Tag Archives: Parental responsibility

From the Horses Mouth … so to speak

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Each and every day there is someone in the news proclaiming to be an expert on gender affirming care. What I have yet to see is anyone who is a long term post-surgical transsexual, with the exception of Caitlyn Jenner, discuss the issues involved in that fateful decision. Now, admittedly I do not watch every news channel, and for a very good reason. Most of them have an agenda and the predominant agenda is based in a push to force a trans-gender ideology on much of the adolescent population in our public schools. I find that tragic.

In the early years of the 21st Century, I stumbled across a mid-nineties article in a medical publication that discussed the suicide rate among transsexuals. The numbers in that article were based on “actual” suicides not “attempted” suicides. There were a lot of statistics listed to shore up the basic findings of the study which the publication quoted. The one statistic that stuck out for me was that the suicide rate among the cisgender community was in the neighborhood 0.25 percent of the study population. In comparison, the rate among the trans community was roughly 10.5 to 11 time higher. Personally, by the time I was in my mid-fifties I had personally only known 2 people who had committed suicide. Within one year of involvment in the transgender community I had four people I knew commit suicide.

Consideration of suicide is something that has never been an issue with me other than to wonder what it would take for me to even mildly entertain the idea. So, when I read about the current rate of youth who have “considered” suicide as a reason for “gender affirming care” in the youth today I have to admit to a certain degree of skepticism stemming from the knowledge that teenagers have a tendency to be a bit dramatic. So, just how accurate is that statistic? Is it based on hospital records or the teenager’s word?

My biggest concern regarding the frequency of “attempted” suicide is the influence that the school personnel are having in the student’s lives. It’s my belief that school personnel have only 2 jobs. The first being to educate children in their care … not indoctrinate them. The second job they have is to keep the parents informed as to the progress their children are making and highlight failings as well as accomplishments. That is not what’s happening today.

Anyone who has followed what I write in this blog knows that I have been beating a drum about the dangers of the NEA for quite some time. It’s a danger that I recognized over sixty years ago when doing debate prep on the high school debate team. Even then I was aware of the fact that our schools and the teachers they employ had in reality more hours a day in which to influence the understanding that children develop than the time their parents have. Recent events regarding gender identity have proven that what I understood then was fairly accurate, without knowing the extent to which the teacher’s unions would go to usurp the rights and influence of the parents. In my mind it’s akin to kidnapping when a teacher who is entrusted with the care of a child goes behind the parents back to push what, in most cases, is surely a temporary fantasy.

What is going to happen ten or even as little as five years from now when that child realized what a horrible mistake has been made? I can’t imagine what the actual suicide rate is going to climb to. Unless I miss my guess, an entirely new form of legal remedies will develop in the form of suits brought against teacher’s union and individual teachers themselves and deservedly so.

There are those who will say to me that I’m just spewing sour grapes since I didn’t make that irreversible decision until late in my life because I was a coward. Maybe! But, when I made that decision, it was with a background of having lived a life as a boy, a man, a husband and a father, which gave me knowledge that could only come from that experience. I admit there are times that I wonder “what might have been” had I not made that irreversible decision. I also wonder at times what life would have been like had I made that decision then. And I seriously doubt that I am no different from every other post-surgical transsexual.

I have had the privilege of living 2 lives which is something that these children who are being groomed by teachers and sometimes by misguided parents who think they are being loving, will never know. In most cases those parents are not being loving at all. How many of these children who are being secretly transitioned are going to return to that classroom with an AK47 ten, fifteen or twenty years from now and indiscriminately open fire in anger. (and yes I’m aware that the recent case involving a former student at a Christian school appeared to be revenge for having not been recognized as who she thought she was).

The bottom line to me is that we are witnessing a tragic confluence of out of control so called educators and woke ideology. As far as I’m concerned, the first of many lawsuits against school administrators and teachers is long overdue. Gender identity should be left to the individual and the family together with a trained counselor.

So now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth… So to speak.

The Ignorance of Innocence

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I am just not sure where to start, but I have to start somewhere so I will start with the laziness of parents; parents who have decided that their job is over as soon as the potty training is over. Entirely too many parents have totally turned the process of raising children who have a clear understanding of their rightful place in society along with basics required to achieve that end; such as accurate knowledge of our history. That fact has never been more on display than it was this past week in Washington DC and more than two hundred other cities across the country. The very idea that “children” should be the ones to tell responsible adults how to handle a subject as important as the right to bear arms is, on its face absurd beyond bounds, and dangerous at its core.

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but I can tell you that there is no legitimate comparison to saying that at the age of 17, young men and women are old enough to lay their lives on the line and don a military uniform are therefore old enough to tell adults what to do. In the first place, in the military at that age and experience level they are not telling anyone what to do. In the military they are being told what to do, how to do it and when to do it by people with far more age and experience. In the process they’re gaining a level of maturity and respect for authority that our school systems are doing a poor job of..

What we saw last weekend was a display of young people who were guided by pure emotion, which in some cases, I’m reasonably sure, were whipped to a frenzy by adults with less than honorable intentions.  Raw emotion has a great deal in common with the object of the frenzy … military weapons. Used for the right reasons and in the hands of someone with the right motives either can be a force for good. But, in the wrong hands and used with the wrong motives either can yield tragic results.

The fact that these “children,” and that is exactly what they are, have been so poorly educated about the history and reasoning embodied in our constitution, and in particular, behind the Second Amendment to our constitution is a worse than tragic reflection on the state of our education system.

When I was on the debate team as a junior in high school the national debate topic that year was about the advisability and necessity of our federal government providing funds for the education systems in the various states. I was young and not the most brilliant mind on our debate team, but in the course of studying the pros and cons of federal involvement in local education I did realize the dangers of a single central influence on the direction of the thought processes of “young skulls full of mush?

To my way of thinking it was a simple matter of math; the math of time. The math worked out like this. The average student spent at the most a half hour in the morning with his/her parents and in many cases barely an hour in the evening. In that brief time, what was being taught and/or learned? Probably not much in the way of how our government influenced our lives and the importance of guarding against ideas contrary to the personal desires of the parents.

On the other hand, children are under the influence and care of whatever school system they attend a minimum of 30 to as much as 40 hours a week. Socialists, liberals and progressives alike recognized this fact years ago and its why organizations like the NEA and teachers unions are so overwhelmingly influenced by ideologies in opposition to the basic Judeo-Christian principles of our founding documents. Is it any wonder then, that it was so easy to gin up the emotions of high school aged students across the country last week and convince them that it was the inanimate tool to blame and not the perpetrator or the people who raised him?

I have no statistics to back up my theory that the success of the Charter School initiative in most cases is the result of schools based on sound educational principles void of liberal dogma and experimental curriculums. Sadly, Charter Schools are not guaranteed continual existence. There are enough of them failing, to create a ground swell of concern for the lack of parental oversite of these schools. And that brings me back to my original premise that in the last 50 or so years parents have come to rely on schools to do the primary job of caring for their children.

So, I will beat the same drum I beat in a recent piece … Parents should be held responsible for the nature of the persons they turn loose on society. Until that happens organizations like the NEA and others with less than honorable intentions about the direction of our society, will control the direction of our society.

Where does the responsibility really lie?

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It’s all a blame game. In the wake of the tragedy that unfolded in the halls and classrooms of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks ago we have witnessed the same rhetoric that has become the mantra again and again. It’s nothing but a blame game because no one has yet to actually get to the root cause of such horrific incidents … at least in my humble opinion.

The very first thing to be blamed, of course, is the instrument of destruction, the weapon; with the liberal left leading the way accompanied by some of the RINOs. The mere fact that so called intelligent, thoughtful people would immediately jump to the conclusion that an inanimate tool was to blame is absurd on it’s very face.

That is followed, naturally by the equally absurd idea that there is no reason for a common citizen to need such a destructive weapon. The notion that only the military should need such a weapon is fostered by the naïve idea that when our forefathers passed the second amendment to our constitution they were only thinking of securing the ability of the citizens to put meat on the table. While that was a consideration it was only a small consideration. A reading of the accompanying documents shows that the basis for that amendment was to forever create a fear in those who govern of the governed. That idea was totally new to mankind. Historically it had always been the governed who feared those who governed.

If weapons of the type used in Florida were banned, any individual determined to kill others would simply find another way to do it. The lesson of the Alfred P Murrah Building in Oklahoma City nearly 23 years ago should be required study for every politician, especially liberal democrats, and government bureaucrats. Timothy McVeigh didn’t need an AR-15. All he needed was a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of Ammonium Nitrate, a rented U-Haul and a cheap timer to kill 168 people, wound another 650 and damage all or parts of 300 buildings.

In light of that you would think that America’s farmers would have to find other sources of nitrogen to fertilize their crops but to my knowledge that is still readily available at any garden center or farm supply center in this country.

Even with all the fire power found in Stephen Paddocks room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino the number of people he killed or wounded pales in comparison to the destruction in Oklahoma City.

Have trucks or cars been banned after their use in the killing of innocent people in Europe? No, they haven’t. And while we’re at it let’s ban the use of all presser cookers. You remember don’t you, that pressure cookers were used in the Boston Marathon bombing a few years ago.

As history progressed so did the development of weapons and up until the invention of weapons like the AR-15 there was little concern with private ownership of certain weapons. I don’t know what was behind the reasoning for letting the ban on private ownership of the AR-15 expire, but it was the right thing to do in my opinion.

The citizens of our country should always have access to weaponry equivalent to the military. It is the only way to see to it that our government, people who serve in our government elected and unelected in particular, never have access to any means of overcoming the freedom of the governed. But that wouldn’t be an issue if the root cause of such tragedies was accurately identified.

The news is rife with politicians, celebrities, psychologists and pseudo-intellects blaming the inanimate weapon, people who own inanimate weapons, those who make inanimate weapons and society in general for the tragedy. But, not one of them has addressed the real root of the problem. True, background checks do help identify people who shouldn’t have access to guns, but that is like trying to stop a leak in a dam from the outside where the water has already breached the dam instead of on the inside where the leak begins.

So where is the inside of this dam? Not one person in any of these tragedies, with one exception that I know of, has placed the root blame where it really belongs.

I have always been a firm believer in the responsibility of parents to see to it that the children they bring in to the world are raised with a respect for the rights of other people and their own responsibility to conduct their affairs in a manner that does not interfere with the rights of other people. There is an old saying that goes like this: “Your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins.”

When any parent fails in this responsibility to teach that concept to their children they bear equal responsibility for the acts of the children they turn loose on society. If an adult does such a lousy job of raising a child that the child becomes a blight on society and as we have seen in the recent events, a deadly blight, they are equally responsible for the acts of that child. It’s my firm belief that if the lives of the perpetrators of these tragedies were traced back far enough you will find an event, involving the parent directly or indirectly, which eventually led to the acts which ended in tragedy for the lives of other people.

That is the very seed of virtually every one of these tragic events and ignorant attention seeking persons of mediocre notoriety are racing to the microphones to blame the inanimate object or the NRA. Stupid corporate leaders are racing to the microphones to withdraw their support of the NRA. How shortsighted and ignorant can those executives be? Apparently extremely ignorant and shortsighted.

Once and for all … let’s get to the root of the problem. People who are ill equipped to raise responsible members of society and the society which chooses to turn a blind eye to them are the real root of the problem. Do I expect that to ever be addressed? No, I don’t.

We have created, at a minimum, two and possibly three generations of adults who have chosen to turn the responsibility for raising the children they bring into the world over to the school systems. Those systems are heavily staffed by teachers and administrators who are teaching our children that they bear no responsibility for their own actions. And that, I believe, is because those liberal educators don’t want to assume responsibility for the outcome of their own lives. They want society to take that responsibility off their shoulders.

Imagine a society that exacted the same penalty on the parents of children who harm others as the penalty imposed on the child. No doubt events such as we have just witnessed would be rare indeed.