature ostensibly is pushing statutory instead of constitutional reform. Nevertheless, statutory law reinforces power of the legislature, as they can easily overturn a statutory initiative and the will of the voters with a simple majority vote – once again, placing the will of the corporate-friendly legislature above the people’s will.

The Colorado Community Rights Amendment: Antidote to Corporate Preemption of Local Democracy

The Colorado Supreme Court on May 2 overturned the Longmont ban and the Ft. Collins moratorium on fracking and “storage and disposal of fracking wastes” within city limits. Both decisions were based on preemption by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Act, overriding local laws passed by majorities in both cities.

Article V of the Colorado Constitution declares the citizens sovereigns and the citizen initiative the first power reserved by the people, superior even to the legislature.

If anything belongs in the Constitution it is the ability of the people to govern themselves. The Colorado Community Rights Amendment would prioritize the rights of natural persons over so-called “corporate personhood” rights. The CCRA secures the right of counties and municipalities to govern to protect the health, safety and welfare of their communities without being subject to nullification by federal, state or international law – so long as local laws “do not restrict or weaken existing fundamental rights or legal protections for natural persons.”

The Amendment reinforces the basic right of people to self-government, as stated in the Colorado Constitution, Article II, Bill of Rights:

“All Political power is vested in and derived from the people; all government, of right, originates from the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole.”

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