What Are We Fighting For?

Two items this week raise genuine concern about the future of civilization. What is destroying the youth? MTV? Video games? I submit that it is parents, teachers, and other authority figures. Two items to illustrate, the first from William Norman Grigg:

"I can't believe what I just saw," exclaimed my lovely wife Korrin, concern etched into her alabaster brow. She had just returned from visiting a friend who runs a day care center. Among that friend's charges was a 3-year-old boy who supposedly suffers from either Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or some more exotic variation on that spurious diagnosis.

Like most other children thus classified, this rambunctious youngster displays all of the symptoms of being a normal, healthy, energetic young male, a condition increasingly treated through some combination of chemical castration and/or torture.
I do not exaggerate.

This little kid is on some toxic cocktail of psychotropic drugs. When he acts up -- which is going to happen, naturally -- he is punished through the use of what have come to be known as "stress positions."

"The doctor told the parents that when this little kid acts up, he has stick his arms straight out and hold them that way for a long time," Korrin told me. The day care provider was told to administer the same punishment. "I can't believe how long he was forced to stand that way," Korrin continued. "He would have this hateful and angry look in his eyes. And if he dropped his arms too soon, he had to start over again. It was like torture."
"No, honey, it wasn't `just like' torture," I commented, "it WAS torture."

Once again I'm compelled to review Alfred McCoy's sobering and indispensable book, A Question of Torture. Chapter 2, which deals with the CIA's MK-Ultra drug and behavior experiments, also refers to the origins of what are now called "stress positions." In the mid-1950s, CIA-connected researchers examined "nonviolent" interrogation methods employed by the KGB and their Chinese counterparts that included such apparently innocuous routines as forcing people to stand still for 18-24 hours.
[...]
The central issue here is the use of coercion to make a person inflict pain on himself, for extended periods, long past the limits of his endurance, as a way of breaking his will and making him submit to the state.
[...]
There are probably hundreds of thousands of little boys receiving exactly the same treatment. Some of them will surmount this experience. Others will become criminals. At least a portion will go on to become law enforcement officers, soldiers, or -- God help us, although we hardly deserve it -- politicians.

The second, from THIS is TRUE came to my attention from Charles Demastus's Freedom Watch newsletter:

SURE, THIS MAKES SENSE: A student at McHenry (Ill.) Community High School has been disciplined after "doodling" in his own notebook. His drawing features the initials "D.L.K." which, school officials told his mother, "could" mean "Disciples Latin King" -- the Latin Kings and the Latin Disciples are two rival gangs. His mother says he's not a member of any gang. But under the school's zero tolerance rules about gang activity, the boy was suspended, and the school board voted unanimously to expel Derek Leon Kelly from any state-funded school for the rest of the school year, rejecting his explanation that the initials he drew are simply his own. (Chicago Tribune) ...Leaving him nothing to do but join a gang.

Let's concede that we don't know the full story. This student may have been a troublemaker on his "last chance." Maybe he shouldn't have been doodling. Nevertheless, writing these initials is not, in any way, shape, or form, an offense. He got kicked out of school for NOTHING. They may have well have kicked him out for going for an evening walk, eating a peanut butter sandwich, or going bowling on a Saturday.

Children are subject to the most arbitrary and unjust rules. They are over-drugged and over-disciplined. They are let down by the very people who have taken it upon themselves to raise them and educate them. They are being conditioned to live as subjects in an authoritarian society. The noncomformists will be jailed, and the violent thugs among them will join the police or army, where they will impose the same torture and arbitrary rules on others that they themselves suffered as kids.

Our country has several holidays in which we glorify our wars and honor our veterans. Let's set facts and reason aside and concede, for the sake of argument, that our wars were all about "freedom" and that our brave men and women fought and died to protect our freedom. But what "freedom" are our soldiers fighting for now? The freedom of doctors and mothers to over-medicate and torture children? The freedom of school boards to be malicious and stupid?

It is absurd that we are using warfare as a means to spread "freedom" abroad. I wouldn't wish American "freedom" on anyone.