So let's get this right... ONDCP thinks that encouraging parents to act like assholes and getting their kids to hate them is a great way to get young people to stay away from drugs. Whatever happened to building important relationships of trust with your kids and making sure they know they can come to you when they need help?
Are these fools serious?
5 comments:
Am I naive to think that I would be personally offended by this if I was a parent?? Let's break down exactly what this ad is saying to parents:
1. Since we know that teens are going to do drugs [because prohibition has failed them], we aren't going to bother to advertize to them anymore. You are the new target.
2. Since parents like you do not have the intestinal fortitude to speak with your kids about sensitive issues, it's our duty to use your tax dollars to tell you how to raise your kids.
3. Don't even try to earn your teen's trust or respect. They are going to hate you no matter what you do.
4. And if, for some reason, they weren't planning on hating you, now this government-funded ad tells them that hate is a natural feeling for teens to display toward their parents.
I wonder if any of the geniuses at the ONDCP realize that these ads embody the same sort of arrogant paternalism that they promote. Just as teenagers will naturally come to resent parents who unsympathetically invade their private space and tell them what to do simply because "they know best", so will American adults come to resent a government who does the same thing to them.
At least I sure as hell hope so.
A message to parents from the DARE Generation: Prove them wrong. Talk with us, not to us. Find out why we are expirimenting with drugs, and teach us how to stay safe if we don't "Just Say No". Defend your honor as teacher, guide, friend, mentor, and parent. To help the government with its problem, first you have to get over yours.
The czar and his buddies just don't get it. They should advertise the tried and true method of parents threatening kids with bodily harm if they abuse drugs. We all know this administration loves torture.
(Tom needs to crash the czar's next presser and share some of these ideas)
I'd type more, but one of my hands is stuck in my mouth. Find out how it happened at abovetheinfluence.com. And let this be a lesson to you, junkies.[/sarcasm]
I see this as nothing but an admission of failure. Failure on the part of two major parties: parents and the Gub'mint.
The former because too many of them would rather the odious chore of having a frank discussion about drugs of all sort, legal and non, be handled by what amounts to mercenaries...mercenaries who have their own agenda. As if such an important task were something as mundane as paying the trashman to pick up your garbage. Parents who abdicate this reponsibility have only themselves to blame if their children feel they cannot be trusted to deal with the matter sincerely by having something that important foisted off to the 'hired help' to handle.
As to the government's failures, they've been catalogued ad nauseum< and needn't be reiterated here, save in one respect: Recall in the voiceovers for the various TV commercials regarding the issue. The ones addressing parents. In them, you invariably hear "We'll tell you what to say."
"We''ll tell you what to say."
First off, the fact of the matter is that many parents already have, thanks to personal experience, plenty of information regarding illicit drugs, and really don't require much in the way of Gub'mint coaching. An uncomfortable fact which many of their children are just itching to ask Mum and Dad about...and Mum and Dad are equally itching to avoid.
But the more troubling aspect of that statement should become obvious to anyone to spends the briefest amount of time considering it: A government that has been proven to habitually lie about illicit drugs...will act as coach for parents to discuss the subject?
Aside from the issue at hand, a larger one looms; since when did parenting require the blanket acceptance of all government pronouncments as being a priori devoid of deception? The implication of this is far darker than the face exposure of it would imply. Who the Hell is the government to tell you that you must think a certain way?
I simply do not understand why parents should act like monsters to thier kids? If we come to them as perennial antagonists, don't you think they would more likely engage in drugs as they see they see them more of a confidant in times of great distress? What happened now to our moral obligations to our children? There maybe drug rehabilitation programs nowadays to overhaul their addicted lives but there can never be a treatment to erase the traumatic experiences they have had during an ordeal with drugs.
--wilma
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