Multiconstruct

Took a long drive today north on 63. It was pretty fall color the maples seem to be coming along now. Smokey rode up front and true to her cattle dog nature barked at a lot of cows. Sheep she’s not interested in except the second glance she gives to hay stacks and picket fences, just to make sure they’re not cows. Horses she grants honorary cow status. I dozed through the wild turkey siting (I wasn’t driving). We were early for our thing so took the dogs to a park in Montezuma. Was pleased to see a lot of old school playground equipment although they had the little plastic crappy stuff too. I immediately thought about walking the dogs up the teeter-totter. Smokey was the only one was game and jumped off when she passed the center of balance. Managed to get all the dogs on the merry-go-round. They were not fans.

Had an interesting experience in the court house (not my case). We were talking about the proven inefficacy of DARE with a lawyer and he mentioned it was a program mentioned by name required by legal statute. He mentioned it was the same way with domestic violence programs (The Duluth Model) which I responded was a good idea because otherwise you’d have people doing all kinds of stuff that beyond not being helpful might be harmful like anger management.

Ran into the lawyer again at the clerk’s window and he was chit-chatting withe the prosecutor about a deal on an assault case where they wanted amongst other things anger management. He hooked a thumb at me and said” this guy says anger management is no good”. The prosecutor asked why and I told her it feeds into the excuse making function. “Honey don’t push my buttons you know I got that anger problem” and that it was harmful in domestic violence situations. She said it wasn’t a domestic case and I told her I still had never seen any evidence it was an effective intervention and that I had had good success with anger issues in my batterer intervention class and told her about this dude I had had come through for road rage after not being helped by anger management several times. No one had ever told him anger was a choice. She said “well he did have an assault on his girlfriend sometime back so we’ll try it”.

Nice being in the right place at the right time. There is so much education to do on this topic. Speaking of, if you’re not familiar batterer intervention is rooted in identifying power and control tactics that are at core of the issue. Domestic violence is purposeful and instrumental, which means its done on purpose and done for a reason. Anger management makes it seem like an accident.