GRAND-CORPS against "Zero Tolerance"
By L. Neil Smith, lneil@netzero.com.
The Libertarian Enterprise. January 14th 2014
Prepared for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. © JPFO. Inc 2014
We have gotten used, now, nearly every day, to hearing of some new insanity perpetrated against children by the administrators of their schools.
Leaning on the phrase "zero tolerance" as if it were a magical incantation that explains everything, our children and grandchildren have been punished, summoned to the principal's office, suspended, and subjected to public humiliation for heinous crimes like kissing a fellow Kindergartner on the cheek, offering aspirin to a friend who has a headache, bringing a plastic butter knife to school with their lunch, drawing pictures of soldiers with rifles or tanks with cannon, bringing toy guns less than an inch long to school with the miniature action figures they belong to, chewing a sandwich or a cookie into the shape of a gun, or pointing an index finger at a classmate and saying "Bang!" >>>>>>> handcuffed.
Everybody who doesn't work in the public school system (and maybe a small handful who do) hates this, but nobody seems to know how to put a stop to it. Sober observers, not accustomed to making radical political pronouncements, will tell you that it appears to them that there is a concerted effort of some kind going on to destroy boyhood, in order to destroy manhood, and create what was once referred to as the "New Soviet Man", a paragon of harmlessness, a robot for the state.
These days we call the syndrome "political correctness".
At the same time, a program of censorship and thought control is going on, under the cover of various scams like environmentalism and multiculturalism. Nobody is to be judged for anything they say or do -- whether it's lying, cheating, or stealing -- as long as it complies with the world-picture the system is promoting. Step outside that picture, however, and, right or wrong, a ton of bricks will fall on you.
School classrooms were tiny tinpot dictatorships even when I was in public school (I graduated in 1964). They are unimaginably worse now, the bullying we hear about almost daily mostly being done by teachers with a Marxist political agenda and an obscene passion to stifle dissent. Any manifestation of individuality -- let alone individualism -- is viewed and dealt with by the authorities as a threat.
America's Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are haughtily dismissed as environmental criminals and cruel exploiters of people of color, while butchers and rapists like Fidel Castro, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and Nelson Mandela are elevated to near godhood.
Intended for no other purpose than to destroy individual life, liberty, and property, and to empower the state even further, blatant and unscientific falsehoods about the ozone layer, desertification, acid rain, and global warming are pounded into young, undefended minds.
David Friedman wrote a book on liberty decades ago, and called it The Machinery of Freedom. Public schools are the machinery of oppression.
As I said, everybody that you and I know complains about this mess and regards it as sheer lunacy. But the question remains, how do we stop it? Lawyers, feeding off the bottom, skimming off the top, are a part of the system we're up against, and pretty much useless at best. Electoral politics, in cases like this, is something of a blind alley. Even if organizations like JPFO were permitted to express themselves in that arena (which they are not) it never seems to produce anything but the same dreary compromise between not very good and absolutely abysmal.
Before we can undo the damage they've done, we have to stop them from doing any more. I've always favored abolishing the public schools altogether, following the advice of Cato the Elder with regard to Carthage, by emptying the buildings out, razing them to the ground so that not one stone is left standing on another, and sowing salt on the ruins.
One thing is certain: nothing will change unless we change it.
I have also long believed that, sooner or later, as the only way to rid ourselves of the collectivism imposed on us over the past hundred years, Americans will have to mount a general strike, in which nobody goes to work for some period, and nobody buys anything. Those who benefit from our work and shopping may feel "inspired" to help end socialism.
The public schools get paid for little butts on seats. That's why they take the role every morning. A series of strikes by pupils and their parents against the public schools, the prospect of empty classrooms every time they screw up, would bring the system to its knees.
As for the kids, it's not as if they'll be missing any part of a quality education. The threat of a school strike must be backed up by home-schooling.
Home-schoolers are already considered dangerously subversive by that fountainhead of state terrorism, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the fascist police state "fusion centers" it feeds with slanderous lies about people to whom religion or the Constitution are important, admirers of Ron Paul, members of the National Rifle Association or the Libertarian Party; why not give the jackboots something real to whine about?
And here's where an important idea comes in. My daughter, now a grown young woman, was entirely home-schooled. We could afford to do that because, as an author, I work at home. And she had a wonderful grandmother who was more than happy to take her a couple of days a week.
I understand that not everybody is that fortunate.
I also understand that most of those who are reading this are close to my age. There are exceptions, but the majority of individuals who care about the future of the country -- and had a decent grounding in its unique history -- seem to have been born just after World War II.
Most of us who have been parents are now becoming grandparents. And many a man will tell you that it was his grandfather who taught him to fish and to shoot -- because Dad was busy earning a living -- exactly as many a grandmother taught her granddaughters to cook and sew.
Grandpa and Grandma can take up the slack when the schools have been emptied by a strike. The old folks can teach the young folks certain self-evident truths that have been systematically denied them by the socialist education bureaucracy. And when -- and if -- the kids go back to the public schools, they will be angry that they were lied to.
Public school teaching will become a subdivision of Hell.
There are those among our number who can put together a decent curriculum for every grade, aimed at correcting lies and teaching important truths. It would be a bare-bones kind of thing to which users would be free to add material on religion, evolution, or whatever they wish. Books are freely available, in dead tree format or online.
I would call this legion of teachers "GRAND-CORPS", an educational militia.
As to the strike itself, we need to create a list of demands, chiefly recognizing children's Constitutional rights. Stupid people usually assume everyone else is as stupid as they are. Somewhere along the line, government employees got the idea that there's an age limit associated with the Bill of Rights, that you can search children's persons and property without the customary legal steps required for adults.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and here's why: the Bill of Rights is misnamed. It wasn't written to apply to you or me or our kids or grandkids. It isn't a list of things that the government has generously allowed us to do. It is actually a "Bill of Limitations", a list of things that government is absolutely forbidden to do under any circumstances.
What we need -- what a school strike should be aimed at winning for us -- is a compact signable by politicians and bureaucrats, by teachers and administrators, featuring an end to all this "zero tolerance" nonsense and restoration of respect for everybody's legal rights. We begin by enlisting other gun groups, and spread out from there.
Battling the public schools will teach us things we need to know until we can win for ourselves an oppression-free, entitlement-free society.
Author and lecturer L. Neil Smith is Senior Editorial Consultant for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. A fifty-year veteran of the libertarian movement, he is the Author of 33 books including The Probability Broach, Ceres, Sweeter Than Wine, And Down With Power: libertarian Policy In A Time Of Crisis. He is also the Publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise, now in its 17th year online.
Visit the Neil Smith archive on JPFO.
© Copyright Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership 2014.
