Baby Lisa Missing One Month

It will be 28 days later this night, Tuesday, November 1 at 4 a.m. that then 10 month old Lisa Irwin was reported missing from her crib by her father. Since then we have had searches of the house, woods, abandoned properties nearby, lakes and cisterns. We've had more lawyer drama then you can imagine, with lawyers from New York and Kansas City. A publicity seeking private investigator came, then went, then came back again.

Baby Lisa's parents, Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin have frequently left investigators, press and public alike scratching their heads in puzzlement over their behavior. They have become very reclusive now, after embracing national press over local media. They have not been out every day, looking for their daughter. They have not made themselves especially available to the Kansas City Police Department. They did indeed retain counsel.

A multitude of people have come forward hoping to help in the case in lieu of the child's family being deeply involved. They range from the poor man from Colorado who lost his child in a similar case to families of victims who were killed after being abducted to so-called community crime activists and editorialists/bloggers. Some are honestly trying to help, others are seeking publicity or other benefits for themselves. An occasional opinionator has tried to make racial hay out of the sad situation: they may or may not have a good point and be saying something worth considering but their timing is horrible; no one wants to hear it while a baby is missing.

And yes, bottom line, a baby is still missing. Have you looked at a 10-11 month old lately? They can't do very much for themselves at all. It has come down to this: unless baby Lisa has been abducted by someone wanting a baby or is being concealed by her extended family somewhere, it is not likely she is alive. The family, especially mom Deborah, continue to do things that cast suspicion in their direction. Someone knows more then they are telling.

Where's baby Lisa?

Replay: C.S. Lewis

Way back in August 2009 I posted this excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity with regard to health care. I think it is time to post it again, this time while we are considering the Occupy-ers and all the issues surrounding our economy. What is the position of the conscientious Christian? Lewis gives us some food for thought here in this bit from the classic book.

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department, Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right....

...The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political programme for applying 'Do as you would be done by; to a particular society at a particular moment...

....All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that here are to be no passengers or parasites: if a man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no 'swank' or 'side', no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience--obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, form children to parents, and (I'm afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls 'busybodies.'

If there was such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense 'advanced', but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old fashioned...Each of us would like some bits of it, but I'm afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself: You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: everyone is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest....

...Charity--giving to the poor--is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality...

And now, before I end, I am going to venture on a guess as to how this section has affected any who have read it. My guess is that there are some Leftist people among them who are very angry that it has not gone further in that direction, and some people of an opposite sort who are angry because they think it has gone much too far...

...A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him. And so, as I warned you, we are driven on to something more inward--driven on from social matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way home.

Say It Isn't So!

I was reading the Kansas City police chief's blog today; there was a press release concerning the new dispatch center and all its nifty new features: upgraded consoles for calltakers and dispatchers, a new video system which allows dispatchers to see live feed through KC SCOUT Traffic Cameras, security cameras set up throughout the city, weather reports, news broadcasts and more so dispatchers can better support officers in the field. Then there was this note: "The 911 Call Center has been undergoing renovations for nearly a year. The upgrades have been to accommodate the new city-wide radio system, which is set to go live Nov. 9."

The federally mandated shift to the 700 megahertz range? The frequency spectrum that requires a $300 scanner to hear?

Say it ain't so!

If you are on Twitter, and have an interest in the workings of the police department, they are going to post all dispatches of officers on Twitter between 1100 and 1200 tomorrow, Thursday October 27. KCPD on Twitter: @kcpolice or www.twitter.com/kcpolice

Baby Lisa Still Missing

It will be three weeks missing come 0400 Tuesday October 25 for now 11 month old Lisa Irwin. There have been tips and searches, interviews, media appearances, police statements and video tapes during the past week. The parents of baby Lisa put in an appearance at a prayer vigil for the first time but otherwise have taken a much lower profile. The lawyers have taken the lead now although the distrust and distance from both local media and the KCPD has continued.
We don't know what KCPD is holding close to the vest in terms of evidence but nothing that has dribbled out is very compelling. A review of a search warrant application revealed that a dog trained to detect human remains had a hit in the house. There was an extensive search after that. Several people reported seeing a man walking in the neighborhood around the time of Lisa's disappearance and a man shows up in the background of a video tape of a nearby store.
If the parents are involved, they have done a good job covering their tracks. If they are the only ones involved it is likely Lisa has died. If they sold or gave the baby away, introducing another party, it is possible that Lisa is alive.
Is it possible we may never know what happened to Lisa? We don't know what all the PD has in terms of evidence and information but it seems to me that someone is going to have to crack for us to know for sure.

City Council Districts: Race Matters and Community Building

With the decision Thursday (pending the rubber stamp from the city council) to draw the new city council district lines as portrayed in the approved Map 1-R following the Voter's Rights Act of 1965 as it is interpreted (requiring 60% of a district to be a minority group) has assured us of a Balkanized city politic and the propagation of the politics of race. Now the temptation of leaders will be to enrich their race first-- including their own selves--and not put the city of Kansas City first.

A cornerstone of the civil rights movement, the voters rights act did good things. It struck down such discriminatory acts as poll taxes, literacy tests and voter intimidation. Somewhere, however, an idea was picked up that it was only possible that a minority voter could only be represented by someone who looked like that minority voter. Also, somehow, it came to be accepted that candidates of color could only win in districts engineered to have a supra-majority of voters of color.

To me this is a victim mentality that needs to be rejected--Blacks are not good enough to run for elected office without the head start of engineered and gerrymandered voting districts? If I were a person of color seeking elected office, I would take that as an insult and a challenge at this point in time. While prejudice and narrow thinking is certainly still present in the majority group, outright discrimination is becoming rarer and rarer. If anything is keeping the Black community down, it is failure to concentrate on the content of character over the color of skin.

Are Black people happy with the quality of their leadership? Are they satisfied with the old guard that sees the Black community as deficient, victimized and needing more, more, more--not to mention the power and financial benefits that these "leaders" accumulate for themselves--rather than seeing the Black community as strong, self sufficient and competent? What has that victim mentality meant for the moral fabric of the Black community?

Before the removal of that slice of the 6th district, the ethnic balance of the entire district was close to 50/50. All is not cookies and milk--the groups are not completely evenly distributed as the district reflects the same east-west divide as is present further north--but the communities were tied together enough to be able to work together. Hickman Mills schools are a good example: the merger of the high schools has been completed without complication and the school district will hit 13 of 14 requirements for full accreditation. This has been done with a lot of work by people of all backgrounds and races. Coalitions have been built from east to west and vice versa with regard to citizens associations for development and assistance. The identity of community was more important than the identity of race for the most part.

It will become more and difficult to govern this city--and this nation--if the politics of racial and ethnic identity become more and more prominent and dominate the exchange of ideas. How many Kansas Citys are there? Two? Three? The answer to that question should be that there is only one (1) Kansas City.

Blogger's note: I've been sitting with this post since Saturday considering whether or not to publish it. I asked questions: Was it naive to think that Blacks had a level playing field? Was it unfair to call out parts of the Black community for playing the victim so they could get goodies and power? Was it wrong to question the quality of leadership in the Black community? Were I to post this as a melanin deficient White person would I just earn scorn and the label of racist (which is the farthest from the truth)?

Well, Louie Diuguid's op-Ed on "The Help" that ended with a whiny group of paragraphs of how Blacks are victims coupled with TKC's post poopooing the neighborhood citizen concerns about redistricting and now I am ready to post this. Until we stop splitting ourselves up to a bunch of identity groups and start thinking more on the order of putting our various talents together for the greater good, we will struggle to solve the many problems that face us. We as humans will always be more comfortable with people like ourselves. If we are smart we realize however that we are not "better" or "worse" than any other group, just different, and that the best way to work together is to not major on differences but on human commonality. As we do this, we get to know one another, removing stereotypes and boogymen along the way. To me, the way it appears that this redistricting will be done is a step in the wrong direction; a step that will serve to further isolate Blacks, Whites and others from each other, generating fear and resentment and making it harder to solve problems and govern this city.

Bloggus Interruptus

Hi folks. I hope you all are having a fab Saturday night. In SKC Observer news, the power adapter to The Observer's laptop has developed a fatal short. So blogging will be via iPhone and public computers until a replacement is secured. Like I said over on Facebook, treat your laptop power cord with great love and respect as they are expensive to replace.
I hope to continue to post regularly during this time, but posts may have a few more typos and not read as smooth. In addition, there will be fewer photos.
Thank you for your patience and for your readership.

Don't Play With Fire!

Folks, there have been quite a few fires lately--not just spectacular blazes in abandoned buildings but fires in occupied houses and apartments. Be safe out there. If you choose to smoke (I have no idea why but it's a mostly free country), take care to make sure your butts are out and your matches and lighters are out of reach of kids. Be careful cooking--don't leave the stovetop unattended. Watch overloading electrical outlets with lots of stuff. Don't put cords under carpets where they can fray.

You know all this stuff but we all get lax. We say oh, fIres are something that happen to the family down the road or on the other side of town. Be smart.

Finally, because accidents do happen, be sure your smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors are working. The time change back to standard time is coming up and that is a perfect time to change the batteries in your detectors.

Links:

http://groucho-karl-marx.blogspot.com/2011/10/two-injured-in-kc-mo-2-alarm-apartment.html

http://www.kctv5.com/story/15784598/firefighters-on-both-sides-of-the-state-line-kept-busy

Late Night Redistricting Ramblings...

I went to the Southern Communities Coalition meeting tonight. As you might expect, it was a meeting of folks who rejected the Map 1-R redistricting solutions; who saw the map that lopped of the top half of the 6th district west clear to Holmes and sent the north west border clear up to 59th street in spots. South KC residents saw both loss--to the 5th of commercial and civic resources--and threat--from the wishes of the richer and more highly connected Waldo/Brookside area. To many it felt as if the 6th was paying the price for the failings of the 5th and 3rd districts--the districts losing population to both other KCMO areas and other cities in the metro due to high crime and other quality of life issues.

You can't think about redistricting without ending up thinking about race matters and we did end up talking after more explicitly afterwards. I hope to share more later, and some photos taken at the meetings, as well as the "community map."
The citizen's committee meets tomorrow at 3:30 at City Hall to issue its decision. It would be nice for the committee to do the people of south KC the courtesy of passing on the "community map" on to the council as well as the so-called "done deal" map 1-R. We may still end up being sliced up pretty well but at least they will have heard us scream.

Posted using Blogger for iPhone.

Map proposed by a group of 6th district citizens. Other maps can be found in this earlier post.