A Gramme is Better than a Damn

Much like the illegal invasion of our country, the issue of drugging children for the syndrome-du-jour is beginning to scare the hell out of me. A grandmother on the radio this morning was lamenting her powerlessness to find a solution for her grandson, who at age ten, is nodding off in the middle of the day and is completely non-functional, since his parents began to use the a chemical nanny at age five. Just try to tell me that this child is not ruined for life.

It's about the Children

I horrify myself with the thought that I might be one of those kids, had I been born a mere decade ago. I was a restless, unruly daydreamer at times as a child. I hated school. I was always fiddling with things, taking them apart, peaking the ire of my mother, when I was unable to reassemble them. I was learning in my own way. My father spanked me only once in his life, because I almost toddled under the wheels of a truck. I remember getting a good shot from mom too. Why? I was pushing every single button I could push, to solicit her anger. I was twisting every knob and toggling every toggle switch. She finally gave it to me. I can tell you with absolute certainty that I deserved every last drop.

My parents used good old-fashioned discipline, applied when it was necessary, not when they felt like it. There is nothing wrong with that. These days, the secular humanist movement believes this to be completely intolerable. They tout the dangers of violence transmitted over generations. Do not misunderstand me. There is always a kernel of truth, to most issues of social dysfunction. As usual, the unprofessional professionals take the fringe data, broadly brush the entire population with it and instantly declare it their moral duty to eradicate all of their hypothetical shortcomings from the normal stream of human behavior. They must be more enlightened and informed than all of those humans, who have moved this species along for thousands of years. Right?

"There's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is."
- World Controller Mustapha Mond from Huxley’s Brave New World

Substitute the Paddle

Now we have a reckless social policy. When that happens, people look for alternatives. It resembles my town's policy on appliance recycling. You cannot put them out in the trash, yet they have no policy to deal with them. So what happens? You see old monitors, trash compactors and broken TVs on the side of the road.

If you cannot spank a child and your touchy feely timeouts do not work, some parents have discovered that the doctor will be more than willing to prescribe a legal pill, with a legal diagnosis. Then they can proceed to destroy a potentially creative mind, by cutting off its ability to gather and analyze the environmental data around it. The child becomes another animatronic fixture in the home, calm, collected, devoid of offensive behavior, yet completely uninspired. Then you have a budding victim, groomed for dependency on the state.

"If you feel you are not properly sedated, call 348-844 immediately. Failure to do so may result in prosecution for criminal drug evasion." – medicine cabinet voice from film THX-1138

When the Other Shoe drops

I am wondering what it will be like to have an army of ACLU protected sociopath adult zombies, who have had the delicate brain wiring of their youth corrosively dissolved by medication, ambling about in the very near future. They will be committing the crimes of the future, insulated by the victim status of their condition.

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence." – Alex from Clockwork Orange

I guess we will be looking at another quick fix social experiment gone awry, with no specific villain you can usher toward the gallows for relief.

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