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October 09, 2020

LUMBERTON Domestic violence survivors are doing their part to help others this month, as crisis calls have increased because of isolation brought on by COVID-19.

The Robeson County Sheriffs Office responded to 2,732 domestic violence calls in the county between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30. Those numbers do not include calls to city police. There are 1,588 domestic violence protective orders pending in the county.

Seven people have died in Robeson County this year because of matters related to domestic violence, said Emily Locklear, executive director of Southeastern Family Violence Center.

Quarterly reports from the Rape Crisis Center of Robeson County also show a 63.9% increase in rape and/or sexual assaults in the county when compared to the same time period in 2019, according to Virginia Locklear, the Crisis Centers executive director. Those numbers include children under the age of 18.

But there are agencies working to address the increased need brought on by COVID-19.

My whole goal with Domestic Violence Awareness Month (October) is to let individuals in our community know that we are here, Emily Locklear said.

I just want people to know that domestic violence is present in our community and that there is help for any individual, she added.

Emily Locklear is a survivor of domestic violence herself, and she often shares her story and strength with others at the center.

The executive director recalls enduring dating violence at the age of 18, when her then boyfriend tried to run her over with his vehicle, while she was pregnant with his child. He convinced her not to continue taking college courses, a decision she would regret and remedy later at a community college.

It altered my life, Emily Locklear said.

But she shares a common history with the rest of the staff, all of whom have been affected by domestic violence in some way, including a worker who started working Wednesday at the center.

The worker, who chose to remain anonymous, recalls six months spent at the centers shelter when she was about 10 years old. She and her younger brother formed bonds with center workers as her mother attended counseling and planned her escape from a husband who used mental and verbal tactics to control and abuse her.

The worker does not recall being abused by her father, but remembers the shouting behind closed doors and the escape from the man behind the heated words.

Now that Im older, I just aspire to be a change, she said.

Although she is new at the center, she hopes to share her story with people who need to hear it most, and to offer advice.

Your situation doesnt define your story, she said.

The worker encourages other victims to reach out for resources and to seek help if needed.

The center offers a 22-bed shelter at an undisclosed location, and programs to help victims plan their way out of abusive situations and to secure housing away from abusers. It also helps with obtaining domestic violence protective orders and hosts a domestic violence support group. A confidential 24-hour crisis hotline also is available at 910-739-8622 or 1-800-742-7794.

Also among about 20 staff members is a Latino advocate and three other Spanish-speaking staff members who work across language barriers to provide accessibility and support for victims.

The SFVC is working to share videos, photos and stories of survivors on its Facebook page during the pandemic, which has restricted its usual methods of raising community awareness of the issue. The center will host its annual candlelight vigil on Thursday via Facebook to honor the memory of people who have died as a result of domestic violence. Anyone interested in sharing photos of loved ones during the ceremony should call the center by Tuesday at 910-739-8622.

About one in four women and nearly one in 10 men have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported some form of IPV-related (intimate partner violence) impact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are several types of abuse, including physical, emotional, verbal, financial and sexual, among others.

Victims are encouraged to contact the Rape Crisis Center of SFVC for help, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sexual assaults have not stopped during the pandemic nor did they stop during the stay-at-home orders. If anything the experience is compounded by the COVID 19 restrictions and isolation, said Virginia Locklear, of the Rape Crisis Center.

If you decide to stay, call our crisis line to devise a safety plan, said Emily Locklear, of SFVC.

When survivors choose to leave, the abuser feels as if his or her power is threatened, which can lead to retaliation, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

As a result, leaving is often the most dangerous period of time for survivors of abuse, the Hotlines website reads in part.

In 2019, SFVC served 1,383 individuals and received 1,151 crisis calls. Ninety-five adults and 84 children used the shelter to escape abuse that year.

Leaving an abusive relationship may be hard to do but its the right thing to do. There is no shame in reporting domestic violence and asking for help. As seen by the numbers in Robeson County, we have an issue, and no one is immune from the threat of domestic violence, Robeson County Sheriff Burnis Wilkins said.

Simply asking for help is the first step in taking charge of your life, Wilkins added.

To find more resources on domestic violence visit http://www.hotline.org. All services provided by SFVC and the Rape Crisis Center are free and confidential. The Crisis Center can be reached by phone at 910-739-6278.

Read the original here:
Donald Trump Jr. stumps for fathers re-election in Rowland - The Robesonian

President Donald Trump, who contracted the coronavirus earlier this month, floated an idea to surprise observers by ripping open his button-down shirt to reveal a Superman t-shirt underneath, according to a New York Times report published Saturday.

Trump made several calls during his stay at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last week, in which he proposed the idea of first appearing physically weak to observers, people familiar with the matter reportedly said. Upon leaving the hospital, he would rip open his dress shirt to reveal a shirt with the famousSuperman logo, according to The Times.

Trump announced he was diagnosed with the coronavirus on Friday, October 2. By the next night, he was transported to Walter Reed and began taking remdesivir, an anti-viral drug. He was also given an experimental antibody cocktail from the drugmaker Regeneron, and later placed on the steroid dexamethasone.

During Trump's three-day stay at the hospital, contradicting narratives on his prognosis emerged. Unnamed Trump advisors and other associates reportedly described him as being "very tired, very fatigued and having some trouble breathing," according to CNN. Others have claimed the rumors were exaggerated.

The uncertainty of Trump's condition was exacerbated after White House physician Sean Conley gave differing timelines for the president's infection. Conley initially claimed that Trump's condition was improving after a 72-hour diagnosis, which meant he would have been diagnosed on Wednesday, September 30. He later released a statement saying he "incorrectly" stated the timeline.

At the time, Conley also dodged several important questions pertaining to Trump's diagnosis, including whether the president received supplemental oxygen.

On Sunday, Trump briefly left the hospital and rode around in the presidential SUV, waving to supporters. His trip was widely criticized for having allegedly endangered those around him in a confined space, including US Secret Service agents, for a photo op.

By Monday, he walked out of the hospital. He has since scheduled to appear at several campaign rallies ahead of the November 3 election.

"Don't let it dominate you," Trump said in a recorded video. "Don't be afraid of it. You're going to beat it."

As of October, over 210,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the US.

See more here:
Trump wanted to wear a Superman shirt to surprise people - Business Insider - Business Insider

Just in case you were about to feel an unfamiliar spasm of sympathy for Donald Trump following his contraction of coronavirus, this week has provided a helpful reminder not only of his morally repugnant character but also of the danger he poses to the United States and the wider world.

Firmly in the first category is his attempt to blame his infection on the grieving relatives of slain soldiers, citing Gold Star families tendency to come within an inch of my face. Speaking to Fox Business on Thursday, Trump said, They want to hug me and they want to kiss me, and so perhaps it was them who had made him sick. Clearly keen not to keep all that viral load to himself, Trump later told Fox News in between coughing bouts that he plans to host a rally in Florida on Saturday and another in Pennsylvania. Hell doubtless repeat the gesture he premiered in his bargain-bin Mussolini performance on the White House balcony on Monday night, ripping off his mask with a flourish as if to prove that nothing and nobody will stop him shrouding his devotees in a cloud of his contaminated breath.

More serious are his assaults on democracy, which become ever more explicit. Lashing out at his own henchmen, he channelled Elton John to warn that the slavishly loyal attorney general, William Barr, would find himself in a sad, sad situation if he did not indict Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for the greatest political crime in the history of our country, namely the federal inquiry into the 2016 Trump campaigns links to Russia. Like strutting on a balcony, threatening to jail your predecessor along with your former and current opponents for political crimes tends to be a feature of darkly authoritarian states rather than democratic ones.

As if to confirm that Trumps threats to democracy are not empty, that the signals he transmits are received, 13 men were arrested in Michigan on Thursday over a violent plot to kidnap the states governor and try her for treason. Youll recall that in April, Trump urged his followers, angry about the states lockdown, to LIBERATE MICHIGAN!. Trumps chief response to the revelation of this episode of domestic terrorism was not contrition, but rather a rebuke to the governor for failing to say thank you to my justice department for uncovering the conspiracy. That my is telling: it is the grammar of the authoritarian strongman.

Most Republicans continue, like Trumps doctors, to act as enablers in all this. Especially eye-catching was a tweet from infected senator Mike Lee of Utah, arguing that democracy was less important than liberty, peace and prosperity and that sometimes Rank democracy can thwart those goals. Few Republicans dare echo the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who rather generously described Trumps increasingly unhinged ramblings as evidence that hes in an altered state.

And yet, the admission by the Republican leader in the senate, Mitch McConnell, that he had not gone near the White House since 6 August because of the administrations lax approach to masks and social distancing, was striking. Now, McConnell is not a man to speak without prior thought: unencumbered by scruples, he is a political calculating machine. And what that remark suggests is the calculation that Republicans need to distance themselves from a president they suspect is heading towards defeat.

Theyve seen the polls, same as everyone else. Those show Bidens lead growing when the race should be tightening, the Democrat consistently ahead in every battleground state bar Florida, and breathing down Trumps neck in states that should be reliably Republican, including must-win Ohio. Whats more, Bidens lead has increased since Trumps diagnosis a week ago. Hard-headed Republicans are beginning to suspect that the pandemic will be the presidents undoing.

If thats right, there would be a compelling, even karmic, logic to it. For Covid-19 could almost have been designed to expose the essence, and failings, of Trumpism.

Consider that one of Trumpisms defining traits is its contempt for truth, facts and science. It was during Trumps first weekend in office that he had his officials lie about the size of his inaugural crowd and speak of alternative facts. Opponents railed against this epistemic vandalism, but truth always seemed an abstract, even elitist concern. And then came coronavirus, accompanied by Trumps insistence that it would just disappear like a miracle, or that it could be chased away with an injection of bleach, as if to demonstrate in the starkest possible terms where a disdain for facts and for science leads: namely, to the graves of more than 200,000 Americans.

Similarly, Trumpism adapts the traditional Republican attachment to individual freedom and mutates it into a darker, Darwinian belief that the strong individual can and should do whatever they like, and to hell with the suckers and losers who might suffer as a result. In normal times, plenty of Trump supporters saw that as an exhilarating libertinism, one that allowed Trump to cheat on his wives and pay no taxes, all without consequences. Theyd have lived like that if they could. But coronavirus doesnt work that way. Suddenly the suckers and losers included Trump supporters, or their loved ones. The virus even caught up with Trump himself along with everyone who got near him.

And, of course, Trumpism is defined by its toxic brand of masculinity, mocking Biden for wearing a mask Might as well carry a purse with that mask, Joe, quipped one Fox host forgetting that covering your face is mainly to protect others, not yourself. Trump is still bragging that he is a perfect physical specimen, that hes seen off Covid, but he says it while wheezing. This virus has done to Trumpian machismo what its done to Trumpian disrespect for rules and science: its exposed it as hollow and a failure.

We dont know what further twists await in this long, melancholy drama; we dont know who will win next month. But if Donald Trump is ejected from office, Americans will still have to wrestle with a tough question: what does it say about the US if it took a pandemic to do it?

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

See original here:
Covid-19 has unmasked the true nature of Donald Trump and Trumpism - The Guardian

American society has long portrayed strength as the opposite of disability and feminization, Wool says. Those go together, and are seen to be incapacitating. This is relevant in the case of Donald Trump.

As a patient, Trump has physical traits that place him among the riskiest categories for dying from COVID-19. He is also emotionally brittle, requiring constant validation and reassurance. But as his niece Mary Trump recently wrote, among Trumps family, weakness was the greatest sin of all. So, in lieu of actual strength, Trump excels at performing a specific masculinized version of it, in which aggression, volume, stubbornness, overconfidence, and mockery are stand-ins for might. This is a man who sees wounded veterans and casualties of war as suckers and losers. Hes a caricature of masculinity, says Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, an emerita disability scholar at Emory University.

Read: Trump: Americans who died in war are losers and suckers

But the leaky nature of metaphor allows displays of strength to be mistaken for its presence. Strongman characterizations seem to revolve around the dispositional, temperamental features of a leader, says Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University, but I think theres some magical thinking about the physical resilience of such a person too. Even when Trump himself fell sick, he and his supporters couched his experience in the language of strength, victory, and courage. Dont let it dominate you, he said in a video.

This strength-centered rhetoric is damaging for three reasons. First, its a terrible public-health message. It dissuades people from distancing themselves from others and wearing a mask, and equates those measures with weakness and cowardice. The more you personify the virus, the more one version of heroism is to ignore it, says Semino. When people take that idea to extremes, they say, Im strong. Im not going to be cowed by this.

Second, it ignores the more than 210,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, and the uncounted thousands who have been disabled. Such dismissals are already common. In recent years, the ideologies of eugenics, where if youre sick, its your own fault and you dont deserve support, [have] become more and more blatant, says Pamela Block, an anthropologist at Western University. As the pandemic progressed, many saw the deaths of elderly people, or those with preexisting conditions, as acceptable and dismissible. And as COVID-19 disproportionately hit Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander communities, people who believed in the idea of white supremacy felt like the virus was doing their work for them, and could promote the idea that theyre genetically stronger, Block adds. One of Trumps supporters recently predicted that the president would beat COVID-19 because of his god-tier genetics; Trump himself recently told a largely white audience that they have good genes before warning about incoming Somalian refugees.

See the original post here:
Donald Trump's Strength Did Not Beat the Coronavirus - The Atlantic

When the FBI announced in October 2016 that it was reviewing new emails related to its investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a private server as secretary of state, it gave Donald Trump a priceless gift. Not because, as it turned out, Clinton had deliberately mishandled classified information or was about to be charged with a crime, but because it gave the impression of impropriety, which the reality-TV host rode all the way to the White House. Unfortunately for Trump, whose polling couldnt be worse, we are living in the year 2020 and he is running against Joe Biden, not Hillary Clinton. These are the sort of simple questions a doctor might ask a patient to assess whether theyve suffered a traumatic brain injury, yet, weirdly, it appears that neither the president nor his employees know the correct answers.

Speaking to Fox News on Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Dana Perino, Weve got the emails. Were getting them out. Were gonna get all this information out so the American people can see it. Youll remember there was classified information on a private server, should have never been there. Hillary Clinton should never have done that. It was unacceptable behavior. Its not the kind of thing that leaders do.... Classified information needs to stay on the right places. Secretary Clinton, when she was here at the State Department, did not do that.... Well get the information out that needs to get outas fast as we can. I certainly think therell be more to see before the election.

The news that the federal government is working on releasing Clintons emails as fast as it can, as though there are no other pressing issues to deal with, comes one day after Trump called in to Fox Business to rant about the fact that his former opponent hasnt been indicted (which may have something to do with the fact that she was cleared of wrongdoing), saying that he was not happy with Pompeo for failing to get her emails out to the public. (He also complained that his attorney general hasnt indicted Biden and Barack Obama, saying that Bill Barr will go down in history as a very sad, sad situation if he fails to prosecute the presidents enemies.)

In a sign of how utterly bizarre it is that Trump is screaming about Clintons emails and thinks releasing them might help his reelection chances, even some of the gang at Fox Business have wondered why he thinks voters care about any of this. President Trump didnt follow what theWall Street Journalwas saying in terms of staying on policy, anchor Dagen McDowell said following the interview with Maria Bartiromo. I am not sure it helped his campaign to talk about Hillary Clintons emails and going back down that rabbit hole like it was four years ago.... It was kind of, well, all over the place. It didnt really focus on the very issues of what the American people want to hear. Some of it did, but some of it clearly did not.

Anyway, its not clear what the president plans to do with his time should he lose in November and actually vacate the White House, but if he does and those close to him finally get him the help he needs, the odds are pretty high hell still regularly be calling in to Fox in 2024 claiming hes got classified information about Clinton thats going to shock voters like you wouldnt believe. Then hell whisper, I gotta go, theyre here while an orderlys key turns in the lock, adding, The DOJ doesnt want you to know this because its part of the deep state, but her husband had an affair with an intern. Its all there in the documents. Then the phone will drop and well hear him yell Stay back! Keep your hands off of me! Presidential harassment!

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And speaking of Trumps mental faculties

Nancy Pelosi is supporting a bill that would create a panel to assess if the president is a stark raving lunatic who should be removed from office:

Pelosi on Friday backed the creation of a congressionally appointed commission that would determine whether a president is capable of performing his duties, insisting that it wasnt specifically about President Trump while suggesting that his recent diagnosis was the motivation for it. Pelosi said Trumps coronavirus infection has raised questions about presidential succession, which is governed by the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. Trump spent last weekend at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, setting off a flurry of inquiries about whether Vice President [Mike] Pence would assume authority, even temporarily.

See more here:
Donald Trump Doesnt Seem to Know What Year It Is, Who Hes Running Against (Hint: Not Hillary Clinton) - Vanity Fair