I stumbled across this more-or-less by accident:

[link|http://www.magicwand4katie.com/index.html|http://www.magicwand...ie.com/index.html]

--but am now brimming with indignation. Oddly enough, I used to know Katie's family: indeed, ten minutes after I first met her, Katie, then three, contrived to gobble 75 hits of syntheroid (doggie thyroid medicine) snagged from a low shelf in my (obviously not child-proofed) Hillegass Avenue flat. We spent the rest of that evening (12/30/82) in hospitals--first in Berkeley's Alta Bates, which summarily ejected us upon learning that the child's parents, freshly back from a US Navy gig in Spain, lacked either paid employment or insurance, and then at Oakland's Children's Hospital, where the policy was to treat first and negotiate later.

The Surrences' marriage and mine disintegrated, for reasons utterly unrelated to one another, at around the same time a few years later, and Katie's mother and I took up with one another for a while, greatly to the irritation of my estranged wife, whose college roommate S had been. I suspect accordingly that Katie would associate me with what must have been an unhappy period for her (leavened, apparently, by musky dreams of smurfs). She was just nine the last time I saw her, and I remember thinking at the time that she had the diction (speaking in easy subordinate clauses) of a child who spent more time with books than with her peers. I'm pleased to note that she has inherited something of her mother's not infrequently trenchant wit.

Anyway, comrades, if you have an ounce of fair play in you, or if your chivalry can claim to have a hair on its ass, you will join the online persecution of Dan Savage to get Katie her damned magic wand.

on fire for justice,