2011-Feb-12
Tara Ashburn, a secondary school teacher in Surprise, Arizona, was fired-- surprise!-- because she refused to either remove a bumper sticker from her car or park the car somewhere where offended parents could not see it.
Why were the parents offended? There is nothing offensive about the bumper sticker. It said: "Have you drugged your kid today". But some parents were offended. I can only presume they were offended because they were ashamed. And the shame came from within themselves because the bumper sticker itself merely says "have you drugged your kid today". It does not say:
you are lazy, inadequate parents who cannot cope with reality and therefore you try to drug your child into oblivion for your own convenience
The bumper sticker did not say that. It did not say:
our society can't possibly spend the money required to actually help our young people cope with the increasing demands placed upon them by parents and schools and friends so we prefer to simply supply them with legal drugs to hammer into a pleasant lassitude and hope they won't notice that we haven't solved any of their problems
The bumper sticker did not say,
our social workers, psychologists, and therapists are so damn clueless about how to help young people that they almost immediately resort to cheap, ineffective, but powerful psychotropic drugs to hold our children over until they are old enough to blame for their own problems
All the bumper sticker said, essentially, was, did you remember to do it.
The rest of the controversy was supplied entirely by the parents who are obviously completely aware of what they are doing. The teacher has broken an implicit social contract: we will ban drugs like marijuana because kids like it and it's not patentable and no corporation owned by their middle-aged fathers and mothers can possibly profit from it. Then we will quietly drug everybody-- and I mean everybody-- every single teenager, and most adults-- with drugs that cost almost nothing to make and generate huge profits for the pharmaceuticals so mommy and daddy can retire on their profitable investments and wonder why the next generation seems to have no character.
At one time, Aldous Huxley imagined an insane, fantasy world wherein all adults were drugged-- it was called "Soma" -- so the government and corporations could exploit them without endlessly without consequence.