Parenting and World Government

I read an article recently about an American Supreme Court ruling that schools need to respect the right of parents to control the information their kids are exposed to on the grounds of religious freedom, thus giving people the right to say "In the name of my religion, I'm extremely homophobic and want to raise an ignorant, homophobic child."

So now American public schools run by LOCAL jurisdictions and funded by mostly LOCAL and state taxes have to accommodate an unfunded mandate from the federal government to tweak curriculum in accordance with PARENTAL requests in the name of religion and not because they have a NOTE from a Rabbi or Priest or Khalif.

And I'm guessing that if I had a school-aged child and went and said "I'm not part of an organized religion, but I believe in astrology and reincarnation and so I'm a spiritual person and I would also like to exercise my PARENTAL RIGHT to insist the schools only teach homophobic curriculum to MY children per this Supreme Court ruling." the answer would be "Bwa ha ha, NO."

I homeschooled my children under California state law for some years and recently left a comment about state laws and mandatory education for children and reporting requirements. I know from Valorie King, founder of tagfam.org, that, no, parents can't just do any durn thing they want with their kids, not even educationally, and there are laws to protect the rights of the CHILD because children grow up and become adult citizens, so saying parents can do any durn thing they want means the "state" -- AKA other people in the country -- have to clean up the mess when some nutter fails to adequately prepare their children to be functional adults in this world.

If you're a good and responsible parent with special needs kids, state laws can be an intimidating aggravation and extra step you need to accommodate while trying to figure out how to best prepare difficult kids for adulthood, but the state cannot make laws solely for the good parents. They mostly need to make laws that account for bad people, including bad parents, because that's the garbage that comes back to bite them in the butt sooner or later.

Ideally, laws don't actively trample parents doing their best under difficult circumstances while trying to address the bad parents. There should be options for allowing parental latitude.

Homeschooling is one such option. If you are devoutly religious and object to content of public school curriculum, you can send the child to private school or you can homeschool and ideally homeschooling isn't overly burdensome bureaucratically while still giving the state the tools it needs to say "Nope. Not educating your kids at all and calling it homeschooling doesn't fly."

I've written elsewhere that I suspect that some of Donald Trump's nutty sounding stated goals are probably an indication that he believes planet Earth needs World Government but I don't agree with how he is going about it. I think he's trying to add other countries as US states thinking we already have the political framework and if you just keep adding states, eventually the entire planet is voting for a president of the US and there you go: One united world under one government.

I don't think that works. The US is currently a MESS and can't solve it's OWN problems, in part because our federal government layer has grown into a cancer eating our states and municipalities.

Originally, the federal government was envisioned as primarily a means to provide for the common defense. US states are so named because they were envisioned as separate nations, not another layer above city and county but below nation levels of political organization.

I believe that government is best which governs least and our federal government is trying to micromanage things in a way that has this country on track to disintegrate into multiple smaller countries. The federal government is FAILING to say "Not our department. We draw the line at X. That's a local problem and a local decision and if it's not crossing some line into federal territory in some fashion, you folks need to decide that yourselves because we are not qualified to make local decisions and this is inappropriate."

They are gobbling up resources, demanding more power to intrude at increasingly local scales and historically they insisted "x, y, and z are not toes we want to step on. Don't ASK us to get involved in that."

My kids tell me I'm an excellent parent and they are so glad I raised them. That doesn't mean I never made mistakes.

Lots of parents are extremely controlling about food in ways that are frequently not healthy and can leave kids with eating disorders. I have a son with TWO conditions that can land a kid in inpatient (hospitalized for potentially WEEKS) treatment for eating issues and he has no such issues.

When he was about two years old and I was frustrated he wasn't eating and was scared he would get CPS called on me because he was skinny and sickly, I stood over him and made him eat his mac and cheese so I could go run errands. Not thirty minutes later, he stood with one foot in his toddler safety seat and one foot on my jacket laying across the truck seat and puked it all back up very memorably all over me and my jacket and I encouraged him to puke on the jacket rather than elsewhere in the truck.

So after that I made it my mission to make it possible for him to eat and leave it up to HIM to decide most of the time with very rare exceptions. I did insist he go to Burger King with me once as a teen and told him "I'm not asking" because he wasn't eating and wasn't sleeping and I felt certain he would go to sleep if he got some food into him. I was correct.

But I mostly made sure that stuff he LIKED that I approved of as adequately healthy was consistently available and adequately convenient and under his control so that when he FELT like eating, he could eat enough of stuff that would adequately nourish him.

So I'm confident if my sorry ass can figure that out for a severely handicapped child with both ASD sensory issues AND a deadly medical condition interfering with his appetite, then the fucking federal government can sort this if they WANT to.

And I believe SUCCESSFUL world government is likely to be a bottom up emergent phenomenon rather than a top down approach. Assuming his goal is world government, Donald Trump is currently pursuing a top down approach with him at the top and everyone else supposed to do as they are told as additional pieces of HIS country when he can't adequately govern what he's got as is.

The European Union and ASEAN are an additional layer of governance above local nations and my understanding is they have limited scope of power and concerns that they address. They do not act like the current US Federal government, as if they replace local power structures and decision making authority.

I learned as a parent that me being older and wiser and smarter and better educated did NOT mean I knew what was best for my child in all instances. My CHILD had LOCAL information I lacked that he couldn't adequately articulate at age two, like "My tummy hurts and I don't FEEL like eating."

So I worked at using all my adult education and knowledge and power over his little life to control the foods he was able to access and then let him DECIDE what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat and he's never had to get therapy for eating disordered behavior that can be life threatening.

ASD kids with sensory issues can become averse to taking food by mouth. Children with his medical condition can end up on a feeding tube surgically implanted in the side of their abdomen and averse to taking anything by mouth. This is a potentially deadly situation where a child will not eat and can starve.

Locals need to have sufficient power to decide appropriate ways to handle local issues and higher levels of government need to limit their decisions as much as possible to "How do we get the pieces to play together?" such as interstate commerce.

The Mann Act is a big deal because if you kidnap someone across state lines, now it's under federal jurisdiction, not state jurisdiction, and they can throw Federal Marshalls at the problem and etc. It's a "Ooh, you don't want to go there!" thing and that should be how all federal stuff is handled: Please kindly don't fuck up so bad that it merits federal intervention. You don't want that and neither do WE.

When my oldest was eight years old, we moved into an old duplex and there was a basement with a low ceiling and my washer and dryer were downstairs in ugly unfinished space and there was one finished room. Again, low ceiling and not a great space, but we decided to make it a play room for the kids who were elementary school age and unbothered by the low ceiling.

We stuck a TV down there in the corner but we were renting so we couldn't drill holes anywhere and I'm standing there talking out loud about "Well, I guess we need to buy a hundred feet of cable and run it around the outside of the room and blah blah blah..." when my eight year old innocently asks "But what about the hole?"

What hole? The one in the wall behind the TV that a pipe or something goes through.

So I look at the hole and it's workable to run the 25 feet of cable we already own through the hole.

Yes, I felt stupid for a few seconds but it's one of my proudest moments as a parent and one of my son's favorite anecdotes about what a good parent I am because a lot of parents, including his father, don't like kids "questioning" them, as if ASKING a question is the same as "questioning their authority."

Writ large, this translates to governmental bodies being very authoritarian and lower levels of people in power being intimidated and feeling bullied and it being extremely hard to say "Dude, I think I know something pertinent to the decision making process."

Donald Trump says incredibly idiotic stuff, like complimenting a Black African guy from an English speaking country on his good English on camera for all the world to see, and doesn't want people to embarrass him or disrespect him etc etc etc when he's really not behaving in a respectable fashion, a fashion worthy of respect. He's not earning respect.

Planet Earth has eight billion people on it. It's not possible for one person to know enough about everyone and everything such that a world leader is qualified to make excellent and wise local decisions. 

The ONLY way we get to an actual FUNCTIONAL world government is by working out what reasonably is under the jurisdiction of the world government and what needs to be handled locally within reasonable parameters such that those local decisions play well with other jurisdictions around them.

And Donald Trump trying to bully Canada and Greenland into becoming US states isn't looking to ME like a reasonable path forward on sorting out such questions.