by Selwyn Duke
The verity of the saying "Truth is stranger than fiction" should never be questioned in this, the day of modern communications. For, every day our media beams into our homes stories of the bizarre, which have been culled from the human drama that plays out every day across the fruited plains. So, now we hear about Eve Hibbits, who went to an outdoor festival and let her two year old daughter and set of twins become so sunburned that it attracted the attention of a police officer. It seems, and this isn't sarcasm, that Mrs. Hibbits had never heard of sunscreen. Then there's Lynn Stuckey, who breast-feeds her son about once a week; the story here isn't that she's starving him though, no - he's eight years old you see.
What bothers me about these stories however, is not the fact that one mother was grievously remiss and the other, well, I'll be kind and say "eccentric." What bothers me is the fact that we heard about their stories in the first place. And it's not that I think they're examples of a sensationalistic media jockeying for ratings, because I can understand their newsworthiness. What bothers me is the reason why we heard about them: the assumption we have nowadays that the government should be "doing" something about these things and the resulting actions taken because of that assumption, which in these cases were the jailing of Mrs. Hibbits for a week and the seizing of Mrs. Stuckey's kids for a period of time.
Now, many people will defend the government's actions by saying that these women were strange and stupid, and that some people shouldn't be allowed to have children. Well, far be it from me to defend these mother's actions, but strangeness and stupidity are nothing new. What is new, is the idea that those in government are immune to strangeness and stupidity and therefore can be trusted to control our lives. And this idea is the greatest example of stupidity I can think of.
Such stupidity leads to tyranny - in this case, the tyranny of social services bureaus. I say this, because while sometimes their wrath is visited on the truly abusive and neglectful, far too often they trump good people's parental rights in the name of enforcing Dr. Spockesque child-rearing practices. Some of you may not be aware of it, but in many jurisdictions throughout the country spanking has been made illegal. And good parents are being arrested and loved children are being seized all because of neighbors or school officials who make allegations of abuse. I personally have heard of stories that would make your head spin. There's a friend of mine whose husband was investigated because he gave their daughter one slap. Then there's the divorced man my friend told me about, who was thrown in jail and disallowed from seeing his son after administering a garden-variety spanking. There's also the case of the former colleague of mine whose elderly mother was taking care of his ill-behaved thirteen year old son. When the boy became unruly and borderline violent his grandmother restrained him as best she could, which resulted in his receiving an accidental scratch. It was insignificant, but still enough to cause some busybody to sic social services on the family, which resulted in granny being investigated and junior being forced to strip naked and submit to an examination. Then there's the vindictive neighbor who had an ax to grind with a family I know of. One day the young son in the family threw a tantrum which made him inconsolable, causing him to spend twenty minutes in the yard bawling his eyes out. Well, the neighbor saw her chance to extract her pound of flesh and reported the parents as being abusers. What happened next? You guessed it: a government agent came a knockin' at their door.
Lest you think I'm exaggerating the magnitude of the problem by using examples of social workers who simply overstepped their bounds, I want to point out that these cases are by no means unusual. I didn't even have to conduct an investigation to compile them - I heard them through the grapevine, and I know of more where they came from. Yes, what should scare every freedom loving American [are there any left?] is that these Orwellian government interlopers acted well WITHIN their bounds - the law prescribes their actions in most cases. In fact, the problem has become so acute that the Florida and Nevada legislatures had to go so far as to enact a "Right to Spank" law in order to rein in intrusive social services agencies. The fact is, we've lowered the threshold for government intrusion into the family to a point where a home is no longer a man's castle - unless that home happens to be someone else's and the man happens to work for the nanny state.
Why are these things happening? It's very simple: people fail to see the forest from the trees - hence, the title of this essay. What I mean is that people focus so much on eliminating relatively rare instances of heart-wrenching abuse, that they don't see the big picture. Consequently, we are administering a societal cure that's worse than the disease. It's not hard to understand how this can happen; after all, the modern media that I mentioned can constantly bring each and every one of us heart-rending stories from distant locales about children hurt or killed at the hands of loved ones. Of course, we seldom hear about the vast majority of parents who treats their kids lovingly. And what this inordinate degree of focus on the bad does is skew people's perception of reality, causing them to have the wrong priorities. This causes them to passionately advocate the wrong causes, and this leads to unjust laws and bad policy. And the laws that govern this matter aren't just unjust, they're tyrannical and an offense against freedom - the policies that do aren't just bad, they are literally contributing to the dissolution of the American family.
But, you might say, "are we to just let abuse occur and do nothing about it?" Well, the first thing that must be realized is that you can't legislate society to perfection. People are imperfect; they are prone to sin - they have frailties. All you can do is devise social rubrics that minimize the negative effects of these frailties, and when you do this, you must account for the fact that those who govern are ridden with the very same frailties. This is why government must never be given too much power. If there is obvious abuse: broken bones and/or other serious permanent injuries, then sure, it's time for the authorities to step in. But it's not the government's place to criminalize corporal punishment simply because some psycho-babblers who themselves are raising demon seeds don't approve of it. It's not the government's place to inject itself into someone's family life simply because there "might" be abuse. And outlawing spanking simply because a small percentage of children are abused makes about as much sense as outlawing driving simply because a small percentage of drivers get into car accidents. Moreover, abuse takes many forms, and everyone notices the ones that send children to the hospital. But what about the abuse committed by government in the name of preventing abuse? Unjustly tearing children away from their families and placing them in foster care is traumatic, and if that isn't abuse I don't know what is. So, we may say we want to err on the side of caution, but what constitutes caution here? Are we being cautious when we abuse three children through government so that we can prevent one from being abused privately? This is why the default mode MUST be that no parent's freedoms are taken away unless there is the kind of obvious abuse I spoke of - parents must be innocent until proven guilty. As it stands now though, they are guilty until proven innocent.
Now you might say, "Duke, what solution do you propose? After all, don't you want to make abuse less common?" Well, sure I do, but the answer is to do it the old-fashioned way - the right way: through the use of social pressure. If we see someone we know doing something wrong, we should do whatever we can, without attempting to trump his God-given rights, to convince him to change his ways. Let's take the cases of the mothers I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Someone, maybe the police officer who noticed the problem, could have tried to educate Mrs. Hibbits on the importance of protecting children from the sun. And, as for Mrs. Stuckey, perhaps friends could have prevailed upon her to change her son's rather anomalous dietary practices - while bearing in mind that the final decision rests with her. This is the true meaning of that African saying, "It takes a village to raise a child:" friends and neighbors should help friends and neighbors, and everyone should keep an eye on the youngsters when they're about town and not under the watchful eye of their parents. Instead, we subscribe to the perverted interpretation of that saying that has been promoted by a certain very shallow thinker who wrote a book by that title. This misinterpretation implies that the village is government, and that it has a right to impose the fashionable ideas of the age on all of us.
Make no mistake about it, there are many things that exemplify how we are no longer a free people, and this violation of the sanctity of our homes is among the most obvious. And there are many examples of our weakening moral fiber, and the fact that we are so willing to report people to the government is one of them. Many of us have become sniveling little cowards, who peer through windows and listen with glasses through walls, with the idea that we might be able to tell on a neighbor we're not too fond of. This is disgraceful; it harks back to Nazi Germany where folks had to worry about what they said for fear that one of their countrymen might report them to their government. And sure, we can say we want to stop a few individuals from tyrannizing a few others, but in our effort to do so we have created a government that is tyrannizing everyone.
