Author and activist Alice Walker is still publicly feuding with her daughter, Rebecca. Well, Rebecca keeps talking about it to the press, this time with the Sunday Times of London.

“My mother did a lot of leaving to go to her writing retreat, which was over 100 miles away — so she’d go there and leave me a little bit of money, leave me in the care of a neighbour,” recalls Rebecca, now 38.

“When I was pregnant at 14, I think it was because I was so lonely that I was reaching out through my sexuality. My mother’s a crusader for daughters around the world, but couldn’t see that her own daughter was having a difficult time. It was me having to psycho-emotionally tiptoe around her, rather than her taking care of me.”

Walker is furious with Rebecca for making such sentiments public, and mother and daughter are estranged with little hope of reconciliation. Rebecca has a three-year-old son, Tenzin, whom her mother has never seen. Their last meaningful exchange, during Rebecca’s pregnancy, ended in Walker sending a terse e-mail in which she resigned from “the job” of being her mother, and told her that in any case their relationship had been “inconsequential” for years.

The depth of her anger was such that she refused to budge even when Rebecca had a difficult birth and Tenzin’s life hung in the balance in a special-care baby unit. “My father called her to tell her what was happening. He couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t run right over . . . In some ways, I wanted her to — but in other ways, I didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t be able to be there for me in the way I wanted. It would be problematic.”

Ouch.

In-Home Care Costs Shoot Through the Roof: The costs of in-home care for an elderly patient has risen by 17 percent since 2004 to $76,460 a year, according to the Alzheimer's Association. As the organization recently pointed out in its newsletter, many Americans are woefully unprepared to deal with skyrocketing costs and a dwindling number of options to care for their elderly family members.

Ford Recalls Pick-Up Trucks: In case you missed it, Ford has recalled its F-150 pickup truck and Lincoln Mark LT because of a faulty hose tied to the trucks' brakes, according to the Associated Press. The recall affects more than 600,000 customers in the United States and another 50,000 in Canada.

Immoral and Unconscionable: The military junta that controls Burma continues to bar foreign aid, including that from nearby Thailand, according to the Associated Press. Yet, the death toll in the country from a vicious cyclone is about to reach 127,000. Sick.

The death toll in Burma after a vicious cyclone hit the country this past weekend could reach 60,000, the number of people reported dead or missing, according to the Washington Post.

Because the country is headed by an incompetent, despotic regime, the people are not easily receiving aid. MoveOn.org passed around a link to donate to Burmese monks, who in turn, have been giving food and shelter to the country's poorest people.

These People Scare Me: I was recently perusing the responses to New York Times Magazine's green edition, when I came across this gem:

(Michael) Pollan asserts as self-evident that a small carbon footprint is always a moral good. But suppose a child is very sick and the nearest hospital is 50 miles away. You can ride a horse and the child might die, or take a helicopter and ensure the child lives. In that case, using more fossil fuel is clearly a moral good. Offering this same sort of choice, if played out less dramatically, is why the green movement may fail.

Pollan is asking for human beings to deliberately make their own lives harsher, duller, perhaps even shorter for the sake of an abstraction. Whatever your belief in the merits of cutting carbon emissions, it’s easy to see why this neo-Romantic argument may not win many converts.

Especially inane, though, is Wendell Berry’s suggestion that “specialization” has been bad for humanity. Division of labor has allowed man to rise from savannas and caves to cities, to feed multitudes and to cure deadly disease. Specialization is precisely what will produce the experts who will ultimately figure out how to make cheap energy without fossil fuels. That process, not some Arcadian fantasy that all humanity will voluntarily regress to a semi-industrial state, is the way to a cleaner world.

HAMPTON STEVENS

Kansas City, Kan.

Okay.

Other Strange Encounters: Here is another one of those quirky Berkeley Parents Network letters, although I bet this woman's situation is not as uncommon as we'd like to think:

My husband recently had a one night stand with a woman with whom he previously (about 2 years ago) had a longer-term affair. The one night stand resulted in a pregnancy, and they've decided to keep the baby. The woman lives in another city so he will be parenting from afar - we also have a child together. We started marriage counseling a couple of weeks ago and, at least right now, we both think we'd like to stay together. We definitely have issues outside of this one that we need to work on, and are both committed to doing so. I'm honestly not that hung up on the affair at this point - it's the realization that there will be another child in his life, with another woman, and that child will likely be incorporated into our family in some way, shape, and form in the future. Plus, the fact that the child will be in another city means he will probably spend time away from us, which is hard to handle. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? This is all very fresh and new and I know my feelings will change over time (because they already have a million times in about 3 weeks!) but I need a little long-term perspective on how this situation might ever really work...thanks!
anon

Whew. This woman sounded remarkably calm for what her husband did. Can't wait for the responses...

Leaving Foster Care: The Washington Post followed around this remarkable young woman as she was leaving the foster care system. At 21-years-old, Marie Willis is learning to live on her own, and is handling it with such aplomb.

What else is in the news? What is on your minds today? Have a good weekend all!