DARE
I speculated earlier at the terror I would feel if I were a parent of a teenaged daughter who listened to H.I.M. or some other suicide-glamorizing satanic glam rock. But actually, after a few minutes of reflection I realized that I probably would never have anything to worry about.
I recently read She Said Yes, the story of the girl who, in the library at Columbine, was asked if she believed in God. Her mother told of earlier years where she had listened to Marilyn Manson and written out fantasies of killing herself and her family. Sounded like pretty typical teenage stuff to me, but I could understand in some measure what the family must have gone through. The family sent the girl to some fundie Christian school and only allowed her to go to social functions of the church youth group from her school, where at some point she miraculously had some kind of spiritual awakening.
This reminds me of when I was in high school. I was in high school in the eighties, and of course those were the Reagan years. Reagan’s gotten a lot of great press since he died, and I don’t mean to tread on the memory of the dead, but I came of age when there was a lunatic in the White House and thousands of nuclear warheads on a hairtrigger on both sides of the planet. More frightening than Soviet warheads was a President who lied with impunityâI was eleven years old when I started asking if it was my imagination or if the President was a big fat liar. All the adults, even the bleeding heart liberals, thought it was unthinkable and told me it was my imagination.
So anyone that was surprised at the whole Iran-Contra mess? An eleven-year-old could see that one coming and did in fact tell you so. Why they called that maniac the great communicator, I’ll still never know.
So yes, my generation read 1984 in 1984. And we saw a planet gone so far beyond insane that the only future we saw for ourselves was nuclear winter. I’m not sure how old I was, but somewhere between six and eight years old when my mother told me to appreciate the blue sky because it might be the last one I ever see.
Did we freak out? Hell yes we freaked out. We dove into drugs and fantasy and tried to kill ourselves, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. The world we inherited was a nightmare of terror and when we spoke up we were told that there’s nothing wrong and it was all in our heads.
None of our parents knew what to do with us, but a lot of them tried what Cassie Bernall’s parents tried. If you have a problem child, send them away.
I lost count of the kids I knew in high school who went away to involuntary vacations in inpatient mental health wards and facilities. Why were they locked up away from anyone they knew? Because their parents didn’t know how to deal with a child becoming an adult in a world where every moment was twenty minutes from armageddon. Parents would either have to admit that they brought children into this ticking time bomb or else find doctors willing to administer thorazine and tie a sixteen year old up in a straightjacket and put the problem away.
Like I said, I lost count of how many of my classmates went away to the nuthouse before I graduated from high school. And I think it’s pretty screwed up that I understand the phrase “cognitive dissonance” because it was a relief to know that there was a name for what I experienced through high school. Reagan was emblematic, but he was just the tip of the iceberg. We also had D.A.R.E. cops lying straight through their teeth at us, trying to scare us with the “facts” about drugs. Everywhere we turned we were fed lies as if we were too stupid to suspect. Then later we’d get some real information backed by scientific research and peer-reviewable study methods and the lucky ones of us figured out simply not to ever trust a policeman or a politician. The rest of us were confused and scared.
I’m just writing this out to remind myself, if I ever become a parent, not to tell lies and not to push a problem away into an asylum. I’m sure it’s easier said than done, but I have to remember this very important fact:
I am one of the lucky ones.
My parents were far from perfect, but I think they played it straight with me and they never panicked and packed me off to Elmhurst or the Yale Psychiatric Institute (more commonly called YPI or “Yippie”) when it was the cool thing for parents to do. Whatever they told me about drugs were their own opinions and honestly gleaned information.
I am one of the lucky ones.
So what could I do if I had a child who came home with a CD with a “parental advisory” label on it? And lyrics like “Oh baby, join me in death”? It’s too easy to be glib about this stuff, but if I had a kid who was listening to Satanic rock, well, hell, I could lend her my copy of The Satanic Bible and introduce her to the few friends I still have who are practicing Satanists. If that didn’t take all the fun out of it, I don’t know what would. I pray that I could get through it without resorting to falsehood.
Lets face it. From Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush, it’s not like we’ve had a decrease in bald-faced lies from our leaders. D.A.R.E. is in full swing. You can replace nuclear winter with the threat of terrorism, I suppose. And handing out mood and mind-altering drugs to children is now absolutely de rigeur. It seems absolutely critical that I remember this if I ever have kids of my own.
It’s a miracle that humanity
It’s a miracle that humanity outlasted the 20th Century.
I suspect it will take a miracle for us to last through the 21st. I also suspect that children (or young adults) will play a large role in bringing our survival about.
I used to think that my generation was idealistic and intelligent enough to put it all together and get it all right. With the benefit of time, I now see that most of us have become just as jaded as we thought the world to be when we were young, or else preoccupied with the responsibility of providing for the next generation.
So we make way for the next generation to get it right, and they grow up hopefully naive enough of the weight of time to make it so, if we do a good enough job of it. And that’s how mankind survives. At least until the big meteor comes, or the big virus, or the big dirty bomb.
” If that didn’t take
” If that didn’t take all the fun out of it, I don’t know what would.”
That’s brilliant. Either you make Satan look hopelessly square and dorky, or as a worst case scenario, your kid now thinks you’re cool enough to talk to.
Yeah, plus actual organized
Yeah, plus actual organized Satanism is pretty non-dangerous; bad fashion combined with a philosophy mostly pilfered from Nietzche and the Social Darwinists. Nothing harsher than a kid would get reading, say, Ayn Rand. Plus they’re very specifically against killing animals. So there might be a little damage control at play, in the best case scenario.
Part I, due to LiveJournal
Part I, due to LiveJournal size limitation
This is a pretty scary article. If you believe that writing out fantasies of killing oneself and oneâs family sounds like pretty typical teenage stuff, one of us has a seriously warped view of teenagers, and I hope it is you. Most of the teens I know are pretty nice, normal kids.
I also know of NO kids that have been sent away to involuntary vacations in inpatient mental health wards. In my entire life, nobody either Susan or I have known has done that. I am sure that it happens, but if it happened to so many of your friends that you lost count, you must have been hanging out with the wrong crowd. I know that Walt sent you to a couple of extremely liberal private schools. I thought it was best at the time because of the abysmal record of the New Haven public schools, but now I wonder if you might have been better off in the public school system with more normal kids.
I have a problem with the term âcognitive dissonance.â As I understand it, that is a fancy term for having two contradictory facts that you havenât yet reconciled. We used to call that a dichotomy or a paradox. Ayn Rand says in Atlas Shrugged, âWhen confronted with a paradox, check your premises.â She knew, as did the rest of us, that a paradox is simply a limitation of knowledge. Perhaps your schools werenât getting that across. Kids have always questioned authority. Didnât they in your generation? If so, they would have found answers to their contradictions and cured their âcognitive dissonance.â
Parents didnât know how to bring up their kids in a world where every moment was twenty minutes from Armageddon? The parents grew up in the same world! That had been the situation since the early 1950âs at least. The âlunaticâ you refer to is the man who ended that! Yes, I know there are still far too many nuclear warheads in the world, but Ronald Reagan ended the constant confrontation of the cold war. The world is a far safer place because of him. (Admittedly, still not a safe place, but far safer.) And he was called the Great Communicator because he could (duh) communicate. With the exception of the mainstream media, everybody liked him. He could disagree with the Democrats on politics, but he did it civilly, and most of his contemporaries on both sides of the aisle actually liked him. Oh, yes. He wrote (or rewrote) most of his speeches. And they were good.
As far as Reagan lying with impunity, what are you referring to? Obviously it was something in 1980 from your comment about being eleven years old.
In his second term reporters accused him of lying when he denied knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair, but with all their inquiries and investigations no one even close to Reagan was actually implicated. The end result was determined to be solely a rogue operation of the NSC. The Tower Commission castigated Reagan for his lack of control over the NSC, but found no link to him. (BTW, I am skeptical that you were pontificating on I‑Ca at age 11. That operation was initiated in 1985 and first came to public light in November of 1986. You would have been almost 17 when it first came out.)
Dad
Part II
Also, ânuclear
Part II
Also, ânuclear winterâ was a term coined by Carl Sagan in 1983. I doubt your mother was terrifying you about that in 1975 when you were six. Incidentally, she was a Goldwater Republican until she married Walt and started working at Yale when you were around ten. We did NOT spend our lives terrified of nuclear war. Of course, we were not then living in a primary target area, either. But between her conservative politics and her reasonableness as a mother, I doubt she ever tried to terrify you about anything, let alone about nuclear winter. And I canât see how the world you were living in was a ânightmare of terrorâ as you described it. It certainly wasnât to most people. Most people thought of the eighties as the best years. Reagan had turned the economy around and created a boom for the US that lasted until the final year of the Clinton administration, when we entered the latest recession that we are finally getting out of. Maybe the terror you speak of had roots in the fact you lived in a violent, crime-filled slum city instead of in national politics.
I am only vaguely familiar with DARE, so I canât speak with certainty, but my impressions from their web site seem pretty straight forward. Of course, DARE was founded on the Left Coast in 1983, so it would have been brand new here when you were in school and they might have improved since then. Of course, more clinical studies have been done in the last 20 years, but the end result is the same: Recreational drug use isnât good for kids. Same with alcohol and tobacco. Duh. You said DARE lied to you. Did they try to convince you that drugs were GOOD for you? There is a difference between lying to someone and having a difference of opinion. There are a few scientists who believe that drugs arenât bad for you, but they are a tiny minority. Even they donât think that recreational drug use is good for children, which also appears to be DAREâs position. (It seems funny to hear you argue in favor of mind-altering drugs and then criticize the widespread use of Ritalin, et al. My position is that life is challenging enough stone-cold sober, let alone FUâed on any drugs.)
I am glad to see that you donât think kids should be lied to. I think real lies are acceptable only in extremely limited circumstances, and hope that I never reach that extreme. (I donât consider saying, âYou look lovely tonight.â a real lie when you are trying to get laid.) A major advantage of truth-telling is that you never have to remember which story you told to whom. But kids shouldnât be lied to. I donât think it is always necessary to answer all their questions, but if you do you should be straight with âem. Of course, there are certain hereditary tales about Santa and the Tooth Fairy, por ejemplo, that I consider entertainment and not lies, per se.
Dad
I’m running off to lunch, so
I’m running off to lunch, so only a quick clarification now: I am not in favor of mind-altering drugs. I’m in favor of not having schools and policemen lie to kids about mind-altering drugs. I was fortunate enough to have an expensive education (thank you for that) so that the anti-drug propaganda was secondary. I think the truth about drugs should be sufficiently scary enough without resorting to falsehood.
The lies were about the specific effects of drugs. All it takes is a kid seeing one person smoke a joint and not go on a homicidal spree before they throw out everything else that a policeman says to them. In fact, when I was on a jury, we were instructed that it was permissible to disregard a witnesses entire testimony if we found that they had lied on one point. So that logic isn’t isolated to children.
But most of the literature given to children about drugs reads like “reefer madness” and are filled with circular logic. Drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. They are dangerous because if you’re caught with them, you’ll go to jail. Huh? Waitaminnit.… so they should be illegal because they are illegal. Riiiiight.
And no, at my schools, we didn’t have DARE itself, but I’ve gotten to see some of the demonstrations and some of their literature. At my school we had teachers that spent some time with us going over the classifications of drugs and the particular dangers and showing us studies and data backed by scientific inquiry. We also had a couple of recovering addicts come in to talk to us about their experiences.
Of course, I went on to use and abuse drugs. So maybe facts and truth are an ineffective deterrent.
In any case, I’m totally addicted to food. Can’t go more than a couple of days without it, and usually I have to have it multiple times per day. I’ll respond to more of your responses later, after lunch (and probably after my workday).
Thanks,
Steve
Reagan personally ended the
Reagan personally ended the cold war.… oy.
DARE doesn’t seem that wacko
DARE doesn’t seem that wacko today. I can’t speak for how they were 20 years ago, but I have never heard anyone claim that smoking one joint would turn you instantly into a homicidal maniac. But marijuana IS the second leading cause of DUI fatalities, after alcohol of course, and I see nothing wrong in saying that. Smoking marijuana is certainly worse for you than smoking tobacco, and EVERYONE approves of anti-tobacco programs. I just don’t get it.
Dad
Reagan ended the cold war -
Reagan ended the cold war — yes! It is generally accepted that his SDI (Star wars) plan forced the Soviets to spend themselves to the brink of bankruptcy to keep up. Gorbachev then backed down and agreed to missile reductions at peace summits in 1985 through 1987, tore down the Wall, and withdrew from Afghanistan. The fact that SDI was an enormous bluff was uncovered later, but it worked. (SDI had a 3.8 billion dollar budget and a trillion dollar cost estimate, IF somebody invented the new type of lasers and supercomputers needed.) Without the need for a unified defense against the US, there was no longer much reason for the expense of the USSR, so the member nations went their own ways, thus terminating the Cold War for good.
At the very least, you have to admit it happened on his watch.
Dad
Steve has touched on
Steve has touched on something regarding DARE. As a parent of children required to go through the program, I definitely observed an Orwellian, Hitler youth element to the program.
The kids were encouraged to report their parents to the police, not only about drug use, but abuse in general. The officers always wanted to try and pull information out of the kids regarding their experience at home. I remember on one occasion having to clarify to the administration that when my daughter was talking about her father, who had a drug problem and put her in jeopardy on one occasion, that she was not referring to me, but to her paternal father who was no longer allowed to have any contact with her. Before that point, I am sure that both the school and the police were on the verge of investigating our household, based only on the narrative coxed out of my then 11 year old.
I considered it a reckless invasion of our privacy that my daughter was being interrogated in school by the police, under the guise of “educating the children about the dangers of drug abuse.”
That certainly is scary. But
That certainly is scary. But is that DARE? I know that a lot of DARE officers are also being trained as School Resource Officers, which I suspect was the capacity they were working in your incident. DARE seems to concentrate on drug abuse.
And, hey! If you actually WERE abusing your kid, I’d hope to hell someone would come get you. I hope somebody gets her bio father. If he would joepardize his own daughter, he’d probably jeopardize somebody else’s.
Just an old-fashioned conservative curmudgeon, I guess.
Dad
“Generally accepted”, yes,
“Generally accepted”, yes, in about the same way that it is “generally accepted” by many Americans that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.
Gorbachev came to power with two agenda items in hand from the start: one was to improve the internal openness of soviet society (glasnost and perestroika) for largely economic reasons, the other was to improve foreign relations with non-superpower countries by getting away from the use of military force and threats against them. (That latter one is almost never mentioned in America.) These two ideas together led directly to the end of the Soviet system: first by encouraging some dissent, and then by refraining from crushing that dissent with lethal force as the Kruschev types had done. Anybody who followed the steps in Eastern Europe that led to the breakup could see that defense and Star Wars had nothing to do with it.
Reagan’s rhetoric against the Soviets created the impression of putting new pressure on them, but Reagan’s policy did nothing of the kind. He took not a single action that changed the difficulties already faced by the Soviets from past US policy. The strategic weapons programs he moved forward all began under Carter, or earlier, and when it came to arms reductions negotiation, he was one of the most flexible and conciliatory of the cold war presidents. Every burden that the Soviet system was laboring under was of long standing, arising from policies going back to Harry Truman. Reagan added nothing new except the bluff of Star Wars, which the entire public knew was not foreseeably workable. It is true that Gorbachev personally made a big deal out of Star Wars when talking with Reagan, but the decisions that brought down the Soviet system had already been made before they ever met, and I have never heard the slightest evidence that Star Wars ever had anything to do with the domestic dissent that broke up the Soviet Union into separate republics.
The Soviet collapse became inevitable not when the US called them evil, but when they acquired a leader who was unwilling to kill people in the streets to preserve the system.
Your 9 – 11 comparison doesn’t
Your 9 – 11 comparison doesn’t make sense. I know of nobody who claims Saddam had any prior knowledge of 9 – 11. Many DO believe he sponsored terrorism.
As for SDI being the straw that broke the USSR’s back, here’s what the Britannica says:
“Reagan’s massive military spending program, the largest in American peacetime history, was undoubtedly another factor, though some observers argued that the buildupâthrough the strain it imposed on the Soviet economyâwas actually responsible for a host of positive developments in Reagan’s second term, including a more accommodating Soviet position in arms negotiations, a weakening of the influence of hard-liners in the Soviet leadership, making possible the glasnost (âopennessâ) and perestroika (ârestructuringâ) policies of moderate Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after 1985, and even the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1990â91.
“A significant component of Reagan’s military buildup was his 1983 proposal for a space-based missile defense system that would use lasers and other as yet undeveloped killing technologies to destroy incoming Soviet nuclear missiles well before they could reach their targets in the United States. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed âStar Warsâ after the popular science-fiction movie of the late 1970s, was denounced by the Soviets, including Gorbachev, as a dangerous escalation of the arms race, a position also taken by many critics at home. Meanwhile, others argued that the project was technologically impossible and potentially a âblack holeâ in the country’s defense budget. In later years, however, former Soviet officials cited SDI as a factor in the eventual collapse of their country, for it showed that the Soviet Union was politically unprepared and economically incapable of competing in a new arms race with the United States, especially one led by someone as unrelenting as Reagan.”
Dad
PS The SDI was first
PS The SDI was first proposed by President Ronald Reagan in a nationwide television address on March 23, 1983. Carter had nothing to do with it.
I will readily concede that the Soviets problems were longstanding and that Reagan merely gave it the final push.
The fact that, as you claim, Reagan acted reasonably even while bluffing militarily indicates that perhaps the term “lunatic” is not appropriate. He did sign several major disarmament treaties, which did make the world a little bit safer.
Dad