Tuesday, October 19, 2004

No Child "Left Behind": Code words for a children's cookbook?

Remember that Twilight Zone episode where the aliens arrived on Earth and presented our leaders with this glorious plan for the planet entitled "How to Serve Man". Well. In the final scene, "How to Serve Man" turns out to be a COOKBOOK!

For those of you familiar with the "Left Behind" series of books dealing with cult Christian longings for Armageddon, you will immediately recognize No Child "Left Behind" as code words too.

According to
www.leftbehind.com, the plot of the "Left Behind" series is basically that, "Passengers aboard a Boeing 747 en route to Europe disappear. Instantly. Nothing remains except their rumpled piles of clothes, jewelry, fillings, surgical pins, and the like. All over the world, in a flash, cars are left unmanned. Terror and chaos continues worldwide as the cataclysm unfolds. For those left behind, the apocalypse has just begun."

The book series goes on to describe what happens next. We who are left get stuck in "The Tribulation," a down-and-dirty war where life for the average American begins to resemble Fallugah and our children are brainwashed into fighting to the death for "Jesus".

In the series' children's books, the heroes are told that killing and killing and killing is the only way to worship God. Should they have doubts about this ACTUALLY being the will of a loving Jesus, they are immediately set straight! "Judd, Vicki, Lionel, and Ryan have decisions to make. Will they accept Christ's forgiveness, or will they blame God for abandoning them and taking away their families?" Sounds like a neo-con push-poll, doesn't it.

The future that "born again" George Bush and his friends have in store for us and our children is endless war. Are we fighting for Jesus? Hardly. We are fighting so that rich men like Bush and Cheney can get richer. The whole Jesus con is a trick with smoke and mirrors. It is a cookbook designed for us -- and for our children.

So. Now that we have been told why we need to send our kids off to boot camp, what exactly are these boot camps like? They are prototypes of The Tribulation. A boot camp in Florida run by neo-con "Christians" has been accused of torture, rape and starvation. Abu Ghraib comes to mind. Are these camps toughening our children up for when they miss The Rapture and get to stew in the cauldron of The Tribulation? You bet.

Another sad thing about the new "send your child off to boot camp" movement is that affluent adults are now sending their children off to the Utah desert or the swamps of Florida as a response to normal everyday-life parent-child situations. Twenty years ago, if Junior broke the crockery, he would have been sent to his room. Now he is tortured and starved instead.

My daughter's friend "Jordan" recently disappeared down the rabbit hole to boot camp. We just found out that he will be there until he turns 18 -- THREE MORE YEARS. What kind of a person will he be when he gets out? One cannot even begin to imagine.

When I was a kid, we had girls in our school who would disappear, alledgedly to "visit relatives" for six or eight months -- and they would always come back looking older and sadder.

Now it is our boys who disappear and come back looking older and sadder. Whenever a boy re-appears at my daughter's school with that "deer in the headlights" look in his eyes, we know there has been a boot camp involved. And that this child has not been "Left Behind" either.

Sources:
http://www.leftbehind.com/channelbooks.asp?channelID=30

International Survivors Action Committee:
http://www.isaccorp.org/ Thousands of children are currently in privately owned "behavior modification" programs. Unfortunately, the "treatment" offered at some of these programs could be considered child abuse.

Kids end up in behavior modification programs, boot camps, wilderness camps, and drug rehabs for all kinds of reasons..... For the kids who end up in a harsh, abusive program, it can be the beginning of a life-long battle with nightmares, depression, rage, and thoughts of suicide.

Great new book: Iraq, Inc. A Profitable Occupation. http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100484530 "Pratap Chatterjee takes us into the fast-spinning revolving door between the government officials who attacked Iraq and the corporations who have profited so handsomely from the war. A powerful combination of investigative research and on-the-ground reporting, Iraq, Inc. is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has really gone wrong in Iraq."—Naomi Klein, author No Logo, columnist The Nation