OK so, let's talk "The Turpins" and cases of extreme abuse which can more easily occur under the cover of the highly unregulated homeschooling option for education.
If you don't know who I'm talking about, you can catch up HERE.
When my eldest, homeschooling, daughter came to me, having read of the Turpins and their abuse, I groaned and sarcastically snapped back, "Oh, I bet they were homeschooled too."
I sat on that for about a day as I looked into the case for myself. Sure enough, they were utilizing the freedom from account, which homeschooling affords, to abuse their children. They were abusing freedom to abuse their kids.
I needed about a day or so to think, rationally, to process the story - and my initial reaction - so, I could suss out what value I would take from this situation, to suss out what I needed to communicate to my newly news attentive teenage daughter.
Before I get to what I shared with her, I need to share this illustrative comment conversation from under another social media post addressing the story:
Ignorant Person, who shall remain unnamed, said the following under a post by an organization that is using the Turpins to further their agenda for government accountability in the homeschool community:
"Terrible. I quickly wrote up the following
13 possible indicators of abuse in honor of the 13 Turpin children.
1)Children are not seen playing outdoors
2) no toys and/or bikes on property
3) children appear pale
4) children appear fearful
5) children appear withdrawn
6) unusual activity at odd hours
7) homeschooling is involved
8) family isolates themselves
9) children appear unusually thin
10) children outside at odd hours.
11) family do not participate in extracurricular activities.
12) family moves frequently.
13) children were seen then suddenly are no longer visible."
This was my response (with a few tweaks for clarity and to cover the names involved):
"My homeschool children solidly fit 7 of the 13, and creepy, fascist, neighbor spying, gestapo like you could easily warp another 4 into your hyperactive imagination, but my children are neither abused nor neglected. Your little list is the reason good homeschool families - who are just making different choices from the mainstream sheople like you - will take their kids underground.
1) YUP. We're in the city and, consequently, my children hate playing outside around our neighborhood.
2) NOPE. "Safe" ... according to you.
3) YUP. My children are naturally pale as sheets, particularly #s 1 and 3
4) That's one which could be twisted *right now*: We've just had the "stranger danger" talk with the 6 year old and he's going through that 6 year old fearful reaction.
5) My children, who don't like to play outside, and some of whom are naturally shy fit this description for some with overactive suspicious natures.
6) YUP. Definitely. My kids stay up late and sleep in #notacrime #homeschoolfreedom.
7) YUP and will continue to be #notacrime AND statistically, not a cause of abuse.
8) YUP. Less than some I know, more than others, which makes it a rather subjective point and also #notacrime.
9) That's another one which could be twisted. My boys are both thin despite three meals and 2 snack times a day, and they, thanks to genetics, are both short for their age. They both might look to some like I chain them to furniture and don't feed them more than once a day ... especially to some fucking busybody moron like you.
10) YUP. During the summer, they don't like the heat of day, so they play outside at night #notacrime
11) YUP. That's mostly true unless it's something my children are interested in, For instance my daughter likes cosplay and comic conventions ... but gee, those don't get noticed by the sport couches and community organizers, you know, the people who are going to prevent abuse according to [organization in question]'s plan for accountability.
12) NOPE. "Safe" on that one ... for now, but if you and the fascists at [organization in question] get their way, I might reconsider making this one a "YUP" and I could because #notacrime.
13) We had neighbors who could've claimed that. My kids used to play outside a lot when they were younger and since have stopped playing outside around our neighborhood. The neighbors were here to witness that transition, if they were looking for abuse the way you guys are, they could have felt justified in making a call to DHS.
So, you know what? Fuck off. This is America, the land of the free, and sometimes my choices in freedom don't look like how you choose to use your freedom, and I shouldn't have to live in fear of government intervention because I have judgmental busybodies for neighbors."
The original comment was deleted moments after I posted my response.
Now, if you've followed me on Minds.com for any length of time, you know that I love writing up humorous observations of my neighbors comings and goings. There's a difference between people watching and people spying. I watch people because they amuse me, and as long as their eccentricities don't spill over onto my person or property, I'd just assume continue to be entertained. But, I have a very liberty minded view of live and let live, and an individualist, nuclear family focused view of how society is best structured.
Those views get to the heart of what I think is important to say about the Turpins.
Last March, I wrote a blog post called: "The Roller Coaster that Made Me Meditate on Fix-It Culture". The Fix-it culture is the one that nationally takes an isolated or rare case of harm or abuse and turns it into, "We must do something about this!", but inevitably what we "must" do is regulate, through legislation, people who aren't doing wrong in order to catch the few who are. And, never mind how selective the things are which we "must" fix, and how they often play into a larger agenda of social/economic restructuring of our country.
The problem with "fixing-it" is that in order to stop rare and extreme cases of abuse, you have to make a general, sweeping legislation which inevitably encroaches on the freedoms of the majority who would never even imagine what the Turpins did, let alone do it. And, the next eventuality is that those sweeping regulations usually either include digging into lives and freedoms in ways which are micro concerns comparatively, or, at the least, provide the foot in the door for someone to come along at a later time and apply mountains control where once there stood a molehill measure.
Another current example everyone ought to be able to easily equate: Gun control measure.
There's this little thing called the 2nd amendment which prohibits the government from encroaching on our right to arm ourselves. Of course, we allowed the government to encroach at one point in time and, now, we're having to fight back that mountain which looms, waiting to crash over this debate like an ocean wave. Most, on the 2A side, understand that, in order to stop a few crazies from abusing freedom, you have to limit freedom across the board, well, every board but the one where the government enforcers are standing - that one gets to keep the right to be armed - and we're back to the reason for 2A's existence.
The founding fathers understood tyrannical governments and the danger an unarmed citizenry would be in without the natural right to protect one's person and property. The problem for homeschoolers is that, despite state laws and some court rulings, what the founding fathers (or anyone else of that age) couldn't have anticipated, with the Bill of Rights, was the attack on the fabric of society through the unraveling of the nuclear family as the highest governing institution for individualism.
While the blue haired, genderqueer, pussy hat wearing feminazis' think they're the bastions of individualism because they've broken free from societal constructs of normality, they're, in reality, the activists tearing down the legal ability to remain individually free.
"We have to fix the possibility that an individual might abuse the freedom of being armed", and "we have to fix the possibility that an individual might abuse the freedom of parents to raise their children how they see fit." Because there are victims - real life, break my heart, make me sick to my stomach to think about it, victims - when individuals choose to abuse freedom.
And, that's a fact.
I'm so glad that one child got free and had the presence of mind to get help. And, those two, adults, deserve every last minute of punishment they get, if they're as guilty as it certainly appears they are, for abusing those sweet kids. I'm disgusted. Sickened by it. As disgusted and sickened by that as I was when Stephen Paddock shot into the audience of country music fans this past summer in Vegas, killing 58+. It's disgusting, but it's the dark side reality of freedom, and freedom is the greater value.
The arguments rage about what we can and can't prevent through "controls", "accountability", and/or outright "elimination" in the area of guns and, soon to be, the area of parental rights in education, or just parental rights in general.
While I understand the motivation behind "we must do something", when I hear: "If we could save just one family of kids like the Turpins, shouldn't we??" My answer has to be, "No", because the Turpin parents are individuals who made an evil decision to abuse our freedom in order to abuse their children. The only way to "fix" that is to punish the individual for their individual abuse of the general freedom and the rights of others, in this case, their children.
See, what [organization in question], and a lot of others, want is to make homeschools somehow accountable through forcing us to plug into the very systems we've removed ourselves from because we've seen how it doesn't serve us well, and we want to use our freedom to try a different path.
Said organization, wants homeschoolers to be accountable to certified teachers and forced to see pediatricians for the yearly visit, and they want these things to be national, universal, federal requirements.
"What's wrong with that?", you ask, "Those couple of forms of accountability don't seem too irrational."
Well, maybe, not to you, probably because you're already unquestioningly submitting to them. However, a few of us have multiple, good reasons, and multiple examples of abuse within those systems, which have driven us down other paths.
What happens when my certified teacher, who they want me to see for abuse accountability my children don’t need, does the other job she's there to do? Namely, checking my children's academic progress through what lens? Her pedagogical training? Through what the government says my children need to learn and when they need to have it learned? You see the problem there don't you? Or, maybe you don't.
Maybe you don't understand that many parents remove their children from public schooling not just for religious reasons, or for reasons of disability/advanced intelligence, but because they see the flaws in the very narrow pedagogical training of western education (especially in current training to teach to the "shift" the education reform is making) and the flaws in the very system of schooling itself. There are many of us homeschooling is such a completely didn't way from the way it's approached through our schooling system (which is why private school is often no more appealing than public), that to be made accountable to one, whose frame of reference for achievement is that system's parameters, would undermine the very purpose of what we're trying to accomplish with our freedom.
I, for another instance, stopped taking my children to yearly wellness checks.
Oh, the horror. I know.
My first sign of weariness over the medical profession, and its capacity for abuse, was that time the Boston Children's Hospital seized Justina Pelletier from her parents and it took over a year, and a court order, for her parents to get her back. Do you know where we, here in Maine, get sent if there's a real problem our hospitals aren't equipped to manage? I'll give you one guess.
Then, and back to gun rights, there is that whole narrative, and Obama executive order, to tie mental illness to gun control measures. I know, I know. Trump overturned it. I wonder what Oprah will do in 2020? You know what our pediatrician's office now screens for in every child, 12 years and older? Depression. The moment our pediatrician feels like questioning the mental health of my children, that goes on a permanent record which could be used to remove their second amendment rights later on. Tell me, what teen doesn't occasionally feel depressed? And, see the story of Justina if you're tempted to say doctors don't abuse their power.
Then, there's the realization that, apart from real health concerns, humans are generally healthy, children in particular. Yearly wellness check-ups are basically data collection that we pay for ... um, no thanks.
Thankfully, I have a good, established relationship with an awesome pediatrician who knows that I'll bring my kids in if, there's any problem I can't manage. She knows it, because she's seen me do it. She's seen me research the crap out of stuff and try every natural remedy before coming to her and, on the occasions I’ve had to come, she's seen me take every necessary step thereafter.
And, herein lies the issue, I have to type that out and try to convince you, as I had to show her, that I'm a good parent, that I'm innocent because, otherwise, there is a presumed potential guilt in all of "We have to fix it". But, we're supposed to be a country of presumed innocence unless there is real, quantifiable, reason to question otherwise. We're not supposed to be looking for quantifiable evidence of guilt in each other. We're not supposed to have to submit ourselves to systems of governing accountability acting as the arbiters of what constitutes innocence and guilt.
How much of what I do sounds kind of similar to Turpins? The answer is, a lot, well, except for that whole part where they chained their children to furniture, choked and beat them, fed them once a day, and only allowed them to bathe once or twice a year. That is where our similarities end. But, because they did those things, our other similarities - in areas that make us both, similarly, and legally, unconventional - now make you squirm a little when you hear me talk about our homeschool experience.
"What about those children who are abused and killed?! Don't you care?"
Yes. I do. And, I'm about to talk about one of the Christian truths that formed part of the basis for individual liberty. Hell. It's "hateful" and "hate speech" when we're talking about gay marriage, but when a pedophile gets busted or people like the Turpins get found out, it's amazing how many people there are, on places like twitter, openly embracing the concept. I almost died laughing at all the wishes for Manson's safe trip there, mid November last year.
"We have to fix-it" comes from a lack of belief that there is a supreme God who will judge and punish what is done here in secret. We all recognize that we can't undo what's been done to the Turpin children so - and without a faith in God and his holiness, which makes him supremely capable of judging righteously the deeds of men- we feel we have to do something to prevent anyone else from doing something like that again.
I care, and I hate, along with you all, what was done to those children, but I believe in Hell and I believe in a just God, and I know that infringing on parent's rights - the majority of whom will deal well with their children, even if you don't agree that how they're managing them is "right" - in hopes of, maybe, stopping someone else's abuse, is a misguided attempt at doing what God will do infinitely better.
That belief holds the idea that justice awaits. First, in the quote: "Be sure your sin will find you out." (Number 32:23). Sin finds us out, sometimes through a whistleblower and sometimes through our own sloppiness. Beyond that, a Christian believes that what God sees done in the dark, he often has a hand in pushing into the sunlight. The Turpins' sin found them out. How many cases of abuse get found out? Well, all the ones we know about, and because we know, they face justice among us. And, the ones we know about after it's too late to save the child(-ren) or the ones we'll never know about? God knows and he will judge. The faith in justice for the few allows for the freedom of many who don't need to face it.
I care, but if "fixing-it" if, "doing something to prevent it" means encroaching on the freedom of all to, possibly, catch the few then, my answer is "No", we shouldn't try to "fix-it" with prevention, because we'll make a bigger mess trying.
The question, then, becomes: which is your greater value? Freedom or safety? You can’t have them both. And, since we know that we can’t provide absolute safety, even when we take away freedom to attain it, we should keep freedom for all, and accept that some will abuse it, but that justice will, eventually, be meted out, one way or the other.
I walked my daughter through the thought process. I told her what I thought of what the Turpins did, and why I responded, at first, the way I did. The sarcastic snappiness of my response was from the understanding that what was an individual’s evil choice would spur an immediate jump to discussions revolving around removing the freedom of all to try and prevent the abuse of some. I asked her what would we collectively need to do to stop some individuals from doing bad? She understood the implications, and she chose freedom as her response. She chose to accept that some will do bad.
And, that was the value I needed her to get out of the sad case of the Turpin children and their parent’s individual choice to abuse our freedom. It’s the lesson she needed, because the national conversation went straight away (HERE and HERE) to "What we must do", because that’s the “fix-it” world she’s growing up in, and the abuse of her freedom and presumed innocence is far more frequent and will negatively impact her far more than what happened with the Turpin children ever will.
And, yeah. I stayed up all night writing this, and I’ll probably sleep the day away to recover.
#notacrime #Imnotabusingmychildren
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