Unfortunately, all too often it is common sense and individual liberty that get trampled underfoot: a student gets suspended under the school's zero tolerance policy against drugs for chewing on a Certs breath mint; a kindergartner is suspended under the school's zero tolerance policy against violence for playing a make-believe game of cops and robbers using his finger as a gun; and a school trip to see "A Christmas Carol" is cancelled because of the school's zero tolerance policy against anything that is in any way offensive.
What's worse, the motto today seems to be "When in doubt, throw it out."
At the slightest hint of trouble, government officials (and corporations) are inclined to chuck anything that might be objectionable. So whereas Mark Twain's classic "Huckleberry Finn" used to at least make the list of banned books every year, it now rarely even makes an appearance on school reading lists. It has been scrubbed out of existence.
Zero tolerance policies are ultimately about programming people into compliance with the government's dictates.
The government doesn't care about Christmas. It cares about control.
By government, I'm talking about the entrenched government bureaucracy that really calls the shots no matter what political party controls Congress and the White House.
Never forget, the police state wants us to be a nation of snowflakes, snitches and book burners: a legalistic, intolerant, elitist, squealing bystander nation willing to turn on each other and turn each other in for the slightest offense.
All of the petty sniping over Melania Trump's red-themed Christmas decorations?
That plays perfectly into the Deep State's efforts to keep the citizenry at odds with each other and incapable of presenting a united front against the threats posed by the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.
You want to know why this country is in the state it's in?
As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the answer is the same no matter what the problem might be, whether it's the economy, government corruption, police brutality, endless wars, censorship, falling literacy rates, etc.: every one of these problems can be sourced back to the fact that "we the people" have stopped thinking for ourselves and relinquished responsibility for our lives and well-being to a government entity that sees us only as useful idiots.
The Greek philosopher Socrates believed in teaching people to think for themselves and in the free exchange of ideas. For his efforts, he was accused of corrupting the youth and was put to death. However, his legacy lived on in the Socratic method of teaching: posing questions that help young and old discover the answers by learning to think for themselves.
Now even the Socratic method is in danger of extinction.
As Rod Serling, creator of the classic sci-fi series Twilight Zone and one of the most insightful commentators on human nature, once observed, "We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think."
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