Of two tribes: Sacrifice and sorrow in worlds apart

As a newspaper beat reporter for more than a decade, I’ve long been proud of my ability to craft stories from complex subjects on tight deadlines.

But a half-year after returning from Ethiopia’s South Omo River Valley, I am discouraged by my incapacity to fully explain what I learned there about ritual tribal infanticide.

The who, what, where and when are simple enough, horrifying as the subject may be: Many among the Kara, Banna and Hamar tribes believe in an evil spirit called Mingi. They fear that, if ignored, it will cause the sun to grow hotter and the rains to stop falling. Crops and animals will die. And then people will die.

The spirit takes many forms, but within these tribes, the most common way Mingi materializes is in infants and small children — those born before proper ceremonies are performed; those born different in some discernable way; those whose top teeth come in before their bottom teeth.

They are suffocated, drowned, bludgeoned and then tossed away to be eaten by wild beasts. Tribal leaders estimate that hundreds of Mingi children are killed in these ways each year.

They do not relish this rite.

“They are human,” one Kara village chief told me. “But we do this for the good of the tribe.”

And here is where we get to the why. And this is where I have been failing, quite miserably, to bridge the immense social, cultural, religious, geographic and economic chasms between this world and that.

Many have tried to change these hearts and minds. So why is it that no one has been able to convince these people that this spirit has no real power over them — that they have sacrificed their children for nothing?

I cannot explain. I can only seek to make meaningful connections. And as we begin to write the first chapters of our nation’s post-Iraq history, I am reminded that we are no less subordinate to the power of fear — and no less seduced by the notion that there is no security without sacrifice.

There were about 160,000 U.S. military members in Iraq when I first visited that country in 2005. Today the war is over. And by the end of this month, our troops will be gone.

Nearly 4,500 U.S. military members have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of that war, nearly nine years ago — including 26 from Utah who died during my tenure as national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune.

I met many of their families. Some I got to know quite well. They let me into their homes. They told me their stories. They shared their pain. And they continued to allow me into their lives, time and again, in the years that followed their loved ones’ deaths.

In 2010, I was invited to join a delegation of “Gold Star Mothers” — those who have lost sons and daughters in the military — that was traveling to Iraq. The trip, to the war-torn nation’s relatively peaceful and semiautonomous Kurdish north, was intended to provide these women with an opportunity to better understand the place where their children fought and fell. And it did.

But Iraq is a complicated place. And even in the region of that nation that has long been most supportive of the U.S. intervention, the experiences these women had were hardly a single-sided confirmation of the righteousness of the cause for which their children died. In Iraq they had a chance to better understand the perils of democracy in a highly charged, sectarian society. They came face-to-face with the shocking ways in which some Iraqis have chosen to celebrate religious freedom. They saw the effects of political impasse on desperate people.

Having earlier reported from some of the very cities where their children had died, I spent a lot of time in quiet corners of our hotel with women who wanted to know more about how what they were seeing in Iraqi Kurdistan was representative of the nation as a whole.

What they so desperately wanted to know — needed to know — was that their children had not died in vain.

But I did not always have the answers they seemed to be seeking.

We spoke a lot, during those weeks, about the ways in which the lives of ordinary Iraqis had changed — for better, worse and not at all — as a result of American intervention and occupation. We spoke of the idea that our nation needed to “prevent another September 11,” about the premise that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped “at all costs,” and, especially, about the time-worn adage that “freedom isn’t free.”

There is fair debate on the question of whether or not most Iraqis are better off today than they would have been if the U.S. had stayed away. But, alas, there is very little evidence that the U.S. adventure in Iraq has prevented acts of terror; that Saddam was any greater threat to his people than other murderous tyrants our nation has simply ignored; that Saddam was any threat, whatsoever, to us; or that the deaths of American service members in Iraq have had any impact on the freedoms we enjoy at home.

But for families who have lost so much, the alternative to believing in the absolute necessity of their sacrifice can be tremendously painful. And it is, for some, simply unthinkable.

In the Mingi mothers of the South Omo tribes, I saw a hauntingly familiar plight. These were desperately grief-stricken women, victims of culture and circumstance, who would carry their anguish to their graves. But the one thing they had — the only thing they really had — was the belief that their sacrifice had bought safety for the rest of their tribe.

And they clung to that. Like a mother holding her child, they clung to that.

For if that were not the case, then what had their tribe done to them?

My God, what had it done to them?

Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University.

Why the Constitution doesn't include camp outs

I stole this photo from City Weekly.

"Hey wait a second! We've got a right to peaceably assemble! The Constitution says so!"

Yes it does. But the Occupy Wall Streeters who were aghast this week at the audacity of police and city leaders who finally decided to enforce no-camping ordinances appear to be as confused as many a Tea Partier about the sovereignty of the Constitution.

Does that 220-year-old document (and its myriad amendments) supersede every last state and municipal law in the nation? Sure does.

But here's the thing: There's this thing called the Judicial Branch. It’s charged with interpreting our laws, including the Constitution. And in cases where there is some question whether our laws are Constitutional, it has the final say.

And that’s a good thing, because the Constitution was written a really long time ago. As you might imagine, some things have changed since then. For instance, nowadays owning slaves is a really big no-no.

You with me so far? Great, because here’s where things get really interesting: As it turns out, none of our founding fathers owned a nylon pup tent. So there’s no way they could have predicted that, some day, people would want to camp out in a city park to protest corporate greed. And as such, they didn’t include impromptu tent cities in the First Amendment.

Personally, I think that was a really big oversight on their part, but nobody’s perfect.

And in any case, they gave us the judiciary. And as it turns out the courts have decided, over the past few centuries, that the exercise of free speech is subject to reasonable restrictions on time, place and manner. That’s why, even though there’s a probably a public sidewalk in front of your house, I can’t go over there tonight with a bullhorn and stage a protest against you.

That would be mean. And it would violate a bunch of city ordinances that in no way violate the Constitution.

Make sense?

The real irony of the camp-out protests in Salt Lake City, Oakland and New York is that they have gone on for as long as they have precisely because public sentiment in those places is sympathetic to, if not overtly supportive of, the “Occupy” message. Here in Salt Lake City, for instance, the man behind the sweep that cleared out the month-old camp at Pioneer Park is a gangly dude named Chris Burbank. And while I’ve had my share of disagreements with Chief Burbank, you are unlikely to find any law enforcement officer more Constitutionally minded than he is. This is a guy, after all, who told the Utah Legislature to shove its anti-illegal immigration laws up its big, fat collective ass because he didn’t believe those laws were legally enforceable.

Burbank — and, by extension the very progressive mayor under whom he serves — didn’t shut down the Pioneer Park camp because they disagreed with the protesters’ message (as it turns out, that would be unconstitutional — even if the city does have laws against camping in the park.) Rather, the shutdown was ordered because city leaders determined (perhaps too late) that the camp presented a health and safety threat to its occupants.

Are those time, place and manner restrictions reasonable? Perhaps one day the judiciary might be called to decide that question specifically. But for now there appears to be little serious debate over decisions by city leaders, across the nation, to finally enforce no-camping ordinances while continuing to permit the free exercise of speech and assembly on city property.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to see a man about a bullhorn.

The man in Apartment 25

Photo by Ramin Rahimian, captureimages.com

The woman in apartment 24 didn’t know him. 

Neither did the man in 26.

Of course they saw him, from time to time, when he’d emerge from apartment 25. They’d stand to the side, along the rail, as he’d cautiously wheel his chair down the long ramp leading to the back parking lot of the Westgate Apartments.

But they did not know his name. They did not know his story. And on Friday evening, as that wheelchair sat in the space between their apartments, loaded with a box of old mail, a half-case of unopened water bottles and a bright red medical waste disposal bin, they did not know why.

They should.

We all should.

*

It was the morning of Oct. 20, 2006 — the final hour of the final mission of Diyar al-Bayati’s service to the U.S. Army in Iraq. 

After more than 200 combat missions, the 20-year-old interpreter was headed for a much safer job translating for a private company in Kuwait.

And then, out from the ground, like hell escaping into Earth, a fiery explosion threw al-Bayati’s world into chaos. In and out of consciousness for the next several months, he awoke one day to find himself in a hospital in Amman, Jordan.

Without his legs.

*

For more than a year, he languished there, waiting for permission to travel to the United States. In America, he believed, he would be able to begin his life anew. But in the year that al-Bayati was wounded, the U.S. government issued just 50 "special immigrant visas" to interpreters like himself. The following year, in response to a growing international condemnation of the way it had abandoned the Iraqi men and women who had put their lives and families at risk to support the U.S. military mission in Mesopotamia, the Bush administration increased the number to 500.

That was not nearly enough. When al-Bayati finally made it to America, it was not through the special visa program but as a refugee. And like most refugees, he didn't get to choose where he would go.

The U.S. government sent him to Salt Lake City.

He had no family here. No friends. None of the soldiers with whom he served in Iraq lived here, either.

And despite his service to our nation’s military, al-Bayati was offered no more assistance than any other refugee.

*

One by one, individuals and non-profit groups came forward to do what our grateful nation’s government had not — providing care, a little bit of money and, most of all, a measure of thanks for his service and sacrifice.

But it was too little. It was too late. The young man’s faith had been shaken.

"They say that I can only get limited help," al-Bayati told me in 2008. "In Iraq, when they wanted my help, I didn't tell them that it was limited. I didn't tell them, 'No, I'm just an interpreter and my services are limited.' "

*

He was in constant pain. He was angry and lonely and hopelessly addicted to prescription pills.

“It was hard,” said Debi Clark, a mental health therapist who has taken an interest in the plights of the growing number of Iraqi refugees in Salt Lake City and, in particular, the case of al-Bayati. “He went through an awful lot of surgeries. And there were an awful lot of disappointments. He actually ended up in quite a bit more severe pain from all the surgeries. He was really struggling. And he was really lonely for his family.”

Apparently aware that the end could be near, al-Bayati begged his friends to promise that they would return his body to Iraq for burial.

Al-Bayati died Tuesday, alone in his apartment, in front of a mirror with a brush in his hand. There was no sign of distress.

*

Mustafa Al-Hussain, a volunteer at the Alrasool Islamic Center in Salt Lake City, said that the cost to fulfill al-Bayati’s final wish will be expensive, perhaps $15,000 if the body could be transported immediately. But because the coroner has been unable to determine precisely how al-Bayati died, U.S. law dictates that his body cannot be moved out of the country for 12 weeks. And that, Al-Hussain said, could raise the cost by another $10,000. 

He said there is a small section of West Jordan's Redwood Memorial Cemetery designated for Muslim burials. Interring al-Bayati’s body there will cost about $2,500, al-Hussain said — a cost that can be sustained by Alrasool's small, working class congregation.

On Friday evening he was attempting to reach al-Bayati’s mother in Iraq to seek her permission to bury her son in Utah. 

al-Hussain knows that is not what al-Bayati wanted. It’s not what anyone wants for him. “But for now it is the best that we can do,” he said. “It is very unfortunate. This is a man who died serving his country. And unfortunately, there seems to be little chance that we will be able to return him to his family there.”

*

Clark would like to believe otherwise. On Saturday she opened an account at Wells Fargo, the Diyar al-Bayati Benefit account, into which anyone can donate simply by visiting a Wells Fargo branch. If enough money is collected, she said, the Alrasool center will be able to send al-Bayati’s body home. If not, the mosque may be able to cover the costs of the local burial and perhaps send a small gift of gratitude to al-Bayati’s mother in honor of her son’s service and sacrifice. 

“In the end, all he wanted was to go home,” Clark said. “And I feel this obligation to somehow get him there. It feels like the least we can do for him and his family.”

___

To learn more about Diyar al-Bayati's story, watch Ramin Rahimian's compelling video/photo presentation, Last Mission/Last Hour, read Bruce Finley's reporting for The Denver Post,
or read my articles for The Salt Lake Tribune here and here.

Karl Rove is a liar — and other facts

"Are your lips moving?"

I’d like to invite The Wall Street Journal’s editors to attend my beginning news writing class at Utah State University this fall. If they do, they’ll learn that there’s difference between fiction and opinion — and they’ll get an earful about the press’ responsibility to deliver the latter. 

Karl Rove’s June 22 op-ed, “Why Obama is likely to lose in 2012,” is chock full of inaccuracies and lies.

A few highlights:

• Rove claims that, while unemployment now stands at 9.1 percent, President Barack Obama “promised much better, declaring that his February 2009 stimulus would cause unemployment to peak at 8 percent by the end of summer 2009 and drop to roughly 6.8 percent today.”

Mr. Rove (and apparently The Journal’s editors) need a civics lesson. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as “The Stimulus” was a complex piece of legislation passed by Congress (that’s the way it works in this republic.) It might be fair to call the bill Obama signed into law a Democratic stimulus (since most Congressional Democrats voted for it and all but three Republicans voted against it) but assigning Obama ownership of the bill is simply inaccurate. (As is the very notion of ObamaCare.)

Furthermore, Obama didn’t “promise” or “declare” anything. Rove’s numbers appear to come from a report by Christina Romer, of the Council of Economic advisors, and Jared Bernstein, of the Office of the Vice President-elect.

Yup. Elect. The report was written before Obama and Vice President Joe Biden even took office — weeks before the stimulus was debated by Congress. Obama didn’t write it, didn’t sign it, didn’t pass it out to his book club.

In any case, Romer and Bernstein didn’t promise anything. They made some estimates. That’s what economists do.

And under no stretch of the English language are "estimate" and "promise" synonyms.

• Convenient things, ellipses. You can use those little bastards to make people say anything. For instance, I can use them to make Rove say: “President Barack Obama is... great.”

For his part, Rove cut down an Obama quote from June 2010 in this way: "Our economy . . . is now growing at a good clip."

What Obama actually said was: “Our economy, which was shrinking by 6 percent when I was sworn in, is now growing at a good clip.”

I can’t imagine why the senior adviser to Obama’s immediate predecessor might have wanted that middle part excised from the record, can you?

In the same speech, by the way, Obama said, “I’m under no illusion that we are where we need to be yet.”

Obama also once said, “Karl Rove... is a ... peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

As I tell my students, using ellipses to eliminate a part of a quote that does not materially affect its meaning is appropriate. Using them to change the meaning of a quote is dishonest.

• Rove writes that “Americans believe they are worse off than when Mr. Obama took office by a 44 percent to 34 percent margin.”

That’s factually incorrect.

According to the Bloomberg poll that Rove cites, 44 percent of Americans believe they are worse off now than when Obama took office and 34 percent believe they are better off. That leaves 22 percent of Americans who don’t think their lot has changed much at all.

Plugging those figures accurately into Mr. Rove’s syntax would result in this sentence:

“Americans believe they are worse off than when Mr. Obama took office by a 44 percent to 56 percent margin.”

Of course, that would be a bit confusing, because it would appear to say that most Americans don’t, in fact, believe they are worse off than they were two years ago. And low and behold, that’s the case. Most Americans believe they are something other than "worse off."

It’s still not particularly flattering to point out that 44 out of every 100 Americans thinks their lives suck more now than two years ago — and that’s what Rove should have said. Instead, he tried to make the numbers look even worse than they are. And that resulted in a lie.

That’s too bad, because when Rove sticks to doing what he does best — making political analyses — he does just fine. Indeed, most of his logic is sound: Obama’s in big trouble. Key groups of supporters have fallen out of love with him. Most aren’t impressed with his handling of the economy.

So yeah, Obama has a re-election problem — but Rove has a truth problem.

And that’s not fiction or an opinion.

It’s a fact.

Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University.

Setting the table: How to fix our nation's food stamp debacle

(Sorry, bleeding hearts. But it's not this simple.)

It’s nearly 10 p.m. at the market near our home and I’m standing in line behind a woman with three young children and a cart full of junk food. There are at least six two-liter bottles of soda pop on the bottom of her cart. There are a few bags of potato chips, a stack of frozen dinners and a frozen pie.

There are also some bananas. I take note of this because it’s the only fresh or nutritious food in the cart.

I don’t like the part of me that assumes — with indignant certainty — that this woman is about to pull out her Utah Horizon card.

But that’s what I think.

And that’s what she does.

About 14 percent of Americans now rely on the federally funded and state-administered food stamp program. That’s nearly 45 million people (up more than 60 percent from just four years earlier) who are now swiping state-issued debit cards at markets across the nation.

Paltry little research has been conducted on how these individuals spend their taxpayer-sponsored food dollars. Even less study has gone into how food stamp recipients spend the rest of their money (for instance, the $70 this woman drops on two cartons of Marlboro Lights after she completes her first transaction.)

“Sure, that happens a lot,” the clerk tells me as the woman departs the store, kids in tow. “They come in and buy a bunch of food with their card and then pay cash for beer and cigarettes.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t put much stake in such anecdotes. When the state of Minnesota sought to prevent food-stampers from buying junk food in 2004, the department argued that such a move would only “perpetuate the myth” that those relying on food assistance aren’t capable of making good decisions about what food to buy.

It’s unclear, though, what evidence the department has that suggests that this is, in fact, a myth — save a study it conducted in 1997 in which food stamp users self-reported their spending and dietary habits to survey takers and focus group leaders. Not surprisingly, given those research methods, the study’s authors concluded that most “food stamp participants are savvy shoppers who take care to get the most for their food dollar” and who only buy “convenience foods” due to time pressures and cultural traditions.

Notwithstanding their glowing assessment of food-stampers, the USDA researchers still found that fewer than 10 percent of recipients were eating a healthy diet. No small wonder that a number of other studies have shown a strong link between food stamp usage and obesity — a sad irony given that food assistance was originally intended to help prevent hunger in America.

Meanwhile, federal investigations into food stamp fraud haven’t kept pace with the program’s growth. An analysis by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting showed that fewer than 4,000 investigations were conducted into potential food stamp fraud in 2009. That’s about 2,000 fewer inquires than were conducted in 1995 — even as tens of millions of additional Americans have jumped onto the food stamp roles.

Not that the good gumshoes at the Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Inspector General haven’t been busy — nor are the crimes they’re pursuing petty. Last week, a Missouri convenience store manager was sentenced to three years in prison for a stamps-for-cash scheme that cost the government $1.5 million. The USDA estimates it loses at least $2 billion a year in food assistance fraud.

But is that enough of a reason for the U.S. government to play food nanny? Even for those who are eating off the public plate?

No.

When it comes to food assistance, we shouldn’t lose sleep over the idea that adults might make poor decisions with what they’re given. They might buy junk food. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Drugs. They might even rip just off.

Fine. That’s part of the price of the social compact.

We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to any of it (and particularly not the fraud) but we don’t need to go bug-eyed over it, either. It’s not going to bankrupt us.

Problem is, though, that the vast majority of food stamp recipients aren’t adults making poor choices for themselves — they’re children who don’t have any say in how their parents spend our collective food money.

That makes them our collective responsibility — and that’s why the federal government should indeed nanny up on this issue.

Having a hard time wrapping your mind around the idea of being responsible for tens of millions of children? How about just one? If a hungry child from your neighborhood came to your door, would you send her away with a few bucks in her hand and instructions to let her mommy decide what to do with the cash? And what if she was still hungry when she returned to your doorstep the next day?

It’s not just that a lack of education means these children’s parents often don’t understand how to make healthful choices for their families. In many cases, they don’t really have a choice at all.

Studies have shown that low-income Americans are far less likely to have grocery stores in their neighborhoods. That leaves them more reliant on convenience stores like 7-11, which concentrate in lower-income neighborhoods and increasingly accept food stamps for their small selection of generally unhealthy and over-priced food. Meanwhile, researchers have found that, calorie for calorie, junk foods cost less and are less subject to inflation than healthy foods. Further complicating matters: Social psychologists feeling their way around the emerging theory of “depletable self-control” have found that the poor, by virtue of having to make more decisions that consequentially affect their bottom line, have less mental capacity remaining to control other impulses.

But we have the capacity to help food stamp recipients make better decisions for their families — simply by limiting access to unhealthful foods and increasing opportunities to purchase nutritious foods.

First and foremost, it’s long past time for the federal government to get behind efforts like the current push in New York to fight obesity by cutting off food stamp purchases of soda pop and other sugared drinks. A reasonable junk food ban (the Food and Drug Administration has a rather convoluted definition of what constitutes “candy,” but it’s a start) should be next. Will some food stampers simply use their own money to purchase these unhealthy products, as the woman at my local supermarket did to get her cigarettes? Certainly. But that will also force more trade-offs between unhealthy products, compelling greater limitations of all of those things.

Next, the feds should tighten the rules on what kinds of foods markets must offer in order to qualify to accept food stamps. Currently, the standard is simply that the market regularly sells products, including perishables, from most parts of the food chain. The new rules should encourage far more fresh and healthy food offerings. With retailers such as Family Dollar citing food stamps as a major driver of sales, the federal government has all the leverage it needs, right now, to prompt more markets to offer better foods.

Speaking of leverage, no one should expect to get something for nothing. If individuals want to continue receiving food stamps, they should have no problem finding one evening a year (or a few hours online) to participate on a tutorial on home cooking and healthy eating. Healthy decision-making can also be incentivized in the much same way that major supermarkets now offer “rewards points” to frequent shoppers — giving stamp shoppers more credit for nutritious choices.

And finally, we need to find other ways to increase access to healthy foods, including making the technology for accepting food stamp debit cards more available at farmers markets across the country. At Salt Lake City’s Downtown Farmer’s Market, food stampers spent $17,000 last year on fresh and healthy foods. That’s not a bad start, but it represents only a tiny fraction of the $35 million in food stamp purchases made last year in the Beehive State. We can do better.

Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University.