The Object of the Exercise

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Have you been caught behind a school bus recently?

They are hard to miss – and not because they’re really big and very yellow. In my area – and probably yours, too – they also have constantly flashing white strobe lights on the roof.

Apparently, there are people out there who miss the big and the yellow.

It will probably not be long before a man runs – or rather, fast walks – in front of the things, waving a red flag. Perhaps they will have him set out a bunch of orange cones around the perimeter of the bus at each stop, too, before the passengers are allowed to disembark.

Which, by the way, they are not allowed to do until the bus has stopped exactly next to the driveway of each passenger. Even if the next kid’s house is 20 yards away, that kid is not allowed to get off and walk the 20 yards to his house. He must sit and wait while the driver goes through the kabuki opera of stopping (then waiting for a moment to make sure the bus is actually, certainly and for-sure stopped) extending those Stop sign flappers that extend from the flanks with the red flashing lights (syncopating with the white strobes on the roof) and only then opening the door and waiting some more for the process of his next-door neighbor to get off the bus, the doors to close, the flappers to fold flush against the flanks and the bus to creep forward the 20 yards to his house, where the show is repeated.

What a depressing, strangulating, suffocating, tedious ordeal.

For the kids, I mean.

But it is an excellent prep school for their intended future role as good (compliant, submissive) show-no-initiative adults. The type of ant-human needed for the ant hill that America has become.

There is always a method to that which is perceived as madness.

When it comes to government – which, never forget, is nothing more than a small minority of your fellow citizens who have got hold of the power to make you do what they say – there is always a reason for that which seems bizarre to you.

Control, for its own sake.

Well, for their sake.

The diminution of autonomy.

Well, your autonomy.

This process has been going on a long time, herky jerky. But it has picked up speed lately – over the past 30 years especially. The extent of the micromanagement, the shriveling of our personal space, is remarkable.

Back to the kids.

Once upon a time in the great hazy past, kids routinely walked (and on their own) to school, if their neighborhoods were within a reasonable distance of the school. This being say a quarter mile or less. It was convenient for all – and most of all, empowering. For the kids. They experienced a brief taste of independence, of their future adulthood.

They learned to negotiate streets, to be conscious of traffic. To allow enough time to get from home to school.

And – much better – after school, they were free.     

The bell rang, the doors of the school opened and kids poured out of the bleak brick-sided prisons and went wherever the wanted. With friends, to their houses. Whatever.

They were free, on their own, until supper.

Nowadays, this is not allowed. The kids are either required to board the mobile prison transport (you know, the bus) or wait on line for their parents’ minivan or SUV to make its way to the head of the car conga to pick them up.

Even if their house is less than a quarter-mile away.

To walk is not allowed.

To do so without adult supervision is – literally – criminal.

The “child protective services” will be sicced on any adult who permits this. This includes the now-heinous crime of permitting one’s child to play in the backyard… one’s own backyard. If an adult is not actually, directly supervising at all times. Which you’d be wise to do given the now-ubiquitous busybody-ism that characterizes every suburb. Rest assured that any child seen walking alone or playing alone (even in his own back yard) will trigger alarums in the rancid cerebrum of a neighborhood frau, who will dial 911. Hut! hut! hut!

This will absolutely ruin your day.

Kids are allowed no independence, for the obvious reason that the America-in-process does not want independent people. It wants dependent, helpless – and most of all, fearful – people.

People who have been trained to wait until they are told what to do – and to accept being told what to do as the normal course of life. To accept at the level of deep conditioning that others – those who operate the government – have the right to tell them what to do. Without, of course, ever consciously entertaining that proposition. To react appropriately. Like a schnauzer who has been trained to not jump on the sofa.

When, as in my own childhood, kids were often left to their own devices – and expected to learn how to negotiate life – they tended to grow into adults with some sense of independence. They tended to not like being regimented because they realized at a young age that they didn’t need to be. That they could walk perfectly well on their own to the school. That it was possible to walk the 20 yards from a common bus stop to their own house. They rode bicycles to their friends’ houses… without wearing a helmet.

It was fun to be a kid because kids int hose days were not treated like kids with Down Syndrome, as today.

Mom and dad, meanwhile, were free to go about their lives and not made into proxy wards of the state whose job has (today) become conditioning their kids to be angst-addled neurotics obsessed with safety-uber-alles, just like them.

Once upon a not-so-long-time ago, getting a ride home in the car was a kind of unusual occurrence. A special treat. Sometimes, your friend’s mom or dad gave you a ride. No seat belts were buckled, either. You jumped in, you jumped out.   

I see parents today strapping their kids into “safety” seats for a less-than-five-minute hope to the elementary school, surrounded by six or more air bags and  haze of fear. Of everything. Risk lurks everywhere. It is depressing, like a fresh grave at the cemetery. It takes at least as long to strap the kid in (and out) as the trip itself. And what must this process be doing to the kids?

It is training.

Getting them ready.

To submit, to accept.

Passivity. indifference.

Today’s kids are tomorrow’s adult Eloi in larval form. The Jesuit psychopath Ignatious Loyola is said to have let slip the following insight about his training protocol:

“Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.“

Indeed.

The government – your neighbors, with the titles, and of course the guns – have taken this lesson to heart.

Think about it the next time you’re caught behind a school bus.