By Jeff Smith I AM SITTING AT my desk--which resembles a landfill in need of a D9 Cat to blade a layer of dirt over it--and I am three months behind in my work. Logic tells me I am never going to get caught up, but conscience nags that if I don't at least give it a try I will burn in hell. I reach for the top of the pile and grab something significant. It is a file folder four inches thick. In one fell swoop I have reduced the rubble on my desktop by 20 percent. Now we're getting somewhere. The file runs 361 pages. Elation turns to defeatism. Logic tells me that I will have nothing tangible to show for my next fortnight's work, but conscience nags that I can't just capitulate. I rationalize a workable compromise with myself, and reach for something in a slimmer size. Something I can see results from by Miller time. IF I AM just me, Smith the scribbler, this is hunky-dory. I tap out a quick read about a topless dancer with three breasts and win a press club award, leaving the weighty tome about recycling Styrofoam fast-food packaging to more serious minds than mine. But if I am a case-worker for Child Protective Services, I may have spent my workday sparing a child from only a second occurrence of raspberried butt, because the slide at his day-care center is too hot to use in the mid-May sun...while the 5-year-old subject of those 361 pages of tabled agenda gets the licking that finally makes his heart quit ticking. Well I'm only human: better to do what is do-able than do nothing. It's not as if we can't make enough babies. BY NOW YOU'VE probably read about the death of Donovan Hendrix. If there's ever been a story better designed for tabloid journalism and a TV-miniseries, I hope never to read it. He was born in Alabama to a 17-year-old girl and a 19-year-old boy. His father's name is Daryl. His parents couldn't raise him so his grandmother and step-grand-dad did their best. His folks divorced and his mom moved to Washington, leaving him and his sister Ashley behind. Dad took up with an older woman named Betty, with a couple kids of her own she couldn't manage. They lived in a trailer outside of Marana. They drank a bit. One day Betty shoved him out of the trailer in his undies and locked the door on him. He went to the neighbor's trailer, dirty, cold and crying. She took his hand and walked him home. Her name was Tiffany. The good guys in these stories have names out of a Jane Austen novel. And lives by Erskine Caldwell. Hell, any one of these red flags is enough for a bad country song and a better-than-even chance at a dead-end existence. Take them all into account and what you've got is a 361-page case history with Child Protective Services, and a two-line death notice in the public records. In agate. It's a wonder Donovan Hendrix lived as long as he did. THERE'S LOTS MORE lurid stuff to relate about the death of Donovan: the multiple visits to doctors and hospitals with suspicious-looking injuries and signs of neglect and outright abuse, the repeated calls to CPS from concerned friends, family and care-givers, the outright, five-alarm warning from his pediatrician that Donovan's life was in jeopardy and that CPS would be to blame if he weren't saved. Well he's dead now, so is CPS to blame? Partly. Not so much as the one who dealt him the fatal blows to the head--presumed at present to have been Betty Armstrong, the father's girlfriend. Not so much as father Daryl, who was a spectator, if not a player, in this deadly game. Not even so much as mother Annette, who didn't do very damn much of what maternal instinct is supposed to make females capable of doing to protect their young. But there's enough blame to reach even to thee and me. We haven't elected enough legislators with enough concern to budget enough of our tightly marshaled tax pennies to protect essentially defenseless children from bullying grown-ups. In fact the major thrust of Gov. J. Fife Symington III's administration, vis a vis kids, is protecting us from them. He wants to try juvenile delinquents as adults and send them to the big people's joint. Cool. So the state office of Child Protective Services has 605 caseworkers to cover about 30,000 complaints a year. That's one a week, each. Most folks I know can't even read 361 pages of print in a week, let alone drive out and talk to the characters in the story, let alone arrive in the nick of time to save the innocent victim. They're human; they do what they can. But if you want life-saving heroics, you've got to have enough troops to battle the bad-guys, and pay hero's wages. This we do not do. So we try to sub the job out to mercenaries, case-workers for charities and social agencies like Catholic Community Services or the Arizona Children's Home. And while they may have smaller case loads and sometimes better results, more cracks are created for children to fall through. And when the inevitable sad story unfolds, the system is blamed for not handling everything in-house. What to do? First decide whether we give a rat's ass. If we don't, then shut-up about it. If we do, then allocate the resources, meaning money and manpower, and get after it. Treat child abuse, spousal abuse, all these forms of Domestic Violence, like other classes of violent crime. Arrest and jail the suspects. Don't let conflicting stories--he said, she said, the kid said, the adult said--leave another Donovan in Purgatory.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth