On 2004-05-20 08:53:00, Antigen wrote:
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On 2004-05-19 11:17:00, Anonymous wrote:
The federal government must step in and protect children not just from being placed in an abusive program, but from their own parents. Holding parents at least equally accountable is clearly a big part of the solution.
Here's where I disagree w/ damned near everyone.
In my view, the Federal government can be, and often is, as bad or worse than these other fanatics. Case in point: Scool Of the Americas (AKA, School of Assassins)
In many cases (too many) the government and these fanatic cults are the same people. DARE is a good example of that. If you want to teach kids about drugs, hire a pharmacist, a nurse or a med student. But hiring cops to teach little kids about drugs? Does that really make sense to anyone but a totalist abstinance freak?
No, I think the solution to our problem is not any branch of the Federal government. The solution is the IVth Estate of government. The parents are accountable for how they raise(or fail to raise) their kids. There's no getting around that. We just have to kill the demand for their bullshit bill of goods by spreading the truth. Even if they sue you, just don't shut up.
Everything that people say to you is personal. Whether it is constructive criticism or not will determine whether it cam from and asshole or not.
----Bill Warbis
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Ginger, I see what you're saying---*but*
The history of the US is that government changes, and government philosophy towards specific issues changes, and backlashes and reforms happen, and *sometimes* those reforms are done well and work out really well.
*Usually* the reforms of an abuse are at least incrementally better than what has gone before.
Because even if we change hearts and minds and raise awareness in the vast majority of parents, there will *still* be the over-gullible few, or the ones knowingly subcontracting out abuse, or just the weird, dysfunctional cult type parents---because there will always be a few, while you're correct that we need a PR hearts and minds revolution, we *also* will ultimately need a governmental solution.
We don't make laws to keep people from doing bad stuff. We make laws so that when unusually dysfunctional people do unusually bad stuff, we've codified the rules of fair play for how we identify those people and either separate them from society (jail) or otherwise take away their power to harm other people (loss of custody, loss of resources through fines or damages--money being power).
Most of the fix will come, you're right, from making it socially unacceptable to send your kid away to a private prison---and from increased awareness so you can't do it on the sly and keep your community peers from knowing what you're doing.
There will *still* be part of the fix that has to be governmental.
And where federal law comes into it is by making it so we don't have to change hearts and minds in *all* fifty states to start prosecuting the nightmarishly dysfunctional and depraved few, but just in enough of a majority to keep the dysfunctional few in other states from shipping their kids into Idaho, Utah, and Missouri.
Or out of the country.
But you are right that the change in the function of government comes *from* the change in what people are willing to define as socially and culturally acceptable---it's a bottom up change.
One of the reasons I focus on legislation is that it's easier to change people's hearts and minds when you give them something concrete (like a bill or a legislative agenda) that they can sign onto to *do* about a problem.
If people feel helpless before a horrible problem, they tend to dismiss it from their minds and block it off. If you give them a concrete way to start working on it, you can get in their head and start the work of building the deep conviction in them that whatever bad thing is happening *is* a bad thing and is or should be socially unacceptable.
Give people no legislative agenda or plan of action, and they'll stick the idea in an "I don't want to think about it it's too depressing" corner of their brain.
Give people something concrete to sign onto, and they're more likely to keep that awareness at a more accessible level in their brains---making them more likely to ream out their neighbor for sending a normal moody teenager off to an expensive gulag.
Legislative activism often works as a tactic to build individual willingness to the small but essential acts of social activism that drives true culture change.
Do I think if Congress passed the bills I want tomorrow, and the President signed them, that it would fix the problem? Hell, no.
Do I think that if a national grassroots movement grows and swells to the point of pressing Congress and the President to do the exact same thing that it will fix the problem? Substantially, yes.
It's not about the end result of putting the laws on the books. It's about the combination of the effects of the new laws with the hugely beneficial side effects of the efforts needed to *get* those laws there.
Manipulative? Absolutely. All politics is. But then, since I was never in a program, I don't necessarily view *all* manipulation as bad.
If my husband manipulates me to exercise more and lose weight, and I know he's doing it and am more or less happy about it, my health improves and I'm happy and I've been helped.
So yeah, anyone who's going to call these tactics manipulative, go right ahead. It's the *good* kind of manipulation, because I'm being completely upfront about what I'm doing and why, and it not only helps, it follows the "first do no harm" ethic.
I don't want *all* residential treatment shut down, I want regulation and social pressure to shut down *bad* residential treatment and foster *good* residential treatment---but *only* for the conditions that really need it. (And only until we develop less restrictive cures, preventatives and treatments for those conditions.) Unnecessary involuntary residential treatment is by definition bad, in my book.
Timoclea
