Recently in my job they erased all covid related restrictions. On the company's intranet most of the people thumbed down this decision. Also comments like these were popular:
"how can we stay safe in the future without guidence?"
People clearly needs their hands held by someone. They are unable to make decisions anymore.
assessing risk, reaching consensus, and debating ideas and praxis is a skill one must learn. if you rob children of this by nerfing their worlds, they fail to acquire it. this leaves them forever dependent on authority because they have no idea how do handle adult situations on their own.
Amen--I'm 53 and it's amazing what I was allowed to do as even a young kid and nobody batted an eye. I'm also guilty of this type of nonsense with my own kids who are 12 and 15 because I've allowed others' idiocy to influence me about what is okay for children or that the world is different or whatever--so while I definitely let my kids take more risks than most these days, it hasn't been anything like the things that I did.
Building our own (very dodgy) bicycles out of spare parts and scrap
Jumping said bicycles off every incline and outdoor staircase we could find
(without helmets)
Lawn Darts, BB Guns, and slingshots
At Jr. High age riding our bicycles to the old rock quarry with our .22 riffles and box of .22LR we purchased at the drug store to terrorize tin cans
Learning to use tools before we were 10...built a 80cc motorcycle from baskets of parts by age 12 and my first car out of junk yard rescue and scavenged parts by the time I was 14 (with working brakes - dad was really grumpy about that).
and on and on.
And...we knew what time to be home for dinner and what happened if we were late (the wrath of Mom). We said please and thank you, no sir and yes mam, wore our pants with the waistband on our waist and not our butt.
I taught my son to weld when he was 10. He started shooting (the same .22 rifle I learned with) at age 5. He learned to camp, start a fire, pitch a tent, dig a hole and police the campsite when finished. He became a "pro" skateboarder by age 14 and an Eagle Scout at 17. He wasn't interested in having a car until he was 17 and when finally that desire awoke he was given a junkyard rescue and a (rather nice) pile of parts and access to tools. He's now 27, employed (paying taxes) and responsible.
Oh, and he knows right from wrong and believes neither politicians nor mass media.
A book for your older children to read and comprehend is, The Coddling of The American Mind. Although I don’t agree with everything written in this book (their account of good people on both sides, Charlottesville, etc,) I managed to comprehend the message. Safeyism is ruining our children, their futures and their minds.
I have an 8 yo son and a 10 yo daughter. My husband and I both had an extreme amount of freedom, even for the time, as kids. In Covid and everything else we seem to put more thought into life, and have done very well for ourselves as a result.
This attitude carries to our own education - which was more game than accomplishment to both of us. We bought degrees and advanced degrees, but never failed to notice the ones insisting most loudly this somehow made us super geniuses were the people selling us the degrees or the other people buying them. Buying a degree doesn’t bestow a brain on people despite what those our age who also purchased degrees would like to claim.
As parents we crave giving our kids more freedom, but how to do it is pretty dang challenging??? Any suggestions??
Overnight camp was a tool, then my (at the time 9 yo) was chocked to the point of loosing sight and unable to scream by another 9 yo after my daughter rebuffed this girls sexual advances (yes - NINE!!!). My daughter elbowed her in the stomach really hard and was able to get to a bathroom she could lock.
Upon going at it with the camp we learned that while “violence” is unacceptable, sexualized elementary school kids was “how the world is now” per the director of a YMCA camp. Oh, and they’d love to have her back, even though it came out if she keeps going she may come across more kids with more “understanding” if sex, and her counselors can be boys who think they are girls. But we shouldn’t worry, this is all “safe” and “perfectly healthy and normal.” This was just an “unfortunate” incident. I am to “understand” the attack was “unrelated” to the fact the girl who did it was kissing and grinding on a different girl in the cabin all week, then attacked my daughter for not being interested in playing that game. According to the guy who runs the camp early sexualization and rebuffing sexual advances 1 second before getting chocked had nothing to do with early sexualization of the attacker, nor the rebuffing of advances. 🙄
Seeing how violent some little boys have gotten post Covid killed the idea for my son too.
We try to send them out to explore the neighborhood, but this isn’t much of a thing anymore. Sure they can climb trees and wonder around, but the days of playing outside all day seem to be over.
Despite having incredibly mature and well behaved/ respectful kids, they are “too young” to be left alone most places. When Covid started we left them home alone to go workout and other little things, something we have continued, but is that really enough?
In all seriousness I’d really appreciate ideas here...........
Have you thought about tent camping in a non campground with your kids? Like out in the actual forest, hiking around and setting up a pup tent every night. We did this when I was young. You let the kids set up the tent, learn how to use a compass and map, respect the forest and its inhabitants, decision making (like thinking thru where to set up camp). You can also bring a book to discover what is edible. NC is loaded with great hiking and camping forest areas. it will also give you uninterrupted time with your kids. You teach, you create things for them to think through, you go on more strenuous hikes, you have fun in the river...
Also, if you have a skill like sailing, get your kids out there, learning that and letting them sail something small like a snark. Adult plus kid until they have command and can right it then let the kids go on their own. You will be very surprised how kids flourish when they learn skills and use them then can do something alone without you there lording over them. (Lording as they see it). They might be scared at first, but accomplishment and capability yield confidence.
I don’t mind some healthy fear and that is another great suggestion. The do have their own kayaks and paddle boards, but sailing adds a level of complexity. They have learned to sail little cats in the Caribbean (the tiny ones at the resorts). Half the time that’s just floating in the ocean looking at the cool creatures. Letting them sail somewhere with actual wind would be a different kind of fun.
Haha this makes me grateful (again!) that I’m divorced! My ex does this with the kids. I’d be horrible at it! (Probably means I should do it too!) Great suggestion.
Thank you for the suggestion. I did outward bound as a teenager and it was great (and basically that). I’ve also lived in the woods over summers in undergrad. They are probably big enough now. I’m sure I can track down a topo map and we already have compasses. Good suggestion!!!
When my son was a kid he had Boy Scouts. Sadly it seems that tradition has declined. But when he did it, it was a great experience. I was Scoutmaster for 6 years and 20 Eagle Scouts (including my son!). Those young men understood honor.
My oldest had to contend with neighborhood girls "coming out" to her and even asking her on a date. The kids still go outside and play, but mine have complained that oftentimes nobody else wants to. Unsurprisingly, they're on their tablets getting groomed on Discord servers and downloading apps telling them all about the myriad fictional genders. My oldest told me her friends' parents don't care about that at all.
A few months after COVID, some masked up mom made some snarky passive-aggressive remark to her kids in the early COVID days after walking past my property and hearing my oldest say masks don't work. This was outside, in a neighborhood where the other kids were out without masks on playing. And some parent was so offended by a child's opinion that she tried to belittle a child for that conclusion. So, I'm not surprised this is apparently "the way of the world" when a "pansexual" third grader isn't alarming, but a similarly-aged child saying face coverings provide no protection (and later scoffing at vaccine protection by saying it doesn't make you "invincible") is serious business.
It’s sad. I hope what sticks with your daughter is that she was right, and that woman a moron. My kids’ elementary STEM lab teacher taught them the definition of aerosol, and confirmed “toot”/ gas particles were factually many times larger than viral aerosol particles. We are grateful for his honesty. My then 6 year old was very confused, and remains confused, as to how so many adults “don’t know the definition of aerosol or have never smelled a fart.” A comment he’s made countless times after seeing masked adults. 🤦♀️😂
Wow, I never thought of this in the present such as you have. Then again I am a gramma of tiny tots. My daughters also biked and :::gasp::: played wildly at playgrounds and on scary and alarmingly dangerous swings!!!
I am shocked that your daughter suffered such disgusting abuse really disrespect from that weird kid. This makes me think that we need to teach our kids how to respond to this action with out getting "suspended"
I will admit, my daughters were both very confident in their "selves" and would not tolerate any of that either and probably would have elbowed or socked the groper.
So, what were we fearful of as kiddos?
I am 67. We were told not to buy candy from strangers in white vans, and to also not be anywhere creepy on our own.
Your kids know they can manage themselves home alone. I used to tell mine, do not open the door unless it is Jesus, but now there are a lot of criminals around that look like Jesus.
You are the boss of your kids. I guess our job now is to help them protect themselves from shitty people. Keep an open relationship with them so they feel free to discuss their daily interactions with others, and talk about how to respond, but also, what their thoughts are.
Camp can be great, my kids (14 and 17) just got back from their second camp in a month (one church run, one school run). The difference, at least for us, is that we only let our kids go to camp run by those 100% in alignment with our moral beliefs. We attend a serious a church that is committed to following the Bible, as is their Christian school. We would never in a million years let our kids go to a secular camp, or one run by a non-serious church.
A local school district here (Los Alamitos) just was in hot water as they allowed a male chaperone that I identified as "them" sleep in the girl's cabin. Seriously? On what planet is this type of thing acceptable? Everyone knows this is wrong but those without a strong biblical foundation are too cowardly to state the truth. So they look the other way as it might jeopardize their pension or someone might call them names. Incredible moral cowardice.
Do you want your kids going to camp with strong, committed believing men or women of God, ones with their own kids and stable marriages, who dress and act as adults, and who love Jesus and read the Bible? Or some childless weirdo, dressed like an obese Peter Pan, who's slogan is "whatever floats your boat"? Not a hard choice, but it only happens if we as parents are extremely discerning and aren't afraid to say "no, absolutely not".
There are definitely good camp and activity options out there for kids, but you have to strictly limit them to those that hold your moral beliefs and aren't afraid if someone calls them names because of it. And it's not just the adults running the camp but the other kids too. From good homes come good kids, and that's who I want my kids around.
The YMCA is not in theory a secular camp, it’s supposed to be Christian and they have some type of daily devotional. Our kids go to a top private, conservative, Christian school. Despite being huge (K-12 has over 1,200 kids), they don’t do a camp for just the kids at school. A lot of churches in our area have been corrupted with gender ideology.
I think I’ve heard camp Merri-wood is still sane. Hopefully that’s an option next year (we are taking this one off). I just need to look herder. Many parents share our values. Their school does. Other institutions not so much.
I hear you but YMCA is secular in my book despite the letter "C". Harvard and USC were originally "Christian" organizations and look at them now. Easy test, does the organization test everything against the Bible in determining policy? If the answer is no then we will not participate and it may as well be secular regardless of what it calls itself.
The nice thing about attending a serious, biblical church is that you can't sit in the pews for long if you aren't walking the walk, it's too uncomfortable. This tends to select for good families as either people are convicted or they leave to find a more worldly "church".
We attend Calvary Chapel and while I can't vouch for all of them, we've had nothing but success in sound biblical teaching. Most of the larger ones sponsor a couple youth camps a year.
I came to Christ in a Bible camp so I cannot advocate for them enough!
Parents should ask a lot of questions before sending their kids away. I cannot imagine sending my kids to live with people who do not share my values and beliefs. I'd want to know they are having fun, learning (for me about Christ) and that the adults were closely supervising. I would also want my kid to go with friends he or she knew. And clearly, if there was trouble they better tell the parent immediately and send the offending kid packing. Sheesh!
My daughter wasn’t suspended or anything else. You are right it’s not nearly as fun anymore. She didn’t get in any trouble for defending herself. If we thought it a good idea to send her back they would welcome her with open arms. She’s “the ideal camper we want” per the director. It happened the last night of camp and we weren’t even informed until we picked her up the next day at regular pickup. 🤯
Both of our kids, but particularly our daughter, exhibit more maturity than a lot of adults. They are respectful, well spoken, intelligent, and confident. They are comfortable making eye contact with, and speaking to, children and adults alike. We are grateful for that, and work hard to encourage self responsibility and accountability. Hopefully it sticks.
On the camp we made the choice we aren’t sending our kids somewhere that ignores reality and evident risks by choosing narrative over predictable bad outcomes in their policies. They wouldn’t tolerate a boy and girl at any age, much less 9, engaged in over the top PDA with each other at friggin YMCA camp, they wouldn’t be staying in the same cabin with each other and other kids having it forced in their face, and certainly wouldn’t tolerate boys hitting on girls with a violent response to rejection. The fact that it was a violent hyper sexualized little girl isn’t really justification to say the hyper sexualization isn’t contributing to the issue by reverting to “that’s just how the world is today,” as the camp insisted.
Camps tolerating the behavior is only making the situation worse. Refusing to confront the parents about their hyper sexualized 4th grader being hyper sexualized is weak and sad. It’s also not helping the parents do better because they weren’t informed WHY their 9 year old chocked another little girl, only that it was her final warning and it she hurt someone the next year she’d be sent home permanently. According to the camp, the parents of both girls that were all over each other most for most of the camp DID know they were sending their girls, who started “dating” and “experimenting” with their “sexual orientation” together before camp (from the same neighborhood), to stay in the same cabin. That these girls have parents evidentially encouraging and enabling this behavior in elementary school says a lot about their parenting, none of it positive. My daughter took a friend who wasn’t attacked, but the constant PDA and issues from these two girls in their cabin ruined her first overnight camp experience long before my daughter got attacked. That’s just made her scared/ sad/ mad.
It’s also came out during conversations with the camp that the cabins are no longer going to be divided by biological sex. It’s never going to be a good idea for young girls to have a delusional and entitled male teen camp counselor overseeing showers and clothing changes, irregardless of his “feelings” or self proclaimed “identity.” The denial of biological sex seems meant to detach kids from objective reality. It is also destroying actual girls’ ability to analyze threats as they actually are. As parents we would not be demonstrating good critical thinking or decision making skills ourselves to send our daughter to play along with the charade, defenseless to stop a much worse sexually motivated attack from a much larger human in a worst case scenario.
That’s the frustration as a parents right now. Sending them somewhere to be indoctrinated, humiliated, sexualized, controlled, micromanaged, etc isn’t going to encourage independence. Confused kids detached from reality doesn’t overlap much with kids who are confident, independent, and capable of making good decisions more often than bad ones.
Sadly, there are few places where kids can be kids these days.
My husband and I so value the ability to learn and grow and screwup and get it right that we had growing up. I was even an outdoor adventure guide in undergrad. We exemplify making our own choices over following the crowd for the sake of following the crowd (as we continue to demonstrate plainly with Covid). We long to give our kids the same ability, yet feel we are failing because of the difficulty in finding ways to give them that freedom to learn and grow. 😩
Hopefully we will see a tide change over the next few years for your grandchildren. God help society in 20 years if we don’t.
The thing is that it was a great camp for generations. A big pull from South America. It was fun. I think Covid made them desperate, and wokeness killed the fun and turned it into a nightmare.
Maybe consider camp at The Wilds. One in New Hampshire and one in North Carolina. They would take these issues seriously and not allow sexual behaviors occurring in the cabins.
My 14 year old daughter and I helped paint two houses for Habitat for Humanity last Saturday. She really liked it and got to talk to one of the home owners who is in a wheel chair.
That is an awesome idea!!! I haven’t worked on a habitat house since before I had kids, but I remember them letting kids help with some stuff. Thank you!
Leaving them home alone and in the neighborhood may be enough at their age, really. They're still learning so much. Each year of development brings an entirely new perspective to the same house and street, so while the same setting may seem boring to adults, kids will find completely different trouble to get into at age 9 vs. 8.
imo: Keep letting them test their capabilities around their home territory. In the meantime, you could try some shorter challenges instead of overnight Lord of the Flies trips - orienteering, martial arts, chess, sports where you can actually win or lose, escape rooms for kids, or even just planning and cooking dinner for the family (with help). Also, community volunteer events (e.g., park cleanup, sorting food pantry canned goods, etc.) can also foster pride and confidence from doing "real" work alongside adults.
Thanks for the suggestion. Our daughter emerged from the womb ready for competition and is one of the top soccer players and swimmers her age in our city. She also co-captained her battle of the books team to victory. Haha. Their school is not an “everybody gets a trophy” place. Our son likes to roll in the mud and wrestle, but isn’t super motivated for athletic competition. I’m comfortable backpacking in WV, so that actually doesn’t make me nervous. Tired to think about it, but not nervous to think about. 😂
The cooking and volunteering we’ve done since they were toddlers (they once thought it was common for adults to be without teeth - oops). Martial arts is a great suggestion. Also the escape rooms. We should try to find a community garden then can actually plant stuff at, or put one in the backyard and hope not too many chemicals get on it.
Unfortunately we aren’t super handy, so aside from cooking, cleaning, laundry and yard work, I’m not sure the real work we can figure out - reading tax regulations, making excel spreadsheets, or choosing stocks and bonds, interests them much. All they seem to grasp at this point is we pay a lot of taxes that mostly get wasted, ESG is propoganda, and always ensure your money is directly invested so never buy some pre-packaged baloney or annuities. 😂🤦♀️😂
Wow, it sounds like you're already encouraging a lot of good stuff. The gardening is a solid idea too. But don't sell yourself short on non-handiness - Excel is pretty much an essential life skill, not only for financial literacy, but also for mentally framing any problem and organizing information
Thinking more... for your son, maybe a kid's obstacle mud run? They're not necessarily competitive, and usually everyone does get a medal, but they're still fun.
Finally, and this one will be tougher, but tackling a woodworking/plumbing/car repair or other handy project together could be rewarding. Involve them in the whole process, from defining the project, learning how to do it, getting things wrong, trying again, etc. Lots of potential lessons in there about planning, research, perseverance, dealing with frustration, teamwork, and seeing that adults don't always have all the answers.
Thanks for soliciting suggestions and sharing the camp story. It's given me a lot to think about as well.
The kid mud run is a good idea. Thank you!!! I appreciate all the suggestions. I’ve been in a funk not coming up with stuff for a few weeks. I’d love to do the handy project, but we have a bunch of tools we have never used because we like our fingers. We have some handy neighbors with kids though - maybe we can recruit them to help us out.
They did help me plot charts (I used excel) to compare the March 26th “models” for NC to actuals for April 2020......... even they got to see why models that are wildly off only cause problems. Even they could tell it was wildly off and they learned about bar charts and line graphs (which are very simple and should be taught much younger in my opinion). That lesson was more of a “hypothesis v outcome” project........... needless to say I didn’t anticipate it turning into a 2 year lesson of tyranny and propoganda. I actually thought basically everyone was doing some version of this purely for curiosity. Mid April I was anticipating everyone would be over Covid and would be ignoring the rules by May/ June. They were sort of because of BLM protests, but wow, I was wrong on the general level of public curiosity about what is actually happening, and the public’s willingness to be ordered around by morons. 🤦♀️
BTW, I'm 57 (had my kids later in life). The downside of the freedom we were given in the 60s and 70s was that I ended up being sexually abused at 4.5 y.o. by a very respected neighbor. No one believed me. Took years to deal with the trauma. I've protected my kids from all manner of child abuse. Beyond that, I've exposed them to nature as much as I can while protecting their innocence. I share accounts of my childhood, of how we were totally unsupervised. I've taught them about safety (none of the stranger danger bs). I've also given them tasks that they must do independently like taking public transportation from their high school, shopping for groceries while I stay in the car, leaving them with friends at the mall (I stayed in the food court, there have been shootings before). Everything within reason and to the extent of their maturity and abilities. YOU know them best. Don't let anyone pressure you into parenting that feels unsafe to you. Blessings on your parenting journey!
Crazy isn't new. Maybe the difference is that upside-down crazy has become institutionalized. Our history (of the Jews that is) and our laws and guidelines explain that when someone who resembles a human being acts inhumanly, such as assaulting another, then they cease to be human under the law. The first commandment, which derives from the law of the Jews, is "shall not murder" (not the mistranslated that is popular). When one kills in defense of themself or others it is not murder. It is duty.
There were sickos and victims then. Even when I was young the mental disarmament had begun. People were learning to be victims. I helped teach self defense classes. A lot of women came to learn. I would hear "oh I couldn't do that". The most important thing to learn was that they had the means, the right and a moral obligation to protect themselves. It was good to know that there were a few less victims as a result.
Even then BS abounded. A common "advice" given to young women was if sexually assaulted, cooperate. The lie told was that they had better odds of surviving. We had a fellow from the FBI bureau of crime data come in to talk. He reported that over 90% of women who did NOT resist a rapist were murdered. Those who cooperated, died. His advice: fight any way you can. He noted that women who resisted survived more than 75% of the reported cases (and of course no counting of the woman who's swift action resulted in a non-report). This was in the 1970s. He also noted that women who carried firearms were almost non-existent in the crime reports for rape and other assaults. And women who learned basic self defense were the ones making crime reports instead of being corpses discovered by others.
Over the last 4 decades the notion of self reliance has been demonized. More people than ever thing it is somehow wrong to act against an non-human in human form who would harm others. This in turn enables and rewards the predators in human shape.
It sounds like you are teaching your kids well. 👍🏽💪🏽I'm sorry that happened to you, so painful. I grew up unsupervised and was sexually abused by a neighbor as well. It takes a long time to process that kind of trauma. 💕💕💕
I was discussing with my husband what happened to your daughter. I rarely think something is so over the top as to make it a household discussion, but this really stunned me. I hope you make sure everyone in your area knows what that YMCA camp is all about (without traumatizing your daughter). So SO outrageous.
Also I saw someone mentioned karate. Such a good idea. Heartening to know moms like you are out there.
It was one of the most completely shocking experiences ever. Never in my life did I think I’d need to be worried about a hyper sexualized 4th grade girl at Y camp, and yes, we’ve shared her “experience” with many. We did when she had a great time the first two years as well, so we felt obligated to let people know their policies, what happened, and why we have moved away from Y overnight camps. I’m hoping to find same sane camps, and I think there are some Christian outdoor camps that still seem rooted in objective biological reality and opposed to little kid sexualization. I thought Y camp would stay sane. I was wrong. It takes a lot more research than it used to I think.
What a horrible camp story! Makes me wary of sending mine! For some further ideas for you (maybe?): Here in the city I let my kids walk or bike to school on their own by age 8ish. Most others don’t do this. It’s a 25 minute walk/10 minute ride. I let them make their way home on their own too, only my eldest (13) just now has a no-data phone. I also send them out for errands. My 8 year old walked to the Main Street over the weekend to grab us some milk! Bread sometimes. Whatever. I have a baby too, so now if my 8 year old is meeting friends at the park (with those friends’ parents) I just send him on his own sometimes and tell him to come back when his friends go home! The 8 and 11 year old took the city bus several blocks down to their rugby classes in the fall. There and back, crossing streets, walking blocks, all that. People seem in awe of how “independent” my kids are. It doesn’t seem that hard, though! To think of what I did when I was a kid it is quite different! I miss those days. Different kind of freedom in those suburbs, though. Mine have some city-kid freedom street smarts (I’m hoping!).
And yes whenever I read these posts I think of upbringings and the education system and how that has forced many of us into compliance from the beginning. Unable to do common sense things, just told to go along with the group sit down shut up raise your hand wear your coat cause I said so...all of that. We need to raise people to think for themselves again! We need schools that respect students as PEOPLE, not SUBJECTS to mold.
Our kids school is a 20-minute drive away (it’s a private Christian school), so that’s out. What phone did you get your daughter? Ours has a Gizmo right now. We are struggling to find one with talk and text minus the unfettered access to the internet.
Good on you for making your kids so independent!!!
I need to find some suburban things. We live in the city, but I’m not even sure the buses run anywhere near here (it isn’t a thing here). There are some grocery stores a mile away they could walk to. That would be good for them. Thanks for the idea!!!
Re phone: It’s a refurbished older iPhone model. I’m reluctant and uneasy about it still…but she can text and talk and connect to wifi. No data option. I’ll look into Gizmo! I don’t know anything about it! Thanks.
I'm sorry that happened to your daughter. That could be traumatizing for sure, and she developed some fight and grit in the process. Good for her! 💪🏽👏When I was young I spent all day outside roaming the neighborhood, sometimes getting into things I wasn't supposed to. Us neighborhood kids were never seriously hurt or caused serious damage. I remember hearing about a park for kids that was made up of wild nature, and the kids were able to build things, walk across fallen tree trunks, climb high places, etc. I forget what city it was in. The parents stayed behind the fence the whole time, and children were allowed to assess their own danger and work out their own problems. I think nature is good for that sort of thing, and that's what I did with my stepsons. I wonder if some lightly supervised areas in nature, with "just right" challenges for your daughters, would be good.
I saw a story (with pictures!) of an urban park like that. Being urban it was basically an empty lot full of junk - car tires, toilets, old plywood and lots of junk. The kids played there anyway, so local parents removed the most lethal looking stuff, fenced it off, and supplied some old tools, nails etc.. At least one parent had to be around to open it up, and stayed near for emergencies only. Kids would line up and wait for them to open it, a huge hit! I believe it was in Ireland somewhere.
That’s a great idea. I was an outdoor adventure guide in undergrad, and we are building a house in the NC mountains right now for that reason. The community has tons of activities and trails and we are hoping it will be a place for them to unplug and go wonder.
I’m going to Google that park. It sounds like a great idea!!!! Thank you.
Wow. I forgot to mention that I started my son with gymnastics at age 2 and learning martial arts at age 4. He learned 2 powerful things: (1) how to fall and (2) how not to fight.
I never heard about a bully choking or beating on my son. I have watched him calmly handle a confrontation and bring a peaceful resolution many times. Because he learned well.
We live in an era of false equivalences. Redefining "bullying" as saying mean things on social media. A kid can be suspended (or even arrested) for saying meant things in a tweet: A boy dressed as a girl can rape a girl in high school and there are no consequences (apparently "no" means "no" only if gender roles are clear?). And when the girls parents object they're labeled terrorists. Really not even Orwell's imagination could make this stuff up...
I wish you luck. I fear for my grandchildren. But all you can do is teach them right from wrong. You clearly can not depend on institutions like schools or the YMCA to do that. You must now teach them to deal with the status quo too...but if enough parents take back the job perhaps things can change.
Teach them to be responsible. The things we did as kids taught us to be responsible for ourselves. We learned to shoot, to camp, to hike. Activities in which you must depend on yourself to stay safe. Staying safe wasn't really hard - learn a few rules, be alert and use your grey matter. Have things changed so much? Other than demonizing all things that we used to do to teach kids responsibility I mean?
My son learned a valuable lesson in high school (10th grade I think). My son had trouble with a math teacher and was failing. Not trouble with the math. However, he made a deal with the teacher: finish the work and pass the final exam and he would pass the class. This deal was made in front of myself, my wife, and the head of the school. Come end of the term the teacher reneged. I was angry. I went to the head of the school and pointed out that a deal was made, hands shaken, and ethical people followed through. The head of school who had been in the room at the time said "well I don't recall....". Instead of being angry I turned it into a teachable moment for my son: next time, get it in writing. He had to retake the math class but he learned a life's lesson and has not made that mistake again.
Schools are not what they were. Parents need to wake up and just look at CRT and the Sex Ed curriculum with focus on gender identity and sexuality from K on. Protect your kids. When my daughter was in 5th grade (10 y.o. then) her sex ed curriculum included a description of anal sex, oral sex, etc. WHY?? Why are adults so bent on destroying the innocence of children? SMH....
It does seem like it's gone from ineffective to ludicrous. When my kid was in school, we worried about class sizes, teachers with no performance incentive, administrators and school boards with no connection with kids, teachers, or reality. Stuff like that. We fought with curriculum that didn't teach the constitution, demonized "the other side" (anyone deviating from The Party line), and setting bad examples of behavior (like telling lies and breaking their word). Nothing like today! Maybe this is good - maybe it will make critical mass and vaporize itself and we can start over?
All you cite seems like it follows the doctrine that kids should be taught WHAT to think instead of HOW to think. Leaving some mysteries can be good; the process of discovery is more meaningful than being told. I've heard kids complain that teachers and counselors harass them if they don't admit uncertainty about gender: one recent university grad (female) told me when she was in middle school and high school, she was told flat out if she thought she was 100% female and heterosexual she was wrong. That if she never doubted her "choices" then she wasn't a good person. Really? Middle school? Isn't puberty confusing enough naturally? Geez....
But I keep meeting young people who get it, who challenge the "woke" and all the other narrow minded bovine excrement. Young people with good heads and clear values. In short kids who give me hope for the future. Anyway I'm over 60 so not my problem in another 30 years or so!
We are not going to sue, but my daughter will testify if anything similar happens to another kid and that terrifies them more because they know their policies are outright insane. My daughter is a 10 year old that’s read over 700 books, gets straight A’s, has never gotten below a 100 on conduct, and is one of the 5 best swimmers and soccer players in our city and county. She’s an attorneys worst nightmare. We have a paper trail of our communications. We’d rather scare they heck out of them so they make better decisions next time, hopefully, then waste time and money on some legal battle that would turn the YMCA lawyers on our kid. I’m not sure it’s the right choice, but it’s the one we make.
I got lots of awesome ideas I really appreciate!! Need is a matter of perspective on this I guess, but I’m genuinely appreciative!!! I had the kids help extra with dinner tonight and we talked to them tonight at dinner and decided to let them head to the library near by alone this weekend. We let them choose (granted there aren’t many choices, but they both lived that idea).
"this is because they were not allowed to play with lawn darts as children."
I thought this until 2020, when I saw my adopted nation lose its damned mind. I am a long-time advocate of "free range" kids having growing up that way. In the developed world, it's hard to think of a population that has had more freedom as children in recent years than New Zealand, and probably one of the reasons they produce some of the best rugby players in the world (I suppose having Polynesian ancestry helps).
I really think you would enjoy this 12 minute vid on NZ's "no rules school", though it's been my experience that while many schools are not this "free" the general cultural attitude was quite prevalent. I frequently saw children alone on the streets that even approached me to pet my dog. There is very little warning in the culture about "stranger danger" etc. that has pervade the US for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Y0cuufVGI
This is a culture that, prior to 2020, was very grounded and common sense and competency. Something else is going on, and perhaps it is that bit about trust... I think their attitude toward the state is what did them in and took them off-guard. Also, really zero experience with totalitarianism or extremely deep corruption on their own soil. "It can't happen here." Their extreme level of naivete did them in. Not being scaremongered and lied to for the last 20 years like Americans have been set them up for this.
I've been an anarchist for years but I thought it was just too wild that the government would use a public health crisis to enact global tyranny and global government. I was very late to the party on covid. Seven years in NZ had desensitized me to the nature of the state. I was wrong.
Some of what I'd consider the best places to live prior to 2020 (Australia, NZ, Canada except for the damned cold) and were honestly pretty free places have been turned into totalitarian hellholes. It's a damned shame.
Then again, it all starts somewhere. Wolves trusted the humans around the campfire and got turned into pugs. And humans trusted the tax collectors who came for the grain in the promise of protection and, well.... here we are.
Our domestication is a very unconscious process. :(
My 8 year old says domesticated dogs didn’t actually come from wolves. They have a common ancestor. I get the moral of the story, but I think it’s inaccurate factually.
You have a well informed 8 year old! I remember a study came out about a decade ago that showed just that. Domestication took place about 13,000 years ago, and the various genetic lines of dogs converge back on that date. But they converge back on three different nodes that themselves don't converge until about 50,000 years ago. Wolves all belong to another line that converges with the three dog lines also about 50,000 years ago. So parsimony would say that wolves are descended from primordial dogs, rather than the other way around as is usually presumed.
Of course, their common ancestors would have looked and acted more like wolves than domesticated dogs. But they were probably more jackal-like in their life strategies, hanging around the real predators to snag their share when the big cat had had its fill. When, about 50,000 years ago, a group of early humans developed the technology to become big game hunters in their own right, and spread across Eurasia spearing deer and bison and mammoths for the good life, I imagine that some of the early canids switched their attention to the human bands. Every Cro Magnon band would have had its pack of wolf-dogs following it, like giant, predatory rats, to claim a share of every kill, or perhaps to mob a stray child if the hunting was poor. Try to leave them behind at the last kill, and they would finish eating and then track you down again by scent. Try to kill them, and they would learn your abilities and come back. They were domesticated only when humans learned to preserve food and save every scrap for themselves and their pets, but long before then they learned to read humans better than any other animal. Their human band was their meal ticket and their territory that they defended from other carnivores, including their own kind. They were our first domesticates, because they were originally the ones domesticating us.
Wolves, I think, were the conservatives who continued to follow the big cats. When the Cats became extinct, their dog-jackals had to strike out on their own, and become the free top-level predators that we know today.
I agree and sent the link to 'lawn darts' to many friends and associates. Some have become Gato Malo advocates :) I also remember the dangerous playgrounds of my youth (1960s) where the merry-go-round not only was made of splintery wood and sharp metal nuts & bolts, but the gravel underneath it was often full of broken glass from the beer bottles the 'older' kids would smash, once they were smashed. We learned that life can be risky and fun activities could be hazardous. Band-aids, neosporin and PhIsoHex antiseptic soap were always on hand at home. We survived and even might say, prospered, despite or maybe because of it all.
I don't really need a book to cover this. I see it with my own eyes.
Not all kids in the Millennial generation are hopeless. It takes more than "free play" and in fact I think the reminiscing is leaving out the rules and constraints that governed our unsupervised time. It was because we learned and understood the rules and limitations that we survived.
At the core of the crisis is a lack of understanding. Some kids even today are raised with clear values, definitive boundaries and limits, and taught to use their brains. But it has become increasingly difficult for parents to provide clear,unambiguous teaching. The institutionalized ignorance that saturates our children via state controlled education (even if you put your kid in a private school) are the foundation of an assault that has demonized the very values and skills that make humans independent. The popular media supports the demonetization of independence in thought and action. Popular culture has elevated dependence on others as somehow more intellectually enlightened. The result is mental disarmament. Circling back to the thread, that is how freedom is not just eradicated, but forgotten.
When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.
Too many people raised over the last 4 decades (even my generation) think that the ability and attitude to defend yourself and others should be reserved to only "the proper authorities" and shun the notion that addressing a threat independently, be it physical, cultural or economic, is simply wrong.
This is what I find terrifying. People unable or unwilling to make personal decisions. And I'm saying this as one who struggles with self-doubt and second guessing. But I see these issues of personal freedom as above all else and am floored by the acceptance of so many that have readily given up their rights.
I think if one surrenders this right it allows them to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility, regret, guilt or shame. It then becomes the onus of the collective rather than the individual. Hence we see division targeted at groups (stereotypically generated) rather than allowing that everyone and every concept exists along a continuum of greyscale rather than the rigid black/white thinking that is pervasive today.
Thus those we want to feel good about themselves readily accept the boundaries set upon them. It is a drug for the masses to be ruled. Just as the junkie that need that fix to camouflage his pain, so the individual gives up his freedom for that fix of complacency.
And as Dennis Prager said, talking about mask-wearing, "Watching half of our fellow Americans accept and engage in such irrational behavior (not to mention sometimes hysterically enforce it, as myriad social media videos attest) not only depresses the rest of us; it frightens us. That more than half of our country willingly obeys completely irrational orders raises the question: What irrational orders from the state would they not obey?"
Parents are sterilizing their kids in mass with big pharma subscriptions and permanent genital mutilation surgeries based on “feelings”......... there isn’t an order some wouldn’t follow.
There also isn’t a way to force some of us into compliance.
It’s the vast middle where the ability to control lies, and the number masking their toddlers like Taliban women is not at all comforting.
Yes, I struggle with anxiety and decision making as well. However, when we I was growing up we were out of the house playing. My mother probably appreciated the peace! The neighbour children would come around to play and we would roam the fields and stay out until the dark. I can't ever remember my parents complaining or saying they were worried about us. Here's the thing: we quickly learned who were the kids to avoid and created heaps of fun and interesting games to play. I remember a girl from up the road who said don't go to the stream (about 20 mins away across the fields). My memory is that she said there was a man there (maybe exposing himself?) Me and my two friends were not to be stopped by this and went away. This could be seen as dangerous and foolish but looking back I feel good that three 8 or 9 year old girls were not afraid. Seems like nowadays a lot of women are real scardy cats!
It is those people who clamor for so called guidance that are the real problem for humanity and not the dictators. If there were no or few incompetent people, the dictators would not have anyone to be openly willing to be controlled.
They need to have some of their peers stand up and lead them out of this madness. The thing is - most of us (even dyed-in-the-wool right wing anarchists like myself) are followers. The people we've been coerced into following just really, really suck and have become adept at killing their competition in the womb.
So people who think they've got what it takes - set the example, do it loud and do it proud. And please god don't just retreat into self reliance - these dumb dumbs need you right now. They're idiots, not bad people.
As for the conscious followers - throw your support behind that guy the second he sticks his head up. Hell, even seek out people in the community that are on the right kind of mission and support them.
I know I'm not the A-type to rally people around me or be the point man on anything, but I'll give everything I've got to the mofos with the cahonas to be that person. Whether it's the workplace, community, politics - whatever. It's the only way out IMO. We need more organic leaders, we need more people to support and fall in line behind those organic leaders.
"how can we stay safe in the future without guidence?" I too see this utter mingyness on the corporate intranet. Its always the same 50 or so abitious, souless muppets. They just have to show how much they are compliant and willing to serve a master. Its how you get on these days.
It is amazing to see how far we have fallen from the deep thinking of individuals from the past. The shift in our thinking is stark, because we have not been tested by monarchy overreach in well over 200 years, by despotism, by invasion. Our future generation seems hypnotized by their screens, both individual and “collective”. The social media is the gladiator entertainment of our generation.
so sad but 100% true. I can see this in my own 19 and 17 year olds. I've had to refrain from talking 'too much' about the vax injuries, and govt tyrannical ways lest my kids walk out of the room. Have been working on finding a balance so they continue to trust me and are open to the occasional article from the honest journalists and analysts (i.e. boriquagato and other substackers). My greatest comfort is that I managed to convince my college kid to request a non-medical exemption to the c19 shots. Keeping them off those clotshots has been my top priority. I'm exhausted.
"The Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, "See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk!"
Your "tax refunds" comment is 100% on point. So many people I chat with have that exact mentality of "the government's being so nice, giving us our money back"!
I also wanted to share an essay I found recently which examines government and corporate policies during the pandemic leading to this encroaching tyranny. From a variety of different angles (legal/policing/education/etc.), all under the same umbrella.
A superb piece of work. All Sr G’s stuff is excellent but this is a philosophical tour de force. Thanks for the reminder of Frédéric Bastiat’s quote. Tax, permission based society, regulation - all apparatus of control & oppression. Anyone who continues to believe in benevolent governance is delusional. The evidence from state responses to Covid is overwhelming; these people are not your friends. But still the masses stay loyal.
Democracy died a long time ago, now we just go through the periodic motion of pretending to choose our oppressor. The only way to end this farce, and it’s unlikely to be in my lifetime, is the wholesale abandonment of the control infrastructure and that starts with understanding the fundamental ideology Sr G sets out here. And rejecting it.
Please -- the USA is not a democracy, and never was. It is (or was) a constitutional republic. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting who's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome of the election.
"Does anyone seriously just go to any doctor that the state says is OK or hire any lawyer that has passed the bar?" .... seriously, it happens all the time.
We have to work really hard to vet this stuff ourselves. I've gone to and quit so many bad doctors, just because I didn't have a way to know in advance, and then I couldn't warn anyone afterwards.
How about successfully treating Stage 2/3 Cancer with a Doctor based out of Tijuana Mexico? No chemo, no radiation, no side effects and no metastasis since 2008, but "advanced" western medicine label these Mexican Docs as quacks and con men. Most disturbingly they have successfully convinced the masses of the danger of the unregulated medical system in Mexico. Instead, pharma's "safe and effective" chemo is the correct and regulated path for treatment.
I don't blame anyone for that. The main point of your GP is that they can sign your absence and schools/workplaces will accept your sickness as valid...
El Gato, you need to write your thoughts on the origins of the Civil War and why slavery wasn't the primary driver of that conflict. That would be an interesting read.
Thanks, el gato, just got it on eBay. Looking forward to reading something outside of the official canon. In light of our government's heavy-handed control of the recent narratives, EVERYTHING is open for re-evalutation.
Initially, I have a hard time bumping slavery from its prime mover role in the conflict for several reasons, among them: 1)Having read the Lincoln/Douglas debates, slavery was front-and-center and, as I recall, practically the only issue discussed in the Illinois senate race. 2)Secession began before Lincoln's inauguration, and Lincoln ran on a platform to simply limit the expansion of slavery into the new territories, not to end the institution.
Sure, most northerners signed up to "preserve the union" and southerners for "states' rights" but the phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" came from this conflict, and rich men have to come up with some pithy phrases to get poor men to enlist, so the reasons expressed by soldiers is often regurgitated spin from our leaders ("they hate us for our freedoms...") Can't put a whole lot of stock in that.
The opposite of a state is not freedom though. Think of the any state or governement overrach, crime, coercion or violation of what you call rights. Now think of that without any state o governement.
The options are try to control the state, or pay off you local ganglord.
Now, when/if said state starts behaving like a local ganglord, then it's high time to treat the state as one should always treat career criminals: a warning shot in the face.
Again: the absence of control, discipline, structure, hierarchy is not freedom, it's chaos - the rule of the strong without limitations or pretense.
We know reality exists as cycles. As humans we want to exists in a “ state” of being that is relatively constant and predictable. But these states don’t last long, and governments come into being with good intentions and are quickly corrupted, serving only themselves. It seems inevitable the cycle ends with anarchy, reset, rejection. I want to believe we could design a government that could last eons, but nature seems to suggest not.
Case study for Gang-based rulers: Mafia in Southern Italy. Many Italians were very comfortable under de-facto Mafia rule for generations. They had good governance, safety, and clear rules of conduct in exchange for their tithes. The Mafia at least has an enforced honor code; that's more than can be claimed by modern bureaucracies!
Well let's start dismantling, and when the biggest problem is "Who will build the roads?" then maybe we can start talking about increasing the power of the state again.
Why would the state need to have more "power" just to built the roads. If that is what their boss, you know, we the people, tell them to do they don't get power from that. They get the obligation to do the work.
So what do we do about it? We actually were having a discussion with our kids the other night and I commented that I felt like more people were paying attention now after Covid but my son seemed to feel that his generation was still pretty unfazed by all the Covid regulation.
I think we get involved in our communities and start local. It’s where we can make the biggest difference.
I have younger kids, and they have a very different perspective. They see a difference in the behavior/ motivation/ desire to participate in life between the kids that were relatively unaffected like they were by attending a conservative in person private Christian schools, no masks, lots of travel, lots of activities, and lived as normally as possible; and their friends who were very isolated with online school, masking, social distancing, no activities or travel, etc.
My daughter (10 yo/ 5th grade) has a few friends whose parents bought into all this crap and she has been saying for a while they seem “sad and empty” now. They never want to do anything with anyone, even though most of their parents have lightened up and allowed them to play with real humans in person again. They have dropped their sports and activities. Just sit there at parties no matter how many people try to talk to them. It’s very sad.
For my son (8 yo, 2nd grade) there is a pretty stark issues with behavior problems from some of the previously isolated boys as they started emerging from isolation even last summer - spitting, hitting, shoving, over the top disrespectful towards adults. Really over the top and concerning enough we won’t let our son go to overnight camp because of how much we are seeing this at activities. Overnight camp was something we had hoped both of our kids would do often pre-Covid, and our daughter had already done 2 summers, not so much now. We have found other ways to encourage independence with fun and challenging activities that don’t involve electronics.
It’s very sad what we have done as a society to children. I hope young people today don’t make the same mistakes that we made. I do not know of a society in human history that so intentionally damaged their own young children to such a wide extent.
We are personally concerned enough about predictable likely outcomes that we already encourage our kids to plan on moving south to build a life, or living in small towns. We are building a vacation home that can easily become our main somewhere that didn’t destroy their kids. I’d be shocked if the mid sized city we live in isn’t poorer and more violent in 10-20 years when the kids that were most damaged by this become young adults. I still hope my fears are proven wrong.......
The hamster who has lived its whole life in a cage does not complain about being confined to the cage but forget to feed it a pellet and their world stops.
What are the "pellets" that upend our young people?
Last week I had a conversation with my Uber driver which drifted onto the subject of taxation.
He complained that they are very high (he's correct - I'm in the People's Republic of California), and I said that all taxation was theft. He was taken aback and had clearly never heard this before.
I then offered up my standard spiel in these (unfortunately rare) encounters:
Imagine I was to come to your door and tell you from now on, you will pay me 30% of your income, and if you don't I will send a gang of costumed, armed thugs to your door, drag you away, throw you into a cage and bankrupt your family. Oh, and if you resist they will murder you.
Would that be okay? A moral thing for me to do?
He then said "No. That is a really good point, but taxation is legal."
My reply: "Just because something is legal does not make it right. Slavery was legal."
He is a young black man and I could tell that gave him serious pause.
Then he asked me if I'd heard of civil asset forfeiture. I told him that in 2014, the cops stole more than all burglaries in the U.S. combined. He was unaware and said he would look it up and send it to his friends.
I spent twenty years making these arguments to people I knew. Sometimes I quoted Bastiat in facebook posts. I don't think I ever changed a single mind. I couldn't even persuade anyone that socialized medicine, i.e. giving over your own health decisions to bureaucrats, was bad.
Eventually, I deleted all social media and threw in the towel. I don't think most people are capable of learning these ideas outside the school of hard knocks and just that sort of lesson is well on its way. It will be a knock so hard that it won't be forgotten for a very long time.
Now I just focus on teaching my children to think critically and to not trust any authority. The main lesson I want them to absorb is just to read enough history to question the status quo. If they can ask why things are done a certain way now when they were done some other way in the past, that is enough. That will lead you to the truth about how the desire for power has distorted our system into its current shape.
You never debate for the person you're talking to, you debate for the unknown number of people reading along. Think of it that way, and you might have changed a lot of minds.
I will quibble with you about privatization of roads though. The toll road across our state was leased/sold years ago and it's the crappiest section of that interstate for 3 states. There's no excuse for it except greed.
Despite the digging I just did, I could find no real verifiable information on who manages it/owns it. It appears IFM, an Aussie company owns part of it b/c the previous managers of the Indiana 80/90 toll road defaulted in 2014. Regardless, it's a disaster just like all the roads in Chicago that are perpetually under construction and tolled. Having to drive anywhere near Chicago adds delays to any trip and has for many years.
Oh good god, in PR I've seen smoother surfaces on guanabana than on roads immediately after the city has patched a pothole. It's like no one in PR has the first clue how to pave anything smoothly. In my neighborhood there was a particularly rough, bumpy patch that the city came to repave. It is now AS ROUGH AND BUMPY as before they "fixed" it, and was that way immediately after they left.
Ditto a couple of potholes in particular on the westbound Parada 18 marginal exit off the Baldorioty. They "fix" them, and then less than a month later they're potholes again. And I mean axel-breaking potholes, because on the eastbound side one late Friday night a few years ago I was up working or whatever and I heard a horrendous thud, worse than usual from that area where there'd been a cavernous pothole for months. A car with 4 women destined for a night out at La Placita hit that pothole and broke their axel. I watched on and off for over an hour from our apartment as the police arrived, the wrecker arrived, the women sat and stood stranded, etc.
Roads are a disgrace here. Government is the disgrace.
Yeah, when the toll went up on the new NYS Thruway decades ago, the promise was that the toll would only remain until the cost of the Thruway was paid for.
What was that, 60 years ago?
Needless to say, the toll is here to stay. As it ever was intended.
So, no mass revolt? I'm guessing that most people are ok with the continuous spending on a road. If you don't hold the politician to their "promise" and the government to its obligation, then who is really at fault?
It is the citizen's fault. The politician/government are hired to do the work the citizen deems to be done. If they do not do the work, they should be fired and replaced with someone who will do the work. If they don't get fired, then the citizen assumes responsibility for the problem.
It's not quite that simple. There's no *citizen* to fire them.
Constituencies are composed of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people, all who have their own perspectives. How do the conservatives in California "fire" the governor and other statewide officeholders, for example, when enough other voters prevent it, or when those in power corrupt the electoral process and steal elections? Are the conservative citizens of California, or the Trump voters of America, at fault for not firing the corrupt, POS Dem pols in MI, WI, PA, and GA who facilitated the steal in 2020, and for not firing the corrupt POS Dem pols in CA who subverted the recall election?
We have the soap box and ballot box, yes. Even the jury box.
But ultimately, you can vote/steal your way into tyranny - that's not the citizen's fault - but removing tyranny always requires the fourth, and remaining, box. Because tyrannical despots don't willingly give up their power.
I think it is that simple. The country belongs to the citizens and when the system is compromised it is the duty of the citizen to put it right. Andrew, I don't mean to argue with you because I think we agree on so much, but you seem to be approaching the problem from solidly within a box. When an election is stolen, and the authorities are in on the steal what does a citizen do? Stand by and say, "oh well, we voted, and it just didn't work out". Firing someone is not limited to voting or the legal system. And the citizen's responsibility is beyond elections. The real questions are what is your freedom worth to you and what are you willing to do to preserve or restore it?
It's 80/90 across Indiana. We discovered last month on a trip that the roads in Southern IL are better than any of ours, which was a COMPLETE shock. Illinois??!! Where all the money goes to support the organized crime that's called Chicago?
Well southern IL/IN don't freeze as hard as 90, but it has still gone to hell. Lots of roads around here are crap too. In MA they spend a whopping 10% of the hwy budget on construction and maintenance. Lotta admin overhead, right?
I help people get liquor licenses in California, and I have been thinking about this so much lately. The hospitality industry is full of creative (albeit egomaniacal) people who have endless ideas, employ a lot of people who can't function in office work (nor stay at home work because alcoholism), and have this very unbureaucratic sensibility.
Seeing them hammered by so many agencies just to try and operate is... abusive. They pay exorbitant fees for licenses for what? The ABC considers their job to serve the 'public', not these business owners who actually pay for the pleasure of supporting them. ABC is regularly doing sting operations to catch them serving minors or making mistakes. Then they pony up to pay me, often gratefully, because it's so painful for them to communicate with these decidedly uncreative bureaucrats who wouldn't last a day running a restaurant.
I have been wondering on what basis this actually makes the state better. A system where society just stopped supporting/shut down bad actors seems like it would do much more good than 'qualifying' everyone who wants to work in this industry.
Watching them jump through every California covid hoop has been horrifying on so many levels, but to their credit, they have stubbornly reinvented themselves every step of the way. All the ABC has done is restrict their abilities.
That’s really fascinating. But it makes sense. People were deciding ways of underground restaurants during Covid shutdown time. Private paid dinner parties where chefs would come cook! Cheers to finding a way! 🥂 🍻
"they have made you afraid of freedom"
Recently in my job they erased all covid related restrictions. On the company's intranet most of the people thumbed down this decision. Also comments like these were popular:
"how can we stay safe in the future without guidence?"
People clearly needs their hands held by someone. They are unable to make decisions anymore.
this is because they were not allowed to play with lawn darts as children.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-lawn-darts?s=w
assessing risk, reaching consensus, and debating ideas and praxis is a skill one must learn. if you rob children of this by nerfing their worlds, they fail to acquire it. this leaves them forever dependent on authority because they have no idea how do handle adult situations on their own.
Amen--I'm 53 and it's amazing what I was allowed to do as even a young kid and nobody batted an eye. I'm also guilty of this type of nonsense with my own kids who are 12 and 15 because I've allowed others' idiocy to influence me about what is okay for children or that the world is different or whatever--so while I definitely let my kids take more risks than most these days, it hasn't been anything like the things that I did.
We somehow survived:
Building our own (very dodgy) bicycles out of spare parts and scrap
Jumping said bicycles off every incline and outdoor staircase we could find
(without helmets)
Lawn Darts, BB Guns, and slingshots
At Jr. High age riding our bicycles to the old rock quarry with our .22 riffles and box of .22LR we purchased at the drug store to terrorize tin cans
Learning to use tools before we were 10...built a 80cc motorcycle from baskets of parts by age 12 and my first car out of junk yard rescue and scavenged parts by the time I was 14 (with working brakes - dad was really grumpy about that).
and on and on.
And...we knew what time to be home for dinner and what happened if we were late (the wrath of Mom). We said please and thank you, no sir and yes mam, wore our pants with the waistband on our waist and not our butt.
I taught my son to weld when he was 10. He started shooting (the same .22 rifle I learned with) at age 5. He learned to camp, start a fire, pitch a tent, dig a hole and police the campsite when finished. He became a "pro" skateboarder by age 14 and an Eagle Scout at 17. He wasn't interested in having a car until he was 17 and when finally that desire awoke he was given a junkyard rescue and a (rather nice) pile of parts and access to tools. He's now 27, employed (paying taxes) and responsible.
Oh, and he knows right from wrong and believes neither politicians nor mass media.
A book for your older children to read and comprehend is, The Coddling of The American Mind. Although I don’t agree with everything written in this book (their account of good people on both sides, Charlottesville, etc,) I managed to comprehend the message. Safeyism is ruining our children, their futures and their minds.
I'm 70 and considering my childhood, I'm lucky to be alive. :)
I can relate. When I think of some of things we did as kids I’m surprised we lived
I have an 8 yo son and a 10 yo daughter. My husband and I both had an extreme amount of freedom, even for the time, as kids. In Covid and everything else we seem to put more thought into life, and have done very well for ourselves as a result.
This attitude carries to our own education - which was more game than accomplishment to both of us. We bought degrees and advanced degrees, but never failed to notice the ones insisting most loudly this somehow made us super geniuses were the people selling us the degrees or the other people buying them. Buying a degree doesn’t bestow a brain on people despite what those our age who also purchased degrees would like to claim.
As parents we crave giving our kids more freedom, but how to do it is pretty dang challenging??? Any suggestions??
Overnight camp was a tool, then my (at the time 9 yo) was chocked to the point of loosing sight and unable to scream by another 9 yo after my daughter rebuffed this girls sexual advances (yes - NINE!!!). My daughter elbowed her in the stomach really hard and was able to get to a bathroom she could lock.
Upon going at it with the camp we learned that while “violence” is unacceptable, sexualized elementary school kids was “how the world is now” per the director of a YMCA camp. Oh, and they’d love to have her back, even though it came out if she keeps going she may come across more kids with more “understanding” if sex, and her counselors can be boys who think they are girls. But we shouldn’t worry, this is all “safe” and “perfectly healthy and normal.” This was just an “unfortunate” incident. I am to “understand” the attack was “unrelated” to the fact the girl who did it was kissing and grinding on a different girl in the cabin all week, then attacked my daughter for not being interested in playing that game. According to the guy who runs the camp early sexualization and rebuffing sexual advances 1 second before getting chocked had nothing to do with early sexualization of the attacker, nor the rebuffing of advances. 🙄
Seeing how violent some little boys have gotten post Covid killed the idea for my son too.
We try to send them out to explore the neighborhood, but this isn’t much of a thing anymore. Sure they can climb trees and wonder around, but the days of playing outside all day seem to be over.
Despite having incredibly mature and well behaved/ respectful kids, they are “too young” to be left alone most places. When Covid started we left them home alone to go workout and other little things, something we have continued, but is that really enough?
In all seriousness I’d really appreciate ideas here...........
Have you thought about tent camping in a non campground with your kids? Like out in the actual forest, hiking around and setting up a pup tent every night. We did this when I was young. You let the kids set up the tent, learn how to use a compass and map, respect the forest and its inhabitants, decision making (like thinking thru where to set up camp). You can also bring a book to discover what is edible. NC is loaded with great hiking and camping forest areas. it will also give you uninterrupted time with your kids. You teach, you create things for them to think through, you go on more strenuous hikes, you have fun in the river...
Also, if you have a skill like sailing, get your kids out there, learning that and letting them sail something small like a snark. Adult plus kid until they have command and can right it then let the kids go on their own. You will be very surprised how kids flourish when they learn skills and use them then can do something alone without you there lording over them. (Lording as they see it). They might be scared at first, but accomplishment and capability yield confidence.
I don’t mind some healthy fear and that is another great suggestion. The do have their own kayaks and paddle boards, but sailing adds a level of complexity. They have learned to sail little cats in the Caribbean (the tiny ones at the resorts). Half the time that’s just floating in the ocean looking at the cool creatures. Letting them sail somewhere with actual wind would be a different kind of fun.
Start on a lake.
we used to pitch a pup tent in the backyard... had loads of fun.
Haha this makes me grateful (again!) that I’m divorced! My ex does this with the kids. I’d be horrible at it! (Probably means I should do it too!) Great suggestion.
Thank you for the suggestion. I did outward bound as a teenager and it was great (and basically that). I’ve also lived in the woods over summers in undergrad. They are probably big enough now. I’m sure I can track down a topo map and we already have compasses. Good suggestion!!!
When my son was a kid he had Boy Scouts. Sadly it seems that tradition has declined. But when he did it, it was a great experience. I was Scoutmaster for 6 years and 20 Eagle Scouts (including my son!). Those young men understood honor.
Terrific! I camped for a couple weeks in the Pisgah Forest when I was a kid. So much fun!
My oldest had to contend with neighborhood girls "coming out" to her and even asking her on a date. The kids still go outside and play, but mine have complained that oftentimes nobody else wants to. Unsurprisingly, they're on their tablets getting groomed on Discord servers and downloading apps telling them all about the myriad fictional genders. My oldest told me her friends' parents don't care about that at all.
A few months after COVID, some masked up mom made some snarky passive-aggressive remark to her kids in the early COVID days after walking past my property and hearing my oldest say masks don't work. This was outside, in a neighborhood where the other kids were out without masks on playing. And some parent was so offended by a child's opinion that she tried to belittle a child for that conclusion. So, I'm not surprised this is apparently "the way of the world" when a "pansexual" third grader isn't alarming, but a similarly-aged child saying face coverings provide no protection (and later scoffing at vaccine protection by saying it doesn't make you "invincible") is serious business.
It’s sad. I hope what sticks with your daughter is that she was right, and that woman a moron. My kids’ elementary STEM lab teacher taught them the definition of aerosol, and confirmed “toot”/ gas particles were factually many times larger than viral aerosol particles. We are grateful for his honesty. My then 6 year old was very confused, and remains confused, as to how so many adults “don’t know the definition of aerosol or have never smelled a fart.” A comment he’s made countless times after seeing masked adults. 🤦♀️😂
I remember in the summer CA was having wild fires and the government/ media (basically one in the same)
were telling people masks would not protect them against smoke.
Smoke particles are much larger than an airborne virus.
Good god people think it through. As they all walked around outside with their masks on.
When fully grown humans act that way it can be hard to tell who is the child other than by size.
Wow, I never thought of this in the present such as you have. Then again I am a gramma of tiny tots. My daughters also biked and :::gasp::: played wildly at playgrounds and on scary and alarmingly dangerous swings!!!
I am shocked that your daughter suffered such disgusting abuse really disrespect from that weird kid. This makes me think that we need to teach our kids how to respond to this action with out getting "suspended"
I will admit, my daughters were both very confident in their "selves" and would not tolerate any of that either and probably would have elbowed or socked the groper.
So, what were we fearful of as kiddos?
I am 67. We were told not to buy candy from strangers in white vans, and to also not be anywhere creepy on our own.
Your kids know they can manage themselves home alone. I used to tell mine, do not open the door unless it is Jesus, but now there are a lot of criminals around that look like Jesus.
You are the boss of your kids. I guess our job now is to help them protect themselves from shitty people. Keep an open relationship with them so they feel free to discuss their daily interactions with others, and talk about how to respond, but also, what their thoughts are.
Camp does not sound so fun anymore.
Camp can be great, my kids (14 and 17) just got back from their second camp in a month (one church run, one school run). The difference, at least for us, is that we only let our kids go to camp run by those 100% in alignment with our moral beliefs. We attend a serious a church that is committed to following the Bible, as is their Christian school. We would never in a million years let our kids go to a secular camp, or one run by a non-serious church.
A local school district here (Los Alamitos) just was in hot water as they allowed a male chaperone that I identified as "them" sleep in the girl's cabin. Seriously? On what planet is this type of thing acceptable? Everyone knows this is wrong but those without a strong biblical foundation are too cowardly to state the truth. So they look the other way as it might jeopardize their pension or someone might call them names. Incredible moral cowardice.
Do you want your kids going to camp with strong, committed believing men or women of God, ones with their own kids and stable marriages, who dress and act as adults, and who love Jesus and read the Bible? Or some childless weirdo, dressed like an obese Peter Pan, who's slogan is "whatever floats your boat"? Not a hard choice, but it only happens if we as parents are extremely discerning and aren't afraid to say "no, absolutely not".
There are definitely good camp and activity options out there for kids, but you have to strictly limit them to those that hold your moral beliefs and aren't afraid if someone calls them names because of it. And it's not just the adults running the camp but the other kids too. From good homes come good kids, and that's who I want my kids around.
The YMCA is not in theory a secular camp, it’s supposed to be Christian and they have some type of daily devotional. Our kids go to a top private, conservative, Christian school. Despite being huge (K-12 has over 1,200 kids), they don’t do a camp for just the kids at school. A lot of churches in our area have been corrupted with gender ideology.
I think I’ve heard camp Merri-wood is still sane. Hopefully that’s an option next year (we are taking this one off). I just need to look herder. Many parents share our values. Their school does. Other institutions not so much.
I hear you but YMCA is secular in my book despite the letter "C". Harvard and USC were originally "Christian" organizations and look at them now. Easy test, does the organization test everything against the Bible in determining policy? If the answer is no then we will not participate and it may as well be secular regardless of what it calls itself.
The nice thing about attending a serious, biblical church is that you can't sit in the pews for long if you aren't walking the walk, it's too uncomfortable. This tends to select for good families as either people are convicted or they leave to find a more worldly "church".
We attend Calvary Chapel and while I can't vouch for all of them, we've had nothing but success in sound biblical teaching. Most of the larger ones sponsor a couple youth camps a year.
I came to Christ in a Bible camp so I cannot advocate for them enough!
Parents should ask a lot of questions before sending their kids away. I cannot imagine sending my kids to live with people who do not share my values and beliefs. I'd want to know they are having fun, learning (for me about Christ) and that the adults were closely supervising. I would also want my kid to go with friends he or she knew. And clearly, if there was trouble they better tell the parent immediately and send the offending kid packing. Sheesh!
My daughter wasn’t suspended or anything else. You are right it’s not nearly as fun anymore. She didn’t get in any trouble for defending herself. If we thought it a good idea to send her back they would welcome her with open arms. She’s “the ideal camper we want” per the director. It happened the last night of camp and we weren’t even informed until we picked her up the next day at regular pickup. 🤯
Both of our kids, but particularly our daughter, exhibit more maturity than a lot of adults. They are respectful, well spoken, intelligent, and confident. They are comfortable making eye contact with, and speaking to, children and adults alike. We are grateful for that, and work hard to encourage self responsibility and accountability. Hopefully it sticks.
On the camp we made the choice we aren’t sending our kids somewhere that ignores reality and evident risks by choosing narrative over predictable bad outcomes in their policies. They wouldn’t tolerate a boy and girl at any age, much less 9, engaged in over the top PDA with each other at friggin YMCA camp, they wouldn’t be staying in the same cabin with each other and other kids having it forced in their face, and certainly wouldn’t tolerate boys hitting on girls with a violent response to rejection. The fact that it was a violent hyper sexualized little girl isn’t really justification to say the hyper sexualization isn’t contributing to the issue by reverting to “that’s just how the world is today,” as the camp insisted.
Camps tolerating the behavior is only making the situation worse. Refusing to confront the parents about their hyper sexualized 4th grader being hyper sexualized is weak and sad. It’s also not helping the parents do better because they weren’t informed WHY their 9 year old chocked another little girl, only that it was her final warning and it she hurt someone the next year she’d be sent home permanently. According to the camp, the parents of both girls that were all over each other most for most of the camp DID know they were sending their girls, who started “dating” and “experimenting” with their “sexual orientation” together before camp (from the same neighborhood), to stay in the same cabin. That these girls have parents evidentially encouraging and enabling this behavior in elementary school says a lot about their parenting, none of it positive. My daughter took a friend who wasn’t attacked, but the constant PDA and issues from these two girls in their cabin ruined her first overnight camp experience long before my daughter got attacked. That’s just made her scared/ sad/ mad.
It’s also came out during conversations with the camp that the cabins are no longer going to be divided by biological sex. It’s never going to be a good idea for young girls to have a delusional and entitled male teen camp counselor overseeing showers and clothing changes, irregardless of his “feelings” or self proclaimed “identity.” The denial of biological sex seems meant to detach kids from objective reality. It is also destroying actual girls’ ability to analyze threats as they actually are. As parents we would not be demonstrating good critical thinking or decision making skills ourselves to send our daughter to play along with the charade, defenseless to stop a much worse sexually motivated attack from a much larger human in a worst case scenario.
That’s the frustration as a parents right now. Sending them somewhere to be indoctrinated, humiliated, sexualized, controlled, micromanaged, etc isn’t going to encourage independence. Confused kids detached from reality doesn’t overlap much with kids who are confident, independent, and capable of making good decisions more often than bad ones.
Sadly, there are few places where kids can be kids these days.
My husband and I so value the ability to learn and grow and screwup and get it right that we had growing up. I was even an outdoor adventure guide in undergrad. We exemplify making our own choices over following the crowd for the sake of following the crowd (as we continue to demonstrate plainly with Covid). We long to give our kids the same ability, yet feel we are failing because of the difficulty in finding ways to give them that freedom to learn and grow. 😩
Hopefully we will see a tide change over the next few years for your grandchildren. God help society in 20 years if we don’t.
you couldn’t pay me to send a kid into a hell hole like that.
The thing is that it was a great camp for generations. A big pull from South America. It was fun. I think Covid made them desperate, and wokeness killed the fun and turned it into a nightmare.
Maybe consider camp at The Wilds. One in New Hampshire and one in North Carolina. They would take these issues seriously and not allow sexual behaviors occurring in the cabins.
I’ll look into it. I’ve never heard of that one. Thanks!
My 14 year old daughter and I helped paint two houses for Habitat for Humanity last Saturday. She really liked it and got to talk to one of the home owners who is in a wheel chair.
https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you/youth-programs
That is an awesome idea!!! I haven’t worked on a habitat house since before I had kids, but I remember them letting kids help with some stuff. Thank you!
Leaving them home alone and in the neighborhood may be enough at their age, really. They're still learning so much. Each year of development brings an entirely new perspective to the same house and street, so while the same setting may seem boring to adults, kids will find completely different trouble to get into at age 9 vs. 8.
imo: Keep letting them test their capabilities around their home territory. In the meantime, you could try some shorter challenges instead of overnight Lord of the Flies trips - orienteering, martial arts, chess, sports where you can actually win or lose, escape rooms for kids, or even just planning and cooking dinner for the family (with help). Also, community volunteer events (e.g., park cleanup, sorting food pantry canned goods, etc.) can also foster pride and confidence from doing "real" work alongside adults.
Thanks for the suggestion. Our daughter emerged from the womb ready for competition and is one of the top soccer players and swimmers her age in our city. She also co-captained her battle of the books team to victory. Haha. Their school is not an “everybody gets a trophy” place. Our son likes to roll in the mud and wrestle, but isn’t super motivated for athletic competition. I’m comfortable backpacking in WV, so that actually doesn’t make me nervous. Tired to think about it, but not nervous to think about. 😂
The cooking and volunteering we’ve done since they were toddlers (they once thought it was common for adults to be without teeth - oops). Martial arts is a great suggestion. Also the escape rooms. We should try to find a community garden then can actually plant stuff at, or put one in the backyard and hope not too many chemicals get on it.
Unfortunately we aren’t super handy, so aside from cooking, cleaning, laundry and yard work, I’m not sure the real work we can figure out - reading tax regulations, making excel spreadsheets, or choosing stocks and bonds, interests them much. All they seem to grasp at this point is we pay a lot of taxes that mostly get wasted, ESG is propoganda, and always ensure your money is directly invested so never buy some pre-packaged baloney or annuities. 😂🤦♀️😂
Wow, it sounds like you're already encouraging a lot of good stuff. The gardening is a solid idea too. But don't sell yourself short on non-handiness - Excel is pretty much an essential life skill, not only for financial literacy, but also for mentally framing any problem and organizing information
Thinking more... for your son, maybe a kid's obstacle mud run? They're not necessarily competitive, and usually everyone does get a medal, but they're still fun.
Finally, and this one will be tougher, but tackling a woodworking/plumbing/car repair or other handy project together could be rewarding. Involve them in the whole process, from defining the project, learning how to do it, getting things wrong, trying again, etc. Lots of potential lessons in there about planning, research, perseverance, dealing with frustration, teamwork, and seeing that adults don't always have all the answers.
Thanks for soliciting suggestions and sharing the camp story. It's given me a lot to think about as well.
The kid mud run is a good idea. Thank you!!! I appreciate all the suggestions. I’ve been in a funk not coming up with stuff for a few weeks. I’d love to do the handy project, but we have a bunch of tools we have never used because we like our fingers. We have some handy neighbors with kids though - maybe we can recruit them to help us out.
They did help me plot charts (I used excel) to compare the March 26th “models” for NC to actuals for April 2020......... even they got to see why models that are wildly off only cause problems. Even they could tell it was wildly off and they learned about bar charts and line graphs (which are very simple and should be taught much younger in my opinion). That lesson was more of a “hypothesis v outcome” project........... needless to say I didn’t anticipate it turning into a 2 year lesson of tyranny and propoganda. I actually thought basically everyone was doing some version of this purely for curiosity. Mid April I was anticipating everyone would be over Covid and would be ignoring the rules by May/ June. They were sort of because of BLM protests, but wow, I was wrong on the general level of public curiosity about what is actually happening, and the public’s willingness to be ordered around by morons. 🤦♀️
BTW, I'm 57 (had my kids later in life). The downside of the freedom we were given in the 60s and 70s was that I ended up being sexually abused at 4.5 y.o. by a very respected neighbor. No one believed me. Took years to deal with the trauma. I've protected my kids from all manner of child abuse. Beyond that, I've exposed them to nature as much as I can while protecting their innocence. I share accounts of my childhood, of how we were totally unsupervised. I've taught them about safety (none of the stranger danger bs). I've also given them tasks that they must do independently like taking public transportation from their high school, shopping for groceries while I stay in the car, leaving them with friends at the mall (I stayed in the food court, there have been shootings before). Everything within reason and to the extent of their maturity and abilities. YOU know them best. Don't let anyone pressure you into parenting that feels unsafe to you. Blessings on your parenting journey!
Crazy isn't new. Maybe the difference is that upside-down crazy has become institutionalized. Our history (of the Jews that is) and our laws and guidelines explain that when someone who resembles a human being acts inhumanly, such as assaulting another, then they cease to be human under the law. The first commandment, which derives from the law of the Jews, is "shall not murder" (not the mistranslated that is popular). When one kills in defense of themself or others it is not murder. It is duty.
There were sickos and victims then. Even when I was young the mental disarmament had begun. People were learning to be victims. I helped teach self defense classes. A lot of women came to learn. I would hear "oh I couldn't do that". The most important thing to learn was that they had the means, the right and a moral obligation to protect themselves. It was good to know that there were a few less victims as a result.
Even then BS abounded. A common "advice" given to young women was if sexually assaulted, cooperate. The lie told was that they had better odds of surviving. We had a fellow from the FBI bureau of crime data come in to talk. He reported that over 90% of women who did NOT resist a rapist were murdered. Those who cooperated, died. His advice: fight any way you can. He noted that women who resisted survived more than 75% of the reported cases (and of course no counting of the woman who's swift action resulted in a non-report). This was in the 1970s. He also noted that women who carried firearms were almost non-existent in the crime reports for rape and other assaults. And women who learned basic self defense were the ones making crime reports instead of being corpses discovered by others.
Over the last 4 decades the notion of self reliance has been demonized. More people than ever thing it is somehow wrong to act against an non-human in human form who would harm others. This in turn enables and rewards the predators in human shape.
It sounds like you are teaching your kids well. 👍🏽💪🏽I'm sorry that happened to you, so painful. I grew up unsupervised and was sexually abused by a neighbor as well. It takes a long time to process that kind of trauma. 💕💕💕
I’m sorry for your pain too...... so many creeps which is so so sad
Thank you!! I’m so sorry for the pain you went through. 💓🙏💓🙏💓
I was discussing with my husband what happened to your daughter. I rarely think something is so over the top as to make it a household discussion, but this really stunned me. I hope you make sure everyone in your area knows what that YMCA camp is all about (without traumatizing your daughter). So SO outrageous.
Also I saw someone mentioned karate. Such a good idea. Heartening to know moms like you are out there.
It was one of the most completely shocking experiences ever. Never in my life did I think I’d need to be worried about a hyper sexualized 4th grade girl at Y camp, and yes, we’ve shared her “experience” with many. We did when she had a great time the first two years as well, so we felt obligated to let people know their policies, what happened, and why we have moved away from Y overnight camps. I’m hoping to find same sane camps, and I think there are some Christian outdoor camps that still seem rooted in objective biological reality and opposed to little kid sexualization. I thought Y camp would stay sane. I was wrong. It takes a lot more research than it used to I think.
Also there’s a website/newsletter called Let Grow that might be helpful for you. And the Free Range Kids book.
What a horrible camp story! Makes me wary of sending mine! For some further ideas for you (maybe?): Here in the city I let my kids walk or bike to school on their own by age 8ish. Most others don’t do this. It’s a 25 minute walk/10 minute ride. I let them make their way home on their own too, only my eldest (13) just now has a no-data phone. I also send them out for errands. My 8 year old walked to the Main Street over the weekend to grab us some milk! Bread sometimes. Whatever. I have a baby too, so now if my 8 year old is meeting friends at the park (with those friends’ parents) I just send him on his own sometimes and tell him to come back when his friends go home! The 8 and 11 year old took the city bus several blocks down to their rugby classes in the fall. There and back, crossing streets, walking blocks, all that. People seem in awe of how “independent” my kids are. It doesn’t seem that hard, though! To think of what I did when I was a kid it is quite different! I miss those days. Different kind of freedom in those suburbs, though. Mine have some city-kid freedom street smarts (I’m hoping!).
And yes whenever I read these posts I think of upbringings and the education system and how that has forced many of us into compliance from the beginning. Unable to do common sense things, just told to go along with the group sit down shut up raise your hand wear your coat cause I said so...all of that. We need to raise people to think for themselves again! We need schools that respect students as PEOPLE, not SUBJECTS to mold.
Our kids school is a 20-minute drive away (it’s a private Christian school), so that’s out. What phone did you get your daughter? Ours has a Gizmo right now. We are struggling to find one with talk and text minus the unfettered access to the internet.
Good on you for making your kids so independent!!!
I need to find some suburban things. We live in the city, but I’m not even sure the buses run anywhere near here (it isn’t a thing here). There are some grocery stores a mile away they could walk to. That would be good for them. Thanks for the idea!!!
You’re welcome! I enjoy this topic.
Re phone: It’s a refurbished older iPhone model. I’m reluctant and uneasy about it still…but she can text and talk and connect to wifi. No data option. I’ll look into Gizmo! I don’t know anything about it! Thanks.
I'm sorry that happened to your daughter. That could be traumatizing for sure, and she developed some fight and grit in the process. Good for her! 💪🏽👏When I was young I spent all day outside roaming the neighborhood, sometimes getting into things I wasn't supposed to. Us neighborhood kids were never seriously hurt or caused serious damage. I remember hearing about a park for kids that was made up of wild nature, and the kids were able to build things, walk across fallen tree trunks, climb high places, etc. I forget what city it was in. The parents stayed behind the fence the whole time, and children were allowed to assess their own danger and work out their own problems. I think nature is good for that sort of thing, and that's what I did with my stepsons. I wonder if some lightly supervised areas in nature, with "just right" challenges for your daughters, would be good.
I saw a story (with pictures!) of an urban park like that. Being urban it was basically an empty lot full of junk - car tires, toilets, old plywood and lots of junk. The kids played there anyway, so local parents removed the most lethal looking stuff, fenced it off, and supplied some old tools, nails etc.. At least one parent had to be around to open it up, and stayed near for emergencies only. Kids would line up and wait for them to open it, a huge hit! I believe it was in Ireland somewhere.
I bet that was it. 😊
That’s a great idea. I was an outdoor adventure guide in undergrad, and we are building a house in the NC mountains right now for that reason. The community has tons of activities and trails and we are hoping it will be a place for them to unplug and go wonder.
I’m going to Google that park. It sounds like a great idea!!!! Thank you.
Wow. I forgot to mention that I started my son with gymnastics at age 2 and learning martial arts at age 4. He learned 2 powerful things: (1) how to fall and (2) how not to fight.
I never heard about a bully choking or beating on my son. I have watched him calmly handle a confrontation and bring a peaceful resolution many times. Because he learned well.
We live in an era of false equivalences. Redefining "bullying" as saying mean things on social media. A kid can be suspended (or even arrested) for saying meant things in a tweet: A boy dressed as a girl can rape a girl in high school and there are no consequences (apparently "no" means "no" only if gender roles are clear?). And when the girls parents object they're labeled terrorists. Really not even Orwell's imagination could make this stuff up...
I wish you luck. I fear for my grandchildren. But all you can do is teach them right from wrong. You clearly can not depend on institutions like schools or the YMCA to do that. You must now teach them to deal with the status quo too...but if enough parents take back the job perhaps things can change.
Teach them to be responsible. The things we did as kids taught us to be responsible for ourselves. We learned to shoot, to camp, to hike. Activities in which you must depend on yourself to stay safe. Staying safe wasn't really hard - learn a few rules, be alert and use your grey matter. Have things changed so much? Other than demonizing all things that we used to do to teach kids responsibility I mean?
My son learned a valuable lesson in high school (10th grade I think). My son had trouble with a math teacher and was failing. Not trouble with the math. However, he made a deal with the teacher: finish the work and pass the final exam and he would pass the class. This deal was made in front of myself, my wife, and the head of the school. Come end of the term the teacher reneged. I was angry. I went to the head of the school and pointed out that a deal was made, hands shaken, and ethical people followed through. The head of school who had been in the room at the time said "well I don't recall....". Instead of being angry I turned it into a teachable moment for my son: next time, get it in writing. He had to retake the math class but he learned a life's lesson and has not made that mistake again.
your son is learning great lessons in a way the lessons will not be forgotten ... you are amazing parents...
everyone here has great ideas... all of you are amazing parents!
Schools are not what they were. Parents need to wake up and just look at CRT and the Sex Ed curriculum with focus on gender identity and sexuality from K on. Protect your kids. When my daughter was in 5th grade (10 y.o. then) her sex ed curriculum included a description of anal sex, oral sex, etc. WHY?? Why are adults so bent on destroying the innocence of children? SMH....
It does seem like it's gone from ineffective to ludicrous. When my kid was in school, we worried about class sizes, teachers with no performance incentive, administrators and school boards with no connection with kids, teachers, or reality. Stuff like that. We fought with curriculum that didn't teach the constitution, demonized "the other side" (anyone deviating from The Party line), and setting bad examples of behavior (like telling lies and breaking their word). Nothing like today! Maybe this is good - maybe it will make critical mass and vaporize itself and we can start over?
All you cite seems like it follows the doctrine that kids should be taught WHAT to think instead of HOW to think. Leaving some mysteries can be good; the process of discovery is more meaningful than being told. I've heard kids complain that teachers and counselors harass them if they don't admit uncertainty about gender: one recent university grad (female) told me when she was in middle school and high school, she was told flat out if she thought she was 100% female and heterosexual she was wrong. That if she never doubted her "choices" then she wasn't a good person. Really? Middle school? Isn't puberty confusing enough naturally? Geez....
But I keep meeting young people who get it, who challenge the "woke" and all the other narrow minded bovine excrement. Young people with good heads and clear values. In short kids who give me hope for the future. Anyway I'm over 60 so not my problem in another 30 years or so!
Take them out out school and camping with you seems the only answer.
disgusting, unbelievable... i would bring a lawsuit against the camp and counselors for criminal negligence.
We are not going to sue, but my daughter will testify if anything similar happens to another kid and that terrifies them more because they know their policies are outright insane. My daughter is a 10 year old that’s read over 700 books, gets straight A’s, has never gotten below a 100 on conduct, and is one of the 5 best swimmers and soccer players in our city and county. She’s an attorneys worst nightmare. We have a paper trail of our communications. We’d rather scare they heck out of them so they make better decisions next time, hopefully, then waste time and money on some legal battle that would turn the YMCA lawyers on our kid. I’m not sure it’s the right choice, but it’s the one we make.
your daughter is amazing, God bless her!
Sounds like you don't need our advice ;-).
I got lots of awesome ideas I really appreciate!! Need is a matter of perspective on this I guess, but I’m genuinely appreciative!!! I had the kids help extra with dinner tonight and we talked to them tonight at dinner and decided to let them head to the library near by alone this weekend. We let them choose (granted there aren’t many choices, but they both lived that idea).
"this is because they were not allowed to play with lawn darts as children."
I thought this until 2020, when I saw my adopted nation lose its damned mind. I am a long-time advocate of "free range" kids having growing up that way. In the developed world, it's hard to think of a population that has had more freedom as children in recent years than New Zealand, and probably one of the reasons they produce some of the best rugby players in the world (I suppose having Polynesian ancestry helps).
I really think you would enjoy this 12 minute vid on NZ's "no rules school", though it's been my experience that while many schools are not this "free" the general cultural attitude was quite prevalent. I frequently saw children alone on the streets that even approached me to pet my dog. There is very little warning in the culture about "stranger danger" etc. that has pervade the US for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Y0cuufVGI
This is a culture that, prior to 2020, was very grounded and common sense and competency. Something else is going on, and perhaps it is that bit about trust... I think their attitude toward the state is what did them in and took them off-guard. Also, really zero experience with totalitarianism or extremely deep corruption on their own soil. "It can't happen here." Their extreme level of naivete did them in. Not being scaremongered and lied to for the last 20 years like Americans have been set them up for this.
I've been an anarchist for years but I thought it was just too wild that the government would use a public health crisis to enact global tyranny and global government. I was very late to the party on covid. Seven years in NZ had desensitized me to the nature of the state. I was wrong.
Some of what I'd consider the best places to live prior to 2020 (Australia, NZ, Canada except for the damned cold) and were honestly pretty free places have been turned into totalitarian hellholes. It's a damned shame.
Then again, it all starts somewhere. Wolves trusted the humans around the campfire and got turned into pugs. And humans trusted the tax collectors who came for the grain in the promise of protection and, well.... here we are.
Our domestication is a very unconscious process. :(
My 8 year old says domesticated dogs didn’t actually come from wolves. They have a common ancestor. I get the moral of the story, but I think it’s inaccurate factually.
You have a well informed 8 year old! I remember a study came out about a decade ago that showed just that. Domestication took place about 13,000 years ago, and the various genetic lines of dogs converge back on that date. But they converge back on three different nodes that themselves don't converge until about 50,000 years ago. Wolves all belong to another line that converges with the three dog lines also about 50,000 years ago. So parsimony would say that wolves are descended from primordial dogs, rather than the other way around as is usually presumed.
Of course, their common ancestors would have looked and acted more like wolves than domesticated dogs. But they were probably more jackal-like in their life strategies, hanging around the real predators to snag their share when the big cat had had its fill. When, about 50,000 years ago, a group of early humans developed the technology to become big game hunters in their own right, and spread across Eurasia spearing deer and bison and mammoths for the good life, I imagine that some of the early canids switched their attention to the human bands. Every Cro Magnon band would have had its pack of wolf-dogs following it, like giant, predatory rats, to claim a share of every kill, or perhaps to mob a stray child if the hunting was poor. Try to leave them behind at the last kill, and they would finish eating and then track you down again by scent. Try to kill them, and they would learn your abilities and come back. They were domesticated only when humans learned to preserve food and save every scrap for themselves and their pets, but long before then they learned to read humans better than any other animal. Their human band was their meal ticket and their territory that they defended from other carnivores, including their own kind. They were our first domesticates, because they were originally the ones domesticating us.
Wolves, I think, were the conservatives who continued to follow the big cats. When the Cats became extinct, their dog-jackals had to strike out on their own, and become the free top-level predators that we know today.
This is my all time favourite post of yours! Absolutely spot on!
I agree and sent the link to 'lawn darts' to many friends and associates. Some have become Gato Malo advocates :) I also remember the dangerous playgrounds of my youth (1960s) where the merry-go-round not only was made of splintery wood and sharp metal nuts & bolts, but the gravel underneath it was often full of broken glass from the beer bottles the 'older' kids would smash, once they were smashed. We learned that life can be risky and fun activities could be hazardous. Band-aids, neosporin and PhIsoHex antiseptic soap were always on hand at home. We survived and even might say, prospered, despite or maybe because of it all.
yeah, I still have some amazing scars on my elbows and knees, and got stitches in my foot ... those are just the most memorable events
I came through relatively unscathed but I was a rough kid if ever there was one--a good day for me involved blood, dirt and torn clothes!
Yes, I love it too!
Gasp! Perhaps they should have been taught to play (safely) with guns at a younger age?
This is covered quite nicely in the book The Coddling of the American Mind. No more free play for kids has resulted in the rise of Safetyism.
I don't really need a book to cover this. I see it with my own eyes.
Not all kids in the Millennial generation are hopeless. It takes more than "free play" and in fact I think the reminiscing is leaving out the rules and constraints that governed our unsupervised time. It was because we learned and understood the rules and limitations that we survived.
At the core of the crisis is a lack of understanding. Some kids even today are raised with clear values, definitive boundaries and limits, and taught to use their brains. But it has become increasingly difficult for parents to provide clear,unambiguous teaching. The institutionalized ignorance that saturates our children via state controlled education (even if you put your kid in a private school) are the foundation of an assault that has demonized the very values and skills that make humans independent. The popular media supports the demonetization of independence in thought and action. Popular culture has elevated dependence on others as somehow more intellectually enlightened. The result is mental disarmament. Circling back to the thread, that is how freedom is not just eradicated, but forgotten.
When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.
Too many people raised over the last 4 decades (even my generation) think that the ability and attitude to defend yourself and others should be reserved to only "the proper authorities" and shun the notion that addressing a threat independently, be it physical, cultural or economic, is simply wrong.
And, folks, thars yer problem!
in praise of lawn darts is my favorite post by gato, by far!
Exactly. And Child Proof Caps. The decline began with child proof caps...
This is what I find terrifying. People unable or unwilling to make personal decisions. And I'm saying this as one who struggles with self-doubt and second guessing. But I see these issues of personal freedom as above all else and am floored by the acceptance of so many that have readily given up their rights.
I think if one surrenders this right it allows them to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility, regret, guilt or shame. It then becomes the onus of the collective rather than the individual. Hence we see division targeted at groups (stereotypically generated) rather than allowing that everyone and every concept exists along a continuum of greyscale rather than the rigid black/white thinking that is pervasive today.
Thus those we want to feel good about themselves readily accept the boundaries set upon them. It is a drug for the masses to be ruled. Just as the junkie that need that fix to camouflage his pain, so the individual gives up his freedom for that fix of complacency.
And as Dennis Prager said, talking about mask-wearing, "Watching half of our fellow Americans accept and engage in such irrational behavior (not to mention sometimes hysterically enforce it, as myriad social media videos attest) not only depresses the rest of us; it frightens us. That more than half of our country willingly obeys completely irrational orders raises the question: What irrational orders from the state would they not obey?"
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2022/01/25/why-the-masked-and-the-unmasked-have-disdain-for-each-other-n2602316
Parents are sterilizing their kids in mass with big pharma subscriptions and permanent genital mutilation surgeries based on “feelings”......... there isn’t an order some wouldn’t follow.
There also isn’t a way to force some of us into compliance.
It’s the vast middle where the ability to control lies, and the number masking their toddlers like Taliban women is not at all comforting.
Yes, I struggle with anxiety and decision making as well. However, when we I was growing up we were out of the house playing. My mother probably appreciated the peace! The neighbour children would come around to play and we would roam the fields and stay out until the dark. I can't ever remember my parents complaining or saying they were worried about us. Here's the thing: we quickly learned who were the kids to avoid and created heaps of fun and interesting games to play. I remember a girl from up the road who said don't go to the stream (about 20 mins away across the fields). My memory is that she said there was a man there (maybe exposing himself?) Me and my two friends were not to be stopped by this and went away. This could be seen as dangerous and foolish but looking back I feel good that three 8 or 9 year old girls were not afraid. Seems like nowadays a lot of women are real scardy cats!
It is those people who clamor for so called guidance that are the real problem for humanity and not the dictators. If there were no or few incompetent people, the dictators would not have anyone to be openly willing to be controlled.
I run a company with 15 employees. We are a close knit team. I had one quit because I refused to make a Covid Protocol for the company.
When sufficiently frightened, most people will not only accept authoritarianism, but demand it.
Unfortunately it doesn't take much to frighten most people. Some people get up and fight and others scramble for a protective wing to huddle under.
They need to have some of their peers stand up and lead them out of this madness. The thing is - most of us (even dyed-in-the-wool right wing anarchists like myself) are followers. The people we've been coerced into following just really, really suck and have become adept at killing their competition in the womb.
So people who think they've got what it takes - set the example, do it loud and do it proud. And please god don't just retreat into self reliance - these dumb dumbs need you right now. They're idiots, not bad people.
As for the conscious followers - throw your support behind that guy the second he sticks his head up. Hell, even seek out people in the community that are on the right kind of mission and support them.
I know I'm not the A-type to rally people around me or be the point man on anything, but I'll give everything I've got to the mofos with the cahonas to be that person. Whether it's the workplace, community, politics - whatever. It's the only way out IMO. We need more organic leaders, we need more people to support and fall in line behind those organic leaders.
"how can we stay safe in the future without guidence?" I too see this utter mingyness on the corporate intranet. Its always the same 50 or so abitious, souless muppets. They just have to show how much they are compliant and willing to serve a master. Its how you get on these days.
How about "How can we make the best of living on this beautiful earth?"
And that was the plan, all along!
Sad 😔
It is amazing to see how far we have fallen from the deep thinking of individuals from the past. The shift in our thinking is stark, because we have not been tested by monarchy overreach in well over 200 years, by despotism, by invasion. Our future generation seems hypnotized by their screens, both individual and “collective”. The social media is the gladiator entertainment of our generation.
That hypnotism appears intentional
Tik-Tok especially has captured the young - cringeworthy…….
Brought on by narcissism and boredom.
Well- said and troublesome.
so sad but 100% true. I can see this in my own 19 and 17 year olds. I've had to refrain from talking 'too much' about the vax injuries, and govt tyrannical ways lest my kids walk out of the room. Have been working on finding a balance so they continue to trust me and are open to the occasional article from the honest journalists and analysts (i.e. boriquagato and other substackers). My greatest comfort is that I managed to convince my college kid to request a non-medical exemption to the c19 shots. Keeping them off those clotshots has been my top priority. I'm exhausted.
"The Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, "See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk!"
Try to imagine the level of liberty and prosperity we would now enjoy had Harry Browne won in 1996.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnVDMU6K1Uk&t=7s
Indeed
😢
The government is the ultimate corporation that has a monopoly on violence. I stole that from Elon Musk
And let’s not forget that universal basic income will be served up digitally, yet another on-ramp to digital ID and a social credit system.
Your "tax refunds" comment is 100% on point. So many people I chat with have that exact mentality of "the government's being so nice, giving us our money back"!
I also wanted to share an essay I found recently which examines government and corporate policies during the pandemic leading to this encroaching tyranny. From a variety of different angles (legal/policing/education/etc.), all under the same umbrella.
Link to the essay: https://geraldrogue.substack.com/p/medicalization-and-colonization?s=r
Many people get more back than they actually paid in so of course they are happy.
Thanks for that link. I’m about 1/5 the way through the essay but will finish it today.
A superb piece of work. All Sr G’s stuff is excellent but this is a philosophical tour de force. Thanks for the reminder of Frédéric Bastiat’s quote. Tax, permission based society, regulation - all apparatus of control & oppression. Anyone who continues to believe in benevolent governance is delusional. The evidence from state responses to Covid is overwhelming; these people are not your friends. But still the masses stay loyal.
Democracy died a long time ago, now we just go through the periodic motion of pretending to choose our oppressor. The only way to end this farce, and it’s unlikely to be in my lifetime, is the wholesale abandonment of the control infrastructure and that starts with understanding the fundamental ideology Sr G sets out here. And rejecting it.
Please -- the USA is not a democracy, and never was. It is (or was) a constitutional republic. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting who's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome of the election.
Good allegory WB.
"Does anyone seriously just go to any doctor that the state says is OK or hire any lawyer that has passed the bar?" .... seriously, it happens all the time.
We have to work really hard to vet this stuff ourselves. I've gone to and quit so many bad doctors, just because I didn't have a way to know in advance, and then I couldn't warn anyone afterwards.
And they never question anything that doctor tells them to do.
How about successfully treating Stage 2/3 Cancer with a Doctor based out of Tijuana Mexico? No chemo, no radiation, no side effects and no metastasis since 2008, but "advanced" western medicine label these Mexican Docs as quacks and con men. Most disturbingly they have successfully convinced the masses of the danger of the unregulated medical system in Mexico. Instead, pharma's "safe and effective" chemo is the correct and regulated path for treatment.
Ding ding ding. See my Substack. :)
Actually we rely on word of mouth and online reviews, but when it comes down to it, you're right.
I know people who picked their doctor and dentist entirely based on 'how close they are to my house' because 'they're all the same'.
I don't blame anyone for that. The main point of your GP is that they can sign your absence and schools/workplaces will accept your sickness as valid...
El Gato, you need to write your thoughts on the origins of the Civil War and why slavery wasn't the primary driver of that conflict. That would be an interesting read.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761526463/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
i recommend reading this.
Thanks, el gato, just got it on eBay. Looking forward to reading something outside of the official canon. In light of our government's heavy-handed control of the recent narratives, EVERYTHING is open for re-evalutation.
Initially, I have a hard time bumping slavery from its prime mover role in the conflict for several reasons, among them: 1)Having read the Lincoln/Douglas debates, slavery was front-and-center and, as I recall, practically the only issue discussed in the Illinois senate race. 2)Secession began before Lincoln's inauguration, and Lincoln ran on a platform to simply limit the expansion of slavery into the new territories, not to end the institution.
Sure, most northerners signed up to "preserve the union" and southerners for "states' rights" but the phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" came from this conflict, and rich men have to come up with some pithy phrases to get poor men to enlist, so the reasons expressed by soldiers is often regurgitated spin from our leaders ("they hate us for our freedoms...") Can't put a whole lot of stock in that.
The opposite of a state is not freedom though. Think of the any state or governement overrach, crime, coercion or violation of what you call rights. Now think of that without any state o governement.
The options are try to control the state, or pay off you local ganglord.
Now, when/if said state starts behaving like a local ganglord, then it's high time to treat the state as one should always treat career criminals: a warning shot in the face.
Again: the absence of control, discipline, structure, hierarchy is not freedom, it's chaos - the rule of the strong without limitations or pretense.
After the past two years, I have come to the realization that I would prefer having to negotiate with a ganglord than a state bureaucrat.
We know reality exists as cycles. As humans we want to exists in a “ state” of being that is relatively constant and predictable. But these states don’t last long, and governments come into being with good intentions and are quickly corrupted, serving only themselves. It seems inevitable the cycle ends with anarchy, reset, rejection. I want to believe we could design a government that could last eons, but nature seems to suggest not.
Case study for Gang-based rulers: Mafia in Southern Italy. Many Italians were very comfortable under de-facto Mafia rule for generations. They had good governance, safety, and clear rules of conduct in exchange for their tithes. The Mafia at least has an enforced honor code; that's more than can be claimed by modern bureaucracies!
Well let's start dismantling, and when the biggest problem is "Who will build the roads?" then maybe we can start talking about increasing the power of the state again.
Until then, hammer away.
Why would the state need to have more "power" just to built the roads. If that is what their boss, you know, we the people, tell them to do they don't get power from that. They get the obligation to do the work.
https://i1.wp.com/theparadiseparadox.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/warlords-might.jpg?fit=460%2C460&ssl=1
So what do we do about it? We actually were having a discussion with our kids the other night and I commented that I felt like more people were paying attention now after Covid but my son seemed to feel that his generation was still pretty unfazed by all the Covid regulation.
I think we get involved in our communities and start local. It’s where we can make the biggest difference.
I have younger kids, and they have a very different perspective. They see a difference in the behavior/ motivation/ desire to participate in life between the kids that were relatively unaffected like they were by attending a conservative in person private Christian schools, no masks, lots of travel, lots of activities, and lived as normally as possible; and their friends who were very isolated with online school, masking, social distancing, no activities or travel, etc.
My daughter (10 yo/ 5th grade) has a few friends whose parents bought into all this crap and she has been saying for a while they seem “sad and empty” now. They never want to do anything with anyone, even though most of their parents have lightened up and allowed them to play with real humans in person again. They have dropped their sports and activities. Just sit there at parties no matter how many people try to talk to them. It’s very sad.
For my son (8 yo, 2nd grade) there is a pretty stark issues with behavior problems from some of the previously isolated boys as they started emerging from isolation even last summer - spitting, hitting, shoving, over the top disrespectful towards adults. Really over the top and concerning enough we won’t let our son go to overnight camp because of how much we are seeing this at activities. Overnight camp was something we had hoped both of our kids would do often pre-Covid, and our daughter had already done 2 summers, not so much now. We have found other ways to encourage independence with fun and challenging activities that don’t involve electronics.
It’s very sad what we have done as a society to children. I hope young people today don’t make the same mistakes that we made. I do not know of a society in human history that so intentionally damaged their own young children to such a wide extent.
We are personally concerned enough about predictable likely outcomes that we already encourage our kids to plan on moving south to build a life, or living in small towns. We are building a vacation home that can easily become our main somewhere that didn’t destroy their kids. I’d be shocked if the mid sized city we live in isn’t poorer and more violent in 10-20 years when the kids that were most damaged by this become young adults. I still hope my fears are proven wrong.......
We stop sanctioning it in every way possible... morally, practically, etc.
Thanks for sharing that. It’s really a terrible time to be a kid.
Sad but true.
The hamster who has lived its whole life in a cage does not complain about being confined to the cage but forget to feed it a pellet and their world stops.
What are the "pellets" that upend our young people?
Being without electricity is one.
Phone service.
A ray of hope...
Last week I had a conversation with my Uber driver which drifted onto the subject of taxation.
He complained that they are very high (he's correct - I'm in the People's Republic of California), and I said that all taxation was theft. He was taken aback and had clearly never heard this before.
I then offered up my standard spiel in these (unfortunately rare) encounters:
Imagine I was to come to your door and tell you from now on, you will pay me 30% of your income, and if you don't I will send a gang of costumed, armed thugs to your door, drag you away, throw you into a cage and bankrupt your family. Oh, and if you resist they will murder you.
Would that be okay? A moral thing for me to do?
He then said "No. That is a really good point, but taxation is legal."
My reply: "Just because something is legal does not make it right. Slavery was legal."
He is a young black man and I could tell that gave him serious pause.
Then he asked me if I'd heard of civil asset forfeiture. I told him that in 2014, the cops stole more than all burglaries in the U.S. combined. He was unaware and said he would look it up and send it to his friends.
Seed planted.
Eighty million to go.
My only question is where you are getting the “80 million” from. 🤔
Comrade Brandon's historic voter turnout.
The most in history, don't you know.
Ohhhhhh! haha! Got it. I think the number is bigger. I was hoping for 330 million or maybe even 7.2 billion. :)
Just wait until the midterms.
The Dems are already polling gravestones for even more voters.
I don’t doubt anything anymore! 😝 I just wish substack had emoji reactions! 😵💫😂
I spent twenty years making these arguments to people I knew. Sometimes I quoted Bastiat in facebook posts. I don't think I ever changed a single mind. I couldn't even persuade anyone that socialized medicine, i.e. giving over your own health decisions to bureaucrats, was bad.
Eventually, I deleted all social media and threw in the towel. I don't think most people are capable of learning these ideas outside the school of hard knocks and just that sort of lesson is well on its way. It will be a knock so hard that it won't be forgotten for a very long time.
Now I just focus on teaching my children to think critically and to not trust any authority. The main lesson I want them to absorb is just to read enough history to question the status quo. If they can ask why things are done a certain way now when they were done some other way in the past, that is enough. That will lead you to the truth about how the desire for power has distorted our system into its current shape.
You never debate for the person you're talking to, you debate for the unknown number of people reading along. Think of it that way, and you might have changed a lot of minds.
I believe it was Mark Twain who said something like, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled”.
Another great and timely piece.
"Everything the state says is a lie. Everything it has is stolen."
Nietzsche
Wow. One of your best, if not THE best. Bastiat for the win!
I will quibble with you about privatization of roads though. The toll road across our state was leased/sold years ago and it's the crappiest section of that interstate for 3 states. There's no excuse for it except greed.
on puerto rico, they are the only pieces of road that are not disasters.
i will bet you that that road is not free to be developed nor competed with nor made better.
many things called "privatized" are nothing of the sort.
the alleged deregulation of power grids into ISO's roughly quadrupled the regulation to which they were subject and removed all real accountability.
this is why it has been such a disaster.
be careful assuming that any one bit of "privatization" really was. a lot of it is just a pretext for greater capture.
Despite the digging I just did, I could find no real verifiable information on who manages it/owns it. It appears IFM, an Aussie company owns part of it b/c the previous managers of the Indiana 80/90 toll road defaulted in 2014. Regardless, it's a disaster just like all the roads in Chicago that are perpetually under construction and tolled. Having to drive anywhere near Chicago adds delays to any trip and has for many years.
84 through Connecticut has had "road under construction, State liability limited" signs up perpetually since at least 1979.
If it wasn't so disgustingly pathetic, it would be funny.
Oh good god, in PR I've seen smoother surfaces on guanabana than on roads immediately after the city has patched a pothole. It's like no one in PR has the first clue how to pave anything smoothly. In my neighborhood there was a particularly rough, bumpy patch that the city came to repave. It is now AS ROUGH AND BUMPY as before they "fixed" it, and was that way immediately after they left.
Ditto a couple of potholes in particular on the westbound Parada 18 marginal exit off the Baldorioty. They "fix" them, and then less than a month later they're potholes again. And I mean axel-breaking potholes, because on the eastbound side one late Friday night a few years ago I was up working or whatever and I heard a horrendous thud, worse than usual from that area where there'd been a cavernous pothole for months. A car with 4 women destined for a night out at La Placita hit that pothole and broke their axel. I watched on and off for over an hour from our apartment as the police arrived, the wrecker arrived, the women sat and stood stranded, etc.
Roads are a disgrace here. Government is the disgrace.
Yeah, when the toll went up on the new NYS Thruway decades ago, the promise was that the toll would only remain until the cost of the Thruway was paid for.
What was that, 60 years ago?
Needless to say, the toll is here to stay. As it ever was intended.
Like the MA turnpike
So, no mass revolt? I'm guessing that most people are ok with the continuous spending on a road. If you don't hold the politician to their "promise" and the government to its obligation, then who is really at fault?
The fault can rest with more than one person or one entity.
It is the citizen's fault. The politician/government are hired to do the work the citizen deems to be done. If they do not do the work, they should be fired and replaced with someone who will do the work. If they don't get fired, then the citizen assumes responsibility for the problem.
It's not quite that simple. There's no *citizen* to fire them.
Constituencies are composed of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people, all who have their own perspectives. How do the conservatives in California "fire" the governor and other statewide officeholders, for example, when enough other voters prevent it, or when those in power corrupt the electoral process and steal elections? Are the conservative citizens of California, or the Trump voters of America, at fault for not firing the corrupt, POS Dem pols in MI, WI, PA, and GA who facilitated the steal in 2020, and for not firing the corrupt POS Dem pols in CA who subverted the recall election?
We have the soap box and ballot box, yes. Even the jury box.
But ultimately, you can vote/steal your way into tyranny - that's not the citizen's fault - but removing tyranny always requires the fourth, and remaining, box. Because tyrannical despots don't willingly give up their power.
I think it is that simple. The country belongs to the citizens and when the system is compromised it is the duty of the citizen to put it right. Andrew, I don't mean to argue with you because I think we agree on so much, but you seem to be approaching the problem from solidly within a box. When an election is stolen, and the authorities are in on the steal what does a citizen do? Stand by and say, "oh well, we voted, and it just didn't work out". Firing someone is not limited to voting or the legal system. And the citizen's responsibility is beyond elections. The real questions are what is your freedom worth to you and what are you willing to do to preserve or restore it?
I live in The Bluest State, so that should answer that.
If it's I-90 it was sold to foreigners. So somebody got paid.
It's 80/90 across Indiana. We discovered last month on a trip that the roads in Southern IL are better than any of ours, which was a COMPLETE shock. Illinois??!! Where all the money goes to support the organized crime that's called Chicago?
That's what I thought you were talking about.
Well southern IL/IN don't freeze as hard as 90, but it has still gone to hell. Lots of roads around here are crap too. In MA they spend a whopping 10% of the hwy budget on construction and maintenance. Lotta admin overhead, right?
Spot on!
I help people get liquor licenses in California, and I have been thinking about this so much lately. The hospitality industry is full of creative (albeit egomaniacal) people who have endless ideas, employ a lot of people who can't function in office work (nor stay at home work because alcoholism), and have this very unbureaucratic sensibility.
Seeing them hammered by so many agencies just to try and operate is... abusive. They pay exorbitant fees for licenses for what? The ABC considers their job to serve the 'public', not these business owners who actually pay for the pleasure of supporting them. ABC is regularly doing sting operations to catch them serving minors or making mistakes. Then they pony up to pay me, often gratefully, because it's so painful for them to communicate with these decidedly uncreative bureaucrats who wouldn't last a day running a restaurant.
I have been wondering on what basis this actually makes the state better. A system where society just stopped supporting/shut down bad actors seems like it would do much more good than 'qualifying' everyone who wants to work in this industry.
Watching them jump through every California covid hoop has been horrifying on so many levels, but to their credit, they have stubbornly reinvented themselves every step of the way. All the ABC has done is restrict their abilities.
That’s really fascinating. But it makes sense. People were deciding ways of underground restaurants during Covid shutdown time. Private paid dinner parties where chefs would come cook! Cheers to finding a way! 🥂 🍻