Minnesota Is Hell - Part

Minnesota Is Hell - Part CIX - Laura Billings columns are like potato chips - you can't fisk just one.

Last Thursday, she wrote about the Naomi Gaines case. It wouldn't be a Laura Billings column without a swipe at the New Right, of course; in this case, those bloody talk shows:

Radio callers all week have been suggesting, in that politely intolerant way some Minnesotans have when talking about people who aren't from here [emphasis from the original article], that her religion and race played some part in her decision.

The thin film of callers to "conservative" talk radio that suggest being Black and Moslem were factors to this tragedy make a nice, comic-book boogyman to draw attention away from the part Billings did get right; people not from here. Minnestoa's entitlement-driven public health system is overtaxed, and people coming in from out of state for our excessively generous benefits and nonexistent residency requirements don't make matters any easier, least of all in the chronically-underfunded mental health area.

Reasonable people can have a reasonable disagreement about that, of course. What is less reasonable is that Laura Billings is sniping at people who talk about "people not from here" on this issue - but herself leads the sniping against "people not like us" on other issues. She's assigned the demise of "Minnesota Nice" to "people not like" her - Volvo-driving, Wellstone-worshipping, "moderate" liberals who are "willing to pay for a Better Minnesota."

Onward:

In fact, two details of her case hint at a much simpler explanation for her isolation.

The first, her brother's observation that having her first child at the age of 16 seemed to turn Gaines into a different person, not just newly burdened, but deeply depressed. Gaines may simply be reflecting the grim statistics that go along with teenage pregnancy: 80 percent of those pregnancies are unintended; two-thirds of pregnant teens drop out of school; 80 percent of unwed teen mothers end up on welfare.

She "may be reflecting the grim statistics" that buttress Billings' inevitable swipe at the budget-cutting movement. But as a single parent, I'd suspect she may more likely be reflecting the crushing workload, the endless demands, the fatigue, the implacable responsibility of being a mom - so unlike the world any 16-year-old inhabits until that baby is born.

But as long as Billings is going to try to link Gaines' initial bout of depresion with her crimes via a facile "perhaps...", perhaps I'll do the same. Perhaps Gaines' situation reflected that significant part of "urban" culture regards knocking up women as a form of counting coup. And Afro-American society devalues fatherhood, one of the most noxious social holdovers from the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Our social service system completes that devaluation.

Perhaps, as long as we unbidden third parties are hijacking Naomi Gaines' voice for her, my explanations are just as good as Billings' are.

The second, her statement to police that she would "rather be dead than live in a place where I'm not free to walk around, I'm not free to be who I am, I'm not free to see other moms out, single black moms with their kids, enjoying their kids." As court records have shown, Gaines was battling serious mental health problems.

And racism.

And yet, her assessment of life as a single mom hints at the contradictory messages we send to women like her. Our political culture these days "celebrates life," while heaping judgment on poor women ("Why have so many kids if you can't afford to pay for them?"), reducing their access to health care, child care and all the other supports that make single parenting more bearable.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that the budgets for such programs haven't been slashed at all.

If you subsidize something, people will go where the money is. If you build stadiums for sports franchise owners, there will be more sports francise owners. If you give tax breaks for buying houses, more people buy houses. If you subsidize single parenthood (or, to be more accurate, unwed teenage single parenthood - I'm a single parent, and I'm not seeing any benefits), you'll increase your supply of unwed teenage single parents. If we stopped making the life of the single, unwed parent so "bearable", perhaps more single, unwed people (male and female) would quit creating children.

It's that heartless - attacking the problem at its source? Why, if we did that, teenagers would have fewer children - which would create fewer jobs for social workers.

Billings wafts back into irrationality:

No wonder if Gaines wasn't seeing a lot of single moms, black or otherwise, enjoying their kids the way she might have wished.

I'm not sure what this means. She wasn't seeing them because:

• she was mentally ill? or
• there's no program to bring single (and black!) mothers together?

I'm confused.

Neither detail excuses Gaines from her alleged crime. Not at all. And yet, they ought to make us feel more compassion than derision for this young mother, who pushed her stroller through the crowds at the Taste of Minnesota and still felt entirely alone in her troubles.

Compassion? Absolutely. The mentally-ill deserve a lot of it - not only doesn't the general public understand them, either does most of science or the "mental health community", really. The psysiology, psychology and chemistry of mental illness is more opaque to science than is the geography of the dark side of the moon.

But for the benefit of Laura Billings, let's put this in perspective; her crime may have been spurred by mental illness. It was not abetted by the erosion of that mythical "Minnesota Nice". Without that "Minnesota Nice", we'd likely have more Naomi Gainses waiting until they were ready to have children.

I know. I'm such a heartless conservative bastard, what with wanting parents to be ready and all, aren't I?

Posted by Mitch at July 14, 2003 11:58 AM