In a Rex Stout mystery
from the 1930's, I recently stumbled across a discussion of
ortho-cousins and cross-cousins, terms with which I was unfamiliar.
Ortho-cousins are your first cousins from your parent's same-sex
sibling. Cross cousins are your first cousins from your parent's
opposite-sex sibling. Your father's brother's child is your
ortho-cousin, as is your mother's sister's child. The child of your
father's sister is your cross cousin, and so is the child of your
mother's brother.
This distinction used to
matter in a lot of places and it still matters in some. It is most
significant with respect to incest laws and taboos. Though most of
the world outside the US permits marriage between first cousins,
there have always been places where ortho-cousin marriage was, and
is, considered incestuous but cross-cousin marriage was permitted.
There are also places
where ortho-cousin marriage is preferred.
In England several hundred years ago, for example, property
(especially land) passed exclusively to male descendants, and a
marriage of a man to his father's brother's daughter would have the
effect of keeping the family's wealth intact. This principle remains
important across the Islamic world, where cousin marriage is very
common. In much of the Middle East, marriage to a father's brother's
daughter (“FBD”) is considered a man's legal right, and the FBD
may not marry another unless the man consents to waive his rights.
*
On
Saturday, October 12, the SNAP (food stamp) program in Louisiana
experienced a series of service interruptions involving the
Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system. When a SNAP recipient
takes food items to a cashier and presents a SNAP card, the EBT
system compares the amount of the purchases with the amount of food
stamp money the bearer has available in their account. There's a
limit each month, in other words. On October 12, however, when SNAP
cards were presented to cashiers at a Wal-Mart in Springhill,
Louisiana, the limits did not appear on the cashier's screen.
This
presented the management at Springhill Wal-Mart with a choice. They
could shut down SNAP sales completely until the problem was fixed,
they could apply a per-customer limit to SNAP sales ($30, let's say),
or they could simply allow any and all SNAP sales to proceed
regardless of the quantity.
For
whatever reason, they chose the last of these alternatives. And all
hell broke loose. Not only did SNAP customers race through the
aisles filling up multiple carts of food but they called their
friends and alerted them to the bonanza in progress. Within minutes,
the store was packed with “customers” frantically filling carts
with whatever food products they could stuff into their shopping
carts, getting the food through the check lanes and into their cars,
and then returning to the store to fill up more carts. All of it was
a race to get as much food out of the Wal-Mart before the EBT system
got repaired. When SNAP limits finally did begin to show up on cash
registers, people simply abandoned their full carts and walked out.
This
was not, let us remember, one or two or five or ten dishonest people.
This was a frenzy of thievery that subsided only when the computer
got fixed. Aisle after aisle and shelf after shelf of canned goods,
dairy, meats and frozen foods were emptied. At the end, the only
food left in the store was what had been abandoned in shopping carts
when the EBT system recovered.
The
news reports were bland, of course. It was an odd story from a
Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart is basically the lowest common denominator of
nationwide retail so it produces its share of odd stories, but there
was no hint of what this event said about the people involved or the
human condition or the human spirit. Even to raise such an issue, or
suggest that what people did was morally suspect, would be wrong or
judgmental or even (OMG!) racist, I guess.
And I
thought, “Wow. Am I really that out of it? Am I truly that old?
Am I the only person left in America who remembers when poor people
had dignity?” Because I do remember it. I remember it quite
clearly. When I was young, in the 1950's, there were a lot more poor
people around, both black and white, and they had a lot less than
poor people do today, but the sort of instinctive stealing that
occurred in Louisiana would never have happened back then. People
may have been poor but they worked for what they had and they
respected themselves. They got dressed up on Sunday, and they
dressed their kids as well, and they all went to church together.
There are still such people around, of course. The “working poor”
are still among us; in fact, I work with some of them. But there are
not nearly as many as there used to be, and there are a lot more of
the debased welfare-dependent shoppers in Springhill than there ever
were before.
Contrary
to left-wing ideology, crime and poverty do not correlate very well
with each other. The Great Depression, for example, was a time of
very low crime rates across the US. The kind of thing that happened
in the Springhill Wal-Mart has very little to do with poverty and a
great deal to do with the loss of self-respect that accompanies
dependency on welfare benefits. What happened at Springhill is what
regularly happens now that socialist values have become embedded in
the permanent underclass that was created by LBJ's Great Society and
nurtured by the American left for the past fifty years.
A
couple days ago, the Senate Budget Committee reported that over the
past five years, the US government had distributed $3.7 trillion in
means-tested welfare benefits. This does not include purely state
welfare benefit payments and it does not include benefits that are
not means-tested, like Social Security. The $3.7 trillion is
about five times the amount spent by the federal government over the
same period on education and transportation.
Margaret
Thatcher spent her eleven years as Prime Minister re-privatizing
industries that British socialists had nationalized in post-war
Britain. In her speeches, she often emphasized that the problem with
socialism, in Europe and the UK, was not merely that it was an
ineffective economic system, but that it destroyed human beings:
“Socialism
turned good citizens into bad ones; it turned strong nations into
weak ones; it promoted vice and discouraged virtue . . . it
transformed formerly hard working and self- reliant men and women
into whining, weak and flabby loafers. Socialism was not a fine idea
that had been misapplied, it was an inherently wicked idea.”
*
In the
ancient art of falconry, there are two methods of hunting ducks.
In the
first, the falconer takes his raptor to a pond and, if he is lucky,
finds some ducks. After tossing a stone into the water so the birds
take flight, he then releases his falcon. Soaring and swooping at up
to 80mph, the falcon hits a duck in midair, kills it and brings it
back to earth. The falconer races to the spot where the falcon is
now feeding on the duck and steals the catch, giving the falcon a bit
of meat for his trouble. That is how it is still done today.
The
second method is no longer considered sporting, but it required great
skill and provided a hefty reward when it succeeded. The hunter
would seek a brace of ducks sitting on shallow water and, when he
found them, would silently unhood his falcon and release it into the
air. With the falcon circling above the pond, the ducks were now
trapped. They would never take flight with a bird of prey in the air
above them, so the hunter would wade into the water, wring their
necks one by one and put them in a sack. All except one, of course.
He would throw the last duck into the sky as a reward for his hunting
partner.
The
relationship between man and falcon is the fascinating aspect of
falconry. It's a business arrangement, pure and simple. The bird is
sheltered, fed and cared for. In return, he provides assistance to
the man when they hunt. But the birds are not “domesticated.” A
man and his falcon never become friends and the falcon remains a wild
animal throughout the relationship, which may last years or may end
whenever the falcon decides to fly away and not return. And they
sometimes do.
*
On
Monday,October 21, a 12-year-old boy in a Sparks, Nevada school
fatally shot a teacher and wounded two other students before killing
himself. Two days later, the papers reported:
“As they try to
understand what prompted a 12-year-old boy to open fire at his
school, district officials were examining an anti-bullying video that
includes a dramatization of a child taking a gun on a school bus to
scare aggressors.”
The
video was shown to the shooter and his fellow students as part of
National Bullying Prevention Month. The behavior depicted in the
film was apparently presented as a “bad example.” This disturbed
12-year-old, however, may have had a different interpretation.
This
dreadful tale follows on the heels of a report in the Journal of
Criminology. Seokjin Jeong, an assistant professor of criminology
and criminal justice at UT-Arlington, reported that their study of
anti-bullying programs in all fifty states revealed that students
exposed to these programs were actually more
likely to become victims of bullying after exposure to a program. He
theorized that anti-bullying programs teach potential bullies new
bullying techniques. They also may illustrate ways to escape
responsibility by using the “right language” when confronted by
teachers or social workers.
The
term “unintended consequences” is insufficient here. We need a
different term to describe training programs for schools that
actually make an undesirable activity more
likely to occur. “Paradoxical consequences”? “Indoctrination
boomerang”?
D.A.R.E.
(Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is the most famous of these
feel-good time-wasters. It has now been around for thirty years and
has been dumped into the heads of tens of millions of American
schoolchildren. Yet there have now been a dozen studies concluding,
as did the National Institute of Justice in 1998, that children
subjected to the D.A.R.E. curriculum are more
likely to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and use drugs than kids who
somehow manage to avoid it.
There
are many reasons for this phenomenon. One is the use of role-playing
games where children may act out scenes of bullying (or purchasing
drugs) in order to learn how NOT to do those things. In fact,
role-playing can actually provide practice in activities that
children might otherwise be too frightened to engage in.
The
other reason often cited for indoctrination boomerang is that the
programs tend to “glamorize” the behavior they seek to eradicate.
There is some truth in this, I suppose, in the sense that spending
millions of bucks on drug education or anti-bullying programs
(instead of teaching math, for example), delivers a message that
these topics are way more important than they actually are.
A
bigger problem, however, is that children are lied to by the adults
who design these things, the kids resent it, and they retaliate by
ignoring the advice. Kids hate being lied to, they often know when
it is happening, and the natural childish reaction is defiance.
D.A.R.E. never tells
kids that drugs are fun, or cool, or can get you laid, for example.
And anti-bullying programs never
teach kids that the most effective way to stop a bully is to pop him
in the beezer. Never.
The
lefties who create these things get millions in tax dollars in order
to usurp the role in moral education that families have always
provided. They know better than the rest of us poor slobs, you see,
what our children should be taught about right and wrong, bad habits,
what it means to be a good person, and so on. In order to advance
what Thomas Sowell calls “the vision of the anointed,” they take
money out of our own pockets and use it to inculcate our children
with their superior values.
It's
wonderful that many kids are not fooled. The phenomenon of
indoctrination boomerang is something I celebrate. My son, for
example, might not be the libertarian free-market conservative he is
if he had not attended Masterman High School in Philadelphia and had
not been force-fed the silliest imaginable left-wing drivel every
day. He and others like him give me hope. They react to the lies
and the intrusion into conscience in admirable ways.
If
these indoctrination programs were 100% effective, I guess none of
our kids would be bullies and none of our kids would ever fire up a
doobie, and no guy would ever pat a girl's bottom in the hallway in
high school, and nobody would ever eat a potato chip or buy a
32-ounce Coke. Some of those things might be good in some sense, but
there's a price to pay for letting the anointed tell everyone what to
think and how to behave, and the price is that we all wind up living
in a place very much like East Germany.
Copyright2013MichaelKubacki
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