Someplace like America

In this article it seems that the author is giving an idea of what America is like through the eyes of other Americans. He feels that America is filled with lost dreams and hard lived lives. He gives descriptions of different place in America. "The Deep South: abandoned cotton gins and vine-covered shacks of tenant farmers. The Great Lakes Region: rusting stacks of ghost steel mills on forested river bars; the ruins of a Detroit hotel with a rotting piano collapsed on the floor of it ballroom, where one imagines giddy couples dancing away the nights after the men came home from World War II to an industrial America that promised a limitless tomorrow. All through the Midwest and the West: century-old grain silos; telegraph lines that now transmit only the sound of the wind; storm-ravaged homesteads with blown-out windows on the desolate prairie. California's central valley: forgotten backwaters where people who evoke the Joads still walk lonely the newly unemployed of 2010, in secret patches of dusty digger pine, just as their counterparts formed the Hoovervilles of the 1930's." The author also goes on and gives you stories through the eyes of Americans living a third world lives that he has visited or heard about through all is years. The one that was remembered the most was Michael: "The eyes of a woman who has fallen from upper-class privileged and is now standing in a charity food line are still proud and hurting a year after she lost her big home. a frugal white collar mom, raiding her children on her own, works two jobs year round, in some season, her eyes filled with tears as she talks about how she is barely surviving." As this story goes on it makes me think about how hard it is for the average person to survive in America. This article also shows how brutal America can be on people: "unbridled fear is in the eyes of a Latino man, a U.S. citizen, who is terrified of being stopped and once again bloodied by cops who assume that he's undocumented because of his brown skin. Tis article mainly shows how America is viewed and the opinions of other fellow Americans.

The second part of this article, "The Marching Phalanx" is an explanation on how this article came about. “Someplace Like America was conceived when I was at Yaddo, the artist' colony, in 2007." It tells the story of I guess what seems to be the influence of the book which is a man named Louis Academic. "In the colony library, I'd reread work by Louis Academic, who had been at Yaddo in 1931 and 1933. This Slovenian immigrant had faced hard times while he was emerged as a young writer. He traveled a hundred thousand miles around the country between 1931 and 1937 for his 1938 book My America." The author Dale Mahadrige took that as inspiration to write is own article, Someplace Like America. This section seems to be a mini biography about Dale and the research which led up to the writing of this article.

In conclusion the third and final section of this article, "Our Journeys”, is a conclusion of what route the author took with his photographer to get the facts and details of how Americans viewed the country they live in. "As Michael and I traveled over the years, we didn’t seek out individuals who offered polemics or who were absorbed in politics. We simply listened to Americans who were in trouble because of the economy. In our interviews with workers, some people appeared to be liberal, others conservative, but most were apparently in that amorphous "middle". He basically researched inside people’s lives and how they survived even if they didn’t make the most money or didn’t have all the privileges in living comfortably. This article is a great factual writing about hoe America is viewed and how people of different races and cultured survives in the hardest conditions possible, and still manage to put a smile on and keep striving to make it.

The Hardest Cases: When Children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive

The the number one cause of baby deaths are usually put in care givers and the parents of the child. In Amarillo Texas there was a man named Ernie Lopez was babysitting Asis Vaiz while he was babysitting the bay collapsed. When Asis was rushed to the hospital it was said that’s he had bruses on her head and body. Also vaginal lacerations were found when further examining the baby. Ernie was charged with aggravated assault and the raping of Asis Vaiz and sentenced to 60 years. The doctors called it multiple blunt entries. For the past year and a half Frontline has been investing medical expertise and forensic pathology. They found that some of the medical examiners are not even certified enough to make the accusation they do. They found 24+ cases which have been overturned because of wrong accusations. Monea Tyson was accused for killing her son. The case was based on what the medical examiner said. They found to be a homicide due to head injuries. The that pathologist for the defense say that there were no skull fracture or any other injury to the head. it was discovered that the examiners had lack of board certification, and that another case that a man was on death row because of the examiners false accusation.

                There is little agreement of what causes children to die. An example is shaken baby syndrome,  Melanie Ware did a year in jail because she was accused for the murder of Jaden Page. She was accused of shaking the baby to death. The case was overturn because the examiner who made the accusation was wrong and didn’t look at the lab work that came back for the baby. My opinion about this topic is really shoking I was shocked to hear and know about all these accident that medical dotors who are suppose to certified making wrong accusation. I also learned that this is because with theses kind of cases doctors are already committed to it being a murder case. I did somemore research on the diseases that doctors mix up for murder and my results were: “

Over the next 20 years, Laposata researched and collected interesting cases he saw, and in 2005, he published an article in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology reviewing some of the diseases that had led to child abuse misdiagnoses.

In particular, Laposata's article focuses on blood disorders that can lead to bleeding and/or bruising, including:

■Von Willebrand disease -- a hereditary disorder that prevents blood from clotting properly

■Vitamin K deficiency -- a rare condition where the body can't absorb the vitamin, which is necessary for blood to properly clot

■Leukemia -- cancer of the blood cells

■Ideopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) -- a condition where a low platelet count prevents blood from clotting properly

■Henoch-Schonlein purpura -- an abnormal immune system response that manifests as purple spots on the skin. The cause of this condition is unknown, and it's more common in children than adults.

Laposata created a PowerPoint presentation that highlights the difficulty in diagnosing abuse cases. He shows a photo of a child with bruises from a bleeding disorder next to a photo of a child who was abused and asks which of the cases is abuse. "I've been looking at patients with bleeding problems for years, more than two decades," he says. "And if you show me the two children with the bruises on their legs, I couldn't tell you that that one is the bleeding disorder. I'd have to do the blood test to find out. I also looked at he cases and picked out the one that caught my eye the most and it’s the one that hasn’t been overturned yet the details are such: Her name was Isis Charm Vas and at 6 months old she was a slight child -- fifth percentile in height and weight. When the ambulance sped her to Northwest Texas Hospital on a Saturday morning in October 2000, doctors and nurses feared that someone had done something awful to her delicate little body. A constellation of bruises stretched across her pale skin. CT scans showed blood pooling on her brain and swelling. Her vagina was bleeding, as well. The damage was so severe that her body's vital organs were shutting down. Less than 24 hours later, Isis died. An autopsy bolstered the initial suspicions that she'd been abused. Dr. Joni McClain, a forensic pathologist, ruled Isis' death a homicide and said the baby had been sexually violated. McClain would later describe it as a "classic" case of blunt force trauma, the type of damage often done by a beating. The police investigation that followed was constructed almost entirely from medical evidence. In the end, prosecutors indicted one of the child's babysitters: Ernie Lopez. Today, Lopez is serving a 60-year prison term for sexual assault and is still facing capital murder charges. But in the years since Lopez was sent to the penitentiary, a growing body of evidence has emerged suggesting that McClain and the hospital staffers were wrong about what happened to Isis -- and that her death was not the result of a criminal attack. If Lopez is ultimately exonerated, his case will not be unique.”

Copied from The Hardest Cases: When children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive, www. blogger.com 

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