I wrote the following after reading John Grange's column on Nov. 9.
In May 2002, the editor or publisher of this newspaper used a half page of the paper to tell the readers they were unpatriotic if they had not voted in the April election. This was soon after 9-11, and there was a great deal of talk about patriotism. In response to that editorial, I wrote four papers. The subjects were government, crime, education and health and disease. I discussed the problems in each area as I saw them and what we needed to do to correct them. Those papers could have been written today. We have the same problems, but each has grown greater. We have more disease. We have more crime, our schools are still failing, and fewer people understand and take part in government. The corrections I suggested are as appropriate today as they were seven years ago.
The cost of disease is in the trillions of dollars annually. We have more disease and spend more on disease care than any other developed country. We have a larger percentage of our people in prison than any other country. Most of the diseases that are epidemic today can be termed last-half-of-the-20th century diseases. What are we doing about our costly disease problem? We should be looking for the cause and correcting it. What we are doing is spending millions of dollars seeking a way to pay for the disease. Why are we doing this? Uninformed and dishonest legislators. Uninformed and dishonest citizens. The schools should be teaching anatomy, physiology, nutrition and causes of disease (mental and physical disabilities) from day one of kindergarten to graduation.
"Crime, like pain, has some unpleasant but necessary uses. It is a warning signal which tells us that the organism is diseased or wounded, and that its existence is in some way placed in danger. Physical pain intensifies when the individual's life is threatened. Crime intensifies when the community is threatened. In either case, we ignore the symptoms at our peril." – The Lawbreakers (1968) by M. Stanton Evans and Margaret Moore
Three things we have to accept:
1. Every society makes its criminals and has the crime it deserves.
2. Prisons won't solve the crime problem.
3. Crime is a health problem.
Earl Mindell, Ph.D., pharmacist, nutritionist, said, "There are no bad children, only bad diets." and
"People who feel bad act bad." Barbara Reed, probation officer, wrote "Food, Teens and Behavior." She reduced recidivism by putting her charges on a healthful diet. Alexander Schauss, Ph.D., criminoligist, wrote books on the relation of diet to crime. Stephen Schoenthaler, Ph.D., California State University professor, has done extensive research on the effect of nutrition on behavior in schools and youth correctional institutions. Harris Coiulter, Ph.D., medical historian, wrote "Vaccination, Social Violence and Ciminality."
Prisons will not solve the crime problem. We need to make our "correctional institutions" real correctional institutions. We begin with indeterminate sentences. The convicted person stays until he is ready to take his place in the community as a useful citizen. The convict is not "paying a debt to society." Society is giving him/her a new opportunity to adjust.
Death penalty? Never! Besides having destroyed a life, we have destroyed the evidence. If we are going to solve our crime problem, we need to know why the criminal committed the crime. We will know that only if we study his/her entire life. Why did the Carr brothers do what they did? Their lives should be investigated back to the day they were born and perhaps even further. We need to start with the child who bullies or is bullied.
Policemen in the schools. The moment we decided they were needed, was the moment we should have sat down together and found the cause and corrected it.
As a graduate student at Wichita University, I read in a book published in 1910 that the only advantage of the graded or ladder school system is its ease of administration. I thought this over and decided that it is true. There had been quite a bit of discussion at that time about nongraded schools, and I was interested in this subject. In the early '70s, I attended a conference sponsored by the Kansas Medical Auxiliary held in the auditorium at Washburn University. At one point in the program, the emcee asked members of the audience to suggest things they would like to see communities do to make things better for our children. People were mentioning playgrounds, parks, etc. I stood and said, "I would like schools that fit all of the children." The audience, which filled the auditorium, rose and applauded. Thirty-five years later we still have the graded system where some children begin to fail on Day One.
There is much more to be said about our educational system. I am going to let Wendell Berry, farmer and college professor, speak. "The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries either by job training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or 'accessing' what we now call 'information' – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first."
We have taken God out of the schools. We are a spiritual people; we cannot get along without God. We have pulled the spiritual rug from under our children. We are reaping the results.
There is so much to be done. If we devise a proper educational system that fits all of the children, we can reduce our disease rate, we can reduce our crime rate, we can regain our constitutional government. We can lower our taxes.
We need leaders. Where are they?
Mildred Lowry
El Dorado
