Abby Zimet
The awful story of Shanesha
Taylor is what's wrong with the state of our union: The mother of two
from Scottsdale, Arizona got called to a job interview she urgently
needed. With no place to leave her two young kids - no neighbors because
she's homeless, no co-workers because she's jobless, no paid childcare
because she has no money, no free childcare because our government,
which at the same time is trying to restrict birth control so women have
to have more kids they don't have the resources to care for - she left them
in her car, with the windows cracked, at naptime.
When she came back
from the interview 45 minutes later, someone had called the police, who
arrested her, charged her with two child abuse felonies, put her in in
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County Jail, and put her kids in state
custody. "She was upset," notes a
police sergeant, who called it "a sad situation all around." It's also a
desperate move by a beleaguered woman facing impossible choices.
Leaving small kids alone in a potentially hot car - even strapped into
their carseats with the windows cracked - is a terrible idea. Another
terrible idea: Arizona cutting 40 percent of its total childcare budget in the past four years, while spending
upwards of $1 billion on its prisons, while states all across this fine
land likewise, ruthlessly cut budgets for childcare, health care, job
training and housing while providing tax cuts to corporations and
prisons, thus turning on its head the notion that the task of any
civilized society is to care for "the last, the least, the littlest."
These skewered policies and priorities have consequences. One of them is
named Shanesha Taylor. She reportedly remains in jail, though her
family is said to have posted bail, and a local woman has begun a fundraiser to help with legal expenses. So there is good in the world. It's just in the wrong - ie: powerless - places.
"Every day in this country some women are coerced or forced by circumstances into
doing things they don’t want to do. For many women, it is the only
static condition of their ever changing lives: to regularly feel
required to make hard choices among, at times, very poor options.”
