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America Closing Her Door to Freedom Exclusive to STR June 24, 2009 At
47, I lament how today’s Nowhere
have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public
schools, where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and
not some print version of Debbie
Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher
in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten --
required reading in those decadent days of my ‘70s high school. But
educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything
controversial. Students
have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can’t
make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make
“adequate yearly progress.” Only
about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes
reveled in such debate. Similarly,
so many high schools have become gated, closed campuses. Mine was wide
open. “Zero tolerance” for drugs and violence policies punish students
carrying aspirin, cough drops, and Tweety-Bird key chains. Now diligent
do-gooders want to ban school Coke machines as well. And to think at my
high school we could even smoke!
Today
political correctness constipates free speech at many schools (as well as
in much of the public and private sectors), and hysterical sexual
harassment policies suspend children for hugging a classmate. If you had
predicted all this to my 1980 senior high class, we’d have laughed that
you’d smoked some mighty bad dope to conjure up such an Orwellian
dystopia. Young
folks’ freedom has been lost off campus as well. The drinking age has of
course been raised, and now there’s a host of teen driving restrictions
I never had to obey.
But
we’ve all lost so much liberty. Look how government’s neurotic nannies
have restricted us with a host of seatbelt, child seat, and helmet laws.
Likewise, so many cities and states ban smoking even in private restaurants and bars. A WWII vet can’t even light up in
his own bar. So
many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J.
O’Rourke notes, if Even
political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued
at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban
books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned
that: "The
freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment
must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied
to the ideas we cherish. Almost
half of all Government
regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher
consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing
the sale of a head of cabbage. In
recent years, obsessive-compulsive environmental regulations halted a Everywhere
rules and paperwork mushroom as nit-picking bureaucrats grow in numbers
and power. As a buddy bemoaned, the increasingly shrill message of the
establishment is “Sit down – and shut up.” No wonder so many
Americans feel frustrated and impotent. Why
has our liberty eroded so badly? Statist public schools have long taught
that equality (of results) and “social justice” trump freedom since
liberty is the handmaiden of “selfish” individualists harming “the
community.” As we’ve grown affluent, there’s more desire to protect
everyone from risk, and our burgeoning welfare state demands ever more of
our economic liberty. Plus, as societies get more secular, they become
more socialist (see We
also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending
that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety. But, as
Justice Louis Brandeis warned: "Experience
teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the
government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally
alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The
greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding." |
