Tears of Rage by John Walsh & Susan Schindehette

Author:John Walsh & Susan Schindehette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books

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Revé said that living in Washington was the closest thing to being in prison that she had ever known. I was on the road for weeks at a time. She was home alone with a baby and a two-year-old, and all her friends were back down in Florida. She said that she had never had so much quiet in her life. So we talked about it, and not long after Callahan was born, we decided to move back home to Florida.

It was, after all, the place where we had won our first victories—where, in the mid-eighties, a local dairy first put the pictures of missing children onto milk cartons, and where a drug chain did the same thing on its shopping bags. By 1983 we had started a statewide clearinghouse run by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the FDLE, that would list the name of any missing child whose parents requested it. Almost as soon as we got that clearinghouse approved, funded, and operational, it had listings for 3,400 missing kids. We went on to a lot of other things, too: mandated background checks of teachers and child-care workers (after we learned that thirty-seven teachers in Florida were felons convicted of either child abuse, drug dealing, or murder), repeat-offender bills, laws that allowed the videotaping of testimony by children who were victims of sexual abuse so that they wouldn’t have to take the witness stand in court.

But those weren’t our only battles. As always, there were still other hurdles on Capitol Hill—this time about getting some sort of ongoing funding for the Center. Arlen Specter and Paul Simon wanted it to be administered by Al Regnery’s office at Justice. Ike Andrews, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina who hated Al Regnery, wanted it administered instead by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The usual stuff.

Through it all, I kept learning about strategy and tactics. One of the things that I picked up was a habit of winging it whenever I had to give testimony at congressional hearings. Most politicians read from a prepared statement whenever they have to give a speech. But I learned to organize everything on two pieces of paper, then work from my notes. I tried a few times to submit testimony beforehand, but I just couldn’t do it. I also found that if I didn’t provide the staff with my remarks in advance the way most witnesses did, it didn’t give them the chance to get a rebuttal together ahead of time.

Those were the kinds of things that I learned from dealing with politicians. A lot of passionate, dedicated, hardworking people hold public office in this country. But also, a lot of politicians are in love with the status and the game of power. I have no respect for those people—the ones who use the perks of office and forget that a lot of the constituents who put them there are poor, don’t know how to work the system, and feel that no one cares about them.

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