Surely, they exist?

Posted on August 8, 2026 by jackperspectives

The reality of our current culture is that families are not coming in to adopt – or even foster – older teens. Not that we always had a large contingent of such families, but it is much worse than ever. The shortage is across the country apparently, and it is since COVID. My administrative staff is convinced that it is a consequence of the way we live now. Everybody is too focused on themselves and their own needs. I get that; I expect that focus to be the focus for my own kids.

Yet, I remain convinced that there are some people out there who do have the wherewithal to give the kids a life. I keep thinking – hoping? – that it’s a matter of finding them. Thus, this blog. Our hope is that it will reach the people I am talking about or reach others who would know the people I am talking about: maybe a friend, a neighbor, a relative whom you suspect might take to these kids. Maybe someone who has raised their kids but is young enough to take on another. Or someone who has no kids but does have a settled life and is willing to do this. Someone.

Otherwise, what choice – what adult – is there for these 4% of the foster care population? The new idea is to not take the kids into foster care in the first place: leave them home or with other relatives and send in the services to get the families through. Sure, agreed. But not every kid has a family they can stay with. Some families are simply too broken. Some families have disappeared even.

What then about these kids? We believe there really aren’t that many of them – maybe 12,000 nationwide. We can’t find good homes in a country of about 350 million people? That’s about 30,000 people for each of the kids. Assuming half the country are adults, that’s still 15,000 people per child. And we can’t find them? Surely they exist. Right?

Right?

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The Luckiest Man I’ve Ever Met

Posted on July 17, 2026 by jackperspectives

I adopted my first kids nearly 48 years ago, although their finalizations took a while. Since then, I have adopted many more. All of this came together again yesterday, on Father’s Day, when I heard from most of them, and many of my grandchildren.  This past month, despite my age, I did it again. Kind of. Both are boys; both are/have been in my Family Focus program. The one is 19, and he signed out of care a while ago, and so we are doing his finalization privately. He has no family to speak of.  The other is only 17, still in foster care, and he has an involved active mother who is dealing with medical issues and cannot currently care for him. 

My response to either teen is exactly the same: I am committed to your good forever. I hold you – I put you – in my heart exactly as I do with every other one of my other kids – some now in their 60s. There is nothing anyone can do to make me change my commitment to either of them.  I have enough parenting experience to know this about myself. My goal for them is only that they be true to themselves and if they are, I am certain that they will then be true to anyone who comes into their lives. 

…This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man…

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3.

My commitment to each of them is a parental commitment. I need nothing from them to make this commitment except their permission; They don’t owe me anything and never will. My choice to love them is MY choice. It is not conditional on any behavior of theirs, or feeling of mine. It is also not revocable. 

Might they get pissed off at me and walk away?  Yep.  I have had a few of my kids do that over the past five decades (eventually – sometimes years later –  they came back).  So what? Were those years painful for me?  Of course. But again: so what?  I’m a big boy and I can take the pain – trusting that I am giving my kids what they need, even if that is a parent to resent, to blame, to cut off, to walk away from. Because too often before, the earlier parents they had would not allow them to do that without getting angry, resentful, blameful, and so forth. 

I love my kids – but I don’t need them to satisfy some emotional need inside me. And that freedom I am able to give them is exactly how love is measured. I was taught that; and I have experienced that from the real parents who took me on – at 17 – and changed my thinking and my life forever. 

It costs me next to nothing to give my kids themselves.  

And the payoff for me?  My kids love me, in response to my love for them, beyond measure. “There is nothing,” I was taught by Msgr. Huntington, “that is not mutual.” Yes, yes, yes. 

And so, I am the luckiest man I’ve ever met. 

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Any Family Is NOT Better Than No Family

Posted on July 15, 2026 by jackperspectives

The push in recent years has been to avoid placing kids into foster care. The idea has been to keep the kids home and provide whatever services they or their families might need in order to make it work.  It’s certainly working statistics wise: the number of kids in care is getting smaller and smaller by significant numbers. But there will always be kids who simply cannot remain at home.  Whatever number of kids that is, among them will be those kids that we call the 4% (see the previous posting). 

We live in a culture of attachment. We get attached to our people, our beliefs, our feelings, our things. And then we use the word “love” to describe those attachments: I love my neighborhood; I love veal parmesan; I love my car; I love how you make me feel.  The kids that have so much difficulty in the foster care system have an apparent inability to attach: thus the diagnosis of RAD – reactive attachment disorder.  These kids haven’t had the same experiences of attachment that most folks do. The constant moving from home to home, school district to school district, family to family has given them the experience of the shallowness of attachments, which are, by definition  – if you think about it, all conditional. Our culture, by mixing up the concepts and experiences of attachment and love, allow too many of us to con ourselves into accepting these conditional attachments as being all there is.  That con does not work for RAD kids. And that’s a healthy thing for them. They demand real: real nurturance, real commitment, real respect, real trust, and real love.  They don’t often know what those real things are, but they sure as heck know what they aren’t.  They need folks who believe in real and recognize the superficiality of attachments. 

The movie “Possum Trot” demonstrates real, both when it’s missing and when it’s there. 

I am, sadly, to the point of no longer believing that any family is better than no family, at least for RAD kids. 

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I’m back – years later, but I’m back

Posted on July 14, 2026 by jackperspectives
Right #1Download

This is a new blog. It is connected to my old blog (Jack Brennan Perspectives.com) but whereas the old one was my personal perspective, this one is from the agency perspective. The two are closely related but the purpose is different – after all, I have been with Family Focus since before their first day, almost forty years ago, and I have now been the Executive Director for going on 13 years. 

To wit:

We once figured out that it was about 80% of foster kids who eventually go home. Of the 20% that don’t go home, about 80% of those, get adopted by their current foster parents, or end up personally connected somehow to a committed adult.  That leaves 4% of the foster kids who have no one. (Though these numbers are approximations, they are close enough for our purposes.) These 4% are very difficult to find adoptive families for: they are older, and these are the kids who bounce from home to home and oftentimes end up in Residential Treatment Centers or even Psych hospitals. Eventually they age out of foster care, whether at 18 or 21, and end up nowhere.  Nowhere being the street, the jails, the shelters.

This blog is an attempt to attract the people who might be willing to take a chance on parenting these kids.   Historically, the characteristics that mark the success of those who have taken them on have little or nothing to do with the children, but everything to do with the adults.  The kids have terrible histories of trauma, and abuse, and abandonment, all leaving their mark on them.  The adults who’ve succeeded with parenting these multiply betrayed kids also have commonalities.  They are first and foremost emotionally adults.  They believe regarding the kids that “there but for the grace of God, go I.”  They believe that their kids are whole, as people, entitled to respect, dignity, trust, and love.  When they recognize the depths of suffering that our kids have endured and how it has impacted their thinking and behavior, they don’t blame the kids, nor do they run away.  They choose to change their own thinking, their own perspectives, and their own responses to their kids. They choose to be “bigger than” their kids.  

We live in a blaming culture. To find the people who have been able to transcend that culture is not easy.  Our kids – the 4% – have lived in many many foster and/or adoptive homes that couldn’t transcend the culture.  They gave the kids up, saying some version of this sentence, “this child has shown me by his/her behavior that he/she does not want to be part of my family.”  In truth – it was that the behavior has shown the families that they – the families – do not want such kids to be part of their family.  It is called, “Blaming the Victim” and there is a 55-year-old, and very intriguing, book with that title, by a man named William Ryan.

It is our hope that this blog – and our website – might reach those people who would step up for parenting our kids; who would step up for right. 

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“It’s You – Not Me” 

Posted on March 29, 2025 by jackperspectives

 

I want to tell you of my own experience with the Child Protective System (CPS).

When I took my first kids – 3 brothers, 8, 10. 12 – I had no intention of adoption. Their mother went into rehab and I took the kids until she would finish her program and then take them back. It was a shock to me when she quit the program and did not take them back. That’s how I got started in this adoptive life of mine. 

At the same time that I was dealing with all that, I was a “big brother” to a 12 year old boy named Gilbert, who lived at an RTC, Children’s Village, in Westchester. We used to say that Gilbert was going to end up in the back wards of a psych hospital.  He was a good kid, friendly and funny but he would go bonkers regularly.  He was a skinny kid, but when he went off, it took six adults to control him.  He would grab big butcher knives in his cottage and go after the other kids or the staff.  He did that regularly. When I moved up here, it was too far to drive down to meet with him, and I had the other three here so we decided that Gilbert would visit on the weekends.

One Sunday, he announced to me that he was moving in here. I didn’t take it seriously, but I still told him that no he was not (it wasn’t even a little bit on my radar).  We went back and forth some and then he said, “Why not? These other guys have.”  Now I was stuck. I said to him that he couldn’t do it because Children’s Village would never allow it. He asked me why.  So, I figured, let me go for it. I told him because he went after people with butcher knives when he got mad. I asked, “what are we going to do – have you run up and down my street chasing kids with butcher knives when you get mad?” He looked at me, and asked, in all sincerity, “That’s why they won’t let me come?  Because I chase people with knives?” Now I was taken aback. He’d been at CV for three years already and had been told a zillion times that that behavior was unacceptable. Yet he was responding as if he’d never heard it. I said, yes, that’s why. He then said, “Well, I will stop picking up knives then.”  And that was it: he walked away happy and so did I. I was certain that he could not control his behavior: three years at CV and much meds hadn’t done it for him. Certainly, willpower wouldn’t do it either. 

But he did do it.  He never picked up another knife. Over the course of months, he showed everyone that he had indeed stopped with the knives completely. I was blown away and intrigued. I knew I had to give him a shot here. It was a huge fight to get him, but get him I did. Eventually. 

He did fine enough here. I had to run up to school every day though to deal with his nonsense. And he was constantly threatening suicide. Especially when they built the second span of the Newburgh bridge, in 1980.  But eventually he got enough control that I was able to take him completely off his meds and he was able to move out of his emotionally handicapped school placement.  In September of 1985,  still in school but 18, he was allowed to ride to BOCES every day for a child-care program they had.  He did great there.  But one day, he sat at the kitchen table and told me that his doing great was because of me, not him. “It’s you, not me” is what he said. That he was allowed to go to BOCES; that he was out of the self-contained class; that he was off meds; that I didn’t even know his teachers that school year all didn’t cut it for him. It was me, not him. I did not agree; hell, I didn’t even understand it. 

Two months earlier, I had a child abuse charge lodged against me. My then-17-year-old son had been doing nothing in school for two years. Finally, I told him that I was going to sign him out and maybe he should think about the army. He was curious and he and I went up to the recruiter even. But he failed the entry exam. However, he’d told his “victim” version to his friend and the friend’s mother called CPS. It was August, as I remember.

The investigator, maybe 23, was named Deborah Rinaldi. That four decades later I remember her name shows how I experienced what happened next. It felt from the gitgo that she had something against me. She refused to look at any of the school documentation, for instance. Ultimately, she found me guilty – “indicated” – in CPS terms. I was shocked and horrified. I appealed it to her; to her bosses; and I got nowhere. Finally in October I went to a lawyer. He told me that there was nothing to be done but do whatever they wanted. I told him that there was nothing they wanted me to do. My case was “indicated but closed.” And he told me that I was stuck with it. I had another kid in the midst of being adopted and I knew his adoption would be stopped cold with a CPS conviction against me. 

I came home from the lawyer on a Friday and completely fell apart.  My life, I felt, was destroyed. It was a terrible Columbus Day weekend.  Monday night, Gilbert picked up a knife for the first time in over six years.  The next day, he jumped off the bridge. 

It took me a long time to recover, if I even still have. I blamed the system; specifically, Rinaldi.  Here I was doing this incredible work with now seven institution kids that no one else could touch. I was the opposite of an abuser. I was saving them, and society. I told myself lots of truths.  All truths. 

I realized only years later that those truths were what we later named “irrelevant truths.”  The deepest truth was that I had been insulted by her; by the system. I was the good guy here. I was entitled to respect for what I was doing – certainly not this. 

But it didn’t matter. Gilbert held himself together; hell, he created himself with me as his support; as his father. And I threw it all away to indulge in my resentful feelings. Because the CPS folks were wrong. And they were – 40 years later I still say they were wrong. Disgustingly wrong. But I allowed my feelings about them to take over my life. I didn’t deserve what they did to me. But instead of putting the feelings where they belonged I indulged them.

And with that, Gilbert knew I couldn’t help him any longer. Once I allowed the feelings to take me over, once I indulged them, there would be no room for him. And, sensing what was going on inside of me for two months, he’d told me – weeks earlier – that without me, he couldn’t do it: “it’s you, not me.”

I didn’t know better; I was only 35; I had no one to guide me through that horror of CPS.  Too bad. I took my eye off the prize and Gilbert died. 

There are all kinds of truths. The most difficult to get past are the ones that feel so completely true but are ultimately irrelevant.  And dangerous.  I wish I’d known that forty years ago. 

Jack

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The Measure of an Adult

Posted on March 9, 2025 by jackperspectives

When I was in high school math class, it intrigued the heck out of me that there were some kind of equations that had more than one correct answer. If you stopped at the first answer, because it worked, and never saw the second answer, that also worked, you would be missing the truth of the equation.  So too,  I think, in life.

There are qualities that make one an adult, the easiest one, of course, being age: 18 or 21 or whatever we agree on. But that only makes a person a technical adult. What is it that makes a person a true adult?  I have always believed that it is the taking  on of responsibilities – really meaning duties, I think now –  that defines adulthood. And I still believe that is true. But there is more truth about adulthood that I haven’t been thinking enough about.  This week though I saw something I had not realized explicitly before that I think more precisely defines an adult, no matter their age nor their responsibilities. And that is: protection.  Adults – meaning people who can be trusted to act as adults – protect, above all else, don’t they?

My father was not a good father. He was, as those who know me have often heard me say, a good citizen. He took care of my needs for community safety, for food, clothes, medical care, education and so forth. He did not take care of my internal need for safety from his anger, and too often, his rage. He was a reactor. Internally then I had to develop ways to protect myself from him.  

When we went to live with Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank (see my historical blog postings), it was a breath of fresh air.  They were both adults. Uncle Frank did not dump his feelings on us the way my father did. I looked up to him in many ways. Being in his presence did not threaten my safety, internal or external, ever. Although he was still a reactor, he was – is there such a thing? – a reasonable one.  Being in his presence was to be in the presence of an adult. 

But there is another level of protection that Uncle Frank did not – I really think, could not – give me. Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington did though.  I struggle to explain this even to myself, even at my age. My father gave me external protection – physical ; Uncle Frank gave me internal protection – psychological, I suppose;  But what protection did Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington give me?  

Wasn’t it spiritual protection? They taught me, separately, that blame is not a proper way of seeing ourselves.  Neither one believed in blame as a proper dynamic within relationships. Isn’t that then spiritual protection? And wasn’t it that perspective that led me down the road of eventually building a safe relationship with myself?  A relationship that neither my father nor Uncle Frank were ready (able?) to give me. 

Having older kids in the house again I am recognizing that using control to try to protect them can’t work in a society (if it ever did) with the internet and smart phones. So, parenting in 2025 sure gets one thinking in terms of protection.  My parental job – above all? – is to teach them about protection: physical, psychological, and, most especially, spiritual.  I cannot allow myself, or them, to be distracted by anything else. I must measure their distance from adulthood, not in years, or accomplishments. I must measure that distance in their understanding of protection, their willingness to always protect, and their habitual, automatic even,  behavior of protection. They are – Msgr. H explicitly taught me this –  to protect anyone and every one who crosses their path. 

My model is not being a “good citizen” like my father. Nor is it being an “adult man” like Uncle Frank. The model is being an always present “fully protective person” –  living beyond the culture, like my beloved and still, 25 years after their deaths, very much missed, Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington – my true, though not my factual, parents. 

All of which must lead us to ask ourselves: what level of protection has been given to the multiply betrayed kids who cross our path? What has that level done to them? And what is then called for from us?

There is only one answer: protection.

Jack

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If A Relationship Is Not A “We”, Then What Is It?

Posted on February 16, 2025 by jackperspectives

When you adopt a kid from the foster care system, especially a teen, and more especially one who was living in an institution (the old orphanages), you have to recognize that their experiences have led them to thinking  – and not thinking – in a way that is often very surprising. And troubling. 

Anthony’s video about his own adoption is out there online now (Family Focus Adoption on Facebook or Instagram) and I know that he wrote, and then spoke, the truth from beginning to end – which is why we recorded it and put it online. I am writing this afternoon to talk a bit about my perspective on him and his adoption. 

Anthony’s judgement is not good. Like many of the kids with his kind of background (and far too many Americans) he lives by his feelings.  Like a young kid, he wants what he wants when he wants it. And this has caused him problems. And driven me crazy. 

Example: he had a great position at Amazon for the past year and a half. He liked it; he was good at; and he got paid really well. But he wants to be on his phone when he wants to be on his phone.  For doing it more than once, it got him put on probation. Then, last month, he did it again, while on that probation, and he was immediately fired.  

Prior to that, my second car, that I was letting him use, died. He decided that he wanted to get a fancy-dancy car. As my car dealer called it: a “vroom vroom” car.  Anthony found a used one at a dealer in the Bronx.  I told him not to buy it: that a car in the city would most likely have much more wear and tear on it than a suburban car. But he was determined. I told him what to watch out for from this used car dealer and I watched as Anthony just blew past every red flag that I saw and pointed out to him. And there were plenty. I asked: “What are you going to do if this lying guy is selling you a lemon; what if you have to bring it to him for repairs and he keeps the car for weeks to do them? What if the lemon can’t be fixed? Where will you get the money to buy a different car?” And so forth and so on.   But he’s 20 years old – I couldn’t forbid him. So, he bought it. I told him that he was on his own. I wasn’t helping him buy it; I wasn’t driving to the Bronx, etc. (of course I violated that when I took him to my mechanics later.)

Within days, the “check engine light” came on. My mechanic, around the corner, opened the hood and said that there was no way he could fix the car.  We took it to my dealer’s mechanic and he said something that he had never said to me in 25 years: “We cannot fix this car.”  He recommended a specialty shop that fixes “vroom vroom” cars.  We brought the car there a month ago and they – on first look – told us to bring it back to the dealer he got it from and get his money back. But Anthony wanted this car, this model specifically. So, we asked if it could be fixed.  They thought so – but it would cost. They gave us an estimate and began work. And as they did the work they came up upon more and more issues. The estimate kept going up and this week had reached 10 grand. 

Yesterday, they called us in and told us that it wasn’t worth fixing; that there was some (even criminal) issues regarding how it passed inspection etc. They told us what to do to walk away whole and how to get the dealer to buy the car back and pay for the repair work already done using DMV. We will do it and see. Meanwhile, Anthony is without a car still. 

But three times, while we were in the garage, while we walked to my car, when we were in the car, Anthony said to me, “Pop, what are we going to do?”  

I wanted to scream at him for bringing this all down on his head, and mine.  I wanted to tell him that he’d made his bed and he will have to lie in it. I wanted to tell him that “I told you so.”  I wanted to tell him a lot of things. 

But I didn’t. 

Because I was experiencing in that very moment, through his language and his presence with me,  his conviction that he and I were a “WE.” I wouldn’t have talked like that at his age. I would have said, “What am I going to do?”  Anthony said, “What are WE going to do?”

Not a doubt in his mind that WE would be doing something. 

That, folks, is the joy, and the realness, of being a father to this young man. And to all those who have been betrayed as he was.

That is what adoption is about: “Pop, what are we going to do?”

WE.

Jack

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Perspectives Part Two (over a decade later): Stories and Musings of a Now Old Man

Posted on February 13, 2025 by jackperspectives

I’m an old man now, by any measure: I’ll be 75 in September. But I’m still working full-time. I have a twenty year old whose adoption I finalized 15 months ago. And I reopened my foster care license two months ago for two kids not known to each other; one 15 and the other 18. My oldest three kids are 61, 63, and the oldest, dead now, would be 64 this May. I am an old man, by any measure – it’s true.
But I don’t feel old; I don’t act old; I don’t think old. I live in the present. And in the present, it is time to begin this blog again. Because maybe my words, my stories, my musings will touch someone enough that that someone will decide to give a teen living in foster care with no permanent parent the gift that I was given when I was seventeen: the gift of forever connection to an adult who chose to love me.
For free. Neither Aunt Rita nor Fr. Chris Huntington asked anything of me but respect. Respect for each of them, respect for myself, and respect for every person on earth. They believed that every person is made in the image and likeness of God. After nearly 75 years of my own life, I have seen enough evidence that they were on the money. 100% on the money. That’s why I originally dedicated this blog to their memory. And tonight I renew that dedication.

I don’t know how often I will write, but I will write regularly. I need to reach the people who are able to recognize the inside truth of a teen who has no one; people who then might decide to give that teen a parent, a home, a real life. The people who might decide to choose to love – as Aunt Rita and Fr. Huntington, separately, chose to love me. And thereby gave me this most incredible life. I am, as I expect will become clear going forward, the luckiest man I’ve ever met.
Jack

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A Broken Heart Is Not the Same As A Closed Heart

Posted on October 26, 2014 by jackperspectives

I was at a meeting last week where adoption workers and supervisors from different counties got together in an attempt to find families for kids who are in particular need – kids who have no one personal in their lives at all.  They are the same kind of kids who get referred to my agency for adoptive placement going back decades.  They are older; many are young teens or close to it; they have psychiatric diagnoses; they have had lots of foster families and so forth.  Finding homes for those kind of kids is why my agency – Family Focus Adoption Services – exists.  I know the type of kids; I have heard the stories for all these years. But this time, there was a significant difference to what I was hearing. Maybe not significant for these caseworkers, but I was new to these meetings, and this was definitely overwhelming for me.

The workers present the kids verbally and thoroughly and it takes a long time to get through them all.  But kid after kid after kid, they reported, had been previously adopted. Not just placed for adoption, but actually finalized in court.  That means, in NY, that their birth certificates, e.g., had been permanently changed. Because they permanently belonged to their adoptive families, the names of the adoptive parents were on their birth certificates – forever.  Yet, here these kids were, most of them years after their finalizations, needing families. It made me berserk.

Our kids have difficulties beyond the norm – no doubt. But our kids have been abused, neglected, and betrayed beyond the norm also.  They are going to have a rocky road growing up. I certainly know this. I am an adoptive parent with some kids now past 50. I get it. But it’s not like any of us didn’t know what we were getting into.  The worst training out there for foster parents gives people enough to know this is not going to be an easy road raising these kids.

And if it turns out to be harder beyond anything we ever dreamed of, so what?  I had no idea – none – of the experiences I would have with my kids when I took the first of them 36 years ago. Plenty of birth parents are raising kids who turned out to be harder to raise than they ever dreamed.  I am not saying one must live with a kid whose behavior would be defined as criminal, were he to be an adult. No one should have to do that. I am saying however that one must remain open to one’s kids, no matter what. No psychiatric, criminal, or any other kind of behavior necessitates closing off one’s heart.  On the contrary, watching one’s child go through those kind of behaviors, should result in opening up one’s (now-broken) heart.

Our kids were targets of other people’s feelings. These kids didn’t ask for the internal consequences that that abuse, neglect, and betrayal, brought inside them, such as PTSD.

We are the adults; we took them on as our kids; and we need to hold on forever. That is the core definition of “parent” isn’t it?  Holding on forever.

Or what’s the point?

Jack

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Catch-22

Posted on October 15, 2014 by jackperspectives

Okay, I’m back. Or more accurately, I think I’m back. It’s been six months since I made a blog entry and I can’t believe that it has been that long. Where have I been?  Busy, of course.  What else could I say?

And what is it that has brought me back this morning? Boiling blood. That is, my blood is boiling. About what? The usual, the always, the ridiculous: bureaucrats and their nonsense.

I got a call last night from a young guy who aged out of the foster care system. He’s 24 now. Like so many of his aged out peers, he has not been doing well preparing for his adulthood. Like so many of them, for whatever reason, he has never learned to protect anything or anybody. He’s thrown away opportunity after opportunity. He blew college; he had his driver’s license snatched; he has no money; no career direction.

As we talked, he told me that he had gone back to a job that I know is not good for him. He knows it too. I asked him why the heck he was doing that. And his response is what made my blood boil – still this morning.

He told me that he had no choice.

Yeah right. What does that ever mean?

Well, it turns out that the only picture id he has – since 9/11 required by almost all jobs – was his license. Once it is an expired license, it doesn’t count as an id. So he needs his birth certificate to begin the process of getting his license back. He claims that he can’t even get a non-driver’s photo id because despite the fact that the DMV KNOWS who he is is – they gave him his license after all – it is bureaucratically irrelevant. His old license, which he only got because he once had the right paperwork and showed it to them, and they know it, is EXPIRED. His picture is on the damn expired license, keep in mind. He has his SS card; school records, etc.  But his evidence that he is himself is EXPIRED!

So, my boy contacted Dade County Florida (Vital Statistics Office) where he was born – in order to get a new copy of his birth certificate. And guess what? He must submit a photo ID to get the birth certificate.   He was on the phone with them for over an hour, he told me, and got nowhere.   And this is the CATCH-22 that drives me berserk.

I figured he was missing some vital detail in his story and there had to be a way to get the birth certificate, even without the picture id. So I tried every which way I could to get it this morning on-line.  And I could not get around the system. There was no way to deal with this not-so-unusual circumstance. Except one, right there on the form: a lawyer. Hire a lawyer. Just what every aged out foster kid can afford.

I did that this morning. I asked a long time friend of Family Focus, who is a lawyer, to take this young man on as a client and she has agreed to help. But where would this guy be if he didn’t know me or I wasn’t willing to help? Exactly where he is: working a job that he shouldn’t be doing with no hope of resolving this.

The kids aging out of foster care continue to have enough things stacked up against them. They don’t need the bureaucracy to make it all worse.

Some of these bureaucratic systems feed hopelessness and disempowerment.  And it’s not just poor folks either.  Have you heard about this medical insurance nonsense that some doctor who is not covered by your insurance can be called into the operating room while you are under, to help out. I’m sure we signed – under duress, of course – permissions for it before the operation.  And then folks are getting hit with medical bills from these non-covered doctors for tens of thousands of dollars.

Thieves and criminals are bad enough, but at least they don’t hide what they are doing under a cloak of reasonableness.  Bureaucrats do. These anti-human systems should be outlawed, dismantled, or drastically changed.  They are disgraceful, and even disgusting, in their disrespect for the person.

Taking away hope from people is very wrong – and very dangerous besides. We don’t get that.

I guess I’m back for real.

Jack

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