The Punishment Society

Paul Craig Roberts



Once upon a time, a dental or medical exam was an opportunity to read a book. No
more. The TV blares. It was talking heads discussing whether a football player
had been sufficiently punished. The offense was unclear. The question was
whether the lashes were sufficient.



It brought to mind that punishment has become a primary feature of American,
indeed Western, society. A baker in Colorado was punished because he would not
bake a wedding cake for a homosexual marriage. A county or state clerk was
punished because she would not issue a marriage license for a homosexual
marriage. University professors are punished because they criticize Israel’s
inhumane treatment of Palestinians. Whistleblowers are punished—despite their
protection under federal law—for revealing crimes of the US government. And
children are punished for being children.


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But not by their parents. Police can slam children around and seriously injure
them. But parents must not lay a hand on a child. If a child gets spanked, as
everyone in my generation was, in comes the Child Protective Services Gestapo.
The child is seized, put into “protective custody,” and the parents are
arrested. The CPS Gestapo receives a federal bonus for every child that they
seize, and they want the money.

About all parents can do today is to restrict TV or video game playing time.
Even this is dicey, because the kids are taught at school to report abusive
behavior of parents. For many kids being told what to do by parents is abusive
behavior. Kids have learned that they can pay back parents for disciplining them
by reporting the parents to teachers or by themselves calling CPS. Kids who
retaliate in this socially approved manner do not realize that they run a high
risk of ruining the lives of their parents as well as their own and ending up in
foster care where the risk of sexual abuse is present.

As society has made it possible for kids to prevail over parents, the kids think
this right also applies to teachers, school administrators, and School Resource
Officers, psychopaths with police badges who maintain discipline with force and
violence.

The kids quickly discover,as Shakara discovered in her encounter with Ben
Fields, that whereas parents are constrained from using corporal punishment,
School Resource Officers are not. Shakara’s desk was overturned as she sat in
it. She was slammed onto the floor, dragged across the floor and handcuffed. Any
parent who did that would be facing jail time.

Schools are no longer places of learning. They are places of punishment. Kids
are punished for the most absurd reasons. Nothing more than behaving as a child
brings on punishment. As Henry Giroux has written, schools have become places of
control, repression, and punishment.

In
Sputniknews.com
http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20151103/1029544746/punishment-society-paul-craig-roberts-column.html
5/11/2015