Vaccinate or Jail?

Parents in Maryland were threatened with jail time on Saturday if they didn't vaccinate their children. On the spot. That's right, nurses with needles were lined up and waiting... and so were police officers.

No, I'm not kidding.

I know I've already made my views on vaccinations pretty clear, but this just really goes too far. Last time I checked, personal freedom was a liberty we still enjoyed in America. Or... we're supposed to. Did someone invent time travel when I wasn't looking? Is this American 2007? Or Big Brother 1984? Perhaps Moscow 1930?

Apparently, immunization paperwork is more important to the police state of Maryland than the paper the Bill of Rights or the Constitution are printed on. Because that's what this is about. Paperwork. A bureacracy gone mad.

Maryland schools claim they've "sent notices" to parents, mostly of middle-schoolers who haven't received their hepatitis-B and chicken pox boosters (two of the most questionably mandated shots in the entire vaccine schedule, I might add) who haven't turned in their paperwork saying that 1) their child has been vaccinated or 2) they wish to waive the vaccination.

Come to find out that many of these parents had turned in their paperwork. Several times. The school, however, "misplaced" it. Oops. Sorry about that. Off to jail with you, school officials--do not pass go, do not collect $200. What? You're not sending them to jail for their paperwork error? Oh, but you're willing to threaten parents with jail time for not turning in paperwork they actually did turn in?

Filing that under "things that make you go hmmmmm..."

Oh, and get this. I love this. Many of these kids waited in line on Saturday to get a chicken pox booster so their parents wouldn't go to jail. Chicken pox--a vaccine that has such dubious effectiveness and value that the federal Immunization Advisory Committee could only rationalize making it mandatory in the first place by arguing that it would prevent parents from losing about a week's worth of time from work. In other words, it was an economic argument, not a medical one.

Now, the police state of Maryland is threatening to throw parents in jail for ten days because their children haven't received a vaccine mandated solely on the grounds that it would keep parents from missing work in the first place...

Filing that under "things that make you go 'DUH!'"...

It reminds me of the same logic vaccination proponents use when they argue that non-vaccinated children are putting other children and the public health at risk.

Um... hello!? If the vaccines WORK as well as the government says they do - then your vaccinated child is perfectly safe around my non-vaccinated one. Unless you went to the G.W. Bush backwards school of logic, that's the only conclusion you can come to.

And if you're going to accuse me of getting a free ride on the system, because a majority of people still vaccinate - I can tell you right now, I'm willing to live in an America that doesn't vaccinate. At all.

So call me a skeptic, call me a crunchy, granola fruitcake because I follow not only the hard evidence and research, but my intuition. Go ahead. But I do have a sixth sense about this issue. I don't see dead people... I see dumb sheeple.

If It's Broke...

I'm going to jump up on a very unpopular soap box here, so if you're looking for love and light today, you might want to click back right about now...

*ahem*

Oregon Plans to Send Foster Child to Mexico

Now, I feel for these foster parents, who have spent a great deal of time loving and caring for this child. Of course they love him, of course they want to keep him...of course they do.

It isn't their fault the state and federal government have set things up the way they have. Of course not.

However...

In any life situation, I have to question anyone who walks into things blind, who believes everything they're told, who doesn't do their own research or think for themselves. Caveat emptor...buyer beware. You have a brain. Use it. Don't assume everyone in authority is doing the right thing or are out for anyone's interests but their own.

Foster parents are people who want to be parents. For whatever reason, whether they can't have children of their own or they just love children in general, they want children. Period. They aren't ever doing it for purely altruistic reasons, any of them. And foster parents often become foster parents instead of, say, trying to adopt through regular channels here or abroad because it's easy to 1.) become a foster parent and 2.) adopt a child through the foster care system.

When you go through a regular adoption, your odds of getting a 6 month old child (or younger) is small. Your odds of getting immediate possession of that child? Practically none. In foster care, however, newborns are often taken from drug addicted mothers immediately from the hospital. It happens all the time.

Granted, foster parents have no guarantee, like in this case, of keeping that child. But they are often told much different. And, because they haven't done their own research, they are taking advantage of a system designed to take advantage of them as well.

If foster parents really want to ADOPT a child, let them go through a regular adoption process, where they actually have to pay for the privilege instead of receiving huge financial gains for taking a child in. The fact that people who adopt children usually pay out of pocket as much or more than foster parents put into their own pockets from state and federal governments is rather telling.

Yes, the state and federal governments have set up this system. They dangle a carrot in front of foster parents, and keep that same carrot dangling in front of biological parents, and use that carrot to plow their fields from both sides until they've made as much money as they can. Perhaps I sound cynical. I suppose I am.

But the fact remains, it's a horrible system, and it's wrong, on both sides. It should be illegal, and it needs to be stopped.

And the reality is that foster parents don’t foster with the idea that this is “temporary” in mind. They foster with the idea that this is “their” child, because that’s what the state leads them to believe. “The odds are, you’ll be able to adopt this child.” That’s what the state says, and that’s actually the truth. They odds are usually in the adoptive parents' favor.

But when, in cases like these, a next of kin is found who is a suitable guardian for the child, everyone gets up in arms about the system that’s “failing children.”

Yeah, they are. They are failing, they continue to fail. They place children with foster families who end up killing them. They place children back with parents who kill them. They place children in group homes where they’re exploited and abused.

The reality is: the system itself is failing.

And yet, Child Protective Services (CPS) keeps asking for more state and federal money. "Help us save the children!" they cry. It's the same story, over and over, they insist: "If the system doesn't work, we need more money to fix it." And what do we do? We keep throwing more and more of our tax money at them because “it’s for the children,” and they become a bloating, bureaucratic machine that eats children by the truckloads and spits out their remains.

The evidence shows the system doesn't work. We've all seen it, on both sides. We all agree it isn't working, and something needs to be done. Yet we keep throwing more money at a system that we all agree is failing...

What's the definition of insanity again?

It's about time we stop doing the same thing, over and over, expecting different results... don't you think?