On 2006-01-18 07:58:00, Anonymous wrote:
Antigen -- I think I want you to take a step back and recalibrate. You really feel that anytime a child needs to be separated from from their parents for a sickness it is considered shipping them off.
No, you're mixing metaphores. I think anytime a parent ships their kid off
for the purpose of gaining inapropriate control of them, not for the purpose of treating an objectively provable medical condition, it's very, very similar to the way some people (and I use that term loosely, cuz I'm fond of dogs) will have their dogs denutted for the purpose of breaking their will.
You have gone from "Anti All programs" to just "antiparents".
I am a parent. I've had sick kids. One of my kids was so sick for some time that I actually had a few conversations w/ real medical professionals on the topic of when enough is enough and the kindest, most responsible and compassionate thing to do is just give lots of morphene and ice cream. This was after this same kid spent a couple of years seemingly dedicated to my premature aging by way of her wreckless choices.
I know the difference. Do you?
Like I say, been there. Don't believe what they say about us over on Struggling Turkeys. We're not really all just a bunch of disaffected punks.
Not everyone can solve their problem at home or be with them during treatment, I am just amazed that you take this position."
Not every problem can be solved. Not every emotional upset is based on objective fact. Surely, you've made the acquaintance before of overbearing, overprotective, overly worried parents. Surely, if you live in the same world I do, you've seen people like this and felt some sympathy for the kid who's forced to work at calming their neurotic parents irrational fears like it's a full time job. Most of these kids have just had about all the help they can stand by the time some bullshitter finds their parents frantic and unconsolable and sells them a handful of magic beans. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your troubled loved one is to quit troubling them, quit disabling them, quit trying to fix them and consider the possability that they're just as competent and resillient as you ever were (maybe more) and what they need most is a break from all of your "help".
If you look over Lon's site w/ a critical eye, you'll see that the parents who have not yet been banned are giving just
exactly this advice to other parents who's results are not quite up to expectation.
"Letting go" is a constant theme over there. But, because it's such a cultish little world they live in, it can't be moderate or reasonable or adapted to the individuals involved, it's got to be clear cut, black and white. If the kid's not following all of the "agreements" that have been made for them as a condition of release, you can't just accept that your kid is not going to behave exactly as you thought you wanted. No! You have to kick them out, change the locks, confiscate their posessions, ban them from contact w/ younger brothers and sisters. If you love your kid, you must (according to the struggling turkeys) execute the "Exit Plan" and be firm about it.
And don't have any truck with anybody, even family, who does not support this extreme line of action. If you disagree, you'd better keep it to yourself or you'll be stuck w/ us misanthropic infidels over here on Fornits because your views will not be tolerated among the true believers.
At the risk of being too longwinded and boring you, I'd like to go a step further w/ the medical allegory. How about the first and most important tenet of the Hypocratic Oath;
First, do no harm? As I said, I've had more experience w/ my daughter and the medical field than I ever would wish on anybody. Of course, there are people in the medical field who are either power trippers or just burned out but stuck (either economically or out of a sense of responsibility). And there are those who are just jaded, don't care and don't want to be bothered w/ the minutea of every little detail of patient care. After awhile, you learn to tolerate them and concentrate on those for whom the practice of medicine is a real calling.
Those are the folks I want to tell you about. When I asked my daughter's doctors, nurses and other caregivers questions about the proceedures and medications they were giving her or proposed to give her, they didn't shout me down. Instead, they handed me their institutional guide book and her chart and made themselves available to help me understand some of the more difficult language. Or they'd spell out some of the terms so that I could go look them up. There was absolutely no attempt made to prevent me from talking w/ other parents, even very unhappy ones. When I questioned their methods or the relative risk/benefit of any particular course of action, I either got a satisfactory explanation about why the procedure was necessary or expected to be worth the risk and discomfort or I got a change of plans.
And here we're talking about an objectively factual set of conditions which, not just maybe, but absolutely would have killed her in very short order w/o treatment or w/o just about
exactly the correct treatment. And yet these folks, who actually earned their degrees, certifications, licenses and positions and have dedicate their lives to ongoing education were continually open to the possability that they might be wrong and that, ultimately, it was up to their young patients to care for themselves.
Compare that to the treatment you've received by these alleged "experts" in taming the wild, lurching teenager creature.
It just does not compare.
All contemporary religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organization, Marxism has always viewed as organs of bourgeois reaction, serving as a defense of exploitation and the doping of the working-classes.
--Nikolai Lenin, Russian revolutionary
