TheStatehouseFile.com 

EDINBURGH, Scotland – If we listen, blood can whisper old, even ancient, truths to us.

Long, long ago, my ancestors lived in this country. My mother’s people were lowland Scots. They lived here, the family stories go, until they bet on the wrong side in one of Britain’s many battles of royal succession. They found themselves transported to Northern Ireland, where they were supposed to serve as a Protestant presence grafted onto a determinedly Catholic land.

Several generations later, not many years before the American Revolution, they left and landed in the Carolinas, before heading north to Indiana around the time of the War of 1812.

But they began in this land.

Part of me – part of my children – began in this land.

I didn’t journey first to Scotland until I was in my late 30s. My wife and I came on our honeymoon. We roamed from Edinburgh to Inverness to the Isle of Skye. We walked over streets that were here when my ancestors lived in this land. We hiked trails both green and stony.

Scotland spoke to me then.

It’s spoken to me ever since.

It wasn’t just that the country is beautiful – although it is beautiful. The sky here achieves shadings of blue and gray that can soothe the most unquiet spirit. The highlands have a harsh, craggy splendor, earth and stone reminders of the weight of eternity.

But it also was that this place was part of me.

One of the homes of my heart.

On that first trip, while my new bride did some shopping in Edinburgh, I stopped at a pub for a pint. Or two.

The guys at the table next to me started reciting poetry. They were several rounds ahead of me. The drinks took the edge off their Scots burrs and transformed every “s” into ”sssssh.”

It also made their recital endearing, particularly when they reached the climax.

A man’s a man for ‘a that.

Even slurred, Robert Burns’ poetry spoke Scotland’s soul.

I also wandered the bookstores in Edinburgh, Inverness and elsewhere, reading upon the Scottish Enlightenment as my wife and I traveled – the long struggle to unshackle the human mind and spirit from all forces that would bind them. As I did, I understood in ways I never had before the devotion my mother’s people had to learning and to charting their own courses. I began to realize my resistance to outsourcing my thinking might be more than a personal quirk.

The inertia of generation after generation after generation fighting to find its own way could have done something to push me down that path.

One late afternoon, we stopped the car along an ocean cliff. I walked out to the edge of the bluff and looked at the water, whitecaps rippling the surface as far as my eye could see.

I never have been a man who finds peace with ease. At that moment, though, I felt nothing but serenity.

As I stared from atop that craggy bluff at the long stretch, I thought about the people whose blood flowed through my veins and how they walked this land centuries before I was even a notion. I thought about the children my wife and I wanted to have.

In that moment, I saw and felt both how important I was in the living moment to my wife and, God willing, my children and how small a piece I was in the endless chain of existence.

I thought about how big and how small we all are.

We’ve been given reason these days, in some of the worst possible ways, to reflect upon where we all came from. Regardless of the motivation, it’s worthwhile exercise, because such reflection, if done with honesty and in the right spirit, should engender humility.

And gratitude.

I’m in Scotland again, this time with my son, who is approaching his own age of manhood.

As he and I stroll these ancient streets, I think about where life might take my children and where it took all those came before us.

As my son and I walk, the past itself seems to flow through our veins.

If we listen, our blood can whisper truths to us.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

By Brandon Barger
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS—The number of children who died across the state as a result of abuse and neglect increased from 2016 to 2017, according to the Indiana Department of Child Services’ latest report on child fatalities.

DCS, in its report released Friday, said the agency examined the deaths of 314 children and determined that 65 ranging in age from one month to 15 died from abuse or neglect in fiscal year 2017. That is up from 59 who died in the previous year. The fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30.

Of those, 21 deaths were due to abuse while 44 were caused by neglect. Thirteen of the children who died, or about one in five, had prior contact with DCS, the agency said in a news release that accompanied the report.

Among the abuse cases included a mother who strangled her 4-year-old with a scarf because she was angry at the child’s father for leaving her alone with two children. The child was injured in 2014 but didn’t die until 2017, according to the report. The mother is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aggravated battery.

Forty-five children were younger than age 3, which aligns with national trends showing that young children are at the highest risk for abuse or neglect, the report said.

Out of the 92 counties in the state, 36 reported one or more deaths related to abuse or neglect, with Lake County having the most with nine deaths, while Marion County reported seven and Clark County reported four.

Twenty-seven or about 42% were determined to be accidental and 30 deaths were declared to be homicides. The manner of death in seven fatalities could not be determined and one death, that of a 15-year-old boy, was a suicide.

The leading cause of death in the abuse cases was head trauma, with 10 child fatalities. The most common cause of death in neglect cases came from either the child drowning or the child dying because the caregiver did not provide proper sleeping care.

In many of the deaths, the main person responsible for the child’s death was someone who was biologically related, most often the parent.

DCS reported that in many cases, either financial stresses or substance abuse within the families contributed to the child abuse or neglect.

“We’d only be speculating as to why, but this is a consistent trend,” said Noelle Russell, DCS spokesperson. “Substance abuse and poverty are consistently cited as among the most common contributing factors in child fatalities caused by abuse and neglect.”

The report cites the case of a 3-month-old child who died from a gunshot wound to the face. The uncle of the child, who said that he had used too much marijuana and had fallen asleep, was charged with murder, neglect of a dependent resulting in death and pled guilty to reckless homicide with five years in prison.

In another case, a 7-year-old died of a traumatic brain injury as the result of an all-terrain vehicle crash. The child was riding between the mother and a friend who was learning to drive the vehicle. Investigators determined that the friend had taken a Jell-O shot before getting behind the controls and the mother tested positive for methamphetamines. The mother received a two-year prison sentence.

DCS, in the report, said the child death data is compiled from multiple source, including DCS records, death certificates, coroners’ reports, autopsy reports and law enforcement records.

Brandon Barger is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalists.