Dreams of their Fathers

The Left seeks the audacity of soap; they want to scrub away parental authority.

A time-honored method of discipline for children who said naughty words was to "wash their mouths out with soap." This was an unpleasant but effective and safe remedy, and thirty years ago no one would have thought better of it. Not now: the nanny state, steeped in the illogic of their "progressive" child-rearing notions of raised self-esteem (arrogance) and a refusal to exercise legitimate moral power, has led to great changes in the way discipline is meted out (in fact, liberal educators don't want discipline at all, believing they can convince a child of the rationality of an argument). They are so against discipline that they are criminalizing corrective acts, as this story illustrates quite plainly. According to the article:

The girl, who police said suffered an allergic reaction, has been removed from the couple's home by the Department of Children and Families, along with her 18-month-old sibling.

Wilfredo Rivera, 41, and Adriyanna Herdener, 32, were charged with neglect of a child and child abuse after police were called to a home in the 2300 block of Shenadoah Drive to investigate the incident.

Both were arrested Friday and face court hearings in early November.

So, what happened here? The child complains and the parents are slow to react because they think the kid is just whining. When they realize there is a problem and take her to the hospital they get arrested!

It may offend the sensibilities of busybody liberals, but there is nothing wrong with this as a form of discipline. It may not be the best way to do things, but it is safe under usual circumstances. That liberals have now criminalized this time-honored technique is itself criminal.

The war on discipline started with a decent effort to prevent ABUSE of children. There are vicious people who hurt children to make themselves feel powerful, and they beat their kids, so well-intentioned people sought to prevent this by criminalizing it. Fair enough, but where is the line drawn between senseless violence and a disciplinarian spanking? A spanking is a ritual; the pain of the spanking is secondary to the dread of the punishment. It teaches the child that there are forces larger than himself, forces with greater moral authority and the power to punish.

That is the very lesson that we try to teach by imprisoning criminals, but by this point criminals have become calloused to the lesson, having gotten away with minor punishment (or none) for too long. Traditional punishment techniques may not work perfectly, but they are effective, and early intervention avoids greater pain and punishment later. The root of this lies in Hebrew scripture:

"He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him." (Proverbs 13:24)

"Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him." (Proverbs 22:15)

Now, this is looked on in horror by the "progressives" who a) believe it is a call to abuse children and b) believe they know better than the Almighty about disciplining those children (and about most everything else). This is open advocacy for corporal punishment!

So, a tender-hearted generation decided it was more humane to spare the rod (or the belt, the back of the hand, etc.) and the results have been a healthier, more moral, more civil society; Oh, wait! That isn't exactly what happened. We now have a perverse generation, a nation unwilling to live within the confines of the law and civility. We have prisons stuffed full of people whose parents thought to spare the rod. We have sexual perversions of every and any stripe. We have Columbine. We have brutal beatings on school busses, on playgrounds by children. It is no coincidence that the types of grand larceny we have seen in recent days, the collapse of AIG, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, the demise of Countrywide Mortgage, of the banks etc. coincide with our kinder, gentler national disciplinary model. America has become a nation of self-seeking scoundrels. The tender mercy of liberals has driven our society to barbarism.

And this suits some on the Left just fine; the radicals have always wanted chaos, a collapse of civil society to justify a fundamental reorganization of the human condition. Can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, eh? Or, as President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel said, "never let a good crisis go to waste."

The first step in reordering America is to sever the ties to the past. That has been accomplished through a number of concrete steps; revisionist history being taught in schools, an assault on traditional religion in favor of either non-western beliefs or, preferably, atheism and agnosticism, purposeful changes in language and pronunciation (we see that all the time; Peking becomes Beijing, Calcutta becomes Kolkata, Kabul pronounces Cobble rather than Cabool, etc. also in the uplifting of slang and dialects such as "Ebonics"), and the removal of the fundamental authority of parents over their children.

What parent isn't terrified that their 14-year-old, angered over not being allowed to go out dressed like a Juarez streetwalker, will denounce them for abuse, sexual or physical? J'accuse! Child service thugs storm the home and remove the poor dainty creature to the custody of the state (the largest abuser of everyone, if you ask me) where psychologists zealously reinforce the notion of abuse in the child's mind when she tries to recant.

Does anyone remember the McMartin Preschool case? Do-gooder psychologists convinced these young children they were ALL sexually molested!

So parents must lose their authority over their children, and the State must absorb that role. If the State can decide how to discipline, they can further decide what transgressions are worthy of discipline. Teachers, psychologists, social workers become far more important in the moral and emotional development of the child, as the parents are reduced to futility and impotence in the face of the leftist intellectual invasion of the child's mind.

John Dewey understood this, and that is why he sought a government-run educational system. According to Dewey:

Children in their early years are neither moral nor immoral, but simply unmoral; their sense of right and wrong has not yet begun to develop. Therefore, they should be allowed as much freedom as possible; prohibitions and commands, the result of which either upon themselves or their companions they cannot understand, are bound to be meaningless; their tendency is to make the child secretive and deceitful.¹

Dewey, like so many of the Left, bought into the Rousseauian notion of the inherent goodness of Man; children need but be guided gently, and their inherent nature will blossom. That every experiment ever conducted shows the exact opposite does not faze the liberals like Dewey, who hold this viewpoint as an article of faith despite their claims to believe in a pragmatic approach. As Dewey puts it,

the moral trinity of the school [is] the demand for social intelligence, social power, and social interests.²

So society should be the final arbiter of what children are taught, what they believe. If that is so, then the purpose of schools is to indoctrinate, to educate IN SPITE OF the wishes of the parents. It is a role that our modern leadership has adopted with relish. It is the reason why there has been a concerted war on discipline; children must not be molded by the ignorant, superstitious parents but by the enlightened masters of society.

It should come as no surprise that a terrorist like William Ayers should find his social redemption not in breaking rocks or digging ditches but in his work as AN EDUCATOR. Education attracts leftists like manure draws flies; it is the key to power over society at large. Not only can the Left influence what people know (and they have perpetuated some huge lies in the past; just ask about Christopher Columbus and you will find half a dozen at least) but, more importantly, how they feel about issues.

Again Dewey:

the children do the work, and the teacher is there to help them to know, not to have them give back what they have memorized.³

That is why education these days is filled with letter writing campaigns, mock trials of historical figures (Christopher Columbus was recently found guilty of "misrepresenting the Spanish Crown and Thievery" and "sentenced" to life in prison by a fourth grade class in Pennsylvania) and other "do it yourself" sacraments of political activism; children must free their inner god, the enlightened Man that dwells within. The purpose of modern education is to coax that New Man forth through gentle nudges, through morality plays, object lessons, peer pressure. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth may be substituted for Milton's Paradise Lost or Dante's Divine Comedy, teaching moral lessons for a new age.

The purpose of these exercises is to wed the children to the Liberal Movement. These are sacraments, designed to seduce the hearts of the innocent and naive through acts of solidarity. But these sacraments will not work if the society is healthy, and it will be healthy if parents hold the final authority over their children. The fundamental goal of any "progressive" plan for "remaking America" must be to weaken that authority.

That is accomplished through a number of methods; ridicule of the values and persons of the parents (watch any television show and see how parental authority is undermined), immoderate flattery of the children's self-esteem while manipulating them ("you're so SMART believing in Global Warming!"), and through the systemic disintegration of the power of parents to discipline. Children are being taught not to listen to their parents, who are well meaning dullards at best and perhaps stupid tyrants. Children are puffed up, led to believe their own limited base of knowledge and experience is superior to those of their old-fashioned and unenlightened sires and that the values and morals of past generations are the purest superstition and ignorance.

Is it any wonder that Barack Obama got his start sitting on the board of the Annenberg Challenge with Ayers? Is it any wonder that Obama's "safe school Czar" is a militant homosexual who wrote the forward to"the Queering of Elementary Education," founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (whose stated purpose is to re-educate children starting with kindergarteners) and was influenced by a member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, a pedophile advocacy group?

Oh, and Kevin Jennings had this to say about that most traditional of American beliefs:

Before, I was the one who was failing God; now I decided He was the one who had failed me . . . Screw you, buddy – I don't need you around anymore.

The purpose Jennings serves is to change the sexual mores of society, to remake America. Sexual morality is the cornerstone of Western society, after all, and rooted in that most distasteful of documents – the Bible. A fundamental shift in morality, one that breaks the Biblical view of sex as something to be circumscribed and applied judiciously, will leave the next generation adrift in a moral sargasso sea, and ready to cling to any lifeline tossed to them. That many seek this generation to be thus cast away BECAUSE they want societal acceptance of libertine and immoral sexual behavior goes without saying, but then liberalism is a self-feeding entity; each aspect advances the whole.

Sexual morality, indeed, sexual desire must be learned and channeled; a point that seems lost on people like Jennings, who see sexual "orientation" as something immutable like blue eyes or red hair. Sexual immorality is both a means and an end, and that end is the ultimate deification of Man the Most High. To achieve the godhead, the Left must start with the most vulnerable. Old notions of morality and decency must first be broken if they are to be rebuilt in a new way.

(It can be argued that this is precisely what happened in Weimar Germany; the loss of so many men in the First World War left a moral and spiritual vacuum that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis would fill – both personally and with the Apparatus of the State and the Volk.)

The popularity of Barack Obama with the nation's youth is attributable to the success in weaning children from the authority of their parents; Obama acts surrogate. He's hip, cool (unlike their parents) yet speaks with authority and seeming moral righteousness, it should be pointed out. Our young desperately seek someone to represent authority and virtue to them; they have been taught to ignore it in their homes, so seek it from celebrities, with Obama tapping into that fundamental need. Oh, and he's about the age of their fathers and so can represent their dreams.

Moral authority must be imposed from without so that it may be imposed from within. Children must be taught right and wrong, and made to understand that right behavior is in their own interest as well as the interest of society at large. The fundamentals of moral behavior provide a proper sphere, a realm of conduct conducive to societal success. Divinely appointed, it is sometimes not clear why that is so, but pragmatism and experience have shown it to be the case. But liberals hate to be constrained by such "arbitrary" rules, and thus they seek to remake our morals and laws to allow absolute freedom – at the expense of the traditional. This is ultimately part of the war against traditional faith. And that war must be fought in the hearts and minds of the young.

To win such a war, the ability of the parents to discipline MUST be eliminated; the liberal elites must be the masters.

The full force of the law must be applied to accomplish this. No more washing out mouths with soap.

Welcome to the audacious New World!

Endnotes

1. John Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, pp. 1-2. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1915.

2. John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education, p. 7. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909.

3. Schools of Tomorrow, p. 1.