It's not easy being a kid in America's police state.
Danger lurks around every corner and attacks from every direction, especially when Big Brother is involved.
If we go out on the street, we risk the threat of police who will shoot first and ask questions later. In our neighborhoods, we have to worry about the nanny state and its network of busybodies who will prosecute parents who allow their children to go to school alone, go to the park alone, play on the beach alone, or even play in the yard alone.
The tentacles of the police state have encroached upon the sanctity of the home, with the government believing it knows better than you (the parent) what is best for your child. The criminalization of parenthood has ranged in recent years from parents being arrested for walking their children home from school to parents being fined and threatened with jail for their children's misbehavior or tardiness at school.
This does not even mention what happens when children are in school, where parents have little or no control over what their children are taught, how they are taught, how and why they are disciplined, and the extent to which they are brainwashed into conforming and following the authoritarian ways of their government, especially in public schools.
The message is chillingly clear: your children are not your children, but are in fact in the custody of the state, who has placed them under your custody temporarily, and if you fail to meet your obligations to the government's satisfaction, your children in your custody will be reassigned elsewhere.
This is what it means to go back to school in America today: Parents have to worry about school resource officers tasing teenagers and handcuffing kindergartners, school authorities criminalizing children's behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills to teach kids fear and submission, and a police-state mentality that has turned schools into quasi-prisons.
Instead of being taught the three R's of education (reading, writing, and arithmetic), young people are being indoctrinated with the three I's of life in the American police state: indoctrination, intimidation, and intolerance.
Indeed, today's young people are learning firsthand what it means to live at the epicenter of a politically charged culture war, yet test scores show that students aren't learning how to succeed in social studies, math, or reading. Instead, government officials are churning out docile incompetents who know next to nothing about their country's history or freedoms.
What will it mean for the future of freedom when young people trained as dumb automatons will one day be running our government?
Under the direction of government officials focused on making schools more authoritarian (sold to parents as a way to make them safer), America's young people are now first and foremost to be searched, monitored, spied on, threatened, shackled, imprisoned, criminalized for non-criminal activities, Tasered, and even shot.
This is how you get young people to march in lockstep with the police state.
Young Americans have fallen victim to a post-9/11 mindset that has transformed the country into a lockdown, militarized, crisis-fueled mockery of representative government.
Caught in the government's profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, disease, and weapons, America's schools have become quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero-tolerance policies, lockdowns, drug-sniffing dogs, strip searches, and target practice.
Not only are students being punished for minor infractions like playing cops and burglars on the schoolyard, bringing Legos to school, or having food contests, but the punishments have become much harsher, moving from detention and a visit to the principal's office to misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers, and even jail time.
Having police in schools only increases the danger.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, School Resource Officers have become the de facto police officers of elementary, middle and high schools, using tasers, pepper spray, batons and physical force to administer their own form of justice to so-called “offenders” within their schools.
Even young children, such as elementary school students, are not immune to these “reinforcement” tactics.
Paradoxically, by adding lockdowns and active shooter drills, rather than making schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating environments where children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, distrust of authority figures, anger, depression, humiliation, hopelessness, and paranoia.
The aftermath was predictable: the nation's young people were treated like violent criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled, and taught a painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) means very little in America's police state.
Similarly, the harm caused by attitudes and policies that treat America's youth as government property isn't just a short-term stripping of individual rights. It's also a long-term effort to indoctrinate young people into believing that civil liberties are luxuries that can and will be abandoned at a whim if government officials determine it is for the so-called “greater good” (i.e., one that perpetuates the purposes and goals of the police state).
So what is the answer for the future of this country, not just at this moment but one day when these young people are in charge of the country?
How can we convince someone who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, bound, imprisoned, and immobilized by government officials before they reached adulthood that they have any rights, let alone the right to challenge injustice, resist oppression, or defend themselves against injustice?
Above all, how can we convince Americans who have spent most of their early lives incarcerated in institutions that teach young people to be obedient, submissive citizens who never rebel, never question, never challenge authority, that their government works for them?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional companion, The Diary of Eric Blair, if we want to raise a generation of freedom fighters who act with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards one another and our government, we must start by running our schools like freedom forums.
About John and Nisha Whitehead:
Constitutional lawyer and author John W. Whitehead is founder and director of the Rutherford Institute. His latest books, The Diary of Eric Blair and Battlefield America: The War on Americans, are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at (email protected). Nisha Whitehead is executive director of the Rutherford Institute. Information about the Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
