Report from Boulder Festival

My sister Ann reported that my son Gary swung over to Boulder from New Mexico, saying it was a long ways, so I will be nervous about him as he had to come back home today because his company is starting a big job on Tuesday and he has to get ready for it. But at least he made it up there which must have pleased his brother Raymond (Dan is his half brother and does not know him very well since Gary was 21 and had married and left home when Dan was born) It was enjoyable to see photos and read a report of the various activities.
I have been busy writing on my newspaper blog G4Life in which I address more issues than I do in this one. Sometimes I copy the entry or vica versa but not always. I post as many entries on issues in this blog as I think readers might tolerate. I am a newspaper kind of person and am always writing letters to the opinion page which I did this morning on an issue relating to this complex. You can access my G4Life blog on the upper right hand corner of the AZ Central News on my blog list.
I think the blogspot world features more blogs from people suffering from debilitating diseases like MS, so I would not always take the same approach with them as I would with newspaper blog readers used to Arizona issues often debated in the news. For example the subject of my blog entry today on G4Life was mental illness. In Arizona we have had what seems to me like an astronomical number of murders by mentally ill family members, mostly of other family members after years of struggle. Nationwide we have also had these kind of murders, but we had one here not long ago that was especially affecting. A mother let her mentally ill son in his 30's come in the backyard to stay because the father said she felt sorry for him. He had banned him from his home. Some days after he camped out in his mother's backyard, he attacked her and his 14 year old nephew with a shovel and killed them both. Police were able to track him down and pick him up after he left and hid out. The sight of the mother of the slain boy sobbing on the TV cameras over what her brother had done, saying she had never imagined his mental problems would result in this was enough to give strangers nightmares.
Montini, a Republic columnist for many years, had printed the gist of another mother of a mentally ill son castigating the 'system' for not having better treatment available for her mentally ill son who she said she could not keep at home because he threatened her especially. I was writing to say that I don't think any health system in the world could take care of all the problems the mentally ill generate, especially after a violent element develops in their personalities and they become potentially very dangerous.
I know my uncle chased six of us little kids with a butcher knife which caused the adults to decide he could never be kept at home again where he could wander. His illness had manifested violence to the point that he had to be watched and under guard. From what I understand my grandfather contributed to his upkeep in a mental hospital more or less for the remainder of his life.
Nobody but the extremely dangerous mentally ill are going to be locked up and guarded. All the others, like those in prison, will eventually get out, and it will be up to society and family to protect themselves from the dangers they pose. I said in my entry that I thought responsibility for their own behavior should be placed on the mentally ill over and over, for if they offend, they will suffer from it. I remember my uncle crying when the Sheriff came to get him, "I will be good! I won't do it again." I thought at 8 years old, he had to pay a high price for chasing kids with a butcher knife, but what other alternative was there for the frightened adults when they found out what happened. As for me I never ran so fast in my life, terrified I would hear a scream from one of the other children not as old as I. I blamed myself for his outburst as I thought I led the other children too close to where he was talking to himself, and I found out later his oldest daughter he also chased blamed herself for his incarceration, for years, because she 'told.'