One more response to my "Widdle Stephanie" column seems worth repeating. Ms. "Vivian," who writes in from one of those "EDU" e-mail addresses, asks:
"Vin -- Do you have children?
"While all the points you made to Stephanie were truthful, you have lost any points you could have made by the approach you have taken with her. She is just a child, obviously fed liberal bull for breakfast, lunch and dinner her whole life. That, however, is not her fault. Your approach will only alienate her and will not open her mind to any truths you submitted. Perhaps a softer approach, while not your style, would have made her actually think rather than react to the harshness you pesented.
"When I was seven years old, I wrote to the editor of a local newspaper, the Orange County Register, in California. I asked him to do something about the sichooashun (situation) because the taxes (and I spelled it correctly I might add, at 7 years of age) kept going up. His response was kind, and pointed out to me that the newspaper couldn't do anything, but the people could. He carefully and patiently explained the power of the vote, etc. It was published in the local paper.
"Today I still follow his advice and try diligently to explain things to young people in a way they can understand and will give them food for thought for many years. If you loose the children of our country you will loose our country -- Vivian.
I replied:
# # #
Hi, Vivian --
So the editor explained to you the power of the people to vote for lower taxes?
Funny. From my observation, folks have been voting for the "less government, lower taxes" candidate every chance they've gotten for 25 years -- with the result that we now have the biggest, most intrusive government in American history, and the highest effective combined tax rates in the history of the world.
As many have said, "If voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal."
It's really none of your business whether I have children. If I can prove I don't have children -- or that any and all of my children are educated at my own expense, without any dependence on the government welfare schools -- will that excuse me from paying the school taxes? Will that allow me to live in a nation not dominated by the thoughtless, quasi-literate little pathological socialists being turned out by these nests of induced hebephrenia and "attention deficit disorder"? (Yes, induced. Read John Taylor Gatto's "Dumbing Us Down," written (start ital)before(end ital) they started doping up a quarter of the next generation on Prozac and Ritalin.)
Where else shall we take this doctrine of yours? If you've never served in combat, does that disqualify you from crticizing our nation's military expenditures, or the use of army tanks and heilicopters at Waco? After all, you "can't know the hardships facing the soldier, who needs our support, not thoughtless criticism from twits like you who probably couldn't clear a jam in an M-16 if your life depended on it. ..." blah blah blah.
Pretty soon, only astronauts and aerospace engineers on government contract will be allowed to vote on how many billions we spend on the space program.
(start ital)I'm(end ital) not the one who threw unprepared widdle Stephanie into this battle. Her teacher clearly assumed any editor receiving her letter would clean up her spelling and publish the letter because it's "cute," and "in the public interest," since giving the government information about our mental health and our income and our racial extraction and our breeding habits and whether we have firearms and how many and where isn't a (start ital)partisan(end ital) issue. Oh no, there can be no debate (start ital)whatever(end ital) about how fine and wonderful and helpful all these government initiatives are. Who would dare?
As though the Army never used census data to round up Japanese-Americans in 1942. As though the Rand Corporation and the highly politicized American Journal of Public Health didn't just release a scary study (well, actually it proves how (start ital)safe(end ital) it is to have unlocked guns lying around, since child gunshot deaths have been declining for decades, though that's hardly the way the networks are spinning it) -- a study "revealing" how many households with children hold unsecured firearms, based on misinterpreted census data and distributed for political purposes. (See www.gunsandcrime.org/randucla.html.)
As though the IRS never chooses households for audit because they report substantially lower incomes than the "baseline for their neighborhoods," as determined from (start ital)census data(end ital), which we're told will (start ital)never(end ital) be shared with other agencies or used against us. ...
Let me make sure I have this straight, now: By enlisting widdle Stephanie as their agent, the other side has rendered themselves (start ital)immune from criticism(end ital) (except of the most gentle, respectful kind), lest the critic be accused of "hurting the feelings of poor, defenseless children"?
Gee, that's a good one. Can we recall anyone else who else has used such tactics? Ever heard about the cute little girls in long white dresses who would run up to our choppers in the Nam, dumping live grenades into the doorways out of their cute little straw hats? I guess you think our guys should have just frozen up and not fired back (albeit with tears streaming down their faces) to save their buddies, so as not to "hurt the widdle children"?
People have been trying "kinder and gentler" and "working within the system for modest, rational reform" of the mandatory government youth propaganda camps for 100 years. The camps just get bigger, more expensive, more arrogant, and less interested in passing along even basic historical literacy.
They have become the reproductive organ of the welfare/police state. They are the greatest enemy, bar none, to our desperately endangered traditions of liberty.
I am not interested in "a softer approach," or in "convincing" the government's little procured agents to change their ways. It's up to widdle Stephanie's parents -- not me -- to stop selling her propaganda services to the government in exchange for free day-care and a few daily slices of subsidized orange cheese. The government schools don't teach children to read. They teach the vast majority to leave school at 18 vowing, "I'm finally out of there; I swear I'll never crack another book so long as I live, and (start ital)no one can make me.(end ital)" These institutions studiously and purposely teach our offspring (start ital)not(end ital) to read much beyond the soup labels and the TV listings, lest they be disturbed by evidence that all their little memorized sound bites may not be true.
("You mean Lincoln and Roosevelt (start ital)weren't(end ital) great and moral men? The income tax (start ital)doesn't(end ital) apply to in-country wages ... and the people who run the IRS know it? Juries (start ital)don't(end ital) have to follow the judges' 'instructions'? The Federal Reserve Board is some big scam, purposely institutionalizing inflation and enriching select private bankers? Government-mandated inoculations cause permanent brain damage or death in at least a dozen infants every year and the government (start ital)knows(end ital) this? There's (start ital)no(end ital) constitutional authorization for the War on Drugs? We were a happier, more peaceful, more literate nation (start ital)before(end ital) all these 'Progressive' new laws and police forces were created after 1912? Nawwww, that can't all be true. Anyone who says so is a 'Black Helicopter Nut.' Teacher says.")
My job is merely to point out how close we are approaching the way government control over conscripted children has long been used in Hitler's Germany, and in communist Russia and China, to propagandize or coerce these kids' own parents and -- when it comes down to it -- to turn those parents in to "the proper authorities" for listening to clandestine BBC radio broadcasts (or, in our own case, for growing pot, possessing firearms, etc.)
If you don't like my stuff, don't read it. You will find the rest of the media positively full of go-along-to-get-along statists, unlikely to say anything to upset you or cause you to consider how close to the precipice of state tyranny we now veer.
Or to hurt widdle Stephanie's feelings.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998" (recently named "Freedom Book of the Year" by the fine folks at FreeMarket.net) is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of pracical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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