G. Frink's

Do you recall the ad with which North Carolina Republicans hope to depress the Democratic gubernatorial and presidential primaries by parachuting in old news about Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's minister?

Yes, the unaired "television ad" which tries to bounce a few words from one of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons onto the two gubernatorial hopefuls -- State Treasurer Richard Moore and Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue. With plenty left over for Democratic presidential hopeful Obama.

Although Republican Party Chairman Linda Daves defends that beast as though it were her own political offspring, tactically identical ads have been trotted out in at least three other states -- Louisana, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. The thing clearly isn't Tar Heel born. She's just reciting her lines, as are her peers in the other states which bought into this ploy.

All of four ads try to both McGovern the Democratic forces by making them wary of supporting one another, and to drive up Democratic negatives with some rank appeal to emotion.

Yet to see a moment of paid air time, the "made to be aired on news shows" North Carolina version has been a triumph of effective misdirection.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain got to look noble and above it all by asking North Carolina Republicans not to air the palpably racist ad.

McCain's request helped revive flagging North Carolina Republican Party spirits, because party leaders got to look semi-tough and sort of independent by refusing to do any such thing.

Ms. Daves even got a free ride on national television news out of it, and while the ad's content is second rate, it is sure to have some stimulative effect on the old JesseCrats.

What a fine farce. Whoever planned this really knows how to orchestrate a campaign melodrama.

Best of all, if you missed this episode, you don't have to bring yourself up to date.

There are new, self-contained episodes in the pipe and scheduled to hit the stage shortly.

I'd try not to let any of it get on my shoes if I were you, though.

Some of my friends say my critique of the North Carolina Republican Party's current advertising efforts and apparent decline was unfair. They argue that the current party leaders can inspire paranoid irrationality with at least as much skill as Jesse Helms at the peak of his powers.

In an attempt to be fair I ask you to compare the elegant skill with which Helms in 1990 misled voters about former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt with a simple pair of white hands, crumpling a rejection letter, while a persuasively confiding voice explains the man's unfortunate predicament.

Whereas the current ad has none of Helms ad's trademark intimacy of delivery and precise focus on that single, compelling sentiment which can send you stumbling to the polls blind with silent rage, to vote vengeance for an uncommitted offense.

Instead this North Carolina Republican Party offers us the unfocused pretense of opposition to both Bev Perdue and Richard Moore for Governor, while attempting to Mau-Mau three candidates with a confused image massaged to resemble bygone Hollywood epics of Africa.

The pasted-on cry of "too extreme!" offers no resolution and is further confused by the concluding motherly lecture.

The evidence is here before you. They made a good-faith effort to appeal to racist sentiment and fear. All of the usual right pieces are there, somewhere. I acknowledge that. But as a result of failures of scripting, production and delivery, and a loss of heart, it doesn't work.

This North Carolina Republican Party is a sad, decadent shadow of its former campaign-time self.

North Carolina Republican leaders demean the campaign heritage of Jesse Helms with that thin, inebriated wander of a television ad they plainly presume will volley his lightning.

The ad, which Republican presidential hopeful John McCain has asked them not to air, makes no scalpel cut to the organ in Southern minds where pockets of animating resentment sometimes lie concealed.

By Carn: 2006-10-17

(c)Public Domain

Instead it swings lazily at three different Democratic candidates, without quite yoking them all together with the minister whose censored speech predominates.

Then abruptly it ends with someone saying again that overused "too extreme for North Carolina" campaign code phrase, which always seemed to me to imply that we North Carolinians really cannot take care of ourselves in the big bad world.

The effect is somewhat less inspiring than I had hoped, since my taste in attack ads was shaped by the white hot malevolent focus of yesteryear. Whereas in its somewhat less than 30-second run time, this North Carolina Republican party campaign centerpiece can move a wide-awake Tar Heel from either major political party to heavy-lidded yawning.

Even one of dirt-road birth like myself, who became accustomed to and perhaps even addicted to boredom while growing up, cannot remain fully awake through repeated viewings.

Of course not. Good grief. We know that State Treasurer Richard Moore and Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue both want the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and, yawn, have both endorsed Sen. Barack Obama's bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee. We've seen, heard and read about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. We've heard or read about Obama's speech addressing the related issues. We've all heard Sen. Hillary Clinton and others tell us at length what they would or would not have done had they been Obama.

So why, oh why, are we going over parts of this again?

There's the rub.

Because there are those who believe it serves the interests of the state Republican Party to get us cranked up about it all. If they can get us cranked up about it all.

The leaders of that party believe it is not insulting when at election time they try to get us drunk on vaguely racist high dudgeon, the way other political operators tried to get our ancestors drunk on campaign rotgut. So that dirty old glass is on the table again.

Like you, I either am now or may soon be crazy, psycho, sicko, whacko, a nut case and if you're a member of Active Minds you're with me.

Those terms mean only that each of us has a living, organic brain which is prey to illnesses to which misguided stigma are attached.

Niels Larsen Stevns (1864-1941): (Jesus) Healing The Leper

Photo by Gunnar Bach Pedersen

(c)Public Domain

Active Minds was first organized because that stigma kills by discouraging the mentally ill from seeking timely, effective treatment, and by burdening with unearned shame some who do seek treatment.

That organization of college students seeks among other things to teach the simple truth -- there is no more legitimate shame in mental illness than there is in the common cold.

Yet the stigma persists. It persists and if we give it nurture, we risk having on our hands the blood of friends and loved ones whom acceptance would have saved.

No, those are not your hands at which I glance. My maternal grandfather killed himself not long before Christmas four decades ago when I was a freshman at North Carolina State University, and I have come to believe that with a little more understanding of chronic depression and rejection of prevailing prejudice about mental illness, I could have pulled him through.

Somewhat similarly, Active Minds was founded by Alison Malmon after her older brother, Brian killed himself when in March of 2000, when he was a 22-year-old college student and she was a college freshman. That was one year after the First U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Mental Illness addressed the stigma as a pervasive evil.

She explains that Brian developed symptoms of a schizoaffective disorder, was hearing voices and was having suicidal thoughts while a student at Columbia University in New York. Because of the stigma, he hid them until even treatment could not make the illness bearable. Thus she says, and I agree, the stigma killed him.

In his book "The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change" (Oxford University Press, 2007), Stephen Hinshaw explains that such concealment continues in part because those who suffer from mental illnesses continue to face housing and job discrimination, as well as hurdles when voting, obtaining a driver's license and maintaining child custody, in addition to facing profoundly negative, misguided, personal responses from others.

No college student, I am not eligible to join Active Minds -- just to say the prejudices involved are deep-seated, irrational and entirely possible to overcome. And live what I assert.

Those prejudices drive into the grave people who could recover, become well, productive and happy again. if we would substitute compassion for this ugly, ancient fear.

Autism in its acute forms is extraordinarily difficult to handle, even while requiring $50,000+ a year in therapeutic attention to grant each child who suffers it a chance at some measure autonomy.

Unless you live in South Carolina or one of the 15 other states which as of this writing to some degree mandate coverage, family health insurance you may have is unlikely to help pay for intensive therapies required to open the door to a better outcome.

Nor is the struggle over if you do live in one of the 16. Parents of autistic children, already exhausted by the demands of the illness, must fight for the benefits law requires.

Save where statute intervenes, insurance companies most often cooly submit that the treatment of autism is not a medical procedure and so not their concern.

Charleston Law School professor Lorri Unumb, who led the fight for change in South Carolina, explained CNN the experience she and her husband had in seeking coverage for care for their son Ryan:

It's not like you read your insurance policy and you can see a specific exclusion. We submitted bills, and we'd get denials back that said "experimental... denied," or "provided by a non-licensed provider... denied." Or sometimes the insurance companies would say "this therapy is educational in nature, not medical... denied."

Yet the diseases which compose the Autism Spectrum Disorders are complex and as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention make clear, they require medical diagnosis or something indistinguishable from it to classify well and so treat appropriately and effectively. The CDC and like authorities also agree that ASDs are the result of genetic, environmental and/or other physiological insults, all undeniably within the realm of medical concerns.

ASDs in most cases require both early intervention and a combination of therapies which are as medical as the rehabilitative therapy more American soldiers should receive when they return home from Iraq. Both cases illustrate how far down the path of commonplace neglect this nation has strayed in public health policy, so that conscience requires Lorri Unumb and others like her to join in years-long battle for legislation like Ryan's Law.

Calling ASD treatments "educational benefits" is a especially false logic. The fact that treatment often occurs at school attests to the age of those treated and speaks directly to the overarching value of keeping those children as much with mainstream life experiences as possible during their 20 to 40 hours a week of therapy.

They must be with other children, lest we risk eventually setting them apart as pariahs and so fail in our fundamental moral obligation to care well for those least able to defend themselves.

That good purpose of helping children live the lives of children by providing treatment at school was not spontaneously embraced by school systems across the land as a natural educational activity. It is fostered by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which in return helps fund the programs.

Susan Pisano of America's Health Insurance Plans, a Washington-based association that represents health insurers, made the place-is-classification argument quite gracefully in an interview with CNN:

I think that it's perfectly understandable that if you are diagnosed with a condition, or a family member is diagnosed with a condition, you want to get services. Traditionally those services have been provided through early intervention programs for children in the 0-3 age group, and by schools for children who are older.

Yet the place of treatment cannot transform the treatments into the equivalents of language arts or math classes, any more than swallowing prescribed medication at school makes that an academic activity. School sponsorship does not transform the treatment either, any more than psychiatric counseling delivered at school becomes coursework by virtue of the building in which it occurs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics regards ASDs as so important an aspect of its members' practices that it has published a technical paper on the subject. That paper begins:

Autism and its milder variants are not rare. Most pediatricians will have the opportunity to provide a medical home for a child with autism.

What drives health insurance companies to their overstrained logic is clear in work like that of Michael Ganz, an assistant professor of Society, Human Development, and Health at Harvard School of Public Health. His studies conclude that $70,000 or more a year is required to properly treat an ASD child with any but the least acute symptoms.

American Health insurance companies typically want none of that cost, for they are by and large in the business of making money, and in most cases of avoiding the burden of those in most need of help.

Children are not spreadsheet ciphers and our obligation to come to their defense is inescapable.

Conscience in this case requires the remedy of law.

If you notice that your child is somehow distressingly different, all of the available scientific data says act on what you notice. Do so immediately and constructively.

Whether you're seeing an Autism Spectrum Disorder, or something else, is a matter for expert diagnosis.

The American Academy of Pediatrics technical paper does an especially good job of explaining exactly what "expert diagnosis" means.

Even though there is no simple list of symptoms, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains with remarkable clarity , when something of this sort is amiss, perhaps 86% of of parents notice and are concerned.

The challenge, then, is to prevent natural, loving aspirations from turning into denial. Because denial helps no one and may do lasting harm.

Neither I nor my offspring suffer from an ASD. Nearsighted I am, though, and my own childhood visual memories are awash in colorful blurs.

Literally and mostly, blurs.

Until I developed the social skills to bring community pressure to bear on them, my parents refused me the corrective lenses required by anyone with 20/200+ vision.

For an autistic child, that kind of treatment delay is likely to mean a life denied.

Whereas sound expert diagnosis followed by 20 hours or more per week of behavioral therapy is likely to mean better behavioral control, a higher level of social skill and where retardation is potentially an issue, a higher IQ.

Certainly exact outcomes are impossible to predict, save perhaps one.

If you are alert and act promptly and with love, your offspring (or grandchildren) will know at every step that you sought with loving diligence the very best for them.

My son Jack's first word was a quiet "Ok."

I recall the place, day, hour, expression on his face, light in the room and the fact that he had agreed to say "ma ma" to his mother.

Yes, and I knew as he spoke that it was developmentally precocious. I was watching for a great many developmental possibilities, as all parents must if we are to cope with this nation's rate of autism.

With Autism Spectrum Disorder, early diagnosis is early treatment, usually via Applied Behavioral Analysis.

Early treatment is so often an open door to a better life that reason the Centers for Disease Control and prevention has a "Learn the signs. Act Early" program.

When his mother returned to the room that fall afternoon, my younger son kept his word and his mother danced joyfully around the room with him clasped securely in her arms. Yet neither of us would have loved him or his older brother George the least bit less had either of them been autistic, for it is out of unconditional love that we are watchful.

The symptoms of ASD are well-understood and clearly explained at the CDC's Autism Information Center.

Young and prospective parents can start with the altogether painless, interactive Milestones Checklist and move on to read and download other materials.

In great part out of love for my own children, all of whom are gloriously competent adults, but also with thoughts of other children I have never known and grandchildren who have yet to born, I read it all.

In a nation where one out of every 150 eight-year-old children suffer from ASD, I will find good uses for every new thing I learned, as will you if you visit the site.

Autism is briefly- and well-explained here by Joanne E. Gerenser, whose Ph.D is in Speech and Language Pathology.

She is the Executive Director of the Eden II Programs, whose mission is helping people with autism.

She is also Autism Expert at DrMDK.com.

This is National Autism Awareness Month.

In the Washington post today, Linda H. Davis writes of Autism Overlooked in this nation which fails to acknowledge that autistic children rarely grow up to be functional adults.

Ms. Davis, president of the nonprofit SAGE Crossing Foundation, reminds us that they typically grow up to be adults who require lifelong care.

As a nation, we are not adequately supporting that care.

The magnitude of our failure can be corrected, if we inform ourselves, and take appropriate action.

The parents of autistic children can rarely deal with this unassisted.

They need our help, and one measure of our humanity is and will be how much and how effectively we provide the needed help.

Growing numbers of autistic Children

Chart published under the GNU Free Documentation License | (C)Eubulides

Wikipedia's detail on how the chart was constructed:

Bar chart of the number (per 1,000 U.S. resident children ages 6-11) of children aged 6-11 who were served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) with a diagnosis of autism, from 1996 through 2005.
Counts of children diagnosed with autism for each year were taken from Table 1-9 of IDEA Part B Child Count (2005).
These were divided by census estimates for U.S. resident population aged 6-11 taken from US census estimates for 1990-1999 resident population by age and the similar estimates for 2000-2005; for all years, the September population estimates were used.

Insomnia sent me jogging through downtown Raleigh alone after midnight, past dark windows and young men fighting over money one had purloined from the other.

Just a few miles quieted my heart and I was walking softly toward home when I saw him sleeping, nestled into the recessed doorway of the Christian Church next door.

I mistook him for tools and drop cloths left by painters planning a fast start at sunrise, until I saw the teddy bear.

So white I'm sure he was freshly laundered, the big, curly furred teddy bear was held close to his face by one hand which sleep had relaxed.

I crept past only a few dozen feet away, and could see the gentle rise and fall of his covers as he slept, silent and otherwise unmoving.

He was neither an old man nor a child and while the bear was clean, all its seams intact, it was worn with much handling.

From where I stood, that teddy bear seemed to have no eyes.

They were, I think, loved out long ago.

Without reason other than the gentle intimacy with which he held it, I was certain that teddy bear had been with him since he was much younger and lived somewhere with the family into which he was born.

Then, I think, he was not homeless and now the bear seems to be all he has of home.

Earlier I had seen a lissome woman in expensive jeans and an embroidered blouse run, face wet, from a tony, eight-story condominium, seeking to call back someone who was bent on leaving.

There were no harsh words, yet after only a moment at the closing car door she ran back sobbing uncontrollably.

My mother burned my teddy bear when I was in my second year at North Carolina State University, and took obvious pleasure in telling me she had done so.

This is not the first night I would have back that big, brown-furred old friend, if only to offer his comfort to some distraught friend or stranger, so they could have more home than sorrow.