Some Serious Questions

I think it's time to take a look at what is happening to our children while we've been distracted by 9-11, war, health care, and the economy.

Something is really wrong. This article on Huffington Post is a must read and should be read out loud to the American people by the President himself. We have an explosion of mental health issues that are being swept under the table as we try and use pharmaceuticals and prisons to contain the problem. But what is deeply concerning is what is happening to our children. Bright, very bright, children are turning into disturbed and violent beings. They terrorize their families, their teachers, their friends, and fellow students. They are often mainstreamed into regular classrooms because most of the time they are good, kind children who are struggling to deal with life and learning with both hands tied behind their back.

The Reagan administration gutted the mental health care system and closed the doors to mental health hospitals. He literally sent these poor people to live in the streets or with families ill-equipped to handle their issues. We can thank him for that. In the aftermath of his destructive policies our prisons filled with the mentally ill. We now house our most vulnerable in an environment of violence and fear. They are left to survive on their own. These same prisons are now for-profit institutions. 

We cannot have this discussion without taking a look at vaccinations. When my grandson was born they wanted to literally give him twice the amount of vaccinations that his mother had when she was born. TWICE THE AMOUNT. I ran a travel immunization program for our local hospital at one point, so I know something about vaccinations, and many of them were not needed for a newborn. The Hep B vaccine they wanted to give him was not given to his mother until she was in junior high school. The Hep A vaccine they wanted to give him AS A NEWBORN is not generally used unless you travel outside of the United States. Our daughters had it when we went to Mexico and they were in high school. I told my daughter to tell them no, he would have them later in life. But they still gave him many more vaccines than they should have, in my opinion. I no longer trust those studies that say all vaccines are safe for newborns.

And then we have to look at the burgeoning business of video games. Violence is epidemic in these games that developing brains are playing over and over and over and over. Like anything we do routinely - it becomes habit. But in developing brains this can have effects that are dangerous. I think we are seeing this now as many shooters are young males - the target audience for these violent, blood-soaked, video games that often involve shooting mass amounts of people.

And what about movies? We've made vampires sexy and super heroes dark, dangerous, and deadly. Graphic violence is the norm for theses movies. On top of that they are fiddling with the frames per second - speeding them up. The new Hobbit movie is making people sick.

We have gutted programs that help families and give passes to bankers that ruin our economy. We put assault weapons in the hands of anyone that can buy them and then we cry when one is used to kill a classroom of kindergartners. We overburden our classrooms and teachers and then blame them for not keeping our country number one in the world. We give tax breaks to multi-billionaires and let our infrastructure crumble. We close our mental health facilities and then step over the mentally ill on our way to work.

It's time to get mad. It's time to take our country back. It's time to hold our politicians accountable to We The People. It's time for our tax dollars to go to us, not black budget military projects that enrich the producers of murder and mayhem all over the world.

ADDENDUM: Fellow blogger Jayne Martin sent a link to this article. It is a must-read if you are trying to understand this most-recent mass murder.