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Support Info: If you are a Survivor and need emotional support, a national crisis line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week: Residential School Survivor Support Line: 1-866-925-4419. Additional Health Support Information: Emotional, cultural, and professional support services are also available to Survivors and their families through the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program. Services can be accessed on an individual, family, or group basis.” These & regional support phone numbers are found at https://nctr.ca/contact/survivors/ . THANK YOU MEGWETCH for reading

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Friday, January 20, 2017

Movie Review: After Watching Steve Jobs

Anne Heffron

I was okay watching Steve Jobs until the last ten minutes.

Then I had to keep wiping at my face with my sleeve because I would have had to walk across the room for a Kleenex.

I was at home, and I was watching the movie on my computer, so I was able to rewind and watch the last two scenes again and again: the one scene with Jobs and his daughter Lisa up on the parking structure where, for the first time in his life, he was willingly making himself late for a product launch, and the next scene where he is on stage, walking towards Lisa, ignoring the crowd, focused, for the first time perhaps, solely on her, on Lisa. The daughter he had once publicly claimed was not his. And now there he was, publicly claiming her. It was like a fairy tale magnified a hundred times, a happily ever after many other adoptees and I will never have.

It has been my experience it’s pretty easy for birth parents to deny either the existence of their child (my birth mother) or the importance of a meet and greet (my birth father). I can’t imagine what it would be like for either my birth mother or birth father to walk towards me, beaming with love or acceptance.

Do you remember being a kid and doing something really cool, like jumping off the diving board for the first time or tying your shoes or getting a 100 on a quiz at school? The kind of thing that had you running to your parents because you knew they were going to be thrilled? That’s a big part of being a kid. Accomplishing one thing after another and having your parents mirror your excitement, proving to you that you are a good person, you are worthy of this life you were given, that everything will be okay because you got this.

Imagine showing up at age 24 or 52, and saying to your finally-found mother or father, Here I am. You made me! We get to see what each other looks like! and having that person shrug and turn away or shake her head and say, You have the wrong person. It’s not me when you know 100% this person is in fact your birth mother. Or imagine if your birth father writes, My wife says you’re not family, so I can’t talk to you.

Imagine you find out you have half siblings, and either they don’t want to meet you, or they do want to meet you and suddenly, for no reason you can know for sure, cut off all contact.

This is part of adoption a lot of people don’t talk about. It’s one of the reason adoptees commit suicide. It’s one of the reason there’s a disproportionate number of adoptees seeking mental health care. When blood relatives turn their backs on adoptees, the effects are devastating, and yet many adoptees do what I did, which is to shrug it off.  I didn’t want to meet her/him anyway. I already have brothers/sisters. I don’t need more.

We shrug it off because the alternative is to feel a level of rejection so deep it can’t be compared to anything else. We shrug it off because the alternative is to feel.

When blood relatives turn their backs on adoptees, it’s often a knife in the part of the brain where the adoptee stores self-worth. Why would I want to exist if the very people who made me either deny my existence or don’t care enough about me to meet? It’s not rocket science, and yet it’s a point a lot of people seem to miss.

I don’t get it.
I must be missing that part of my brain.

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The religious organizations that operated the schools — the Anglican Church of Canada, Presbyterian Church in Canada, United Church of Canada, Jesuits of English Canada and some Catholic groups — in 2015 expressed regret for the “well-documented” abuses. The Catholic Church has never offered an official apology, something that Trudeau and others have repeatedly called for.

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Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.

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As the single largest unregulated industry in the United States, adoption is viewed as a benevolent action that results in the formation of “forever families.”
The truth is that it is a very lucrative business with a known sales pitch. With profits last estimated at over $1.44 billion dollars a year, mothers who consider adoption for their babies need to be very aware that all of this promotion clouds the facts and only though independent research can they get an accurate account of what life might be like for both them and their child after signing the adoption paperwork.

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Why tribes do not recommend the DNA swab

Rebecca Tallbear entitled: “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe”, bearing out what I only inferred:

Detailed discussion of the Bering Strait theory and other scientific theories about the population of the modern-day Americas is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it should be noted that Indian people have expressed suspicion that DNA analysis is a tool that scientists will use to support theories about the origins of tribal people that contradict tribal oral histories and origin stories. Perhaps more important,the alternative origin stories of scientists are seen as intending to weaken tribal land and other legal claims (and even diminish a history of colonialism?) that are supported in U.S. federal and tribal law. As genetic evidence has already been used to resolve land conflicts in Asian and Eastern European countries, this is not an unfounded fear.

GOOGLE

In some cases, companies may even take it upon themselves to control the narrative according to their own politics and professed values, with no need for government intervention. For example: Google, the most powerful information company in the world, has been reported to fix its algorithms to promote, demote, and disappear content according to undisclosed internal “fairness” guidelines. This was revealed by a whistleblower named Zach Vorhies in his almost completely ignored book, Google Leaks, and by Project Veritas, in a sting operation against Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation. In their benevolent desire to protect us from hate speech and disinformation, Google/YouTube immediately removed the original Project Veritas video from the Internet. - https://desultoryheroics.com/2023/11/12/internet-censorship-everywhere-all-at-once

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