Posted on 09/22/2014 10:58:18 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Children's book author Kari Anne Roy was recently visited by the Austin police and Child Protective Services for allowing her son Isaac, age 6, to do the unthinkable: Play outside, up her street, unsupervised.
He'd been out there for about 10 minutes when Roy's doorbell rang. She opened it to find her son —and a woman she didn't know. As Roy wrote on her blog HaikuMama last week, the mystery woman asked: "Is this your son?"
I nodded, still trying to figure out what was happening.
"He said this was his house. I brought him home." She was wearing dark glasses. I couldn't see her eyes, couldn't gauge her expression.
"You brought..."
"Yes. He was all the way down there, with no adult." She motioned to a park bench about 150 yards from my house. A bench that is visible from my front porch. A bench where he had been playing with my 8-year-old daughter, and where he decided to stay and play when she brought our dog home from the walk they'd gone on.
"You brought him home... from playing outside?" I continued to be baffled.
And then the woman smiled condescendingly, explained that he was OUTSIDE. And he was ALONE. And she was RETURNING HIM SAFELY. To stay INSIDE. With an ADULT. I thanked her for her concern, quickly shut the door and tried to figure out what just happened.
What happened? The usual. A busybody saw that rarest of sights—a child playing outside without a security detail—and wanted to teach his parents a lesson. Roy might not have given the incident a whole lot more thought except that shortly afterward, her doorbell rang again.
This time it was a policewoman. "She wanted to know if my son had been lost and how long he'd been gone," Roy told me by phone. She also took Roy's I.D. and the names of her kids.
That night Isaac cried when he went to bed and couldn't immediately fall asleep. "He thought someone was going to call the police because it was past bedtime and he was still awake."
As it turns out, he was almost right. About a week later, an investigator from Child Protective Services came to the house and interrogated each of Roy's three children separately, without their parents, about their upbringing.
"She asked my 12 year old if he had ever done drugs or alcohol. She asked my 8-year-old daughter if she had ever seen movies with people's private parts, so my daughter, who didn't know that things like that exist, does now," says Roy. "Thank you, CPS."
It was only last week, about a month after it all began, that the case was officially closed. That's when Roy felt safe enough to write about it. But safe is a relative term. In her last conversation with the CPS investigator, who actually seemed to be on her side, Roy asked, "What do I do now?"
Replied the investigator, "You just don't let them play outside."
There you have it. You are free to raise your children as you like, except if you want to actually give them a childhood. Fail to incarcerate your child and you could face incarceration yourself.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
Solzhenitsyn
“How is that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
I remember. Yeah, we were gone from sun up to sun down during the summer, just to make sure no one would find some chores for us to do. When I was 5ish I loaded my buddies into my mom's VW Beetle and drove to the dime store (and the swedish smorgasbord, yum!). I remember when carrying a pocket knife was a mark of manly virtue and how the school teacher would ask one of us to cut something (we never questioned why they didn't just pull out their own knife). I remember learning how to start up the campfire for breakfast without burning the prairie down.
That was the Texas (and Austin!) I remember.
I’m also thinking that “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” from GS also applies pretty well.
Liberals allowed to run wild complete their evolution to National Socialism eventually. And then people die.
Actually, they did. But people committing violence against children were more likely to end up dead without the benefit of a trial. Those that did make it to trial usually ended up convicted with a death sentence. The turning point where things went downhill was probably the '70s during the Carter administration.
My husband has three girls from his first marriage. When they would go out on the ranch as teenagers they always carried a pistol with them. I’m sure the ninny from Austin would poop herself if she heard about this.
You can't discount that predators will cloak themselves in the mantle of respectable bureaucracy. Look at the BTK killer for example.
We could come back for lunch around noon...then out again we went. Had to be back by 5.
This started when I was 6 and my older sister was 7.
By the time we were teenagers, the entire neighborhood of kids would be up and out past midnight, every night of the summer.
It was cool enough to enjoy after the sun went down.
And, nobody rolled the windows of their cars up at night either.
It was not unusual to forget to lock the front door...but by then we were starting to think of such things.
Yea those are days long gone by. It’s only when reflecting upon the past that I truly realize how far gone our society is.
And as a defense attorney (and former prosecutor) I know the extent of the dangers presented by predators on so many levels, so my kids are far more sheltered.
That said, we do our best to teach our kids how to safely deal with people (including cops and CPS workers) without scaring them to death.
We also home school our kids, so that adds an extra element of disfavor from the government.
Our two year old has Downs Syndrome and the older kids love him so much and they take turns watching over and playing with him while my wife is teaching the other kid.
It works out pretty well.
But it’s scary when we let them out to play. There are so many ways that a nanny state CPS worker or cop can make your life miserable over the smallest thing.
Fortunately my reputation keeps such figures off my porch. I’ve been in court with most of them and they don’t want any extra. I just hope it stays that way.
No to mention I was always packing. Early on a pellet gun then after I was about 11 a .22 or 20 gauge.
Had ENOUGH Yet ?
I used to leave the house after breakfast on my bike with my .22 bolt action rifle and be gone all day at 10 years old in 1970.
Never got in trouble,or shot anybody until I went in the military.
I turned out alright. My boys turned out alright except they had atv’s to ride and 10-22’s. Thank God we lived in the country.
My baby girl could strip and reassemble an AK at 8 and still likes them better than AR-15’s She’s currently a Capt. in the USMC.
At 11 she got her 1st deer. 1st day of archery season she shot an 8 pointer with my 7mm Mag from the kitchen window about dawn.
I made her dress it out. She didn’t bat an eye. Then I changed the sheets. I’m a horrible parent I guess.
What is Heritage Defense?
Being of the Greatest Generation’ and WWII vets, my older brother and I often were out of town either on the Mississippi River that bordered the town on the East or off at other places outside of town. We often spent our days ‘exploring’ far off places. I don’t see such happy days available to the youth of today. I tend to believe the change/breakdown occurred after WWII when the ‘feely-goody’ crowd came on scene and the crud of the world (along with the many good)were allowed into the USA. It is still happening today so I see the possibility of even worse conditions. Of course I probably should not be so cynical because the USA is now a haven for good times with it’s ballgames, porno movies and stage shows, and fun time homo sexuals, etc.
Yeah, because they’re more worried about allowing the criminally perverted have their freedom than allowing our children to have childhoods.
So, some strange woman abducted a six year old child within sight of his home?
http://www.heritagedefense.org
“Social services is an anonymous tip from your door. Have attorneys ready to defend your family 24/7 by joining today.”
“Protect Our Children. Preserve Our Freedoms. Defend Our Heritage.
A war for the biblical family is being waged in America. Today is the day for Christian families to unite and stand.”
Haha. Good luck with that.
Train your six year-old offspring to Shelter-In-Place like a good little taxpayer.
In our town, which has many Arabs, the Arab children are on the go, and out playing all day. On bikes, playing soccer, running around. They remind me of the American children of the 50’s and 60’s etc. They are not like the pasty faced American sissies.
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