The Freedom Bulletin

Did you hear about the 8-year-old boy who was ordered by his school to go to a psychologist because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross?

While there are many facts in dispute between the boy’s parents and school officials, there is no doubt in my mind that the school is in the wrong. The boy’s father said that he drew the cross when asked to draw something that reminded him of Christmas; the school denies that. It’s unclear whether the boy meant to draw himself or Jesus on the cross. The school says they didn’t actually suspend the boy but just forced him to have a psychological evaluation before he could return – seems like the same thing to me. They even disagree on whether the drawing the boy’s father has been showing to the media is the one the boy drew.

But even if you interpret the evidence in the way that is the most favorable to the school, what happened to this boy is unjust. It’s just like what I posted about last time – people need to let other people be. A school’s job is to teach kids facts about math, writing, grammar, history, science, computers, and other subjects. It shouldn’t be a school’s job to meddle in students’ lives or to push value judgments on them. Kids should be able to draw whatever they want, and teachers and superintendents shouldn’t psychoanalyze their drawings and send them to shrinks for anything different or unusual.

The father in this case has been criticized for being too willing to speak to the media and for demanding that the school reimburse his son for his suffering and pay for tuition to a private school since the boy is too traumatized to go back to the same school. But I agree with him! The school officials violated the boy’s rights and should compensate him for his suffering. I don’t blame him for wanting to go to a different school. Being singled out and sent to a psychiatrist would be traumatic, and drawing a picture, even if it is of yourself on the cross, does not merit that.

As Pink Floyd said, teachers need to leave kids alone! Schools should teach facts and skills, not psychoanalyze kids’ drawings and single them out for psychotherapy for every little thing. Kids should be able to express themselves without being labeled as mentally ill.

The parents of a Harvard student are suing the university’s health services after they prescribed him three psych drugs and he committed suicide. I hope they win, and for what it’s worth in my non-medical-expert opinion, I believe that the medications were totally inappropriate.

It seems that the only reason that the student, John Edwards, went to see mental health services was because he was not able to study as long as his friends. Because of this, he was diagnosed with ADHD and an anxiety disorder, and a nurse practitioner decided to prescribe him the antidepressants Prozac and Wellbutrin and the anti-ADHD drug Adderall. Five months after his first visit, he killed himself.

From what I can tell by reading about this, there was nothing wrong with John Edwards and absolutely no need for him to undergo any psychotherapy or psych medications. This is just another example of how our society tries to make everyone the same. If someone is bad at anything or has any unusual qualities or is sad about anything, psychiatrists want to give them psychotherapy and medications to turn them into whatever society has arbitrarily decided the perfect person should be like.

When a kid learns to walk later than average, they give them physical therapy. When a kid learns to talk later than average, they give them speech therapy. If someone is shorter than average, they give them human growth hormone. If someone’s teeth aren’t perfectly straight, they have to get braces. If you’re shy, you are diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and have to get therapy. If you’re sad, you have to take anti-depressants. If you have any ache or pain, you are told to go to the doctor. If you aren’t great in a school subject, you have to get extra tutoring.

I could keep going on and on, but I think you get the point. Basically, everyone is expected to eat healthy food all the time, exercise for an hour every day, get good grades, be outgoing, dress stylishly, do prestigious internships every summer, and do a million extracurricular activities. Anyone who differs from this is made to get therapy and medications to make them just like everyone else.

Why can’t society accept all different kinds of people? Some people are optimistic, some are pessimistic. Some are quiet, some are loud. Some are tall, some are short. Some are skinny, some are fat. Some like to socialize, some don’t and instead prefer going on the computer or reading. Some people are athletic, some aren’t. Some people are good at math, some are good at writing, some are good at art, some are good with cars, and some are good with animals. People are good and bad at all different things, and that’s okay!

If you can’t study for as long as your friends, just don’t! Not everyone has to get perfect grades. If you really, really want to, then either drink more coffee, drink less coffee, find a quiet room to study, or play music to help yourself study.

The conformist, authoritarian attitude that much of society, especially the mental health profession, seems to have is evil, and it looks like it cost this young man his life.

Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate in the MA Senate special election, might not debate her rival, Republican Scott Brown, unless the Libertarian candidate, Joe Kennedy, is included as well.

I have mixed feelings about this. I agree with Coakley that voters should hear the ideas of all the candidates, and I am no fan of the two-party system, which severely limits voters’ choices. However, I don’t think that’s what Coakley actually thinks. It’s pretty obvious that she just wants Brown and Kennedy to split the conservative/libertarian vote.

If you know anything about my politics, you’d know that I like both Brown and Kennedy much better than Coakley. But right now I’m undecided which to vote for. When it comes to their political views, I think I like Kennedy better. He thinks that the welfare system should be abolished, that the government shouldn’t license marriages, and lots of other great libertarian things.

Brown is a good candidate, too. He is (mostly) pro-choice and anti-gay-marriage, like me, but he supports the Massachusetts law requiring everyone to have health insurance, and I am extremely reluctant to vote for anyone who supports that.

But since Kennedy is a third-party candidate, Brown almost definitely has a better chance of winning. I am torn between voting for the candidate I like best and the one I like best out of those who have a chance to win. Massachusetts (and all of the USA) should adopt instant-runoff voting. Then no one would have this dilemma, and people would have a wide range of viable candidates to choose from, instead of having to choose from the unintuitively thrown-together collections of views of the two major parties.

I feel that lately I’ve been doing little else on this blog but posting links to articles, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this one. Sheldon Richman has written before about the injustice of the individual health insurance mandate, but now he has outdone himself. He is totally right that the individual mandate is an unprecedented assault on our liberties, and it’s outrageous that most of the coverage of the health reform debate focuses on abortion, deficits, and the public option instead of this.

A short excerpt:

“Coverage is not likely to be cheap because the bill that President Obama signs will also undoubtedly mandate that “basic” coverage contain far more than coverage for bankruptcy-threatening catastrophic illness. It will also include a large variety of elective and preventive services that are actually inappropriate for insurance, since they are discretionary… Congress and the president will decree that you must have Cadillac coverage even if a Ford suits your needs and your budget better.”

Be sure to check out “Kill the insurance mandate” by Sheldon Richman. I agree with every word of it!

Yay! Alison Lobron in the Boston Globe wrote exactly what I’ve been saying! Rewarding married people with health insurance and other benefits from their spouses’ jobs is discriminatory to single people:

“Our country’s habit of passing out financial perks based on marital status is hardly a time-honored tradition. According to marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that US governments and corporations began using marital status as a way to decide who got which benefits. ‘The development of the welfare state here was more attached to marriage than to individual rights,’ she says.

Extending the privileges of one spouse to the other might have made sense back when women were often required to leave the workforce upon marriage. But now it’s hopelessly dated. ‘Why should my access to health care depend on whom I’m sleeping with?’ Coontz says. ‘It’s a good reason to argue for the state to develop other ways to extend health insurance and benefits.’”

Proponents of gay marriage should heed this, since they often argue that allowing gays to marry is the only way to have equality. Actually, they just want to join with married straight people to discriminate against singles. True equality will only happen when married people no longer get benefits that single people don’t get. The best way to do that is for the government to get out of the marriage business altogether.

I believe that climate change, pollution, and overuse of the Earth’s resources are serious problems. However, unlike most environmentalists, I believe that the way to solve these problems is not for each person to use fewer resources, but for the Earth’s population to decrease.

The basic problem is that we can only have two of the following things: (1) each person using a lot of resources, (2) a large population, or (3) a sustainable planet. So-called conservatives(for the most part) seem to support continuing on the current path of keeping (1) and (2) and eventually losing (3) (Earth will be destroyed). That isn’t good, so in order to save the Earth, we have to sacrifice either (1) (unlimited energy use per person), or (2) (unlimited reproduction). So-called liberals seem to support sacrificing (1), but I think sacrificing (2) and keeping (1) is a lot better.

This is because, more or less, energy use per person corresponds to quality of life. It is sometimes possible to develop green products and services that are just as good as their non-green counterparts, but in the majority of cases it isn’t. Being able to choose whether you want to walk, take public transportation, or drive is better than being pressured into doing one of the first two. Having to wash out all disposable food containers in order to recycle them is more work than not having to. Being able to take the length of showers that you want is better than being pressured to make your showers shorter and shorter or even worse, take them with someone else (yes, I have seen posters at my school encouraging people to do this).

In order to be environmentally-friendly, my school dining hall uses only brown napkins, got rid of milk and juice cartons, stopped putting out paper cups so that people can no longer take hot chocolate or coffee with them, and now uses only clear, yellowish plastic cups that often crack when you try to put the cover on. Once they even put signs reading “WASTE” in front of the packaged chips and cookies so that people wouldn’t take them, but they thankfully took those down. Professors aren’t allowed to heat their classrooms above a certain temperature, causing me to be uncomfortably cold in class, even though I keep my winter coat on. I constantly receive emails encouraging me to turn the heat down in my (cold) dorm room and reminding me how much money the school spends each year to heat students’ rooms.

Another example of excessive green-ness is this article I saw in the Metro about Vanessa Farquharson, who created a book and blog about her decision to (among other things) sleep naked and stop using toilet paper and tampons in order to be more eco-friendly.

The bottom line is that I have noticed my quality of life going down because of people’s efforts to force me to be more green. Each of these things, by itself, may seem minor, but taken together they amount to a significant decrease in quality of life for everyone. Forcing or even pressuring people to be more green violates their rights, because people have a right to do anything that does not violate the rights of anyone else. Even if the “green” pressure is exerted by a private organization or lacks the force of law, it still violates people’s liberty rights because it imposes guilt and social disapproval on innocent people, punishing them for choices they have every right to make. You have a right to live without PJs, toilet paper, and tampons if you want to, but I certainly wouldn’t want to, and it would be unacceptable for people to be expected to.

On the other hand, a world with a smaller population doesn’t seem like it would be worse at all. People’s quality of life wouldn’t go down. In my opinion, no one’s rights would be violated. This point is widely contested, but I do not believe that reproduction is a fundamental right. People have the right to live their own lives however they want, but creating a new person falls outside the boundary of my own life. I believe that the government has a right (and even a duty if it’s needed to save the planet) to place a fine or tax penalty on people who have babies or even limit the number of children people can have (as China currently does).

So reducing the size of Earth’s population is the right way to save the environment, not destroying everyone’s quality of life. The nations of the world should collaborate to figure out how much energy it takes for a person to have a good quality of life each year and how much energy can sustainably be produced each year, and then divide the second number by the first to arrive at what the population should be. To get the population to this level, any countries that have policies encouraging people to have babies should stop immediately. For example, America should get rid of the child tax credit and instead create a child tax. Countries should consider adopting policies like China’s one-child policy if financial incentives are not enough to stop overpopulation.

Anyone who’s taken basic economics knows that you should subsidize things you want more of and tax things you want less of. If you want to save the Earth while allowing people to have a good quality of life, reproduction is something you should want less of.