According to MSNBC, a shortage of drugs used to treat ADD and ADHD has parents "scrambling" to find ways to keep their children medicated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "5.4 million children ages 4 to 17 have ever (sic) been diagnosed with ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and 66 percent of those with current ADHD take medication to control the condition." Would it be indelicate to think that a child introduced to chemical dependency at the ripe old age of four might be a tad more amenable to government dependency further down the line?
No doubt some kids have legitimate mental illness. But color me extremely skeptical when the number of children ostensibly requiring regular doses of mind-altering medication reaches 5.4 million. Even more so after I read a Washington Post article by California child and adolescent psychiatrist Elizabeth J. Roberts, who contended her colleagues are "now misdiagnosing and overmedicating children for ordinary defiance and misbehavior. The temper tantrums of belligerent children are increasingly being characterized as psychiatric illnesses," or when she reveals that there "was a time in the profession of child psychiatry when doctors insisted on hours of evaluation of a child before making a diagnosis or prescribing a medication. Today some of my colleagues in psychiatry brag that they can make an initial assessment of a child and write a prescription in less than 20 minutes."
Twenty minutes of diagnosis to change a kid's life forever and that's something to brag about? Fyi, that article was written in 2006. Does anyone seriously think there's been a downward trend in medicating children?
And color me cynical if you want, but this is one American who sees a not-so-casual connection between legions of drug-dependent Americans, and a disturbing desire for more and more Nanny State government. A yearning for the kind of leaders who tell one nothing is one's own fault or responsibility. For the almost seamless transition from taking a pill to "make all of one's problems go away" to hopping on a government program designed to do exactly the same thing.
One can concede that there is a certain nobility in attempting to alleviate human suffering. Yet one must also recognize the both the futility--and unseemliness--of attempting to eliminate every bump in the road of life. Raising a nation of "delicate flowers" serves no one's interest, save those whose desire to run everyone else's life "for their own good" is a subterfuge for acquiring and maintaining power by any means necessary. In a sane society, drugging kids in order to make them more "manageable" would be seen for the complete abdication of decency it truly is. We are only one or two generations away from a time when Americans will no longer remember what life was like when children were allowed to run around, skin their knees, and act out without being "labeled"--and medicated.
Why are these kids drugged? To make them compliant. Question: is there anything more desirable for the maintenance of a top-down, command-and-control, freedom-killing bureaucracy than millions of compliant Americans?
Compliancy is the lifeblood of the welfare state. The siren song of the statists
Compliancy is the lifeblood of the welfare state. The siren song of the statists, as so eloquently, if unintentionally, articulated by Barack Obama in his "budget" speech was the idea that, without ever-expanding government, Americans are helpless, hapless, hopeless, or a combination of all three. For the statists, compassion equals government dependency, and self-reliance is tantamount to survival of the fittest. Anyone daring to suggest that most Americans ought to stand on their own two feet and pay their own way is castigated as "mean-spirited," or "cruel" by those who consider themselves paragons of virtue.
Only a progressive would see the relinquishment of personal dignity for collective security as virtuous. Only a progressive would view the millions of Americans who no longer feel the slightest twinge of guilt or remorse for getting something for nothing, as a good thing. If progressivism stopped there it would be bad enough. But it doesn't. Guilt and remorse have been replaced with a sense of entitlement championed as social justice. Getting something for nothing--be it a welfare check or a corporate subsidy--is righteous.
You don't run up $14 trillion of debt without cultivating vice as virtue. Thus, when the president speaks of confiscating more and more wealth from the private sector, the failure of which "would lead to fundamentally different America than the one we've known throughout most of our history," far too many Americans can no longer recognize that most of American history has been one hundred and eighty degrees removed from such a preposterous assessment. The welfare state has been around for 60 years. America has been a country for 235. Perhaps some of the less brain-washed might occasionally ponder how our forebears managed to survive--dare I say flourish--without the all-encompassing "beneficence" of big government. They even might peruse the Constitution and discover that it is fundamentally structured to limit the power of government, not expand it.
In a sense, the upcoming budget battles are a metaphor. In reality, the nation's soul is at stake. Progressives inherently reject the notion that Americans will take care of the genuinely needy, absent massive amounts of government coercion. In one sense they are correct: the left contributes far less to charity than those on the right, despite having generally higher incomes. More importantly their faux-compassion is unsustainable--
and they know it. Thus, when the facade of their self-anointed self-righteousness is stripped away, there is only one thing left: the permanent establishment of an all-powerful state. One for which millions of compliant Americans is a prerequisite.
Medicating four year olds is a great place to start.
