Creating a brown shirt society

April 27, 2005

On April 20, 2005, incidentally the birthday of Hitler and the anniversary of the Columbine High School rampage, the local news station reported on a wonderful program being used in Spokane, Washington to “keep our schools safe.” Considering the spate of recent incidents of guns in schools in Spokane, that claim is questionable.

The program, called “Keep Guns Out of School” pays $75 rewards “to students who contacted an adult when they had information that lead to solving vandalism, removing a weapon or confiscating drugs on school property.”

A lady working with the program in Spokane went on the air stating to the effect that anything that produced safer schools was acceptable. In other words, the end justifies the means.

News articles are appearing nation-wide about this wonderful program. Quite obviously, the source of it, claims or no claims, is not local to any of the areas reporting on the program.

It didn’t take long to find the source: the United States Department of Justice / Safe Neighborhoods Program. Another of those top-down but made to appear bottom-up, grass-roots, local in flavor initiatives funded by federal grants (with strings attached) to insure that what is done in Spokane, Washington or Minneapolis, Minnesota or _______ (fill in the blank) conforms to the federal agenda in the systems approach to global order.

But please don’t think for a moment that the Keep Guns Out of School program is the first of its kind. Far from it. The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, used in schools for many, many years is another of this same ilk. It also taught children to “snitch” on siblings, friends, neighbors and parents just as the Hitler youth snitched on their siblings, friends, neighbors and parents.

Another of the same ilk is the DFYIT (Drug Free Youth In Town) program out of Texas. This program rewards children who join the club which requires them to give regular urine samples that must be drug free. Those who join and are drug free are given discounts (rewards) by local businesses.

Does the program decrease the incidence of drug abuse? No. Six years after being implemented in the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho schools, the schools were bringing in dope sniffing dogs to search students, lockers and cars on school grounds. The program was implemented in the Nine Mile Falls School District northwest of Spokane in the mid 1990’s. The dope sniffing dogs are now being used there also.

What has resulted from the program is that any student who does not join “the club” is considered to be on dope. After all, as the flawed logic goes, if you aren’t on dope you would have no qualms about giving a urine sample. Constitutional rights are not part of the equation just as they aren’t part of the equation with cameras placed at intersections to watch traffic ― if you aren’t breaking the law, why should you care if there’s a camera watching you? The same is true of body searches at airports ― if you aren’t breaking the law, why should you have a problem with being searched? How about the cops showing up at your door to search your house ― if you aren’t breaking the law, why would you have a problem with your house being searched?

Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Guess that archaic notion only stands when one of the proponents of this concept gets caught in the snare he/she thinks is so great so long as it applies to everyone but them! The mind-set is one of extreme ignorance, and in the long haul, self-destructive.

Now we have the Safe Neighborhoods Program that incorporates the underlying concept of both the DARE program and the DFYIT program in rewarding students for being snitches. So, today we reward the child for snitching, for doing what we want. And in the process we teach the child to be extrinsically motivated (motivated by external stimuli), reinforced over time, the concept becomes engrained, natural, part of the subconscious. This is how we train an animal, just as the rats in the Skinner Rat Box, just as the Pavlovian slobbering dogs.

Now we’ve set this child up beautifully: he/she will do whatever we want so long as the reward is something he/she wants. Today the cause is noble ― keeping guns out of schools, but what about tomorrow? Who will be that child’s “handler” tomorrow? And what reward will he/she offer? And will that reward be something the child will want, bearing in mind that the child has also been trained to respond to his/her emotions (wants) as a priority over his/her intellect (thinking and reasoning)?

With this in mind, what happens when a child is standing there with a gun in his/her hand with that gun pointed at someone and there is no one there to reward that child for not pulling the trigger or the child will be rewarded for pulling the trigger?

And therein lays the problem with extrinsic motivation. Extrinsically motivating an animal via the methods of BF Skinner or Ivan Pavlov (also known as operant conditioning) is one thing, doing it with humans is another, the major difference being the level of intellect or mental capability that differentiates man from animal.

Guns in schools are not funny; nothing to be joked about; not to be ignored. The same is true with drugs, alcohol or any other vice. But the Keep Guns Out of School program, along with the myriad of government programs of the same ilk, is not going to cure the problem in the long haul. If anything they exacerbate the problem by portending to be a solution. They are not a solution. We must remember that government is there to justify and enlarge its current existence. Curing a problem is obviously counter to that goal.

The only solution that is a solution is to address the underlying philosophy (humanism) that is the basis of education in the schools today and is the basis of the problems that plague our society today. And unless that happens our country will continue on the road to self-destruction.

The Keep Guns Out of Schools program would be better called “Snitches for Riches.”