Mike Angwin wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:
 MA> Government should never be used as a replacement for parental 
 MA> responsibility.  Unfortuantely, you are correct, many, many 
 MA> parents have abdicated, even looked for, government to assume 
 MA> their responsibilities as parents, and as more and more 
 MA> parental responsibility is upsurped by government more and more
 MA> parents seem to willingly accept that assumption of their 
 MA> responsibilities. 
Worse than that,  many people in general (not just parents) are abidcating 
the taking of responsibility for their own lives in many areas,  and it's all 
too natural for the power-hungry among us to use government to "take over" 
those responsibilities from people who want to give them up.
Bad enough,  but then such "solutions" get imposed on the rest of us,  too,  
whether we want them or not.
 MA> Government, however, can never replace the parent.  Even at 
 MA> it's best it could never hope to do the job of child 
 MA> development even as well as the most incompetent of parents.
Right.  But we seem to have a trend in our society to put *infants* into 
daycare.  This period,  when you get into just past the newborn stage and up 
until the end of the first year,  is the most important time of a baby's life 
and the most crucial when it comes to forming the bond between child and 
parent.
And when it comes to people who are so anxious to get back to their "careers" 
that they do this kind of thing,  I have to wonder why they even bother to 
have kids in the first place.
 MA> To return to an era of greater parental responsibility and to 
 MA> strengthen the family unit, we need to discourage government 
 MA> intervention into this realm.  Parents must be allowed to 
 MA> assume the responsibility for their own children and to assume 
 MA> that responsibility they must posess the authority to act as 
 MA> parents should act.
Yep.
 MA> Our present system increasingly discourages parental
 MA> responsibility and, as a result, we have less and less of it.
I suspect that a lot of the roots of this in at least some instances are due 
to both parents having to work just to maintain survival-level income,  and I 
blame the tax structure for this.
RJ>Literally!
RJ>I remember well a situation going back a number of years where a family
RJ>having a lot of personal problems (job,  divorce, etc.) and this one ki
RJ>absent a lot more than he should have been.  The mother got called into
RJ>school and lectured,  and when she tried to deal with the *ASSHOLE* on 
RJ>other side of the desk he got all snippy and pointed to his bit of
RJ>wallpaper,  asking her where hers was.  The upshot of it was that he en
RJ>up declaring those absences to be "unexcused",  with a fine being the
RJ>result.  She ended up trying to go to the school board,  which didn't w
RJ>to deal with the situation at all,  and then before a local district ju
RJ>where costs and such were added to the "fine".
RJ>Grr.
 MA> Once, in a far different world, those employed by government 
 MA> were referredto as public servants.  It is more appropiate 
 MA> today to refer to those who do not work for government as 
 MA> public servants.  They now assume they are our masters and if 
 MA> we do not comply with their demands they use the power of 
 MA> institutions our forefathers created to serve us, against us.
Yep.
 MA> When JFK stood before the nation almost four decades ago and 
 MA> made the statement "Ask not what your country can do for you, 
 MA> ask what you can do for your country", this nation had gone 
 MA> full circle.  This was the first nation on Earth which existed 
 MA> with government suborfinate to the people in the grand scheme 
 MA> of things.  Our country was created to serve us, not us to 
 MA> serve it.
My feelings exactly,  but there seem to be a lot of folks in positions of 
power who feel otherwise.
What can ya do?
email: roy.j.tellason%tanstaaf@frackit.com 
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