I agree. When I said earlier that the response from a Boulder County Human Service employee was unacceptable, I should have made it clear that I understand that it’s not their fault.
Boy stuck for weeks at Colorado hospital after dad abandons him and social services too busy to help
9 Likes
Exactly.
At this point, the BCHS should be investigating THEMSELVES for child neglect and endangerment.
Once again, Mr. Carlin delivers the goods:
"They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.
Conservatives don’t give a shit about you until you reach “military age”. Then they think you are just fine. Just what they’ve been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers."
While his screed was funny the first time around, it’s getting to be… more rage inducing than anything in our current times.
12 Likes
The front line social workers are doing their best. They really are. No one who doesn’t sincerely care about kids takes that job and keeps it. It’s incredibly tough work and mentally damaging.
But the system is broken and underfunded. Texas DFPS is in a decade long lawsuit over how kids are not safe in the foster care system. But despite a very active judge, almost nothing has changed. The only thing the GOP dominated legislature done is shift licensing regulations to the health and human services agency. Which did help a bit. That’s it.
Social services everywhere need more money, more inspectors for the foster homes, more support for the foster homes (both money and therapy), more therapeutic support for the kids. But the GOP would rather fund almost anything else. The forced-birth polices are going to make this worse. People who didn’t want to be parents, already have as many kids as they can handle, or just aren’t equipped.
This boy should have a safe temporary place to live. But the ER is unfortunately as safe as it gets. The nurses and doctors are understandably frustrated but kids in the spectrum are incredibly vulnerable to abuse and that is a little less likely in the ER than a temporary group home.
10 Likes
The leftists have no real power to make a difference, at least not without having The Revolution, and that isn’t happening. What I want to know is where are the liberals, who do have the power to do something?
Yes, call me bitter at having experienced the failures and uncaring indifference of liberal political parties and their government departments when it was literally their job to help me. Why do you think I became an anarcho-communist?
4 Likes
In a lot of states (TX, FL, too many others) progressive vouces are pretty much limited to raising hell about the shitty things being done. Some, like here in VA, are able to at least hold the line against the fascist movement. There are only a few where progressives can actually advance the cause of equality. This is why voting is so desperately important. Getting more progessive voices at the table. Evicting fascists from power. These are equally vital, and generally go hand in hand. Even when we can’t get wholeheartedly behind the Dem, evicting the fascist is a noble outcome.
9 Likes
The ER staff are trained to take care of emergencies. We* are staffed to barely have enough time to do that. No one in an ER has the time or training to take care of a child that is boarding in their department, let along a child that needs more than basic care. It isn’t that we are frustrated to have a kid around, it is that we recognize this as a wholly unhealthy, unacceptable and emotionally unsafe milieu for a child.
*I do not work at the UCH Longmont facility, but I am an ER nurse nearby.
6 Likes
I didn’t mean to imply the doctors and nurses were frustrated by having a child around. They would be understandably frustrated because they aren’t trained in childcare, it isn’t their job, and they are probably overworked.
Agreed. But safer than many temporary foster homes. Which is very upsetting in and of itself.
6 Likes
The is the US. It’s hard to know the actual circumstances.
I can think of alot of ways this story may have more to it than we’re hearing. I’m just glad the hospital wasn’t heartless enough to ask the police to remove the child. People die that way.
What I do know for sure is that, as a US citizen we have a cruel and unjust system that grinds people like those in this story into paste and does it all in my name.
3 Likes
I was going to type a sarcrastic “Welcome to Colorado DHS” but you too live here.
Pueblo DHS routinely returns kids to parents/guardians with histories of abuse; where about three or four kids are beaten/starved to death a year. #SadTruth
I’m convinced that DHS is more of a chronicle type of service, where they don’t do much other than fill paper and digital files with histories of kids. It’s that bad.
Yes. News media more or less just looks away if they even looked in the first place. 
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
