Confidentiality Lost

Posted on April 25, 2007 in Confidentiality Conservatives Paranoids Privacy Violence

Now that they’ve lost the momentum of 9-11 and find themselves facing an increasingly hostile public, the neocons have found a new Trojan horse in the form of the Virginia Tech shootings. Given that up to 40% of the American public has suffered some kind of mental illness, can we afford to let them have their way?

I was going to comment on this article but then I got to the part of the page which asked me for details that purported to be necessary if I were to be a commenter at Townhall.com. These included my real name, email (ok, i don’t gripe about that), and ADDRESS. How fitting because the article which I intended to respond to proposed that college age students with mental health problems lose their rights to confidentiality.

One thing Wilson whined about was a new Virginia law that prohibits schools from expelling suicidal students. Someone should inform Wilson that many more bipolars and depressives attempt suicide than commit acts of violence and that the two behaviors are not necessarilly congruent. A commenter proposed that professors be removed for mental illness, too. This suggests the strategy often used under [[Brezhnev]] where political dissidents were diagnosed as insane and shuttled off to mental hospitals.

I think the language of Walter E. Wilson was telling: he kept referring to Cho as a “child”. Says something about how he sees those of us who struggle with [[bipolar disorder]] and similar ailments. We are of lesser intelligence, the implication goes. We never have control of our emotions and actions. We must surrender ourselves to the State. I find it ironic that Wilson is the author of a book called “Liberty means less government”. The kind of government he means to reduce is the kind that used to hand out free pamphlets on agricultural and home economics, that protects employees from their employers, etc. He is perfectly happy to strip away the rights of the mentally ill just because of one exception to an overwhelming statistical trend, namely that the mentally ill are less violent than the general population.

This is all very telling about the kind of government conservatives want. It’s a small, sneaky government that does nothing for most of its citizens and keeps tabs on their actions through a secret police network consisting of the people we entrust to administer our educational institutions and welfare system. Be certain that you will lose your hard-earned rights if the neocons’ proposals become law.

[tags], privacy, confidentiality, paranoids, violence[/tags]