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May 11, 2005 I ran out of words today, happened right after I got home from work. I turned on CNN and there spread across my television screen was the mug of an ex-con, Jerry Hobbs, who allegedly killed his daughter and his daughter’s sister. I ran out of words when I saw about fifteen or twenty cops shooting at an unarmed man in an SUV, 120 bullets spent. I ran out of words when a sexual deviant killed his neighbor’s daughter a few weeks back, lived only yards from his victim. I ran out of words when a husband in California killed his wife and their unborn child, subsequently dumping them both in the bay. I ran out of words a year or so ago when a woman drowned her five children systematically in their bathtub. I ran out of words several years ago when a mother drove her two little kids into a lake. What can be said? What words will bring back the damaged caused by such heinous crimes? The list goes on. There is no end to it. The word “tragedy” does not fit. The word “horrific” does not work. What words in the millions of books we possess can describe what we are experiencing “live and in color?” I can only think of the holocaust in Germany during World War II. We are living in a cultural holocaust in this country. Our prisons are crawling with the base of humanity, overcrowded and unproductive. Near my hometown in Indiana, there is a prison with a population larger than many of our quaint and peaceful Hoosier communities. We cannot build prisons fast enough in this country. We cannot accommodate all of our criminals and many of them go free for this reason. It is a tragedy. Yet, we claim to be the most powerful nation in the world. How can that be? We want to democratize the world when our own democracy is in question. We have thousands of illegal immigrants crossing our borders. Our cities are turning into sewers and our politicians can’t focus on a way to solve these internal blights. Our children are being left behind in school. Our children are bringing guns to school and killing each other. Our children are learning distrust, fear, and anxiety at a very early age. What about childhood? They are skipping childhood and going straight into a neurotic, immature adulthood. Is Iraq that important? Is Russia’s attitude about democracy that important? Is China’s treatment of its citizens important? The most valuable commodity we have in this country is the child. If our children are not led in the way of humaneness, we will have even larger prisons someday. If we don’t properly educate and discipline our children, we are heading for an Americanized Roman Empire. I remember once I tried to discipline my child and was told I needed to visit Family Services. Family Services in turn told me that my son had rights and told me I was in the wrong for trying to make my son go to school. How’s that? When I was a kid, my mother would smack my butt and shove me on the school bus. If I acted up in school, my teacher would smack my butt, send a note to my mother, and she would smack me twice as much as the teacher. Today it’s called child abuse.
A strong nation begins in the home, not on foreign soil. The billions of dollars wasted on Iraqi blood and oil, could be spent on education and parent training. The holocaust of our American society has begun.
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