The Punishment Society
Paul Craig Roberts
Once upon a time, a dental or medical exam was an opportunity to
read a book. No more. The TV blares. It was talking heads discussing
whether a football player had been sufficiently punished. The offense
was unclear. The question was whether the lashes were sufficient.
It brought to mind that punishment has become a primary feature of
American, indeed Western, society. A baker in Colorado was punished
because he would not bake a wedding cake for a homosexual marriage. A
county or state clerk was punished because she would not issue a
marriage license for a homosexual marriage. Whistleblowers are punished—despite their protection
under federal law—for revealing crimes of the US government. And
children are punished for being children.
But not by their parents. Police can slam children around and
seriously injure them. But parents must not lay a hand on a child. If a
child gets spanked, as everyone in my generation was, in comes the
Child Protective Services Gestapo. The child is seized, put into
“protective custody,” and the parents are arrested. The CPS Gestapo
receives a federal bonus for every child that they seize, and they want
the money.
About all parents can do today is to restrict TV or video game
playing time. Even this is dicey, because the kids are taught at school
to report abusive behavior of parents. For many kids being told what
to do by parents is abusive behavior. Kids have learned that they can
pay back parents for disciplining them by reporting the parents to
teachers or by themselves calling CPS. Kids who retaliate in this
socially approved manner do not realize that they run a high risk of
ruining the lives of their parents as well as their own by ending up in
foster care where the risk of sexual abuse is present.
As society has made it possible for kids to prevail over parents, the
kids think this right also applies to teachers, school administrators,
and School Resource Officers, psychopaths with police badges who
maintain discipline with force and violence. The kids quickly
discover,as Shakara discovered in her encounter with Ben Fields, that
whereas parents are constrained from using corporal punishment, School
Resource Officers are not. Shakara’s desk was overturned as she sat in
it. She was slammed onto the floor, dragged across the floor and
handcuffed. Any parent who did that would be facing jail time.
Schools are no longer places of learning. They are places of
punishment. Kids are punished for the most absurd reasons. Nothing more
than behaving as a child brings on punishment. As Henry Giroux has
written, schools have become places of control, repression, and
punishment.
17,000 American public schools have a police presence. All common sense has long departed.
Five and six year-olds who get into a shoving match are arrested and
carried off in handcuffs. Police issue tickets and fines to students for
what was ordinary behavior in my school days. Suspensions result as do
police records that hamper a child’s prospect of success.
The violence that Ben Fields used against Shakara is routine. Mother
Jones reports that a Louisville goon thug, Jonathan Hardin punched a
13-year old in the face for cutting into the cafeteria line and of
holding another 13-year old in a chokehold until the student became
unconscious. A dispute over cell phone use resulted in a Houston student
being hit 18 times with a police weapon.
The police violence extends beyond the schools. Any American
unfortunate enough to have a police encounter risks being tasered,
beaten, arrested, and even murdered. Protesters, war and otherwise, are beaten, tear gassed, arrested.
The American police state is working hard to criminalize all criticism
of itself. Violence has become the defining hallmark of the United
States. It is even the basis of US foreign policy. In the 21st century
millions of peoples have been killed and displaced by American violence
against the world.
With our public schools and police forces working overtime to teach
the children who will comprise the future generations that violence is
the solution and submission is the only alternative, expect the United
States to be unliveable at home and an even worse danger to the rest of
the world.