I am so glad I took the trip back to my hometown this past weekend. I walked away with a renewed sense of purpose in many areas, as well as getting refreshed by "getting away", if only for a few precious hours.

But I also walked away BEYOND furious at the "system" for one very compelling reason. For those of you who read my article "Revisiting the Foster Farm" (Link ), you will pretty easily understand why.

Probably the greatest sense of outrage I have at the Child Protective Services setup in this country is that it often shields the truly guilty from criminal prosecution while harassing and persecuting the innocent under the guise of protecting the "best interests of the child". Children are the victims of this overbearing abuse of power, as only in the rarest of cases do their parents and fosterers face justice for the crimes they commit against these children, and the overcrowding of foster children in a child kidnapping by quota system destroys the lives of so many whose parents are guilty of nothing more than poverty while denying those children who were truly abused and/or neglected the attention and care they so desperately deserved to facilitate healing.

In the "foster farm" I described in my previous article, I have only begun to scratch the surface of what went on there. I know of at least two rapes that occured while I was there that were not pursued by the social worker, who insisted that the accusers were lying (I have VERY compelling reasons to believe that they were not). I was personally swindled out of over $1500 that I had earned through hard work bussing tables at the Mexican restaurant through a car "deal" in which I drew the short straw because I did not know better, and because my foster father, who was supposed to PROTECT my financial interests, was the seller. I purchased my own cap and gown, my own class ring, my own senior pictures, and rented my own tuxedo for the prom, despite the fact that my foster parents were given money by the state for these expenses. And I could go on and on with the list of atrocities, which, in fact, I did when I requested an emancipation hearing 3 months before my 18th birthday, a hearing which my social worker denied me despite having no right to do so.

And so, when I returned "home" to see that these people were still receiving foster children from the state, still licensed by the state, the word "furious" doesn't even begin to describe it. The conditions of their home aren't fitting for a kennel, much less a state approved foster care facility. And yet, despite numerous reports to CPS about the actions of these people almost TWENTY YEARS AGO, CPS has not seen fit to shut them down. Ironically, the same agency that insists that children will never lie about abuse and neglect is insisting that the sworn testimony of at least five individuals housed in that facility were lies.

There are 580,000 children in foster care in the US. Statistically speaking, only about 44% of them will ever be returned home (despite the fact that 97% of their parents will never be criminally proven guilty of abuse or neglect). That means over a quarter of a million children in foster care today will "age out" and be released at the age of 18 into a world that they have not been equipped to handle. They will have no family, few independent survival skills, and many of them will find themselves incarcerated or addicted to drugs. They are truly the "lost" children of America, and the sad truth is, we don't care. We ignore them because we WANT to believe the system works, we WANT to believe that we are doing everything we can to protect our children, and to nurture them. And when one of them comes before a jury trial after committing a heinous murder out of the desperation and drug induced fog that resulted from the hellish lifestyle they so long endured, those 12 men and women of the jury will turn their "thumbs down", oblivious to the possibility that this very well may have been a monster of our own creation.

I beg each and every one of you reading this to get "beyond furious" with me. We owe our children better than the legacy of hopelessness so many of them stand ready to inherit.