Imagining the worst, hoping for the best…
It’s common knowledge. I write some of my best stuff when I am about to boil over and wreck someone’s day. So I guess what I am going to do is something like that.
I am going to let you all imagine a little something.
Imagine you have this friend, a dear friend that means the world to you.
Imagine you get a message from that friend…that she has been having some incredibly difficult family problems involving her sociopathic and incredibly violent douchebag ex-husband (who we will imagine is called Jordan1). She is concerned for her children… yes, the same ones we will imagine have proven he has abused2 That’s right, imagine she’s already had him proven to be abusive to the kids (in court no less).
Imagine finding out that she was instructed to stop reporting the abuse or she would lose her children by DFPS3 not because they were false, but because they didn’t have the ability/manpower to process the reports she was filing and she was questioning their ability to do their job. I imagine I would already be calling shenanigans…
Imagine finding out that the DFPS deliberately informed the psycho asshat ex-husband when she was taking the kids to visit her parents, and how incredibly coincidental it would have been that someone broke into her house, and stole important documentation, than trashed out the entire house…all of it.
Imagine hearing that she’s so afraid of retaliation from her ex-husband that she moves an extremely promising blog offline to keep the psycho asshat ex-husband from going off the deep end and showing up to kill them all …imagine that I’m not even joking here people…Imagine someone chaining you through fear and terror so much that you can’t express yourself anymore. Imagine that while tracking her website it’s found that psycho asshat ex-husband is hitting her site over 50 times a day (fyi – this is reaaaaally too much even if they’re really really funny).
Imagine finding out the DFPS turned around and dismissed all the reports because the pictures didn’t show enough damage like bruises arent enough to prove abuse?!, only to find out that they looked at black and whites instead of the color originals that were actually submitted with the report.
Imagine it’s been a year, and he’s been reported directly to the DFPS supervisor about the injuries at least 6 times. SIX TIMES in over a years time, not including the medical personnel that the mother brought the child to after the kids were injured so bad they had to see a doctor. Imagine the police are now saying that they don’t want to hear a report from you unless there are broken bones involved.
Imagine that the psycho asshat ex-husband got away with breaking into and destroying everything in the her house…everything. Stole all her documentation, the kids birth documents, her laptop (which held all of her professional and personal documents), this jerk even stole some of the kids clothes.
Imagine this piece of work was just discovered to have stolen and used his ex-wife’s identity to secure a wireless account through AT&T and running up hundreds of dollars.. Imagine AT&T wouldn’t admit to any wrongdoing on their part.
Imagine this asshat actually got caught bugging her home. Imagine how invaded you would feel if you found out that he bugged your home, and the cops weren’t able to convict him for it even after he’d admitted it was his when it was found.
Imagine that not only did DFPS toss all that out. Imagine that the counselor (we’ll call her Annette4) in charge tells your friend that since her ex-husband (who makes six figures, only has a 30 hour work-week, and doesn’t even pay his support on time) is under so much stress with his job and the divorce that she, the mother -who has to work extra hours every week because said imaginary douche canoe ex-husband isn’t paying his support to her – will now be expected to transport the kids to him for visitation. Imagine this asshole man, already proven to be violent and constantly under the influence of pain-killers and heavy anti-depressants. Then imagine that not only does your friend have to permit him around the kids, imagine her being told she will have to actually drive those children to him…just imagine a social worker telling you that, under pain of reporting that you’re not following a court ordered visitation.
Now imagine having to see your child returned to you bruised and injured every single time the psycho asshat ex-husband is given unsupervised visitation…for the last year.
Now imagine your child returning to you from visitation and finding out the psycho asshat ex-husband has taught his 3 year old son to call his mother a whore.
I want you to imagine trying to protect those kids, when the very system designed to protect them is more interested in exposing them to an abusive and violent sociopath.
What would YOU do?
Me? I imagine I would I call her every day to make sure she’s okay, and that her kids are okay, and then I’d get more and more angry and eventually write about it in my blog. I imagine I would want to know who’s in charge of making sure the DFPS is handling their cases properly. Because I imagine I haven’t heard from DFPS regarding any reports. I imagine tomorrow I’ll be able to spend the time necessary to make all the phone calls I need to the media regarding this (those that aren’t already subscribed to me via RSS), since I imagine the DFPS didn’t find one of these reports important enough to follow up with me on…namely MINE.
I imagine that dear friend is so far away that I’ll have to take leave from my job to come down there and help. So before I do that, I am going to let everyone else I can think of reaching know about this…because I imagine I know of at least one person that’s reported these problems to the DFPS that still hasn’t been contacted, and if so the ball is getting dropped bigtime.
Hear that?…that’s the sound of the clock running out before the charade is at an end and we can imagine the police finally being able to charge that psycho asshat ex-husband with something that will stick.
…that’s the sound of the time running out before we imagine the DFPS realizes that so much damage lays squarely at their feet that despite it being almost impossible to fix, they will start.
…that’s the sound of the clock as time continues and we imagine someone reads this and finally realizes they might not be imagining a damn thing.
Before you label me for going too far. Before you think I shouldn’t be involved. Please know that I deliberated for a LONG time about posting this. In the scenario depicted above, an incredibly dear friend and her children are being nothing short of terrorized physically and mentally by a guy that the state agencies simply seem incapable or unwilling to protect them from. An appeal to the media, and to the public is sometimes necessary in order to make it clear that in this imagined scene, at least a few of us will not stop defending our friends…even where the state makes it evident they will not.
And before someone mistakenly thinks they might need to C&D me, you’d better read the disclaimer at the bottom of this website. This is my house, not yours. Conjecture isn’t illegal, neither is imagination, and most importantly neither is my ability to continue speaking out about everything I find wrong in this world….most importantly some imaginary asshat that thinks he can continually terrorize a family, and the fucked up system that is turning a blind eye to it all.
UPDATE:
The CPS division of the DFPS can be located at:
http://www.dfps.state.tx.us/Child_Protection/About_Child_Protective_Services/. If you need to contact them or even suspect abuse, please call 1-800-252-5400 or go to https://www.txabusehotline.org
If you are an agent of the state or with the media and wish to get more information regarding this article, please use the contact page (CLICK HERE).
