THRASHING

“If your child displays extreme irritability, anger, and frequent, intense temper outbursts, they may benefit from being screened for disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD), which is fairly new diagnosis.”

“The symptoms of DMDD resemble those of other childhood disorders, notably attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and bipolar disorder in children. DMDD first appeared as a disorder in DSM-5 in 2013. Little is known about its course or etiology.”

“DSM-5 includes several additional diagnostic criteria which describe the duration, setting, and onset of the disorder: the outbursts must be present for at least 12 months and occur in at least two settings (e.g. home or at school), and be severe in at least one setting. Symptoms appear before the age of ten, and diagnosis must be made between ages 6 and 18.  The diagnosis for DMDD should not be made for the first time before 6, or after the age of 18. This new diagnosis was implemented to help children who, although may have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, their explosive rages were not being treated properly.”  [i.e. wrong meds.]

This is taxonomy medicine, the 19th century approach to the unknown, an impulse to make lists based on observation and subjective judgments of the variations.  It is met and encouraged by profit-linked pharmacopia, lists that match the “diagnosis” with the approved pill.

But I know of whole categories of society where the children and some of the adults, (in fact, I myself) have extreme irritability, anger, and frequent, intense temper outbursts.  I’m a hermit — the cats are the only ones who really know about my fits and their strategy is not pills — it’s avoidance.  On the reservation next to me, these kids are easy to find.  In fact, they are not well-hidden even in the little white ag towns that are supposed to be havens of normality and love.  

Nevertheless, I suggest that the treatment AND the cause is cultural and iatrogenic (at least partly caused by the present treatment).  Also, closely related to the variations among the array of things like painkillers, antacids, cough syrups, and detergents on our supermarket shelves.  The cause and cure are locked together so tightly that it’s very hard to just dump both unless one goes to the base cause: over-reliance on one-to-one understandings of symptoms and cures presenting options that are not suppression.

This morning my newsfeeds showed a Mexican woman sitting in water while being suffocated with a plastic bag.  My guess is that sitting in water has something to do with body temp extremes and something to do with electricity.  Torture is meant to take the victim to the edge of homeostasis where their survival is in doubt.  The homeostasis may include the ability of the brain to process and the damage may persist after the action stops.

But it wasn’t my mother or sister or lover being tortured so my empathy was thinned.  No intimate categories in my life look like that woman, except for all my Blackfeet, Cree, and Metis friends.  If that woman survives, my premise is that she (and her children) will suffer from extreme irritability, anger, and frequent, intense temper outbursts.  For those people there are two strategies: change their society or get the hell out.

If children in white, adequately prosperous, respectable communities are showing these symptoms, there must be something going on that we are not recognizing.  Or that we don’t know what to do about and so deny.  If we were taking a taxonomic approach, we might say:  broken families; unhappy jobs; global shifting of weather, economics; substance abuse; confrontational politics;  unwanted children.  Abuse begets abuse which makes a cycle but  there has to be a hub and a pathway — a point of attachment and a way to go.

But I’m wandering.  The subject is disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, part of a suite of trouble-making behaviors from kids who just won’t get along.   Maybe not just kids.

“On National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day May 5, NIMH is hosting a Twitter chat on DMDD and severe irritability from 12-1 p.m. ET with expert Dr. Ellen Leibenluft. Please follow our tweets on NIMH’s Twitter page. To ask questions, you must have a Twitter account and include the hashtag #NIMHchats in every tweet. If you won't be able to make the chat, you can submit your questions in advance. You may submit questions via email NIMHpress@nih.gov, Twitter using #NIMHchats, or NIMH's Facebook page.”

This “symptom” justifies the dedication of a day, an expert, and an e-conference.  It seems aimed at parents and teachers of “nice” kids — or at least kids who should be nice, but aren’t — spotted here and there around the country.  So from my chosen vantage, I testify that there are whole classes and categories of kids where this is the norm, not the exception.  They show extreme irritability, anger, and frequent, intense temper outbursts because they are thrashing.  “Thrashing” can be a technical term, a biological description of a trapped creature who cannot find a way out and whose body, abandoning thought, has resorted to random extremes on the chance that they might accidentally trip some kind of release or tear something loose.

Thrashing can also refer to beating someone at a drastic level to punish them or force obedience, usually accompanied by a high level of incoherent emotion.

“In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer's virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse. The situation may continue indefinitely until the underlying cause is addressed. The term is also used for various similar phenomena, particularly movement between other levels of the memory hierarchy, where a process progresses slowly because significant time is being spent acquiring resources.”  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)

If I were confronted with a kid with extreme irritability, anger, and frequent, intense temper outbursts, my first strategy would be to look for what is trapping him or her.  If there is nothing that can be seen by an outsider, I would look for the inside traps, using empathy to discover why the kid believes he or she is trapped.  Is it memory, illusion, too much television?  Loss of identity?  Fear?  In my case it is most often having my identity and existence questioned, blocked, and belittled that makes me rave and smash and drive all cats under the bed.  I think a lot of nice people are doing it to their kids.

I also think the world is doing it to whole classes of kids so that they never feel safe, lose touch with who they are, and can’t see which way to go.  I see several relevant image tropes on television, repeat and repeat.  One is the little phalanx of heavily armed, dressed-in-black, SWAT teams moving as a unit to find and destroy.  Another is the corresponding small group of fleeing kids: hoodies, tennies, jeans, wheels.  And a third is a long machine-polished hallway with identical doors down both sides: hospital, school, jail.  The fourth is the infrastructure labyrinth of pipes and circuits with the occasional metal ladder leading up and — presumably — out.

It’s enough to make an alligator thrash.  Unless he can climb ladders.

PAIN AND SUFFERING

Hieronymus Bosch

Suffering is everywhere and yet it is so hard to understand even though the motivation is very high.  Pain seems to signal something urgently, and yet it often makes the sufferer close down and pull away from everyone.  Holding still, being quiet, trying not to feel, are not good strategies for finding the cause, but that’s what our instinct tells us.  Clench, clamp, chill.

Plain ordinary pain is one thing: step on a nail, slice your finger while meaning to cut something else, strike something hard -- these traumas are clearly what pain is for, to draw your attention and motivate an effort to clean, to bandage, to protect.  Yet the mechanisms that take the information to the brain and interpret trauma there can get “stuck”:  person whose damaged part has been removed (an amputated leg) so that it theoretically CAN’T hurt, goes right on hurting.

But pain is only one kind of suffering.  A few kinds of emotional anguish can be resolved by a second person who is willing to pay close attention and offer reassurance, interpretation, hope for a better future.  An impulse to help a suffering person is present in small children or in animals.  Loneliness, guilt, an inability to see a way out of a trap, a loss of hope for an end to troubles, an inability to imagine and therefore move towards something better --

these are the anguish that religious institutions promise to ease but sometimes only make worse.

Being virtuous doesn’t seem to have much to do with avoiding suffering, it seems to me.  Entirely innocent people suffer terrible trauma and disease and some of the treatments that can save lives also impose ghastly agony.  Consider burns where the treatment is excruciating, so much so that the nurses come to hate the patient because they hate hurting a person so much.

There’s no equivalence.  In the Eastern contexts, like Buddhism, the emphasis is not on escaping but on enduring, partly by withdrawing desire which can lead into the floating detachment of opium.

For some people suffering is handled with anger, rage rage against the injustice and sometimes that will kindle fires of adrenaline and other warrior molecules that have evolved to handle attacks, hunter’s focused obsession, the molecules that paralyze the mouse in the claws of the cat by putting it into a kind of victim’s euphoria.

A while back the media and script writers discovered displaced suffering and especially torture that does not hurt you but the person you care about,  because that’s also torture, courtesy of empathy.  For a while there were crime plots about girls kidnapped in pairs so that one could be tortured to make the other obey without scarring her with lesions.  So much about suffering is suggested to us by script writers rather than shrinks or docs or priests.

Do you remember Peter Pain?

Advertising puts in its two cents worth, suggesting pains of various kinds and then offering relief through meds or some other handy product.  

There is a kind of pain that is not pain, at least not in the way we understand it as physical discomfort, but rather a psychological state like depression or even just floating nothingness.  The body wants to be busy and the brain will begin to go haywire or lose function unless there’s a steady flow.  That’s the insane punishment of solitary confinement, which doesn’t have to be physical confinement.  Just solitary.

Understanding suffering need not be a matter of book learning, but of experience.  When I was working in a nursing home there were patients who were legitimately (with medical cause) suffering who begged for relief.  The nursing staff would begin to be annoyed with them and to talk about addiction, even withholding the drugs to punish the patient for not being cooperative.  

Addiction is the big Scare Threat, and yet these were sometimes dying people.  Addiction over-rides pain, but I’ve known people who WERE truly addicted in the worse kind of dependence on that escape, but who were still able to “kick” drugs.  It wasn’t easy and the kind of pain was the kind I dread most: nausea, the invasion within.  It was a decision of some kind on their part, maybe a desire for clarity.  A goal beyond suffering.

Another kind of suffering is invasion of space, maybe as simple as coming inside that invisible circle around a person or animal or even insect close enough to be a threat.  Do not walk up behind a person who has been in prison -- the circle around that person is BIG.  There are some people who either can’t perceive the line or have somehow learned to stand very close.  In some cultures people will stand close enough to feel and smell your breath.  Personally, I have to clench my teeth to be on a crowded bus.  Why do you think I’m in Montana!

But to have one’s body invaded through orifices or with a needle or blade through skin, even with a careful and well-lubricated instrument, can add insult and outrage to real pain.  If you’re an old woman having a pelvic, prepare for pain and then the comment “Oh, these elderly vaginas are like that.”  With no easing off.  

In France the insertion of urinary catheters into a male is done with anesthesia.  You can watch this procedure on YouTube.  I’ve watched on video a careful soothing nurse do this for a boy who couldn’t even hear her through his suffering.  The passing of body-generated “stones” -- kidney stones -- is screamingly painful.

There is fMRI study of pain:  http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/01/breakthrough-on-chronic-pain/  

Here’s a little jargon sample.  “Finding increased levels of the translocator protein in regions like the thalamus — the brain’s sensory gateway for pain and other stimuli — is important, since we know that this protein is highly expressed in microglia and astrocytes, the immune cells of the central nervous system, when they are activated in response to some pathologic event.”  The translation is that one can see pain on a computer screen.  It turned out to be quite consistent.

But it’s not possible to see suffering.  Suffering can be moral, which is to say invisible and relative.  I found a Swedish study that looked at women with borderline personality disorder.

“The main findings were that BPD patients suffer to an extent that is often unendurable, leading to deliberate self-harm (DSH) and suicide attempts to relieve suffering or just try to get away from it all (paper II). In study III the BPD patients showed significantly poorer quality-of-life (even physical) than normal population controls of comparable age. The suffering, suicide attempts, DSH and poor quality-of-life . . . put the patients in a position of voluntarily or involuntarily getting involved with psychiatric care. . . . On one hand, psychiatric professionals can add to the suffering by not being understanding and being disrespectful, on the other hand they can be helpful and relieve suffering by being respectful, understanding and validating. There was a clear relationship between the patients ́ experience of validation and the experience of being helped.” 

The third explicit goal of the study was to relieve the suffering of the counselor burdened with the task of helping!  I’ve heard more than one shrink complain about having to counsel women, interpreting them as shirking, childish, and boring.  The woman feels this, of course, and so do boys who go for help but instead get sighs over their intractability.  Myself, I find that a bad counselor is like a clumsy catheter inserter, an unjustifiable invader who only adds to the suffering.  I run.  I shirk.  I'm childish.

There are a few who enjoy authorized hurting of others.  At this point my psychiatric nurse friend will mention Dr. Mengele.  If you’re too young to remember him, use Google.  But brace yourself.

(to be continued)

GENES AND MEMES

Muhammadu Buhari won election over President Goodluck Jonathan

It appears to be a good time to think about the Yoruba of Nigeria since the long -time leader of this democracy has NOT been re-elected and has stepped down gracefully.   It's a little worrisome that Buhari is a former general and considered strict.  But now we have to think of everything in global terms, so I’ll give it a try.

The Yoruba were an oral culture that didn’t really cohere as a group except with their language until they developed in place “out of earlier Mesolithic Volta-Niger populations by the 1^st millennium BCE.  Oral history recorded under the Oyo Empire derives the Yoruba as an ethnic group to the 4^th century BCE with urban structures appearing in the 12^th century.  The urban phase of Ife before the rise of Oyo, c. 1100-1600 was a significant peak of political centralization in the 12^th described as a “golden age” of life.”

The Yoruba had a council of elders meant to prevent dictatorships.  Their own version of Robin Hood developed from farmer’s union network that went underground and opposed any domination by other groups.  Because one of their basic foods is yams, which contain a plant version of estrogen, there are many twins.  This wasn’t developed by the mysterious writer or writers of the Wikipedia entry.  But there is an echo in Navajo mythology.  Some cultures welcome the unusual and others try to destroy any variation.  The practice of the time was to pay off conquerers in war by handing over people to be slaves, but the Yoruba often just conquered some other weaker group and handed THEM over.  Still, some involuntarily contributed to the human Gumbo of the New World.

Igbo and Ora

This time period caught my eye.  In Europe this was the insanely chaotic and power-mad time that drives the plots and theories of “Game of Thrones.”  In a little essay derived from E.R. Truitt’s book, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” Truitt says, “Certain technologies are so characteristic of their historical milieux that they serve as a kind of shorthand. The arresting title credit sequence to the TV series "Game of Thrones" proclaims the show’s medieval setting with an assortment of clockpunk gears, waterwheels, winches and pulleys.” It appears that Rube Goldberg was a throwback to medieval times.  It was the age when every town had erected a clock tower (cock power).  The Valier Baptist church finally turned off their electronic version, but the Main Street crossroads put up a small version on a pillar in the corner park.  

The emperor's new nightingale

“Most [mechanisms] were designed and built beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom, in the cosmopolitan courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople and Karakorum. Such automata came to medieval Europe as gifts from foreign rulers, or were reported in texts by travellers to these faraway places.”  This is no doubt the origin of the idea of the clockwork God, who sets the world to ticking.  More to say about that paradigm in a later post.

Truitt emphasizes the idea that mechanical wonders imported to Europe impressed the people as magic, at root demonic.  Eventually that led to our idea of the contrasting sanctity of the wilderness and nature.

Mechanisms of pain and death.

Meanwhile in Medieval Europe there began a practice of horrific torture to enforce domination and a kind of fatalism about literally crushing individuals for the sake of the whole, which they claimed would continue after death.  Followers of the “Game of Thrones” story recoil at the episodes of torture, but the practices of Medieval Europe rival any examples elsewhere.  I once heard Vine Deloria, Jr. speak to the Portland, OR, City Group, elegant local elites who met for lunch.  He had just visited Powell’s and carried with him a book on Medieval torture which he described to us to make the point that the demonization of North American tribes by whites were quite equal to the white past.  So this suggests another line of inquiry:  why do people torture?  It seems we are now embarked on another Era of Torture, linked to prisons.

Having named an African 12^th century Yoruba culture and the parallel-in-time Medieval period in Europe which started out well but ended with the “Little Ice Age” that seriously damaged agriculture.   That sent adventurers searching for warmer climes.  This period include the years of plague:  “The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1346–53.”  

But the wave of disease that followed the arrival of Columbus in North America killed so many people that the drastic depopulation of the continent actually changed the climate.  Without humans and their fires, the carbon-generated warming was removed.  This is not popular information -- another line of investigation to be pursued.  

In the meantime I found this little time-table from Wikipedia, that dubious source, which seems at least a place to start thinking about pre-Columbian oral cultures, which turn out to have some written codes after all. I left in the links because most people know little about these groups.

• 900–1150: Pueblo II Era in the American Southwest
• 1000–1200: Early Mississippian culture in the Eastern Woodland1000–1200: Dresden Codex written and illuminated. This Yucatecan Mayan codex from Chichén Itzá is the earliest known surviving book from the Americas^[1
• 1000–1200: Acoma Pueblo and Old Oraibi are established, and become the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States^[2][3][4
• 1142: League of the Iroquois is founded, and the Great Law of Peace is adopted by the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida people.^[5] Wampum invented by Ayenwatha, which the Haudenosaunee used to record information.^[6]
• 1150–1350: Pueblo III Era in the American Southwest
• The Inuit Thule people largely displaced the old Dorset culture in Arctic Alaska.
• The most important city of the Mississippian culture of mound builders, Cahokia on the Mississippi River opposite modern Saint Louis, Missouri, reached its zenith with a population near 20,000 or perhaps 40,000. No other city in the United States would boast of such a large population until the early days of the Republic
• Natives of the American Southwest began building spectacular cliff dwellings housing hundreds of people in the later half of the century.

Again it appears that the 12^th century began with leaps forward in development and clustering of nomads, but by the 1400’s it is changing and then is ended by the shadow of plague. “ Etiology, the modern branch of science that deals with the causes of infectious disease, recognizes five major modes of disease transmission: airborne, waterborne, bloodborne, by direct contact, and through vector (insects or other creatures that carry germs from one species to another).  As humans began traveling over seas and across lands which were previously isolated, research suggests that diseases have been spread by all five transmission modes.”  Some writers will talk about diseases that result from animal domestication about ten thousand years ago (smallpox).  Both Asia and Africa have donated diseases to everyone else.  Disease is entwined with climate because it affects vectors like insects (mosquitoes are moving north now and bringing malaria with them).  But also famine or malnutrition, stigmatization that prevents access to care, and the simple deprivation and filth of poverty also encourage disease while loading people with what amounts to torture.

Erlich's crew in Greenland

At the eye doctor yesterday I was squinting my way through Gretel Erlich’s powerful and terrifying Harper’s magazine essay called “Rotten Ice,” meant to be a metaphor for the phenomenon of the melting of the ice cap of the planet.  The essay is taken from her book, "This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland."  The people in Greenland -- who exist on the narrowest of terms -- are being destroyed, one-by-one and as a culture.  

I drove to GF and back through the vast mono-crop landscape of wheat-raising on which several nations depend for their bread.  Only a few miles to the north on the higher land the growing season will sometimes be too short to ripen barley, which is tougher than wheat.  If one thinks about the ice-destruction in Greenland, the Irish potato famine, the Black Death in Europe, and the depopulation of the native peoples of North America, one can become very jumpy about the safety of these wheat crops, which are vulnerable to hail or even out-of-season snow, let alone some aberration of their genome or invading entity.

And yet “Green Land” was named that by a people who planted vineyards there in their time.  “A careful examination of the climate record reveals that Europe experienced a relative warm period known as the Medieval Warm Period (hereafter referred to as MWP) between the years 600 and 1150, cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460, a brief warming between the years 1460 and 1560, followed by cooling known as the Little Ice Age (hereafter referred to as LIA) between the years 1560 and 1850.”

The point is well-made by Erlich that both the planet and people are flexible, responsive, adaptable, complex and always changing.  Whatever the cause, the glaciers are melting according to forces and currents that are complex and often unseen, like the warmer water that causes the glacier to melt from the bottom, to “rot” until one day the ice structure collapses.  What that means in terms of civilization can’t be known yet, but it will be painful, support chaos, and winnow down the human beings -- not through their genes but through their memes, their behaviors.

Yoruba trader

TORTURE

To even consider the topic of torture is to invite intervention and rejection by others.  Even as protected and entitled a person as Elaine Scarry uses a framework to approach the subject.  More frank than most people are prepared to be, Scarry invokes Amnesty International, an institution generally agreed to be “good” beyond reproach.  “Beyond” is the right word because it is about writing letters from faraway people neither tortured nor torturing, acting on conscience and compassion for people they don't know.  The political motives are muted.

Scarry comes to the conclusion that there are three “simultaneous phenomena” in the structure of torture.

1.  the infliction of pain

2.  the objectification of the subjective attributes of pain ( to the suffering one, the instruments, the room of confinement, the furniture become instruments of pain)

3.  the translation of the objectified attributes of pain into the insignia of power (“I collapse your world so mine prevails.”)

She does not talk much about the commodification of torture by making it entertainment, though she mentions the historical crowds who watched beheading, hanging, truth-testing through ordeals, and so on.  

http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/tv/10966/

For weeks I’ve been working my way through the series called “Alias,” devised by J.J. Abrams, which at first seems to be about a strong beautiful woman who is powerful on the side of good.   She is regularly tortured, usually by electroshock, poison, or other technical and scientific means, but is only temporarily disoriented.  Her core personality is the conviction that she knows what is worthy and good and therefore must resist two “fathers” who move in and out of being good.  She loves her biological father, though he has killed her biological mother, and hates her boss-father, though he often acts to save her.  Both purport to want to protect her, but don’t.  Her boyfriend, understandably, has the perpetually worried face of a hound dog.

The show is fascinating because of the actress who shapeshifts her way through one wiggy disguise, after another.  CGI seems to have little to do with her transformations, though clever editing helps a lot.  The goal is not magic but stubborn thinking that preserves her sense of herself and her goal.  She is childlike in many ways, never quite violated in the way a grown woman might be.  The worst tortures are the ones inflicted on her friends because she is full of empathy for them.  This demographic is young adults.  The show is not realistic, but it is playing with some very real and troubling forces in our culture: the acceptance of violence, the resentment by men who would like to torture women, the idea that evil forces are supernatural, and so on.

Leave that.  Scarry’s premise is that torture renders the person inarticulate, in fact, collapses their ability to maintain a self in a world-context.  The book promises that by the end of the discussion, it will be shown that the self can claim itself back through creative expression, rebuilding a world.  This is certainly the premise of “talking cure” in PTSD cases.  If I can stand reading that long, I’ll report.

But I think one of the most powerful points Scarry makes has been made in other places as well:  that to say torture is a way of discovering information is a scam, a deception.  The thought-eliminating pain is supposedly inflicted in an oxymoronic way for the sake of “intel,” as “Alias” would style it.  Yet it denies the intelligence of the victim, motivates lying and distorting.  Scarry says, “It became clear that torture often is carried out when a country ceases to believe in itself, and therefore there is a certain element of spectacle involved in it.”  

Entertainment and mockery of the enemy (photos at Abu Graib) are disguised ways to assert importance and power when in fact it is not there.  (Nazi or Red Chinese spectacles.)  Torture is based on lying, not truth.  Scarry says, “In Chile the torture room was called the “blue-lit stage” and in the Philippines it was called the “production room” and in South Vietnam it was called the “cinema room.”  Torturers fancy themselves as J.J. Abrams?  Certainly they are denying the reality of the victim’s world.  They are denying compassion and love as efficacious guides to virtue.  The “information” idea is a self-deception on the part of the torturer -- if he or she needs one.  Once tortured, the victim knows nothing.

Water-boarding or space walking in a helmet filling with water?  This is stunt crew working on the actress for the sake of the story -- not the story itself.  So what is it?  Torture for art?

Now I’m leaving Scarry.  “Helpers” in our culture -- like doctors, social workers and teachers -- feel justified in closely questioning suffering people.  They want to know just exactly what kind of pain is being felt, they want to know “why” people feel that way, why they insist on their own world instead of the helper world.  Demanding that suffering people justify their self-damaging practices adds to the torture.  If they knew the cause, if they wanted to change, if they understood how to do it, why would they need the helpers?  Questioning them just underlines the power and entitlement of the helper, at least in the helper’s world.  It denies their own creative powers by setting the terms of communication.  It blames them for their own suffering.

Scarry spends a bit of time on phantom pain, which has been studied constructively lately, esp. by Dr. Ramachandran whose mirror therapy seems to convince the brain that the limb is there, then gone, in a way the brain can accept.  But how do we get our culture to address its phantom terrorism fears, to find what is real, accept that, then know when it is gone?  Both are matters of thinking, of the construction of reality in the brain.  What happens in a culture that has no reality but what it constructs -- but isn't that EVERY culture?

Let’s leave the notorious and lurid realms of international terrorism.  I’m more immediately interested in the schism between the worlds of adults and young people in our own quiet communities and the lengths to which we are willing to go in order to coerce young people into denying their own worlds, even if it means a withdrawal into sullen silence and hidden anguish.  HIV-AIDS workshops worry about how to “reach” youngsters in order to get them to test themselves, even if only with a private home test like that for pregnancy.  But their transparent end goal is to get them “under control” and medicated, therefore tabulated and converted to percentages, evidence for funding.

Every time in the classroom I’ve allowed and encouraged students to describe their reality, authorities have been quick to object and suppress.  The end result has been to harden the boundaries and intensify their determination to justify themselves.  Some of them never forget the lesson in invasive authority and resist for the rest of their lives.  Others, learning only obedience, never develop the critical reflection that is necessary for democracy to work.  They see survival as a matter of identifying with authorities, being surrogates of power.