BLAME THE 11 YEAR OLD

11 year old Jordan Brown was charged Saturday as an adult in the shooting death of 26-year-old Kenzie Marie Houk, who was 8 months pregnant. (Yes you read that correctly! 11 YEARS OLD!). According to police and the District Attorney in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania the 11 year old took his 20 gauge (his gun used for hunting with his father and not requiring a permit) and shot his father's pregnant girlfriend in their western Pennsylvania farmhouse, then got on the school bus and went to school, authorities said Saturday.


By now if your not shaking your head in total disbelief and astonishment then there might be something wrong with you. But! Then again, given the enormous amount of violence, brutality and treachery which we are exposed to each day you might not be shocked at all. What shocked me were three things;

1. A 26 year old woman Kenzie Marie Houk and her unborn child were brutally slain by her soon to be stepson and that two families have been destroyed by this terrible act.
2. That he is 11 YEARS OLD. No more needs to be said.
3. That the District Attorney John Bongivengo decided to charge the 11 year old as an adult.

Now first let me start by clearly stating that i am not a bleeding heart liberal. Yes my political leanings tend to be more Liberal then Conservative but i do consider myself rather independent in my political views ( i believe in the death penalty for murder or heinous crimes against children and women). Secondly I want to also say that the victims here are Kenzie Marie Houk and her unborn child. They are the victims of this terrible crime. There is no way to justify the act. Any attempt to try and candy coat the earth shattering impact it has had and will have on their families would serve only to undermine this tragedy.

One thing we must do however is try and understand the act and most importantly weigh the logic in charging an 11 Year Old as an adult. It is necessary to ask the questions that need to be asked. To try and gain greater insight into what has happened and more importantly what is happening to the youth in our society. The questions are not simple and the answers are far from clear. The fact however remains that there is an 11 year old who is going to be brought to justice for his act by being put on trial as an adult. The questions are. What purpose does this serve our society? What impact does this have on preventing or deterring similar crimes in the future? Most importantly will ultimately putting him on trial as an adult fix anything that is wrong with today's youth? I probably don't have many of the answers to those questions but i do want to explore some things more indepth.

For any of you who have 11 year olds take a look at them. Now sit back and carefully analyze how they act. What is their level of intellectual intelligence? What are their overall social skills and compartment? What is their ability to rationalize and distinguish between right and wrong? Not right and wrong as in its not OK to pull my 8 year old sisters hair, but their ability to measure the long term implications and consequences of their own actions and the actual real life results. This is where i have a problem. I have an 11 year old. I cannot imagine my child or any other 11 year old taking such a course of action. I cannot imagine what would drive or motivate them to do something like that. At the same time i know how 11 year olds act as i have had 3 of my other children pass that age. I understand to a limited degree their ability to measure actions and the resulting consequences. I am also all to conscious of the incredible impact our current social environment has on them and how they behave. Am i trying to create an excuse for murder? NOT for one single second. But i am not willing to simply throw any 11 year old under the bus simply because we live in some state of denial.

11 year old's of today are not the 11 year old's of yesterday. They are similar but they are different then night is from day. The constant bombardment of violence available from all formats including TV, music, Internet, video games and movies is one element that is completely different then that which an 11 year old growing up in the 70's would have experienced. The transformation of the family unit from two parents to single shared parents and in many cases singular parent models is vastly contrasted to the 11 year old of the 1970's. Our children grow up in a very different world facing very different pressures and exposure then we did 35 years ago. Some might say its easy to look back and make comparisons and to say that that is in no way a justification for the violence and the crime which contaminates the youth of today. In some cases it would be right not to try to hard to look back to see how we were but to focus on how we are now. It would also be easy to write off the change which has occurred and simply blame the obvious. That is unacceptable. This desire we have as a society to blame everyone and anyone else for the current plight of our youth is sickening. We try and blame everything and anything on their habits, their conduct and their actions. We blame Hollywood, the video game producers, we blame the Internet, we blame their teachers, we blame other parents.We blame a weak judicial system, bad judges, lawyers, police. We blame the government. We simply point the finger and the situation grows ever worse.We never ever take responsibility.

That responsibility is clear. The reason its clear is because we are the parents, we are the Internet, we are the film makers and video game makers. We are to blame. We vote for the people who make the laws. We allow our children to see what they see. To be exposed to what they are exposed to. There is no way to protect them or shelter them from everything that is out there but our attempt to limit our liability and responsibility to 10% is sad. So now an 11 year old will stand trial for his crime. There is no doubt that he must be punished for his acts. That he must be made to understand the irreversible effect which his actions have caused. The pain and trauma which results from those actions. The truth though, is we should all be on trial for what we have allowed to happen. What he have accepted is happening in our society and how we have turned a blind eye and tried to blame everyone else for the current results. This child needs to be on trial as a child, he is a child and he is what we have allowed and permitted him to become. The old fall back of, ''he must just be evil'' is a lame excuse for us, for our society. A way for us to simply continue to pass along the blame. This 11 year old boy could be anyone's son, yours or mine. The idea that we can simply write off these actions to rare occurrences has long since past. Don't believe me? Simply type in child killers into an Internet search engine and prepare to be astonished. In reality you won't be astonished because somewhere buried deep in the recess of your mind and heart you already know how off track we have become in regards to raising and managing our young people.

Fear not however my friends for very soon a child will go on trial as an adult and instead of questioning ourselves and our actions we'll simply watch the process. We will not question what we have allowed our society to become and our role in that. Instead of trying to find answers and solutions to what plagues our young people we will simply allow ourselves to believe that the district attorney of Lawrence county Pennsylvania has the answer. We won't seek out tough answers to tough questions. We won't modify anything in our society. We will certainly not modify our behaviour. No we won't do any of those things. What will we do? We'll simply blame the 11 YEAR OLD!

DYING TO GET IN

Is it just me or are things going from bad to worst on a constant basis. Most particularly Health care in this country and specifically in the province of Quebec. It has become abundantly clear that no one and I mean no one has a solution to the current crisis. I am so sick and tired of listening to politicians banter back and forth about who is to blame for the current situation. I am also fatigued by the claims by both Mr. Premier Ministre (Charest) and the Health Minister that the system is generally good. It is abundantly clear that neither they nor anyone of their families spend any amount of time in a Hospital emergency room. It is actually sickening to imagine that these very individuals who claim the system is good would never have to spend one minute let alone 20 hours waiting in an emergency room. What one quickly understands about these individuals is that they are so detached from actual reality that they may as well be living on Mars. Does anyone actually think that the Premier Ministre, Health Minister or the leader of the opposition would be ushered off to the local emergency room by their handlers if they were to fall ill or get injured? That they would sit there with the common folks waiting to be triaged and evaluated only to be told it will take 20 hours before being seen by a doctor? NEVER! Therein lies the biggest problem. How can those who are least affected or touched by a problem be in any position to correct it. What kills me (and for that matter many others for real) is the promises and the lies and the impotency to take any concrete action. Yesterday during question period in the House in Quebec this was the discussion between the Premier Ministre and the leader of the Opposition Madame Marois.

(NOT WORD FOR WORD BUT CLOSE ENOUGH)

Mr. Charest: Since 2003 our government and party has worked tirelessly to repair the debacle created by the previous government.

Madame Marois: Mr. Le Premier Ministre please stop blaming what happened over 7 years ago on the current government. It is you that has been in power for the last 7 years and the problems have not been fixed by your administration and when we were in power people did not die waiting for a heart operation.

Madame Marois: May i remind the ''Premier Ministre'' that he is the leader and that this situation is his responsibility

Mr. Charest: May i remind Madame Marois that this situation is her fault.

WHAT?????? Are you serious? Are you telling me that this is the way the people we elect manage issues facing the government and our society. Nah-Nah your to blame...NAH NAH its not my fault....for God sakes SHUT UP! While they are acting like 10 year olds people are dying. These people aren't from another planet. They are not strangers. They are our fathers, mothers, grand parents, children our brothers and sisters. While these politically motivated and irrelevant politicians debate about who is to blame members of our families die. These are not isolated cases. They are not anomalies, they are an indicator of just how broken the system is. Here is whats happening in the province.

These are some stories from a recent Montreal Gazette article by By CHARLIE FIDELMAN

• On Friday, Jean-Guy Pitre, 65, a retired police officer, died after waiting six months for surgery to fix a blocked aorta. His heart operation was delayed because of a lack of beds in the intensive care unit, said officials with the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal.
  
• Mariette Fournier died Feb. 23 after spending four days in a corridor of the Maisonneuve-Rosemont's ER. Her family wants an inquiry into Quebec's health-care system
• Mieczyslaw Figiel died last month in the corridor of Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital's emergency room, right next to the triage nursing station where an ambulance had left him that morning. By late afternoon, when the 75-year-old Montrealer was gasping for air, triage couldn't locate his file in the computer. After he stopped breathing, medical staff came to his side with a blood-pressure device and a thermometer.

       "I watched my father pass away before my eyes," Della Figiel, his daughter, said yesterday.

        On Feb. 3, after Figiel fainted at home, an ambulance delivered him to Maisonneuve-   
       Rosemont Hospital at 9:45 a.m., hooked to oxygen and a heart monitor. He was still wearing
       his hospital bracelet from a week before. Ambulance staff took their equipment and left him
       with no oxygen or heart monitor right under the window of the triage office. His wife, Helen,
       was by his side. "I showed up at 4 p.m.," said Della Figiel, who drove in from Ottawa. "My
       mother was standing in the hallway. She said they couldn't do anything and there was a 16-
       hour wait to be seen." Operating at about 180-per-cent capacity, the hospital ER was jammed.

Listen the system is terribly broken. It is broken across this country. People are dying as a result of the in-actions of government. The Ontario Government recently released numbers showing that out of every tax dollar collected 40 cents went to health care and that within 10 years that number would jump to 70 cents. According to statistics the amount Canadians spend on health care in 1997 dollars has increased every year between 1975 and 2009 from $39.7 billion to $137.3 billion or a more than doubling of per capita spending from $1,715 to $4089. In 2009 dollars spending is expected to reach $183.1 billion ( a more than five percent increase over the previous year ) or $5,452 per person. Most of this increase in health care costs has been covered by public funds. The greatest proportion of this money goes to hospitals ($51B), followed by pharmaceuticals ($30B), and physicians ($26B). Total spending in 2007 was equivalent to 10.1% of the gross domestic product which was slightly above the average for OECD countries, and below the 16.0% of GDP spend on health care in the United States. The proportion spent on hospitals and physicians has declined between 1975 and 2009 while the amount spent on pharmaceuticals has increased.

The issue at hand is not only the failing of the existing system from an operational and management perspective but what will ultimately (and some say already has) become our inability to support it financially. The common idea has been to throw money at the problem. With a ''that will save it'' mentality. The idea that the system itself is not broken but simply the Political managerial system which supports it, is also WRONG! The true fact is all of it is broken regardless of who wields the stick of power and nothing short of a complete overhaul of the system is going to make it better. When i say overhaul i don't mean an inquiry or commission. I don't mean a few additional tax dollars raised and thrown at the problem. I mean serious ''knock it down and rebuild it''. What do i mean? Well i mean rebuild much more then the system. I mean rebuild the way we think, act and live. Here you go. Instead of just criticizing the problem or lamenting it I'll offer up my 1 cent worth of ideas

1. The administration of health care, the bureaucrats, the administrators, the boards, hospital structures they all need to be deconstructed and rebuilt.


2. The ''addicted to pharmaceuticals'' by both Doctor and patients. The out of control, ''prescribe drugs to fix it'' mentality has to change. The role of pharmaceutical companies in the system needs to be strictly regulated and controlled.

3. The implementation of an incentive program to encourage our youth to become doctors, nurses and medical specialists and to hold onto those already in the system. Including a potential, ''Service for Learning'' model could be adopted and implemented as well as a ''stay and earn more'' program for those already in the system.

4. The obesity factor. Everything from the food manufacturers, distributor and the consumer needs to change. Including heavy tax on food items (Soda, chocolate, cakes, candy etc..) which are predominant causes of obesity and other health problems (all taxes collected go directly back into the health care system).

5. The potential implementation of a modified and strictly controlled ''pay by user'' model needs to be seriously considered.

Now I'm sure your saying Ha! Good luck with any of that. The reality is that if something concrete does not take place there is going to be a health care system in this country that within 20 years will look like what they have in Africa or Mexico (which by the way is none!). The one item which has always been a flash point is number 5. The whole, ''pay as you go'' system. Every time this is mentioned everyone points across the border to the US and says, ''thank good that's not our system.'' The problem with this ideology or philosophy is simply that we have the ability to change our system and build a better one without becoming like the United States. Think about how many times you have seen someone in the Emergency room of a Hospital looking like anything other then an Emergency? 2 or 4 times or more. Sure you have. We all have. In many cases we ourselves have gone to the Emergency room when we were not really an emergency worthy patient. The whole ideology of a State System lends itself to abuse. It has gotten so bad that we have created bogus issues which we use to blame for the systems failure. Instead of looking directly at ourselves and our own actions we turn outward to find other things to blame. The other issue is that people will call you Un-Canadian for proposing such a system as if you wanting a better system makes you a Socialist or uncaring, or greedy. We all better get beyond that nonsense pretty fast because the train wreck is coming and were all either in the train of stuck on the tracks.

To implement a system that could potentially work Government would have to apply;

1. A ''pay as you go'' system would have to insure that those who cannot pay end up getting equal care to those that can. Is this hard? Not really. You implement a system that ensures that new Doctors or nurses coming into the system have to do 4 years in the no pay system before being able to leave for the ''pay as you go'' system. The Government pays for ALL the school bills for these individuals in return for service. Similar to a military, ''serve and learn program''. Government could establish those who cannot pay by annual income, set at a specific amount. Those on Social assistance programs such as Welfare, Unemployment, workers compensation. Those under the age of 18 and those over the age of 70. Those with diagnosed prescribed medical conditions or serious illnesses.

2. Giving back the percentage it currently collects in taxes for health care to each citizen who does not fall into anyone of the groups mentioned above to offset potential, ''pay as you go'' cost to the user.

3. Specific strategies need to be implemented to cover habitual users. (by this i do not mean those with legitimate health issues but those who tax the system in an unreasonable way).

4. This will sound brutal but those individuals who by their own actions and personal life style choices create their medical conditions such as smoking, over eaters (obesity) would not get a free pass into the government paid system. They in fact would have to assume the cost for their own care.

5. A 5% increase to corporate tax to be used directly to re-subsidize Company health care programs which could be used in a direct ''pay as you go'' system.

These are just a few of the ideas that could be used. I am not saying anyone idea alone will fix what is broken. There are many, many others and there are those way more qualified then me to come up with some ways to avert the upcoming train wreck. The hardest part is getting to the place we need to be, not just us but politicians, health-care workers and for that matter everyone. A place where everyone recognizes that if we don't pull together and fix it its going to die.

If your not convinced that anything needs to change then simply go pay a visit to your local emergency room. Or God forbid be forced into one as a result of a sick child, a friend or a member of your family. Then pray the system doesn't fail you as it did Jean-Guy Pitre, Mariette Fournier, Mieczyslaw Figiel or the many others we pretend not to know about.

I STAND ON GUARD FOR THEE

Ok friends let me just start off by saying that yes i was TOTALLY wrong about the Men's Olympic Hockey results. I blew it big time. Both our Men's and Women's teams performed incredibly and both took home GOLD BABY! In the Women's case I don't think there was ever a whole lot of doubt. The women did not disappoint and it was fun watching them take another Gold medal. I was saddened to hear the negative press from the celebration the women held on the ice (with no one in the arena but a few media types). It made me angry that these women were called to behave in a manner that would constantly pass had they been Men. The double standard was disgusting from the media and I think the women deserved to celebrate however they saw fit. Good on you ladies don,t be deterred by a few talking heads.

So i am eating my crow on the men's side big time. Admitting that i was wrong and might i say i am very, very happy to have been. The start for the men was questionable. Especially the first game against the Americans. Perhaps that game was a wake-up call. Or perhaps it was just simply a part of the team bonding process. Whatever it was it certainly didn't make the average Canadian Hockey fan to comfortable. There were however some strong positives working in favour of our men's team. It seems the Russians and Swede's decided to give only 50% and they ended up doing us a big favor. On paper as is often the case the best team did not win Gold. But as always the paper is worthless its what you hang around your neck that counts the most. For our Boys it was Gold and that's all that anyone will ever remember. This team, at home with almost unattainable expectations did what it had to do. It pulled the strength, courage and skill together to create the winning recepie.

These games marked a potential turning point for Olympic Hockey. With no guarantee the NHL will compete is Sochi Russia in 2014 it might have been the last opportunity we Canadians get to see the very best our country produces on a sheet of ice together. If that is the case it will be a sad day for Hockey while at the same time it will restore the original Olympic spirit of amateur sport. I truly believe that having amateurs compete in Olympic Hockey would actually be good for the sport world wide. I believe it has the ability to grow the sport more then having NHLer's participate. The reason i say this is simple. Most youngster watching the Pro's play in the Olympics realize that that is a rare, if not impossible dream to make it to the NHL. If the players were still amateurs while playing in the Olympics it gives a better perception of the opportunity that might still exist for some young boy hoping one day to achieve hockey greatness. Prior to the NHL being involved in sending players to the Games almost all the players (minus Russia and the Czech) were amateur. Many of those players never made it to the NHL after competing in the games. However many of their names still remain common as a result of their performances during those 2 weeks every 4 years. I think if you want to build hockey worldwide you have to start by making it seem like it is possible to achieve great things without looking singularly at the NHL as an example of all hockey has to offer.

Whatever ends up happening will never change the past. it won’t change the Gold in Salt lake City or the 7th place finish in Torino or the most recent Gold. Canada's sport is hockey and whatever decision is made concerning Sochi in 2014 you can rest assured that Canadian televisions will be glued to every game involving our men's team.