President's Pen
It is horrifying to imagine that some people openly advocate the imprisonment
of young people, both without any sort of due process or guilt for a crime.
However, the horrifying is reality when it comes to gulag schools.
Some people would like to sugar coat gulag
schools by saying that while they may be harsh, it is a necessary approach
to turn the lives of youth around. I say that this is hogwash.
Many young people are sent to these
schools without any sort of evidence of psychological problems, other
than that they disagree with their parents about something, which is a
normal fact of life and hardly unusual. These gulag schools are almost
like cults, drawing parents in with their promise of an easy solution,
in which the parents do not have to deal with the problem, and for many
thousands of dollars can have the problem magically fixed by a little so-called
"tough love".
Some people would like to call these places
"behavior modification schools". I believe that this is equivalent
to referring to Nazi concentration camps as "internment camps". We
should call them as they are, gulag
schools. Stalin sent political dissidents and anyone else who
angered him to the gulags, which were forced labor camps. Many were
never heard from again. In the same way, young people are kidnapped
by people they have never
seen, often from their own bedrooms, and taken to these aptly named
gulag schools. Many of these schools are either outside of the United
States in order to avoid legal troubles, or in very remote areas.
Victims of these gulag schools are often denied any kind of contact with
the outside world, including communication with their parents, and are
emotionally tortured to comply with an overly strict and authoritarian
regime which makes a military school look like a Sunday picnic.
The gulag schools are yet another symptom
of parental laziness. Parents need to realize that it is perfectly normal
and natural that they are going to have conflicts with their children,
especially in the teenage years.
Just because this happens does not mean their lives are going to turn
out poorly. Parents are being seduced by the promise of an easy solution
which means less work for them, just as they have been seduced by curfews,
so-called "voluntary" ratings systems on computer games, and many others.
The ends do not justify the means. Many victims of gulag schools are psychologically
scarred for life, and they are the lucky ones. Recently, one
young person
committed suicide after his mother threatened to send him back to a
gulag school, all of this because she did not want to resolve conflicts
with her son, who wasn't even in serious trouble.
It is time for this to stop. The government
must step in and protect the civil rights of young people. The parents
who send their children to gulag schools, as well as the schools themselves,
are treating young people as property to be brainwashed and controlled,
rather than as human beings. It is time for the government to stop
the immoral imprisonment of young people in gulag schools. H. L.
Mencken once said that, "For every complex problem,
there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Gulag schools
are perfectly described by his words.