To: Martin Glenn, United States Bankruptcy Judge and James W. Giddens, Trustee, SIPA Liquidation of MF Global, Inc.

From: Cathy Cuthbert

RE: MF Global Heist

So, Jimmy and Marty, I've been wondering. Do you two ride horses to work? No, wait a minute, what was I thinking? You're part of the 1%, so you must take a Hansom cab wherever you go. Right? The reason I'm asking is that I suspect you are either Luddites or wholly unaware of the innovations we have these days in the 21st century, so I thought I'd help you out by explaining a bit about modern technology.

I took a look at Jimmy's latest iteration of a claims form for us aggrieved MF Global clients to retrieve our stolen money, and I have to say I was pleased that you edited out the language praising yourself as the indefatigable savior of the downtrodden. However, I was utterly shocked and appalled that a grown-up in the 21st century would have the courage to suggest using a paper form to be snail mailed to clients. Listen, there are these machines called computers and MF Global used to use them to keep track of all the clients' accounts. They are incredibly efficient. At the end of every trading day, the computers calculated our mark to market information. Isn't that amazing? Every day. What will they think of next? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you have control of those computers.

Apparently you don't trust the information in MF Global's books to use it for claims. It's funny how you trusted it to transfer our open positions without sufficient margin, but I suppose you are right not to trust Corzine's accounting. That, however, has nothing to do with the clients' accounts. You might recall that clients' accounts were segregated from house accounts. Contrary to the implications from the MSM, MF Global is accused of stealing our funds, not of messing up their accounting and computers and somehow losing them along with their lunch money. As lawyer and CTA Jame Koutoulas points out:

MF Global used third party statement provider Sungard's GMI accounting software to automate back office accounting of trading and everything else that happens to a commodities account. Every day customers received a GMI generated statement via US mail or email. Commodities customers are trained to check their statements daily and report issues at once. Whether or not MF Global's corporate books were cooked is irrelevant in establishing the legitimacy of customer claims. Almost all you need to do is look at a statement from GMI.

If I have to fill out one of these claims forms, guess where I will get the information? You've got it, my GMI-generated statements. So tell us what the difference is between you downloading the information and us filling out paper forms with the very same information from our statements. As far as I can tell, the difference is about six months.

Gee, I wonder what can happen in six months. Seems like plenty of time for the public to lose interest in the story, for individual clients to run out of money for legal fees and for JP Morgan to wear down everybody with endless motions to the bankruptcy court allowing them to finally, silently slink off with their ill gotten gains.

Gotta tell ya, though, I love the way Jimmy is managing expectations. The amount of "missing" money is growing every day. I imagine this will continue until, OMG, there's NOTHING LEFT! Then magically, our hero trustee will don his cape, wrestle with the database to find 80% of the amount owed and triumphantly return the money to our accounts. Won't we be relieved to have at least something returned, and we'll have the courageous Jimmy Giddens to thank. What a guy.

Marty, these ploys are so obvious that I'm amazed Jimmy wasn't embarrassed to try them. Don't you think it would be best for all concerned if he called it a day? He could gracefully dodge the accusations of conflict of interest while allowing a real trustee to get to work returning our stolen property.

Look at it this way, the Big Banks are going belly up sooner or later anyway, why not help them along? In the process, you'd be giving us a genuinely courageous Marty Glen to thank.

Cathy Cuthbert [send her mail] is a liberty activist and a member of the Board of Directors for the Alliance for the Separation of School and State and the Advocates for Self Government. She is a former homeschooling mom (they grew up, damn it), and very recently became a former futures trader, who lives on California’s Central Coast.

Cathy Cuthbert Archives

To: James W. Giddens, Trustee, SIPA Liquidation of MF Global, Inc. and Martin Glenn, United States Bankruptcy Judge

From: Cathy Cuthbert

RE: MF Global Heist

I am a lucky, former MF Global client. Unfortunately, I'm not a multi-billionaire who got the memo. I had a modest account that was supplying me with a modest livelihood, when suddenly one Monday afternoon, my account was frozen, my livelihood was essentially gone and four years worth of trading profits vanished into cyber space. You might be interested to know that sitting on my desk as I write is an application for a part-time, seasonal position stocking shelves at the local Rite-Aid. Then again, maybe not…

Let's try a thought experiment. Suppose I worked at a little bank in Anywhere, USA and it just so happened that I had a few peccadilloes I needed to clean up. So I borrowed just a tad of money from a few clients' accounts without it showing on their statements or anything — don't want to alarm the little tykes — intending all along to of course return the money u2018cause ya know, I'm good for it, but somehow I just couldn't come up with the bucks fast enough and somebody found out. Do you suppose I could just resign, go home and suck a sore paw while someone else looked high and low, under my desk, in my filing cabinet, maybe pieced together my shredded docs hoping to find out where, oh where the money went?

Don't be ridiculous. Not only would I immediately be tased, hand cuffed and thrown into the slammer, hard evidence or no, but the money would be very quickly found since there is not one thin dime that passes between accounts in all of the entire USA that isn't thoroughly and incessantly tracked anywhere and everywhere it goes. Not one thin dime. You fellas know it, I know it, but worse for you, the whole world knows it and I don't have to tell you they are all watching.

Should I remind you that the key factor in any financial market is the belief of all the participants that the market is mostly fair? Oh, please, don't call me naïve. I am well aware that futures trading is a negative sum game, and that there are plenty of shenanigans going on with bad fills, running stops and the like. That's ok, though, since it is petty theft and we can figure out ways to stay in the game regardless. But what everybody needs to know is that nobody is going to clean out our accounts. We need to be assured that flagrant grand theft is simply out of the question. If the idea were to become credible that anyone's account — or, as in this case, everyone's accounts — can be stolen with impunity and with no recourse for the aggrieved, nobody in his right mind would be in the futures market.

You can obfuscate with legal mumbo jumbo about how depositing money into a futures account makes me an unsecured creditor, but I can assure you that you don't want to go in that direction. Here's why. If you use that excuse to pay off the Big Boys by letting them cut ahead of us clients in bankruptcy due to our status as unsecured creditors, what does that mean for my account at the friendly, neighborhood Bank of America? Steal from us MF Global clients, and the hoi polloi, who are already slowly but surely waking up to the banking scam, just might figure out that they, too, are unsecured creditors every time they deposit their paychecks.

Yes, Jimmy and Marty, you are staring in the face of not just a run on the futures markets, but a run on the banks.

Let's stop pretending that you don't know where the money is. Corzine got a margin call from the Big Boys and paid it. So claw it back. Yes, it's that simple. A mere $600 million is not going to solve their multi-billion dollar problems, anyway. While you're waiting for the clawback, you can make all the clients' accounts whole with funds from SIPC if you have to. Forget this pathetic 60% recovery of collateral. Nothing less than 100% will do. And don't forget to order Corzine his orange jump suit. Either he bunks with Madoff or no one will believe that this can't happen again.

So here's the deal. You can be the heroes or you can be the goats. You can take the high ground, convince the Big Boys that they have gone too far for their own good and return the futures markets to some semblance of reliability, or you could be the ones to kick the last prop out from under the vestiges of capitalism and send the world spiraling at an ever accelerating pace into a fascist future.

Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Cathy Cuthbert [send her mail] is a liberty activist and a member of the Board of Directors for the Alliance for the Separation of School and State and the Advocates for Self Government. She is a former homeschooling mom (they grew up, damn it), and very recently became a former futures trader, who lives on California’s Central Coast.

Cathy Cuthbert Archives

I have a
prediction about the TSA. The porn scanners will stay, one way
or another.

How do I
know? Because I have been an observer of government schooling
for 25 years and I see much the same institutional and sociological
dynamic going on in the airports as has been commonplace in government
schools.

Making a
comparison on an organizational level, we find similarity in the
centralization of authority that mandates procedures and doles
out lucrative contracts. Rapiscan, is the rough equivalent of
textbook publishers, for example. There have been endless textbook
conflicts over the years, yet no one ever proposes abolishing
this centralized system. Quite the contrary, the movement to further
centralization via national standards is stronger than ever. Don't
expect Rapiscan to be legislated away.

Local functionaries
are generally not free to use discretion in performing their duties.
However, they are never penalized and often rewarded for going
that extra mile in devising creative interpretation and application
of the rules in the name of safety. TSO prohibitions regarding
knitting needles and mother's milk are the equivalent of zero
tolerance punishments for grade school children who use their
fingers to mimic guns and bring butter knives to school. There
have been some attempts to overturn the really crazy zero tolerance
punishments, but the rules are still in force. Look for the same
pattern with TSA regulations.

In both government
schools and airports, the fascist strong-arming of the innocent
is long standing. In schools, there are lock downs, metal detectors,
drug sniffing dogs, locker searches and the occasional strip search,
all of which have their TSA counterparts. Even the no passing
notes, no talking to your neighbor and wipe that smile off your
face despotisms find their equivalent with no bomb jokes.

Witness the
marginalization of dissidents. In our land of the free/home of
the brave, anyone who challenges the system needs professional
help. Just as boys who, quite understandably, find it difficult
to bottle up their boundless energy and sit quietly for hours
on end in a boring classroom have been diagnosed with mental deficiencies,
so too have the refuse nicks who challenge TSA's Hobson's choice.

Of course,
the sine qua non of totalitarianism is the exemption of
the ruling class from the rules. The Washington "elite"
expects to go through airline security about as much as they expect
to enroll their children in DC's frightening schools.

Sociologically
speaking, there are some other interesting parallels, such as:

• Bullies
  steal lunch money, TSOs steal from our luggage
• Star athletes
  get special treatment, pilots' are exempt from security screening
• Teacher
  sends a student to the principal's office, TSO puts a passenger
  in a penalty box and calls a supervisor
• High school
  boys peep in the girls' locker room, TSA porno-scans attractive
  women

These parallels
might seem humorous, but in fact they are not. Eighty-five percent
of the American public spent its formative years in government
schools — and another 14% or so in private look-a-like schools.
As a result of this rearing, the alumni are more than likely to
revert to their previous roles. Already there are teacher's pets
who thank TSA goons for keeping us safe, snitches who rat on their
fellow passengers and class clowns who go through security stripped
to their skivvies. Yes, they all hate TSA, but rather than be
enraged at the injustice of warrantless searches, they are merely
irritated at the inconvenience, since as former students they
have been habituated to the position of powerlessness. The rebellious
passion and righteous rage have long been programmed out of them.
Like Columbine parents who dutifully sent their terrorized children
back to school, airline passengers will continue to submit their
children to TSA's sexual assault. It has become second nature
to them.

Now you should
understand what government schooling is for.

December
3, 2010

Cathy
Cuthbert [send her mail]
is a liberty activist and a member of the Board of Directors for
the Alliance for the Separation
of School and State and for the Advocates
for Self Government. She is a former homeschooling mother
(they grew up, damn it) who lives on California’s central coast.

Cathy
Cuthbert Archives

Many people
are becoming aware of the need to have a preparedness plan for
their families in the event of an emergency, whether it is a natural
disaster or an economic one. The most obvious places to look for
advice on how to prepare are the survivalist blogs and companies
that have been in the business of preparedness for many years,
and their advice is by far the most common we've seen.

Despite their
experience and many excellent suggestions, we have two objections
to the usual advice on survival food storage offered by these
sources. The first is that these storage programs are typically
devised under the assumption that your stash — all of your stash
— should last you for one year or maybe even 15 years without
active management. We see three problems with this assumption.

1. Most emergencies
   don't last for a year. Disruptions due to fire, flood and storm
   typically are rectified in a matter of days or sometimes weeks
   rather than months or years. Even when we researched emergencies
   that we here in the US have not suffered in recent memory, such
   as a currency crisis, we still don't see them lasting for a
   full year, at least not the final blow-off stage. The exception
   that immediately comes to mind is war. However, we surmise that
   preparing for a war by planning to hunker down with a year's
   worth of food is more or less futile. Chances are you will be
   outed. Overall, these programs seem like a waste of resources.
2. If all
   your food has to have a shelf life of a year, you'll make different
   choices than if your storage program is designed for, say, four
   to six months. Beans, rice, wheat, canned and highly processed,
   dehydrated or freeze dried foods just about have to be the staples
   for a yearlong storage plan. However, a program for six months
   opens up the possibility of including many fresh and frozen
   foods. Not only are these healthier options, but this is how
   we eat already, making it much more likely we will properly
   rotate our supplies in order to make good use of our resources
   and keep our stash fresh and ready if we need it.
3. You will
   spend more money and storage space on the quantity of your food
   while the quality of your storage food will suffer. There are
   two reasons for this. First, you will simply be storing too
   much. Second, what you will be storing will have reduced nutritional
   value compared to the fresh, nutrient-dense products that you
   would normally be eating. Without nutrient-dense foods, you
   will need more food to get the same level of nutrition, if you
   can get it at all. In other words, when you eat low quality
   food, you eat more of it trying to satisfy your nutritional
   needs.

This brings
up our second objections to the standard advice — the lack of
nutrient density. Food storage programs look a lot like a dried
out version of SAD — the Standard American Diet. They are a modified
version of the unhealthy and disastrous food pyramid, with its
heavy dependence on grains and processed foods. To be fair, we
recognize that many preparedness advisors include vitamins and
seeds in their programs in their effort to address the lack of
nutrient density of the foods they recommend and we applaud them
for that, but in the context of the total program, this is only
a band aid measure.

Further,
in a attempt to construct a dehydrated SAD-like diet, preparedness
vendors have created a whole array of very unnatural and frankly
scary products — insipid, too — that we would never eat, such
as textured vegetable protein, dried dairy products, sugary energy
drink powders, and dried fruits processed with sulfur and sugar,
to name just a few. We even read an article from a blogger who
suggested buying candy for a disaster preparedness program. Eating
candy is the last thing any health-minded grown-up should be doing
in the best of times. During a time of crisis, when our lives
may be at stake and both emotional and physical stress is extreme,
eating candy which will further depress the immune system could
be nothing less than a fatal choice. This recommendation is irresponsible.

Once we change
the parameter for the storage program from one year's amount of
food to four-six months, we no longer need to depend so heavily
on grains and processed foods for their long shelf life. We can
spend our money on quality, natural, organic foods, many of which
can be fresh. We can also devote some resources to providing cold
storage such as a good, old fashioned root cellar or perhaps a
spare refrigerator or freezer.

You may disagree
that a four-six months food supply is sufficient. Fair enough,
we can be convinced of that. However, many of the high quality,
nutrient-dense foods on our list have long shelf lives and can
easily be part of a yearlong program. Of course the more perishable
items fit into the first four-six months of that plan. You may
choose to more heavily rely on grains for the second six months.

In keeping
with the recommendation that we should store the foods that most
resemble our current eating habits, I have set out to plan a food
storage program for a paleo diet.

Proteins

Eat fish,
grass fed meat and raw, grass fed dairy for our proteins. If you
intend to store these, obviously a freezer is necessary. The best
freezers for long-term storage are NOT frost free. Frost free
freezers work by cycling a heating coil on and off, raising the
temperature (while using more electricity) which reduces the shelf
life of your frozen foods.

Finding a
local source for your proteins is generally the best way to go,
especially finding a local source for eggs. Buy cage free eggs
that have not been detergent washed if you can. To find these,
you will have to buy directly from a farm. With the natural coating
left to protect the eggs, they will last several weeks to months
in a cool place such as a root cellar or spare refrigerator. (Be
sure to wash your eggs with hot water and detergent to disinfect
before using.) If you can't find a local source for the meats
and dairy, try U.S.
Wellness. They have an excellent selection of grass fed meat,
poultry and dairy products that they deliver frozen to your door.
If you can't find a local source for fish, try Vital
Choice or U.S. Wellness

Although
it is tempting to store soy products for shelf life, you may change
your mind after reading about the "soy is a health food"
scam. Both the Weston A.
Price Foundation and Joseph
Mercola supply ample information on this topic, see here
and here.
According to both, the only soy products that can be safely consumed
are fermented: miso, soy sauce and tempeh. Tempeh can be frozen.
All have a long shelf life if properly stored. Here are some suggestions:

• Canned
  and frozen fish, low mercury only. Excellent shelf life.
• Frozen
  grass fed meats. If the power goes out, be prepared to make
  jerky
• Jerky
• Eggs
• Raw, grass
  fed cheese, delivered and stored frozen or in the wheel and
  stored in a cool place.
• Grass
  fed milk can be stored frozen
• Tempeh

One more
thing you may want to store is whey. Make it from raw grass-fed
milk that has soured or high quality organic yogurt by straining
out the curds using cheese cloth. Whey will store for six months
in the refrigerator. According to Sally Fallon's Nourishing
Traditions, whey is healthful for digestion and can be
used in preparing grains, mayonnaise and fermented vegetables.
(See below.)

Hone
your skills: Learn how to raise backyard chickens. Chickens
are immensely useful. They not only provide eggs and meat, but
rid your yard of insects, clean your garden after harvest and
provide a source of fertilizer. Four to six chickens in your
backyard with a chicken tractor are easy to care for and great
fun to watch too, way better than TV. For smaller areas, such
as in your garage, try coturnix quail. I've have raised these
in my garage. They supply meat and eggs. Obviously, storing
feed is a good idea.

Books:
Chickens
in Your Backyard, Chicken
Tractor

Vegetables

The only
canned veggies we would store would be tomatoes for flavor. If
you want to store canned vegetables, we recommend Eden's healthy
cans without BPA. Otherwise, store fresh veggies when possible
and seeds.

We urge you
to create an indoor or patio garden that can't be seen by passersby.
Choose crops for small places that can be harvest-ready in a short
period of time. Examples: peas, radishes, lettuce and other salad
greens, bok choy, spinach, green onions, herbs, etc. Fruit crops
such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and eggplant, take too long
to ripen. (We've had no luck with Zucchini and corn in containers,
by the way.) But if you have the space and inclination, try cherry
tomatoes and small hot peppers since they ripen sooner than the
large varieties.

Use edible
plants throughout your landscape, particularly plants that most
people don't know are edible. Some examples are nasturtium, New
Zealand lettuce, pursilane, and sunflowers. Consider planting
edible perennials in your yard that fit this description, as well,
such as day lilies and Jerusalem artichokes.

Microgreens
and sprouts are an excellent source of fresh nutrition. Full of
vitamins and precious enzymes, they need little space and are
ready to eat in only days. Look for seed mixes specifically for
microgreen container gardening at Pinetree
Garden Seeds and Bountiful
Gardens.

A wide variety
of sea weeds are available commercially. They come dried and have
a long shelf life. Whenever you make a soup or stew, add sea weed.
You will not taste it yet you will gain all the advantages of
organic minerals necessary for health. Granulated kelp can also
be bought and can be sprinkled on salads and soups.

• Microgreens
  and Sprouts
• Seeds
  for your hidden garden.
• Seeds
  for a large garden and barter
• Veggies
  for your root cellar: onions (avoid purple onions since they
  don't store as well), garlic, winter squash, spuds
• Tomato
  sauce in jars
• Sundried
  tomatoes in olive oil
• Fermented
  foods: kim chi, sauerkraut, miso.
• Sea weeds
  for the minerals

Hone
your skills: Learn about the wild edibles and edible perennials
that grow in your area. Also, learn about hydroponics and aquaponics.
Try this website for ideas on implementing an affordable system
for the home garden or even for your condominium or apartment:
Friendly Aquaponics.

Books:
Microgreens,
Edible
Landscaping, Perennial
Vegetables, Grow
More Foods than You Ever Thought Possible, and any of
the publications from Bountiful Gardens, The
Contrary Farmer, The
Integral Urban House, Toolbox
for Sustainable City Living.

Storing seeds
for an extended emergency is critically important. We recommend
that you take the time to choose seeds wisely. We have seen storage
seed packages and looking at the contents found that they didn't
suit our location or eating habits and preferences. They were also
very expensive to the point of being a rip off. Choose your seeds
yourself, buying at least some open pollinators along with the hybrids.
To store them properly, buy silica gel at any craft store, dry the
silica in the oven according to the directions, pour about a half
inch into canning jars with new lids, put the seed packets in the
jars and tightly seal. After about a week to 10 days, the seeds
can be stored in the freezer. You can but don't have to remove the
silica before storage. When you need the seeds, take them out being
careful not to expose the others to the air for longer than necessary.
Your seeds should be viable for many years.

Hybrid varieties
are not all bad. Best boy and early girl are going to out yield
black krim 4 to 1, easy. It is simply not true as you may read
on the blogs that hybrid seeds are sterile. The next generation
of plants will not be identical, but anyone who is a gardener
knows that there will be plenty of volunteers in your garden next
year from the tomatoes that hit the ground this year.

Hone
your skills: learn how to select and store seeds from your
own harvest. An excellent book on the subject is Seed
to Seed by Ashworth and Whealy.

Fats

In our effort
to find foods with long shelf life, let's not stumble into storing
what many consider the bane of our modern food system — unhealthy
fats. That includes commercial peanut butter with its added transfats.
With the proper storage conditions, we can store healthy fats
for much longer than four-six months and they have better flavor,
too.

Coconut oil
is the oil of choice for cooking since it is more stable than
all the others. Mercola.com recently published this tip: to preserve
olive oil, buy in small dark-colored bottles and add the contents
of a gel cap of astaxanthan or lutien to the bottle as an antioxidant.

Being paleo-dieters,
we can't forget butter for our storage program. Butter can be frozen,
but need not be, especially if wrapped airtight. Ghee, of course,
has a longer shelf life than butter.

• Coconut
  oil, minimally processed
• Mac Nut
  and Olive Oil
• Nuts in
  the shell. Store frozen if possible. Don't forget the nut cracker.
• Tahini
• Olives
• Butter
• Ghee
• Homemade
  mayonnaise using whey, shelf life of about six months in fridge.

Hone
your skills: experiment with making your own butters from
your organic stored-in-the-shell nuts and seeds.

Carbs

Despite our
disapproval of the food pyramid, we believe there is a place for
grains and legumes in your storage program. The Westin A. Price
Foundation has published quite a bit on how to use grains in a healthy
manner by sprouting or fermenting them before cooking. (See their
newsletter, Wise Traditions, Summer 2006 for more.) For example,
Nourishing
Traditions, says to let rice sit overnight at room temperature
with whey in the salted cooking water before boiling it the next
day. This type of fermentation reduces the anti-nutrients in the
grains making them more digestible. Fermenting the grain flours
with sourdough starter or yogurt is also suggested.

Another use
of grains that you may overlook is sprouting. Wheat can be sprouted
for a couple of days to yield a healthy drink called rejuvelac,
and the wheat berries added to salads. Buckwheat can be sprouted
as a microgreen. Beans also can be sprouted for eating with salads,
as well as cooked for soups, daals and stews. You should note
that lentils need not be soaked therefore require less water for
preparation.

Miscellaneous

• Sea salt,
  not commercial salt which contains aluminum
• Teas, especially
  medicinal teas such as Saint John's Wort
• Dried fruit
  for the phytonutrients and, of course, taste
• Raw, unfiltered
  apple cider vinegar
• Raw, unfiltered
  honey, stevia, maple syrup
• Herbs and
  spices. Many spices are not only prized for their flavor but also
  their medicinal qualities, particularly the curry spices. Fresh
  ginger can be stored frozen.
• Water. In
  many cases, you should NOT store municipal tap water for drinking.
  We suggest looking for a used, food grade 55 gal drum and filling
  it with reverse osmosis water or quality well water with hydrogen
  peroxide (preservative) for drinking. A great trick is to install
  a used, busted hot water tank in line with your working hot water
  tank. (Call your plumber. He may have a tank to sell to you.)
  If your water service is interrupted, this tank can be used for
  washing. Because it is in line, it is constantly being refreshed
  so that there is no need to add a preservative.
• Supplements.
  At a minimum, store the three things our bodies need and can't
  produce, according to Dr.
  Don Miller — vitamins C and D3 and iodine. Also store nutritional
  yeast for B complex and if you are into it, green superfoods.
• Alcohol
  for medicinal purposes. Buy vodka in glass bottles for you and
  airline-size plastic bottles by the case for barter.
• Organic
  fertilizers for your hidden garden.
• Solar cooker

  Hone
  your skills: Learn how to solar cook. Go to the Solar
  Cookers International website for cookers and books. We
  have been solar cooking for years and have even roasted beef
  with the sun. A solar cooker could be a life saver in an emergency
  since water can be pasteurized with it.

Also a
selection of medicinal herb is wise. Learn how to grow or gather
them in your area and how to make tinctures.

Books:
Cooking
with the Sun.

Please view
this article as a work in progress. I welcome suggestions to improve
this program and will update it with your help.

December
2, 2010

Cathy
Cuthbert [send her mail]
is a liberty activist and a member of the Board of Directors for
the Alliance for the Separation
of School and State and for the Advocates
for Self Government. She is a former homeschooling mother
(they grew up, damn it) who lives on California’s central coast.

Cathy
Cuthbert Archives

Nicolas works in a little natural foods grocery store as a clerk. At the age of 35, he has been there almost nine years learning how to run the business because he hopes to take over as manager when the current manager retires. As you can imagine, Nicolas is not a millionaire. He earns a grocery clerk’s wage, but he is very frugal and saves as much as he can.

I’d also like to mention my friend, Joe. He has been working in the same grocery for many years, too. Last year he turned 62, retired on social security and now works part time. He needs to work 15 hours a week, no more, no fewer. If he works more, it cuts into his social security. If he works fewer, well, let’s just say it’s smaller helpings of rice and beans that week. Joe is also very frugal. He has no car, but is happy getting around on his bike or by foot.

Both Nicolas and Joe help make ends meet by taking advantage of food discounts from the grocery. At times they eat fruit and veggies that are perfectly edible but not saleable in the store. Occasionally, they go home with free packaged food that is at or past the expiration date.

Nicolas and Joe are clean, presentable and cheerful. They provide excellent customer service and take great pride in their work. They are intelligent people, yet for whatever reason, they never wanted to jump on the fast track.

One day in early April, Nicolas asked me if I knew anything about a tax increase. He told me that, for the first time, he and Joe have to make payments with their 1040s. Nicolas said that it was a lot of money. He said he had enough in savings to pay it, but he was worried that Joe didn’t. u201CIt’s a lot of money,u201D he reiterated, u201Cabout $100.u201D

Pardon the cliché but you could have knocked me over with a feather. I had absolutely no idea that in this land of plenty, these two gentlemen were living so close to the edge.

I quickly did some research and discovered what had happened. Our friends in DC had changed the withholding schedule so that people like Nicolas and Joe would have a bit less taken from their pay each week. This was supposed to u201Cstimulateu201D the economy with increased spending. Nick and Joe had no idea what was going on, since the change each pay day was so small. But at the end of the year, this added up to more than Joe could afford in taxes.

Is this what the economic miracle of the last few decades has given us; people who after 10, 15, 20 years of a career in the service sector can barely make ends meet? People who are afraid that for lack of a measly $100, they will be at the mercy of the IRS? People who are subjected to the half-baked schemes of anonymous government economists? Good, hardworking people who subsist on expired food while being taxed to pay Goldman Sachs bonuses?

The only miracle I see in this situation is the lack of rioting in the streets of America.

Cathy Cuthbert [send her mail] is a liberty activist and a member of the Board of Directors for the Alliance for the Separation of School and State and for the Advocates for Self Government. She is a former homeschooling mother (they grew up, damn it) who lives on California’s central coast.

Cathy Cuthbert Archives

By day, I shop for organic produce in local health food stores and farmers’ markets. I talk with people about what’s in season, new vegan recipes, the next fermented food craze, and how to displaced cooked, junk foods — excuse the redundancy — in our families’ diets. I meet many people who are trying to reverse the hardship and disease that our modern food and medical industries have wrought. These are thoughtful people, open minded and willing to make huge changes in their lives. They are taking responsibility for their own health.

By night, I socialize with freedom lovers. I feel a true sense of relief that I can comment against taxes, inflation, government schools, in fact all manner of regulation and coercion. These people agree with me and show admiration for my choices in life. They are a fellowship of honest, moral and wise people. Libertarianism is a club in which I am proud to have membership.

Now, here’s the rub. I cannot without derision expose myself as a vegan to libertarians. Similarly, I cannot reveal my libertarian politics to vegans and escape with my life. What’s a vegan libertarian to do?

Whenever I go to a vegan potluck, I’m forced to listen to stories of greedy capitalists committing horrors that only tougher government regulation can dispel. I have to keep my mouth full of kale and carrots for fear that a libertarian sentiment may escape my lips. Only my favorite soup — an amazingly flavorful tomato avocado chowder that I invented myself, email for recipe — prevented the murder of Terry when she said, "I like paying taxes. The more I pay, the more money I get back." And mango lime pie was all that stood in the way of Vivian’s demise the day she patiently explained to me that licensing is essential for keeping the riff raff out. "Not just anyone can sell insurance…" Would that celery up the nose could have done her in.

The frustration is different although equally acute with my libertarian friends. When they comment on my habit of eating salad for dinner, I hide behind the excuse of having to watch my weight, adding, "Wow, that steak looks great." I suffer in silence as they hoot and laugh at the crazy “granola crunchers” who are so stupid to think that organic matters. And I’m itching to break it to them that wisecracks about coffee enemas do not demonstrate even the slightest comedic genius. If only I had the courage to wear my "Thomas Jefferson was a vegetarian" sweatshirt — but alas, I don’t.

I’ve been living a lie.

I know one thing I absolutely can’t do, and that is approach vegans for understanding. To confess my libertarianism would be tantamount to proclaiming myself the devil incarnate. I would no doubt be subjected to emotional, ad hominem, socialist tirades from which it would be impossible to recover a cordial relationship. I would be pilloried with invectives such as "capitalist" and sneered at for having no heart.

Yet, I can no longer live this life of dishonesty, not 24/7 anyway. Mainly because libertarians eschew the initiation of force, I’ve chosen to come out of the closet to the libertarian brotherhood and throw myself on your mercy.

I am a vegan. I am, in fact, the worst kind of vegan, the raw food kind. That’s right, not only do I eat exclusively fruits and vegetables, I refuse to cook ‘em, too.

On this very website, Brad Edmonds recently said, "[Y]ou tend to find more paleolibertarians among carnivores than among vegans." Is the converse true as well? Are there more carnivores than vegans among paleolibertarians? Or are there many vegan libertarians hiding their orientation as I do, constantly in fear of being outed and branded quasi-antivivisectionist Marxists? (Or is that neo-antivivisectionists?)

I make my confession with the intention of slaying my own personal demons, yes. But I have a higher purpose, as well. I aim to free my fellow oppressed vegan libertarians and bring unity to the movement. My sacrifice can mark the beginning of a new era of peace and understanding among carnivore and vegan libertarians. We have more in common than you may think. The forces of fascism are destroying both the food and medical industries. Surely, there can be agreement on that. And I have yet to meet a hawkish vegan, so if we discount the fringe pro-war Objectivists — please — here is more common ground.

Libertarians of the world unite. Let us drop the snide comments across the dinner table and pursue the struggle against our true enemy; call a culinary truce so that we may defend our homes and refrigerators. Let us shop, eat and fight for freedom in dietary harmony.

And please, pass the kelp…

Cathy Cuthbert [send her mail] is a wife and homeschooling mother, who does not cook fruit and vegetables somewhere on the Central Coast of — where else? — California. She is the editor of the email newsletter of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, The School Liberator.

Contemplating this phenomenon reminded me of Mrs. McGinty, a babysitter we had when we were very young. She rarely came to mind us, my mother being at home, yet we all loved her. One day when Mrs. McGinty couldn’t come and another little, gray-haired lady appeared in her place, I cried bitterly, begging for her. I was inconsolable, even when my mother arranged for her to come the next week. I sobbed all through her visit. No picnic, no games, no amount of Mrs. McGinty’s sweetness and light could make things right again.

Adults use the catch-all phrase that change is upsetting to young children in such situations, but I’ve come to understand the child’s response as more significant. After all, my family has moved four times in the past ten years and our children didn’t find these more significant changes in the least upsetting. Mrs. McGinty’s absence didn’t merely unsettle me; I was not just being cranky that day. I believe I felt betrayed because I had been abandoned, and I think these young dancers felt that way, too. To children — say eight and under, maybe older — anyone who steps in to mind them or teach them is taking on mom’s or dad’s role and becomes a surrogate parent. For this surrogate to then not return is, of course, traumatic.

This observation has consequences far beyond dance studios and babysitting services. Not only does it predict disruption for families who can provide little continuity in who looks after the children, it predicts trouble for those who provide even what we might today consider the normal level of continuity, what my sometimes correspondent Valerie Moon calls “serial parenting.”

In a speech she gave to an association of child care workers, Valerie coined the term serial parenting. She is referring to the employment of multiple babysitters, after school programs, and electronic wizardry to maintain our children until we show up after work, that is — our society’s new habit of having children and then farming them out to be raised. “Although almost everybody has someplace they have to be,” she told her day care worker audience, “in our society being with the child is rarely that place — it’s as if the child is a hot potato who keeps getting passed around.”1

Consider this: if being abandoned by one very-part-time surrogate mother/dance teacher is traumatic, what is it to be abandoned by a whole succession of surrogate mothers? And what is it to be abandoned by mom, the Real Thing, when forced to go to day care and school?

Am I waxing nostalgic for that Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver sort of life of a by-gone age? Well, yes, in a way, but not for nostalgia’s sake. My concerns are based in child psychology and human nature and are aligned with experts in the field, although not completely.

One of the most important articles on children in our society ever penned is Karl Zinsmeister’s “The Problem with Day Care.”2 That this article is not known by heart by every mother in this country is a scandal of profound proportions. In it, Zinsmeister relates the experience of William and Wendy Dreskin who owned a high-quality day care facility in the San Francisco area. In their book, The Day Care Decision, the Dreskins wrote:

“For two years we watched day care children respond to the stresses of ten hours a day of separation from their parents with tears, anger, withdrawal, or profound sadness,” the Dreskins write, “and we found, to our dismay, that nothing in our affection and caring for these children would erase this sense of loss and abandonment.” They found themselves in a dilemma: “The problem was not with our facility. It was with a problem inherent in day care itself, a problem that hung like a dark storm over good, and bad, day care centers alike. The children were too young to be spending so much time away from their parents. They were like young birds being forced out of the nest and abandoned by their parents before they could fly, their wings undeveloped, unready to carry them into the world.

“We were so distressed by our observations,” the Dreskins conclude, “that we closed the center.”

Zinsmeister goes on to report that nearly all experts on child development agree that it is harmful for children under three to be separated from their mothers, but my question is what is the magic that occurs on a child’s third birthday? Do four- and five-year-olds really take playing the role of hot potato in stride? Do twelve- and thirteen-year-olds? Likely, age three is an arbitrary cut-off correlating with pre-school enrollment rather than having true developmental significance, for clearly children of all ages need close contact with their parents, though the nature of that contact changes as children grow. Serial parenting interferes with necessary parental involvement at all ages, with teens often appearing to be the most short-changed of all.

John Taylor Gatto, who taught preteens, not toddlers, writes:

“Just beneath the veneer of superficial good manners, these [children from comfortable families on the Upper West Side of Manhattan] were a group of angry kids, furious I think at the shallow waste of time academic schooling had become, furious at their parents for their dereliction from family life, their historic role as father and mother replaced by an endless string of surrogate parents in the form of private television sets, phones, computers, closets full of games and toys, and private lessons in music, art, dancing, singing and anything imaginable. What made these kids most angry was the way the school and the home had conspired to make their lives insignificant.”3

The School Conundrum: Is Separating School and State Enough?

Libertarians like to talk about all the free market solutions that will spring up once government schools are put out of business. There would be an explosion of choices spanning all teaching methodologies and espousing every world view. I am confident of the virtues to come from free market education, so much so that I choose to volunteer in the movement to separate school and state.4 Yet despite the anticipation of a glorious free market triumph, I am not completely optimistic. I don’t foresee the abandonment of full-time, institutional schooling and the serial parenting that has risen around it, a hurdle barring true education reform. Why? Because child rearing is not an activity that should be hired out. The relationship between mother and child is not economic; it is deeply personal.

Simply put, the division of labor cannot be applied to matters of the heart. Just as I would not hire a surrogate wife to fill my place in my husband’s bed, I could never hire a surrogate mother to raise my children. And central to the raising of children is their education.

The true nature of education is not, or at least not solely, the development of intellect. It is the development of character, which is why it can never be reduced to the mere transmittal of information from teacher to student.

Whether the experts admit it or not, and regardless of our opinions as parents, all education results in the student being immersed in the teacher’s philosophy (or religion, or world view). Education is a shared experience for the student and teacher in what is implicitly their search for truth, wisdom, and virtue. Our culture’s deepest tragedy is that a thing so vital, so intimate, and so spiritual as the education of our children has been left to hired hands, however well-meaning, predominantly government agents and electronic gadgets at that.

This radical experiment of institutionalizing children — all day and on a mass scale — although from the beginning monstrous, has taken on grotesque proportions in recent years. Was our generation not the first to have our very worth as human beings defined by our academic achievements and reduced to a numeric score by ETS?5 Is it not in just the past thirty years that the term “drop out” has become synonymous with “criminal in training?” And have we not as parents dogged our children with schooling, not only by day but also by night, on weekends, and during vacations by demanding greater homework loads at ever-younger ages? Despite research showing that early academics and institutionalized schooling are detrimental to children’s ability to learn — we can only guess at the affect on their ability to love, to be secure, and to find happiness — education institutions from state to state can be heard constantly beating the drum to “get ‘em while they’re young”: start DARE at fifth grade; extend Head Start to the middle class; lower the compulsory school age; begin the homosexual tolerance lessons in kindergarten, institute mandatory pre-school; and on and on.

Why parents seriously consider any of these proposals is beyond comprehension.

Perversely, the typical parental response is, “Take ‘em while they’re young,” even and maybe especially among the upper middle class. In well-to-do neighborhoods where the financial wherewithal exists for mom to be home for her children, it is a minority that eschews pre-school these days, and a smaller minority still that says no to kindergarten. “Got to get him into the right pre-school if we want little Johnny to get into Harvard.” There is no opposing force of any weight on the education/political scene demanding the abolition, or even the delay, of institutionalization, or the attenuation of serial parenting, despite the rise of such free market phenomena as homeschooling, Mom’s Clubs, and periodicals catering to stay-at-home mothers. Yes, even in homeschool circles, few question institutional schooling for other people’s children.

This is not to say that a math tutor or a co-op class puts children in imminent danger, or that teachers other than parents can’t offer valuable insights and experiences. Rather, it is the daylong institutionalization of children of all ages that must be condemned. Through daylong institutional schooling, America’s parents have rendered themselves utterly impotent. Having farmed out the rearing of our children, we are not parents at all, but boarding house proprietors, providing little more than room and, if the children are lucky, three squares a day. We are in danger of becoming, wholly unwittingly, the next Spartan race with our children this country’s first generation to be raised not by parents, or even part-time parents, but by a procession of strangers. The wide acceptance of serial parenting is a Gordian knot that separating school and state alone cannot cut.

Liberating education from the dead hand of government is a laudable goal, but is nevertheless only one of many stepping-stones on our way to abandoning the institutional school and attaining intellectual freedom for our children.

Notes

1. “What Do We Want for Our Children?" Unpublished speech by Valerie Moon.
2. Karl Zinsmeister, “The Problem with Day Care," The American Enterprise, May-June 1998.
3. John Taylor Gatto, “A Curriculum beyond Money," The LINK, volume 5, number 3.
4. The Alliance for the Separation of School & State, 559/292—1776.
5. Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ. Responsible for the SATs, among other tests.

Cathy Cuthbert [send her mail] is a wife, mother and homeschool advocate living in California. She is the editor of The School Liberator produced by the Alliance for the Separation of School and State.

Cathy Cuthbert Archives

Strangely,
the messages from both left and right are mixed. Conservatives would
have us believe that vouchers will solve the public education dilemma
through market competition, while banishing God from the classroom
is an attack on freedom of conscience that will harm our children.
Liberals contend that vouchers will destroy the public schools by
starving them for money, while protecting children from government
establishment of religion will support family autonomy.

Is
either scenario credible? Are the Judicial Oracles so lacking in
insight that they reach out one hand to help just as they slap us
down with the other?

The
answer to this paradox may be in the third decision handed down
last week. Mentioned only in passing in the national press was Board
of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie
County v. Earls which said that the widening, indiscriminate drug
testing of schoolchildren is also constitutional, the Fourth Amendment
notwithstanding. In Earls, the Supremes have put us on notice that
this is not the end, soon all public school children will be peeing
into cups for the privilege of attending government run indoctrination
camps 180 days per year. Their reasoning is familiar, especially
of late: safety trumps liberty every time.

Despite
the "protect-the-children" sentiment, it is not safety
that the Supremes are really after, for note this sentence: "Preventing
drug use of schoolchildren is an important government concern."
The unconstitutionality, the hubris, the shear gall of that sentence
is as overwhelming as it is revealing. To the contrary, preventing
drug use is an important parental concern, yet at some point in
our nation's history our government became daddy to all our children.

Put
all three decisions together, look at the big picture that has emerged
over the past 150 or so years, and the real government agenda is
laid bare – control.

At
first, control was exercised subtly by supplying a good which all
parents need while maintaining the nexus at the local level. Yet
since the turn of the twentieth century with the development of
certain ineluctable trendsu2014the widespread adoption of textbooks,
the consolidation of school districts, the state and federal distribution
of education dollars, zero tolerance and truancy policies, and more
recently the push for national standards and testing – government
control of schooling, which means government control of children,
has become increasingly brazen.

Last
week's decisions are all of a piece. Vouchers have nothing to do
with improving public schools and everything to do with controlling
and thereby destroying private education. Even a proponent of vouchers
admits the danger.

Writes
Reason Foundation's Lisa Snell:

"I can't
help but think of Marshall Fritz today, and all the others, who
fear that this is not a victory for parents and children over
government schools, but a victory for the government over private
schools…

"We
know from efforts to regulate charter schools, compulsory education
laws, efforts to regulate homeschoolers, and education management
companies that sacrifice their business models for government
contracts, that regardless of the circumstances, the government
will never stop pushing to gain more control over private decisions
about education."

The
banishment of God from the classroom, begun in the earliest stages
of government schooling in the 1840s and all but completed with
Supreme Court opinions in the early 1960s, is not as some believe
an attack on Christianity, for religion here is merely collateral
damage. The Ninth Circuit's ban of the "Pledge of Allegiance"
has nothing to do with the First Amendment and everything to do
with controlling children's minds.

And
Earls serves not to protect schoolchildren from the big, bad drug
monster, but to habituate the nation's citizenry to the kind of
self-administered humiliation required for total control. If you
are not sure about this, reread 1984.

Rather
than waste time analyzing tortured judicial logic, it is more instructive
to ask the question, "Why now?" In this Age of Public
Relations, for the government boldly to show its agenda of control
– to take the mask away – is either a monumental blunder
or an act of abject desperation. In considering answers, bear in
mind that in national politics, monumental blunders rarely happen.

As
every mother of a toddler knows, total control of other human beings
is an impossibility. 1984 is a novel, after all. In real life, control
begets further control, a vicious circle that culminates in blowback.
It just might be that the Education Establishment understands the
severity of the situation in which they find themselves – that
the critical system of political control over which they preside
is reaching a crisis as never before seen – and has acted accordingly.

Every
freedom lover should rejoice at the opinions last week. With each
new turn of the screw, more and more people are facing the fact
that government is no parent. Even the allure of free day care cannot
forever prevent mothers from rescuing their precious children. Our
Berlin Wall is teetering. Exercise genuine school choice, take your
children out of government school and, from a safe distance, watch
it fall.

July
6, 2002

Cathy
Cuthbert [send her mail]

is the editor of "The School Liberator," a weekly email
publication of the Alliance for
the Separation of School and State. She is a wife, mother and
homeschool advocate, who receives no government subsidy of any kind,
living on California's central coast.

"How does
it feel to be the youngest ever…"

"What
a come back. How did you get your confidence back?"

"What
was the turning point in the match?"

Someone tells
me that I have a phone call, that the President of the Unites States
of America is on the line. Through the noise and commotion, on international
television with all the microphones and cameras shoved in my face,
I take the phone and say, "I will not be used by you. You will
not make my personal achievement that has nothing to do with you
or your corrupt government a vehicle for your political gain."
I drop the phone and exit the press area with my trophy and my integrity.

My fantasy
comes to mind around this time of year, when the Scripps Howard
spelling bee, National Geographic geography bee and homeschool children
are in the news. The pundits love homeschool winners, turning them
into a statement against government schools – although speaking out
against government schools is a noble endeavor at any time, mind
you. The children's impressive showing in contests of esoterica
becomes proof that homeschooling "works" and that government
schooling doesn't.

Even more troublesome
is the conclusion that the Mackinac Center's Samuel Walker draws
in his May 24th commentary ("Homeschoolers
Make the Case for School Choice"). After a chronicle of
recent homeschool trivia champs, Mr. Walker uses a kind of logic
that my little brain simply cannot follow, saying: "Is it any
wonder that there is a vital, forward-looking school choice movement
to allow parents a wider range of educational choices for their
children?"

School choice
is the euphemism for government funded education welfare with a
bit of flexibility thrown in. The individual achievements of thoroughly
independent families that homeschoolers are have no connection whatever
to the education welfarism advocated by school choice proponents.
My decision to homeschool has everything to do with barring the
corrupting influence of government from my family's life and nothing
to do with promoting a government takeover of private schooling.
How could the two possibly be confused?

Seems Mr. Walker
and most of his colleagues “don’t get it.” There is a widespread
lack of understanding of education’s and, more specifically, homeschooling’s
true nature. Part of the problem is the mistaken notion that schooling
is equivalent to education. Another part is the word homeschooling,
since it conjures the image of the government school model transferred
to our kitchen tables. Both these errors lead to the penchant for
measuring academic success the way the government does — through
contests, test scores, and their adjunct, college admissions.

Leaving aside
the valid arguments against these being true indicators of academic
prowess, let me help the pundits with their confusion: education
is not the measurable acquisition of massive amounts of facts. Rather,
education is the lifelong search for truth, wisdom and virtue. Clearly,
government bureaucratic agencies geared to the indoctrination of
other people's children cannot possibly satisfy this definition
of education. To the contrary, they are education's antithesis.
Once this definition and its implications are understood, the confusion
about the nature of homeschooling magically disappears, and any
attempt to equate winning a contest with being educated becomes
plainly absurd.

Homeschooling
success cannot be measured by the existing techniques of tapping
into a child's brain. Here's our dirty little secret: there are
homeschoolers who read below grade level, who haven't figured out
long division, who have no idea where Madagascar is. Yet these families
are every bit as successful as the McCarters, the Millers, the Bartons
and all the rest. They are learning what they chose to learn, when
they chose to learn it, and under the guidance of the people who
love them most in their search for truth, wisdom and virtue. And
they don't need vouchers, non-refundable tax credits or any other
government sponsored meddling to do it.

Homeschooling's
greatest value is not found in academic achievement. It is found
in liberty. If my son never locates Lop Nur on a map, if my daughter
never correctly spells succedaneum, what does that matter? In our
over-politicized, propaganda-dominated world, they have escaped
the dead hand of government. Their minds are free.

And that is
the grand achievement for which homeschool families deserve congratulations.

June
10, 2002

Cathy
Cuthbert [send her mail]

is the editor of "The School Liberator," a weekly email
publication of the Alliance for
the Separation of School and State. She is a wife, mother and
homeschool advocate, who receives no government subsidy of any kind,
living on California's central coast.

"What
is this?" I thought. "A real, live adult taking the Gore-Bush
slapstick seriously? She sounds distraught. *Gasp* Do you suppose
she thought that elections were, well, fair?"

I decided to
validate her feelings and offer consolation.

"Yeah,
it’s really a scream, ain’t it? Don’t worry. Pretty soon one of
the Big Boys will pull Al aside and tell him to knock it off. It’ll
be over by January 19th anyway."

Somehow, I
don’t think I helped her feel any better. Actually, I don’t think
she heard me at all. She went on, clearly still in distress.

"I’ve
been walking around in a daze. The TV is on all day long. Cathy,
what do we tell our children?"

Without much
sympathy I replied, "You’re a homeschool mom, aren’t you? Look
at this as a great opportunity for a learning experience. Design
a unit study."

We put our
heads together and developed this list of projects, offered here
as a guide, a starting point, really, for your homeschool. We call
it "Elections, American-style."

Political
Science: Have an Election at Your House

Pick two children
to run against each other. Dress one in a suit and tie, the other
in a polo shirt and dockers. For a week prior to the election, have
them canvas the neighborhood promising all the neighbors a share
of daddy’s income in exchange for their vote. Your candidates must
take credit for every positive thing that happens on your block
and blame excessive consumerism, the unfettered market and unfair
foreign trade for everything that goes wrong. Make sure they know
to not answer a single question, and if cornered, lie. Designate
Granny, who is nearly blind with cataracts and hard of hearing,
as the polling booth official. On the day of the election, have
your candidates slip everyone a pack of cigarette and $5. After
the votes are cast, count them: there should be more ballots than
voters. Now the whining begins. We suggest that the youngest in
your family lose, since the quality and quantity of the whining
will be nonpareil. Both candidates should then go to mommy and demand
that she pick the winner.

Social Studies:
Analyze the News Coverage

Turn on the
national news every evening. Have your children count how many times
they hear the phrase, "the will of the people." Have a
contest to see who can repeat that phrase in the best deep, resonant
and impeccably serious tone without laughing. Come up with a list
of softball questions for the candidates. Make sure they include,
"How do you feel right now?"

Language
Arts

Use the words
chad and snippy in a sentence.

Solve the word
puzzle below: change Gore to Bush in six steps by changing one letter
at a time. Each line should be a word.

G O R E
__ __ __ __

__ __ __ __

__ __ __ __

__ __ __ __

__ __ __ __

B U S H

Science:
Entomology

Make a chart
of the life cycle of the Florida butterfly ballot.

History:
Pristine Elections is American History

Define these
terms: gerrymander, poll tax, political machine.

Research the
elections during the Civil War. How did suspending habeas corpus,
spying on and jailing war dissenters, intercepting the mail and
telegraphs, interferring with the press and maintaining martial
law in the Border States effected the results of those elections?
How do you think soldiers who had to sign their names to their ballots
voted? The employees of the burgeoning federal bureaucracy?

Who was Boss
Tweed? DeWit Clinton? Richard Daley? Were political machines effective?
If so, do you think they are no longer in existence?

Research the
presidential election of 1960? Is it true that Illinois and Texas
are the only two states that allow voting via seance?

Extra Credit
– What is walking around money? And why haven’t I ever gotten
any?

Advanced Topic
– How does including in the franchise people who receive government
paychecks–any variety including social security welfare, military
pay welfare, defense industry welfare, public school welfare, scientific
research welfare, as well as plain vanilla welfare – effect
not only the results of elections but the ethos of the voting population?

Advanced Topic,
Extra Credit – After reading Walter Karp’s Indispensable
Enemies, the most important book on American politics ever
penned, answer the following question: who in their right mind would
ever be silly enough to think that a Bush defeat would lead to the
demise of the Republican Party?

Tell ‘Em What Elections Are Really for

Now, here’s
an assignment for all you distraught parents, walking around in
a daze – a stiff dose of reality. Click on this link to Murray
Rothbard’s essay, "The
Anatomy of the State." In it you will find the following
passage:

As Bertrand
de Jouvenel has sagely pointed out, through the centuries men
have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise
of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual
allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual
rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees
and actions. Originally, in Western Europe, the concept of divine
sovereignty held that the kings may rule only according to divine
law; the kings turned the concept into a rubber stamp of divine
approval for any of the kings’ actions. The concept of parliamentary
democracy began as a popular check upon absolute monarchical rule;
it ended with parliament being the essential part of the State
and its every act totally sovereign.

So there you
have it. The safeguards put in place to check state power are ultimately
used by the state to legitimize and extend its power. And so it
goes with elections, from the coup d’etat that saddled us
with the Constitution of 1787, to the rise to power of the American
Caligula – elections in the good ol’ US of A are no different
from those of any other banana republic. Somewhere during those
dark days of your government schooling, you must have come across
the quotation, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely." That’s how all this can happen in the land of
the free and the home of the brave. Quite obviously, voting is neither
a check on government power nor in any way a measure of the will
of the people. It is a mind game meant to engender in us the warm,
fuzzy feeling that we are part of something really important. Elections
are a clever ruse for suckers to whom flag waving and the Pledge
of Allegiance mean something.

So now, finally,
like Helen Keller kneeling at the water pump in The Miracle Worker,
you know.

And what should
my friend tell her children? The same thing I told mine – the
truth, damn it. Always, tell them the truth.

December
13, 2000

Cathy
Cuthbert is a wife, mother and homeschool advocate living in California.
Look for more unit studies at her new web project, deschooling.org,
coming in the next few weeks. She can be reached at deschoolcuthbert@aol.com.

This
was, of course, a victory for homeschoolers, with the Education
Establishment again being turned back in their endless assault on
educational liberty. More importantly, however, it was a victory
for all parents because without the growing homeschool movement
and its clearly superior pedagogy, public schools would not be under
such great pressure to address their worst failings.

We
homeschoolers, being life-long students and natural teachers, look
for lessons in everything. It is therefore not surprising that we
would look for lessons in The Berkeley Four case. An obvious one
I’ve heard is that if California homeschoolers follow the law –
that is, file our annual affidavit with the state notifying them
that we are operating our own private schools and maintain the required
records-we have nothing to fear. The Berkeley Four, who filed their
affidavits, were exonerated and so will we.

But
if a student in my homeschool made that argument, I would have to
hand out a failing grade for naïveté and superficial
analysis. For one thing, the long-standing debate among homeschoolers
on whether or not to obey the immoral compulsory attendance laws
is passed over. For another, the ordeal that someone must endure
to defend himself against the unlimited power of the state is ignored.
Be that as it may, in surveying the current homeschooling scene
here in California, I come away with very different lessons from
the sanguine one above.

Bear
in mind that there are tens of thousands of homeschoolers in California,
probably over 100,000. A sizable percentage has declared their homes
private schools. As mentioned, we file an affidavit with the state
every year that includes our names, addresses and phone numbers.
Clearly, the state knows who we are, where we are and how to contact
us.

Yet,
in any given year, only a small fraction of homeschoolers is investigated
for truancy by local school districts. In the majority of these
cases, a letter from a homeschool organization or a lawyer explaining
that the family in question has enrolled their children in private
school in full compliance with the California Education Code is
all that is necessary to close the investigation. Occasionally,
such a letter does not deter school officials, the family is required
to make the same case in front of a Student Attendance Review Board
and that closes the investigation. In other words, in almost all
cases, public school harassment of homeschoolers ends rather quickly
and harmlessly.

This
begs the question: Why do local school districts continue to harass
homeschoolers? I offer my homeschool civics lessons in answer.

Homeschool
Civics Lesson #1. Government officials don’t know the law. Occasionally,
there are education bureaucrats who don’t know the law and probably
have never bothered to read the Education Code or their manuals.
They simply don’t know that independent homeschooling is legal.
Their colleagues say it’s illegal and they accept the statement
without verification. If they receive a complaint about a child
who may be truant, until The California Homeschool Network explains
the law to them they proceed accordingly. Two priceless quotations
from Alameda County bureaucrats during the late unpleasantness illustrate
this point.

“To
declare yourself a private school is not illegal, but it’s not legal
either – it resides in this very murky legal area.”

“We
all have different feelings about whether homeschooling is legal
in California.”

However,
I suspect this type of bureaucrat is in the minority.

Homeschool
Civics Lesson #2. Government officials exercise their authority
as a club against people they simply don’t like. There are odious
bureaucrats-some in Berkeley, in fact – to whom homeschoolers
have explained the law time and time again. They know full well
that homeschoolers are not truant, their past challenges have gone
nowhere, yet they continue to pursue truancy investigations to harass
and punish. And punishment their investigations truly are, since
fending off a government attack is time consuming, expensive and
nerve-racking, with the possibility of a CPS kidnapping always a
threat. The Berkeley Four found out first hand that punishment doesn’t
begin with a guilty verdict, but with an accusation.

The
majority ascribes government malfeasance to lesson number one and
recoils from any other likely explanation for the many tyrannies
we suffer, petty and grand. They want to believe that the bureaucrat
is a nice guy, maybe misguided, but just trying to do his job. As
a result, when a family is victimized by a school district, homeschoolers
often blame the victim by asking what the family did to deserve
harassment. They don’t want to believe that the family under attack
was picked out arbitrarily. Actually, families are generally not
picked out arbitrarily. The reality is far worse.

Homeschool
Civics Lesson #3. State power is wielded where success is perceived
as likely. Most of the families over the years who are investigated
are vulnerable ones-single parent households, welfare recipients,
families embroiled in custody disputes, people who could be portrayed
as religious fanatics. The state perceives them as easy targets
and they are. “The Berkeley Four” investigation began in a custody
dispute and the families are members of a non-traditional church.
Two other California homeschool cases pending also prove this point.
In both, the mothers are single and on welfare. Yet, in all three
situations, the families are in complete compliance with the Education
Code and the government officials know it. In fact, when one of
these beleaguered mothers asked why among all the 200 homeschool
families in her county she was singled out, the answer was swift:
“Because you don’t have a job.”

Homeschool
Civics Lesson #4. The state “makes an example” of a small number
of people to deter dissent. Even though the Department of Education
has the names and addresses of homeschoolers all across California,
they have not and will not initiate a statewide round up. They know
that the backlash would be a public relations disaster. The Lucia
Mar School District in San Luis Obispo County tried to do just this
a few years ago and the calls and faxes of protest shut down the
district office until the bureaucrats cried uncle and called off
their assault.

No,
a mass, nazi-style sweep of moms and dads is simply out of the question,
especially in this era of friendly fascism. Even most low-level
government functionaries know full well the Misean dictum that all
governments, no matter how tyrannical, require public support. Instead,
the state uses the cheaper, easier and elegant strategy of attrition.
It acts as all predators do, surveying the herd, looking for the
young, the sick, the injured, biding its time to strike when the
weak is not protected by the others. We California Homeschoolers
are a nervous herd of gazelle with a cheetah roaming in our midst.
We go about grazing, drinking from the watering hole, minding our
young, but always with an eye on the cheetah and wondering who will
be his next meal. Some of us find playing the role of prey too much
and quit or flee to what is perceived as relative safety, the government
run homeschooling programs. California Homeschool Network looses
a significant percentage of our membership each year due to families
sending their children back to public school. How many give up because
they are tired of being afraid we may never know. How many more
families never try homeschooling because they are afraid?

Homeschool
Civics Lesson #5. The state can threaten you, fine you and indeed
take your children for lawful activity. Information from the Homeschool
Legal Defense Fund, Pacific
Justice Institute and CPSWatch
indicates that a small but growing number of families find themselves
entangled with Child Protective Services for either being Christian,
homeschoolers or worse, both. Apparently, Christian parents are
automatically suspected of being child beaters because they spank
and indoctrinate their children with – horrors – religion.
Likewise, homeschoolers are suspected of being abusers because we
isolate our children and neglect their education. In the Kafkaesque
world of family court where common sense – forget about the
Bill of Rights – does not apply, lawful activity can have grave
consequences. The child protection racket has made the inconvenient
and messy process of passing laws against subversive behavior obsolete.
Remember, the accusation, not the guilty verdict, begins the punishment.

In
general, homeschool advocates don’t like to call attention to these
civics lessons. We much prefer to spread our positive message of
how natural, loving and rewarding homeschooling is and that all
families can benefit from the homeschooling life. My colleagues
and I in the California Homeschool Network devote most of our energy
to addressing the issue of how we can make homeschooling easier,
particularly for new families. Our webpage sports the statement,
which is quite true, that a homeschooler is more likely to be hit
by lightning than meet official harassment in California.

Nevertheless,
the fact remains, though deafeningly unspoken in homeschooling circles,
that we are enemies of the state. Whether we admit it or not, whether
we want it to be or not, homeschooling is a profoundly political
act. It is the rejection of the state’s all-important first step
in instilling the habit of obedience in its subjects. Our children
are not captive in government schools where they can be prevented
from learning to read, inculcated with a loathing of all things
intellectual, force fed a constant diet of propaganda or psychologically
manipulated and drugged into obedience. Without public school attendance,
the state cannot break the family bond to wrest control of our children’s
minds and is thereby thwarted in its regimen of voluntary servitude.
That is why homeschooling is so hated not only by the Education
Establishment which sees its jobs threatened by us, but more importantly
by the political class – and their managers, whomever you believe
is at the locus of power – which sees its power endangered
by us.

Homeschoolers
will never be left alone. Even if the Education Establishment woke
up tomorrow to the glaringly obvious realization that homeschooling
can’t put a significant dent in their machine – present day
economics and the brainwashing of the current generation of adults
stand forcibly in the way – the political class cannot allow
our escape hatch from compulsory schooling to remain open. Only
a tiny minority of intellectuals devoted to liberty could cause
a revolution, as has happened in every revolution throughout history.
How better to develop these intellectuals than in the quintessence
of educational freedom that is homeschooling? Our government, like
every government since before Plato conceived of his Republic, knows
full well the danger that homeschooling represents. My final Homeschool
Civics Lesson is therefore the most important to learn: homeschoolers
must be eternally vigilant.

September
21, 2000

Cathy
Cuthbert is a wife, homeschooling mother and volunteer with the
California Homeschool Network. CHN has established a Legal Defense
Fund for the Berkeley families and other California families facing
serious challenges to their right to homeschool. For more information
go to http://www.cahomeschoolnet.org
or call 800/327-5339 (760/431-1027 outside California).

The
legality of independent homeschooling, and therefore homeschooling
itself, is being challenged by the Berkeley Unified School District.
This is a serious situation for four families who were involved
in a recent truancy hearing even though they are either enrolled
in a home based private school or in a private Independent Study
Program. The families are complying with California Education Code,
which clearly states that private schools are not regulated by any
government agency in California. They have been requested to supply
attendance records and curriculum information as of May 31but have
declined to do so, supplying only evidence that they have enrolled
their children in private schools as prescribed by California
Education Code section 48222. This case has been referred to
the District Attorney for possible prosecution of the children for
truancy in juvenile court, where the bright light of public scrutiny
is not allowed to shine, and possible prosecution of the parents
for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

"The
families are acting in accord with thousands of other families in
California. They are acting consistent with a reasonable interpretation
of statutory law," said Attorney William Rogers, who is representing
the four Berkeley families pro bono. "The battle is
shaping up. The Berkeley public schools will be on trial as well
as homeschoolers who have been unjustly singled out due to their
attempt to act on their freedom to find the best education for their
children."

This
is not the only challenge to homeschooling in the past few months.
In San Leandro, also in the same county, one family who removed
their child from public school was threatened with a truancy investigation
unless they enroll in the public school ISP. The school district
office, using taxpayer money to pursue law-abiding families, has
retained a law firm to back up their claim that homeschoolers establishing
home based private schools are truant. Earlier this year, San Leandro's
harassment of another homeschooling family resulted in the mother
being pepper sprayed in front of her 10 year old son during her
arrest. Also in Berkeley, Child Protective Services took custody
of twin boys from a single mother for the offense of "isolation
due to homeschooling." In Los Osos, in San Luis Obispo County,
a single mother on welfare has had her right to homeschool threatened
despite the child's attendance and successful record at the local
community college.

Clearly,
school district bureaucrats are increasing the pressure on homeschoolers
in an attempt to restrict independent homeschooling.

You
may wonder how school districts in California can accuse homeschoolers
of truancy when homeschooling is legal. Here is a nutshell explanation
of a rather complicated legal issue.

California
does not have a homeschool law. In fact, the term homeschool is
not found anywhere in the Education Code. The Code does, however,
outline the procedure for establishing a private school, which involves
annually notifying the state that the private school is operating,
maintaining various records and offering a specified minimum course
of study. Further, the Code does not confer the authority on any
state agency to regulate private schools. About 20 years ago, parents
reading the Education Code reasoned that they could open private
schools in their own homes. Nothing in the law forbids it. There
is no minimum size for a private school; there are no stipulations
on familial relationships between teachers and pupils. What school
could ever be more of a private school than a home based one? By
following the Code, any family, not just those who can afford a
tutor or who have a parent who is a certified teacher, can escape
the tender mercies of the public schools.

State
and local education bureaucrats, threatened by their loss of control
over homeschooling families, immediately, and have consistently
ever since, lied about what the law says with regard to homeschooling.
Showing themselves to be the bullies they are, they threaten a small
number of the most vulnerable families every year – welfare recipients,
single mothers, parents embroiled in custody battles – people who
generally lack the knowledge and wherewithal to fight off government
funded harassment. Usually these families either give in by sending
their children back to public school, or move out of the county.
But the bureaucrats have not challenged the legality of home based
private schools in the courts, knowing that their position is fallacious
and they may very well lose, setting a precedent they must avoid – an
unequivocal declaration of the legality of independent homeschooling.

They
have not challenged home based private schools until now, that is.
Berkeley Attendance Director Alex Palau has said that they want
to make this a test case, presumably to outlaw independent homeschooling
statewide.

Alameda
County Office of Education spokesman Jan Passama was quoted as saying,
"We all have different feelings as to whether homeschooling
is legal or not." This statement reveals the utter corruption
of a bankrupt education establishment. In the land of the free and
the home of the brave, it is not what the law says but what bureaucrats
feel that triggers the full power of the state to come crashing
down upon homeschoolers' heads. In the Soviet Union, everything
not explicitly allowed was denied. I thought we lived under a different
system of jurisprudence here.

The
Great Shell Game

If
you think that Alameda County must have showcase schools, allowing
them the luxury of being able to spend precious time, money and
effort on pursuing several thousand homeschoolers, you are dead
wrong. Alameda County schools are among the worst in the state,
23 having been enrolled in the State's Immediate Intervention for
Underperforming Schools Program for 1999-2000. Does it make sense
to squander money harassing law-abiding parents while the public
schools are so dismal? Only when it is realized that, just like
a huckster running a shell game, Alameda County's tactic is to divert
attention away from their abject failures by attacking homeschoolers.
California taxpayers are having their pockets picked as they gaze
in the wrong direction, duped once again by education bureaucrats.

What's
Truly behind this Harassment

The
Education Establishment says that their intrusions upon homeschoolers
are necessary to ensure that all children receive an adequate education.
Don't you believe it. Money is behind these ceaseless attacks on
homeschooling.

Schools
are reimbursed by the state depending upon their Average Daily Attendance,
or ADA. Targeting homeschoolers to force them into public school
programs would increase that ADA and therefore bring in more
money to the school districts' coffers. Of course, the more students,
the more teachers for public schools, and the greater the union
dues, which explains why the NEA
for the past decade has advocated the abolition of independent homeschooling.
Fat budgets, more jobs, greater union dues: the magic combination
that relegates liberty to insignificance.

The
Truancy Crisis

In
1996, there were more bucks to be had, courtesy of Uncle Sam. The
federal Department of Education announced an initiative to reduce
truancy. In that year, the DOE shipped out propaganda packets "to
every school district in the nation" entitled a Manual
to Combat Truancy – a screed that implies all
crime begins with truancy – and dangled $10 million in $300,000
to $500,000 chunks in front of local school districts to set up
truancy prevention programs. The directive, then, was sent down
from on high: crack down on truancy with zero tolerance and make
the parents pay.

In
California, the directive was heard loud and clear. Only three unexcused
absences can now land a parent in a humiliating and intimidating
meeting with the District Attorney where he will threaten, quote
dubious statistics such as 90% of all prison inmates are high school
drop-outs (which is supposed to fool us into thinking that 90% of
all drop-outs become prison inmates) and offer the "assistance"
of the cops in rounding up recalcitrant teens. Will it really take
more than this to convince parents that schools are no more that
juvenile prisons?

Here,
then, is the classic Ludwig von Mises case of a government created
problem being exacerbated by further government controls. Without
compulsory school attendance laws, truancy of course would not exist.
How do government officials deal with this completely artificial
problem of their own creation? They have the choice of allowing
children who don't want to attend public school a way out, either
by offering a variety of exemptions or by improving the public schools
to make them more attractive or both. Instead, in true Leviathan
fashion, they choose to crack down on those reprobates. This is
not a path taken by bureaucratic inertia, a polite fiction propagated
by government apologists that I just cannot abide. Although we may
not always be privy to such information, decisions have names and
faces associated with them. So do the extensions of those decisions
to include unintended victims. In Berkeley, Palau is the overzealous
hunter who has trapped homeschoolers in his truancy snare.

What's
Next for California Homeschoolers?

Homeschooling
parents have already discerned that America's schools are prisons
and have refused to sentence their children. Will the state now
force the issue? Will Berkeley bureaucrats really succeed in shutting
down homeschooling? They are certainly trying. We are facing the
possibility that with the stroke of a corrupt judge's pen, all homeschooling
parents will become criminals for choosing to educate their children
themselves. Yet, California bureaucrats would be wise to heed the
rage in these sentiments recently expressed by one parent:

They
would have to physically pry my children from my cold, dead hands
and even then I would probably find a way to fight. I know I am
not the only homeschooling parent who feels this way. Absolutely
not.

June
14, 2000

Cathy
Cuthbert is a wife, homeschooling mother and volunteer with the
California Homeschool Network. CHN has established a Legal Defense
Fund for the Berkeley families and other California families facing
serious challenges to their right to homeschool. For more information
go to http://www.cahomeschoolnet.org
or call 800/327-5339 (760/431-1027 outside California).

If you are a regular reader of literature of liberty, at some point you must have wondered how America acquired an empire. How did a national government based on the premise that all men are created equal, segue into the subjugation of men living in other countries? How did a people so profoundly uninterested in foreign people and foreign affairs become hoodwinked into laboring for a worldwide, fascist bureaucracy? And you must have wondered about the most amazing irony of all – How can Americans be blissfully unaware of their government's empire?

A Nation of Adult School Children

I had a series of discussions – ok, ok, arguments – with a friend over the war in Kosovo. This friend had had a Vietnam draft number but wouldn’t have gone if his number came up. He said that while traveling in Greece in the u201870s, he had heard a very different story about United States Government (USG) involvement in SE Asia than the one being told at home. Yet this same man thirty years later declared that the genocide in Kosovo was so abhorrent to him that he was willing to go fight at the age of 48. He believed every story of ethnic cleansing and mass graves no matter how unbelievable. He demanded no evidence other than Tom Browkaw’s word to he make up his mind, or rather to have his mind made up for him, that Milosevic is a Serbian Hitler. He sincerely believed that NATO was fighting a humanitarian war and that if NATO didn’t stop the slaughter of innocents, it would go on till no one was left.

"We have a responsibility to do something," he said. "It's the same as if you knew that a thug was breaking into your neighbor’s house and attacking him and his family. You’d be morally bound to do something to stop it."

I looked at my friend and shook my head, trying to understand how he can so fervently believe such utter nonsense. No argument could shake him. Does 2,000 killed on both sides over two years really constitute genocide? Do mass graves really have head stones? Didn't he know about the forensic evidence found at Racak showing that the massacre was staged? Facts and logic didn't matter to him. I was at a loss to explain his tenacious grip on received opinion. Then I closed my eyes and saw my friend as he must have been forty years ago, sitting attentively at a little desk. With this image the whole of 20th century political history became clear to me.

The USG has troops stationed in 135 countries. It bombed four countries in 1999 alone. Yet few Americans are horrified at this. Any time and anywhere in the entire world there is conflict, Americans demand that the USG act, which means flex its military muscle. At any incident that can be propagandized as terrorism and before any evidence or even details are available, Pavlov's dogs flood talk radio with calls demanding that "we nuke the towel heads." Close your eyes and call up a vision of a first grade classroom and the reason will be clear to you, too.

Every night, millions of dog tired working stiffs – and I don't mean only the Joe Sixpacks, but those 60 hour work week Yuppies, as well – collapse onto their couches in front of their TVs, turn on the evening news and revert back to childhood as they imbibe a constant stream of lies and propaganda about, well, everything. "The most trusted men in America" read a script carefully constructed to paint just the right picture of what is happening in all aspects of 20th century American life. Expert advice is now considered essential to understanding foreign affairs or domestic politics or global warming or even the lack of safety in their own neighborhoods. Exhausted from the day's labors and mesmerized by the flashing lights before them, they take it all in the way they took in Miss Wormwood's exhortations forty years before. There is no difference.

Compulsory government schooling began in the US in 1852 in Massachusetts. At that time, it took guns, soldiers and the threat of bloody violence, rather than expert advice, to force parents to submit to giving up their children. After one generation of public schooling with its propaganda about the sacred nature of the union and manifest destiny, it was possible for McKinley to make the first concrete steps toward world wide rather than continental empire. By the time the last state passed its compulsory schooling law in 1918 and another generation served out its prison term in government schools, the USG was able to institute war socialism and jail war dissenters in the land of the free and the home of the brave. After three generations of compulsory schooling, the grip on the minds of institutionally schooled people was so strong that the same propaganda used on the previous generation about the Kaiser's Germany, even though thoroughly discredited, could be recycled and used against Hitler's Germany. By the time the number of non-institutionally schooled grandparents and even great-grandparents dwindled to zero, allowing distortions about the nature of the republic, the office of the presidency, democracy, entangling alliances, and a standing army to become common wisdom, it was possible for a USG functionary to claim straight-faced that they burned the village to save it. It may not be scientific to say it, but the cause and effect is clear to me: the road to imperialism is paved by government schooling.

Macro-Mechanisms of Tyranny

In this Era of Friendly Fascism in which we live, the ruling class is loathe to show its full-blown violent face – at least not too often – on the home front. From our reading we know the mechanisms of their tyranny. For the modest sum of $1, anyone can buy his own copy of The Prince. Walter Karp in Indispensable Enemies updates Machiavelli to modern American democracy. In explaining the importance of the two party system to ruling class power, the good cop/bad cop routines, the purposely lost elections and the political extortion are exposed as tactics in an overarching strategy that has made American politics a shadow play. Robert Higgs' in Crisis and Leviathan has shown how various crises, particularly wars, have been used as excuses to rob Americans of their freedoms bit by bit. Yes, some of the edicts promulgated in the name of war were reversed, but never completely, yielding a ratchet effect. Etienne de la Boetie in his 16th century treatise The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude rightly attributes habituation to serfdom as the chief means the ruling class uses to remain in power. Yet serfs must be serfs before they can become habituated to it, and for the first one hundred years or so Americans – white Americans at least – were not serfs.

We don't enjoy the freedom that our ancestors had. The ruling class forbids it; Karp's party collusion, Higgs' ratchet effect and de la Boetie's voluntary servitude prevent it. No mystery here, but still there is a key missing element to understanding the current political climate. On the psychological level, how does Friendly Fascism work? How is it that the majority of the citizenry know what is expected of them to be good citizens, and willingly do it, like the Romper Room "Do Bees" of our childhood? The voluntary income tax is the quintessence of Do Beeism. So is registering for the draft. So is sending children to school, especially with homeschooling legal in every state. The question is not, "Why do people comply?" Chicanery, force and fear, habit, of course. The question is, "Why do they comply willingly?" Why do they march forward to sacrifice not only their own well being but that of their children and seem happy to do so? Why do they deny all the evidence of their senses and proclaim proudly that we Americans are free?

The previous European empires that dissolved with the world wars called themselves empires, but the American Empire can never be admitted. The American Empire ended with the Progressive Era according to court historians. Indeed, most Americans become angry when they hear the term "American Empire," particularly military personnel who labor in its service. This phenomenon cannot be explained by the macro-mechanisms of tyranny. Cognitive dissonance of this stunning depth must be the result of early and brutal brainwashing and brainwashing of such stunning breadth must take place through the only common childhood experience in the US, that is government schooling.

The American Empire is sustained in that first grade classroom.

Micro-Mechanisms of Tyranny

There can be no denying the deplorable condition of America's public schools. Yet, our national debate about public school reform very purposefully misses the point. No amount of reform will solve the educational and social problems of public school since the schools were designed to create these very problems. They were planned as indoctrination centers and their techniques have been continually refined so that as each wave of reform takes hold, fewer and fewer children can pass through the gauntlet unscathed. Do you doubt this? Do you question the steadily declining test scores, the debasement of school textbooks and curricula, the increasing need for remedial courses at our colleges, the wide spread and growing use of drugs on young children, the universal adoption of the green, racial, anti-gun and pro-drug war agenda, the utter disappearance of personal boundaries and civility in everyday conversation, and, of course, the abject terror and violence?

Useful idiots such as Bill Bennet and Chester Finn rail against the hollow curricula of American public schools, yet, curriculum content is beside the point. Poor curriculum would, after all, make for merely ignorant students, not deranged, violent, suicidal or vapid one. The content of public school course work is not the major tool for indoctrination. Rather, it is what John Taylor Gatto calls the hidden curriculum, administrative policies and teaching techniques that do the trick. They work their magic the way the Nazi concentration camps worked theirs, as Leonard Piekoff describes in The Ominous Parallels. Reality must be looked squarely in the face and repeatedly and vehemently denied day in, day out over a long period of time for cognitive dissonance to take hold. Amazingly, public schools use the same modis operandi to accomplish this end yet without the overt violence. Instead, they get the child early and drive a wedge between him and his parents. Parent-child estrangement: this is the goal of the hidden curriculum in a nutshell.

The Real School Wars – Every Parent against His Own Child

John Holt brilliantly explains the real school wars in his book, What Do I Do Monday? Slipped among chapters of a book written to provide teachers with practical yet innovative classroom methods, Holt reveals the horrifying truth about the psychology of public schooling and I believe the key to the micro mechanism of American imperialism. This book is far more than a bag of teacher's tricks as the book jacket says, the most germane chapter being "The Killing of the Self."

Holt applies insights about human psychology from Ronald Laing's The Divide Self to show how teachers drive children to insanity, or rather, to cognitive dissonance to save what little sanity they can salvage. He points out the physical constraints imposed by schools, such as "children are not only required for most of the day to sit at desks without any chance to move or stretch, but they are not even allowed to change their position, to move in their chairs," restrictions that adults would not endure for long. Comparing public school to Black chattel slavery, he goes on to describe the psychological conditioning in which parents are unwitting collaborators:

[T]he schools are the only organization of our times that can make people accept and blame themselves for their own oppression and degradation. The parents cannot and do not say to their children, "I can't prevent your teacher from despising and humiliating and mistreating you, because the schools have more political power than I have, and they know it. But you are not what they think and say you are, and want to make you think you are. You are right to want to resist them, and even if you resist them only in your heart, resist them there." On the contrary, and against their wishes and instincts, they believe and must try to make their children believe that the schools are always right and the children wrong, that if the teacher says you are bad for any reason, or none at all, you are bad. So, among most of the poor, and even much of the middle class, when the schools says something bad about a child, the parents accept it and use all their considerable power to make the child accept it. Seeing his parents accept it, he usually does. So far – I hope not much longer – few parents have had the insight of … the parent who not long ago said to James Herndon, author of The Way It Spozed to Be, "For years the schools have been making me hate my kid." Even the most cruel and oppressive racists have hardly ever been able to make people do that.

Unlike slave parents who demanded their children act with subservience to the master to save them from harm, parents today demand their children act with subservience because they believe it is right. As a result, in the school child's reality, he has no one to turn to, nowhere to go, no sanctuary even in his mother's arms from his abusers. With the time worn excuse, "It's for your own good," the wedge between parent and child that was inserted by the very fact of enrolling him in school, tantamount to pushing the young child out of his home before he is ready, is driven further with each passing school term.

But it gets worse, this psychological torture via denial of reality, for at one time, many teachers were overt, undeniable sadists, wielding sticks at their recalcitrant charges. Today, America has therapeutic education with "caregivers" that wear smiles while meting out their abuse. They claim to love your child, to have only his welfare at heart and to be working toward world peace while denigrating and humiliating him. It used to be that parents knew schools were unpleasant and could sympathize with their children while unable to rescue them. Today, parents, all adults, constantly send the message to children that school is fun. Many children believe school is fun because they want to believe and please their parents. They need to believe that school is fun to be able to get through the next day. But do an experiment as I did. Ask children who claim they love school to list what they love about it. I guarantee you will get answers such as pizza parties, field trips, lunch, being with their friends, after school sports, that is, everything unschoolish about school, everything that is outside the classroom, everything except school itself.

In the truly Orwellian circumstances of their daily academic lives, either children are unable to develop any true self esteem so that they adopt the strategy of gaining the approval of others in its stead, or they fight back and live a grim life in constant battle with everyone in authority. The former become the Do Bees, dutifully memorizing the material in their government approved textbooks, filling in government approved answers on their endless, meaningless worksheets, turning in their parents to the DARE cops, and unconsciously blinding themselves to any reality that doesn't jibe with the national, imperial curriculum:

• America is the freest country in the world;
• Paying our taxes is our highest civic duty;
• No American president would start a war for political gain;
• All religious fundamentalist are dangerous and potential terrorists;
• Americans must make the world safe for democracy; Milosevic is a Serbian Hitler;
• Extinctions, pollution, global warming and the ozone hole are the greatest threats to mankind;
• and so on.

Without the ability to recognize reality, the Do Bees absorb this packaged collection of received opinions very willingly and quite happily, the last vestiges of their sanity depending on it. They become unwitting though avid agents of American imperialism, each generation more unwitting and zealous than their parents before them.

The children with spirit who can salvage their self esteem, who recognize their oppressors for what they are and choose to fight them are increasingly unable to escape through truancy or without graduating. They are branded with various labels that will haunt them throughout their academic lives, prescribed psychiatric drugs to make them docile, enrolled in more intensive brainwashing programs. The push to deny drivers licenses to truants, the Goals 2000 School to Work system whereby occupations will be closed to unfavored students and universal preschool are the latest "reforms" to control these children and stamp out dissention.

The Antidote to Imperialism

The best hope for rejection of the American Empire and a resurgence of a love of liberty is homeschooling.

Homeschool families live their lives with a level of intimacy that families used to enjoy before the massive interference of government programs and policies in this century. Family intimacy is the first principle in building a healthy emotional foundation for our children.

Homeschool families live their lives immersed in the real world. They are not held in the confinement of a strange, Kafkaesque world, surreal in the uniformity of age of its inmates, its false and meaningless rewards system, its wholly arbitrary rules, its distorted social conventions. Being in the real world mitigates the extremes of denial that eventuate cognitive dissonance.

Homeschool children are not separated from their parents too early and plunged into a Lord of the Flies environment to fend for themselves without their family for security and guidance. They are neither fed a constant stream of propaganda, prevented from learning to read, inculcated with a loathing of learning, nor psychologically manipulated and drugged into obedience.

It may take time for homeschool families to emerge from their parents' public school brainwashing, but with intellectual freedom will come the inevitable rejection of government lies and statist sophistry. I predict that homeschoolers will dominate the minority that brings about the next American revolution, just as homeschoolers dominated that minority in the first American revolution. And I expect my homeschool family to be part of it.

Cathy Cuthbert is a homeschool mother and a volunteer with The California Homeschool Network.

While
the rest of the country may have been glued to their various electronic
devices obsessed with the media obsession to find some answer to
the burning question why, I was unaware that the massacre had even
occurred until this afternoon. But then, I was able to come up to
speed quickly, since if you've seen one media disaster coverage,
you've seen them all, and this one was little different – the angst,
the voyeurism, the bumbling public officials, the anti-gun message.
Nowhere was the obsession satisfied.

I
will satisfy it. I can answer the question why as only an outsider
can.

"…Michael
Williams, 20, a student at the Art Institute of Atlanta, [and
the murderer's brother] told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution[,]
"People like to pick on him. It was like that as long as
I could remember."

"He's
still my friend," Vanessa Willis told the Los Angeles
Times. "I'm not going to dislike him just because he
killed people. He's not sick in the head like those people from
Columbine. He's a nice guy."

What
these two quotations show is a shocking toleration of aberrant behavior.
America has become a nation of inept, even infantile, parents who
are unwilling or incapable of protecting their children from bullies,
even the ultimate bully – a gunman targeting unarmed innocents. What's
worse, it seems they don't really mind their horrifying impotence – attendance
at Santana High on Wednesday was 85%, including four of the victims.

Through
a tyrannical compulsory school system, through relentless propaganda
throughout this culture trivializing parenthood, parents have suppressed
their most primeval drive – the fierce protection of their young.

Well,
this parent hasn't been stripped of that drive. I did not put my
children in day care at age six weeks to continue my career as proof
that I have worth beyond being just a mother. I did not dump them
in pre-school so they could ostensibly learn to get along with other
children, while I heaved a sigh of relief that I was rid of them.
I have not condemned them to a juvenile penitentiary where they
will be indoctrinated against my husband and me, and taught there
are no moral truths and that murderers are nice guys. And all the
while I have stepped in to save them from bullies, despite taking
criticism for doing so.

Am
I protecting my children? You're damn straight I am. That's my job
and it's your job, too.

My
children are home with me, living and learning under my watchful
care. They are apprenticed to my husband and me so that they may
know how to become mature adults. They have learned that there are
moral truths and that there is aberrant behavior that under no circumstance
can be tolerated. And they know they are loved and protected. This
is proper socialization, not the Lord
of the Flies variety holding sway in government schools.

The
burning question that obsesses me is where is the breaking point?
When will parents finally show some outrage and declare that enough
is enough? When will they appear en mass at the juvenile penitentiaries,
their suppressed primeval drive surging forth to liberate them?
When will Americans storm their Bastille and separate school and
state?

March
9, 2000

Cathy
Cuthbert is a wife, mother and homeschool advocate living in California.
She is the editor of the online newsletter, The School Liberator,
produced by the Alliance for the Separation of School and State.
Cathy is also the owner of the forthcoming website, deschooling.org.

The
in-your-face ad spanning the length of the buses reads "DC
Public Schools Wants You!!! Go To Class-It' a Blast!!!" Seventy-five
buses so emblazoned for one month cost the district $41,000. Superintendent
Paul L. Vance, we are told, when asked about the s missing after
the apostrophe was "infuriated by the error." (Just one?
I might inquire.) "It reinforces the perception that we're
less than competent." To this priceless quotation, I can't
resist adding my own funny papers punctuation–!?!

"u2018Oh
dear, oh dear,' said D.C. Council member Sharon Ambrose who serves
on the panel's education committee. u2018What an embarrassment….The
message is, unfortunately, probably going to be that someone in
the D.C. public schools doesn't know how to write.'"

Ho,
ho, hee, hee!!! Oh, Sharon, please stop, you're killing me!!!

Clearly,
this article is supposed to have us wringing our hands at the horrid
grammar of educators in our nation's capital. Many may go so far
as to call the incident a national embarrassment, but some how I
can't get worked up over it. I wouldn't call the missing s a grammatical
error at all but a typographical one. Having produced many articles,
brochures, flyers, newsletters and several ads of my own over the
years, I would feel sympathy rather than disgust at such an easy-to-make
mistake.

I
would feel sympathy, that is, if I were not worked up over the true
outrage in The Missing S Affair – tax dollars spent for propaganda
aimed at school children.

Since
the early days of American education, children have found school
boring, burdensome, and constraining, at best. At worst, school
has been the venue for stifling spirits, assaulting psyches, and
numbing minds. Their modus operandi has always been humiliation,
their facilities breeding grounds for bullies. Yes, from the beginning,
free market education notwithstanding. Read about the experiences
of Ben Franklin, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Thomas Edison. Recall the
proverbial schoolmaster with a whip in hand or the Catholic nun
with a ruler. No don't – think of your own experience. What is worse
is that today's torturer is an empath who recommends therapy and
Ritalin for your child's own good. The abuse has not been eradicated
but has migrated from the physical to the psychological.

We
would be most appreciative if someone would research for us how
many Washington D.C. schools have metal detectors, uniformed or
armed guards, lock downs, barred windows, chain link fences with
or without razor wire, drug-sniffing dogs, gangs, drug dealers,
bullies or any other accouterments of penitentiaries.

With
these ads, D.C. district officials are telling students who endure
the abuses of government schooling that their aversion to the classroom
is unfounded, made up, all in their heads. School is actually, well,
fun. "Forget about your daily experiences," they say.
"Deny reality. You are having u2018a blast.' The sign says so."

Are
these people really nutty enough to think that a handful of signs
will contribute to solving the truancy "crisis"? I will
have more to say shortly about this latest bugaboo, much more. But
for now, I'd like to remind the Education Establishment of an admonition
from Princess Leia: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin,
the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

In
the spirit of truth in advertising, let's demand the ads be corrected
to read "Go to Class, It' a Stinkin' Prison."

PS.
When discussing the Missing S Affair with a colleague, we found
that we had the same off the cuff reaction to the ad – that
it was written to be ebonically correct. I suspect that this was
a public relations problem of a different variety. Shall we call
Superintendent Vance and ax him?

January
26, 2000

Cathy
Cuthbert is a wife, mother and homeschool advocate living in California.
Look for more commentary on education at her new web project, deschooling.org,
coming in the next few weeks. She can be reached at deschoolcuthbert@aol.com.

I must challenge both Mr. Murphy and Mr. Friedman on the nature and origin of temper. I am a first class, bonafide wimpy parent. Send my daughter to bed without dessert — never. Take away computer time from my son — you must be joking. I have never spanked them or taken away any of their possessions. In fact, my husband and I neither punish our children nor bribe them with rewards.

Yet I have never had the misfortune of dealing with a temper tantrum in public, and only a few times had to deal with a temper tantrum in private. And if the truth be known, I come from a family of wimpy parents sans temper tantrums. My parents had nine children who never embarrassed them in this fashion either. Lest you think that I have incorrigibles, think again. I am regularly and universally complemented on the maturity and good manners of my children.

Unlike Mr. Friedman, I don’t look upon my family life as an "us against them" struggle. Like the free market where there are no win-lose exchanges, mutually beneficial interactions dominate. When my children want something, they ask and I say yes or no and tell them why. If necessary, we may discuss further and reach a compromise. They know from long experience that I am fair, have superior knowledge and wisdom, have their best interest at heart and they completely trust me. In addition, they know that when I have made a final decision there is no turning back and all the whining and moaning will do absolutely no good. Amazingly enough, Mr. Friedman, not only have a never given into a child’s threats, I have never been threatened.

The temper tantrums I have witnessed had nothing to do with me being manipulated by a conniving brat. Children often want to do things themselves that are beyond their capabilities and the resulting frustration can lead to a tantrum. Also, over-stimulation of a tired child can lead to a breakdown. These situations are certainly unwelcome but do not signal any defect in the child.

Children’s manipulative behavior has little to do with a mythical brat gene, or with not being tough enough. Being boss will not avoid bad behavior. Having well-mannered children has everything to do with the your attitude toward your children and toward parenting itself. Accept your children as full-fledged human beings, with valid needs and concerns, just like you. Love not only your children, love and whole heartedly accept being a parent. The tantrums will surely disappear.

Cathy Cuthbert is a wife, mother and homeschool advocate living in California. She is the editor of The School Liberator produced by the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, and the owner of the forthcoming — really — deschooling.org website.

March 17, 2001

Cathy Cuthbert is a wife, mother and homeschool advocate living in California. She is the editor of The School Liberator produced by the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, and the owner of the forthcoming — really — deschooling.org website.