Another day, another report on the barbaric way this state treats its disabled children, in this case autistic kids whose families aren't always told about their mistreatment. That was the word out of the U. S. Department of Education's office of civil rights: "We're seeing injuries of spiral fracture, kids getting injured, kids getting manhandled," said Debra Poulin, legal director of Disability Rights Arkansas. "We see all kinds of crazy things that you just wouldn't really believe."
But what else would you expect when, alone and afraid, autistic kids are put into isolating restraints by the "adults" in charge of their school systems. Bureaucracies have their policies but not necessarily their reasons. To note one practice Ms. Poulin cites, "[There's] the 'hamburger,' where somebody put a mat on the floor and a child on it and the 200-plus pound principal got on top of another mat and stood on the child . . ."
Is that a disciplinary measure or just plain old masochism?
Despite all the reforms that are passed, and all the regulations the Legislature enacts year after year, these stories continue to make headlines. And well they should in a society that calls itself civilized but doesn't act that way. For the barbarians are not only at the gates, or even within the citadel, but inside each of us who just reads the headline and turns the page.
Familiarity even with barbarism breeds contempt, and many of us no longer bother to pay attention. It's just another day, another report, ho hum.
All of us in Arkansas need to wake up and pay attention at last, for these barbarities are being committed in our once good name. Scandal gives way to scandal, then reform to reform, but nothing seems to rouse us from our stupor.
Maybe it's the human condition: How easily we become conditioned to the inhumane. But the mark of society that develops is not one that just keeps repeating the same mistakes but changes its ways. And even identifies with the least among us, the hurting and abused, especially those being abused by our lawful authority. For here the people rule, or are supposed to. Surely it is not too late for Arkansas to change its shameful ways--our shameful ways.
Once again a subject that should inspire moral introspection becomes reduced to only a legal dispute between teams of lawyers, each with their own departments and agencies to represent.
No, nothing is simple, certainly not at law, or often enough outside it, when ethics are debated. And few things are sadder than the reduction of ethics to a matter for official Boards of Ethics, while the heart of the matter--like the ethical treatment of children, lower-case and unofficial--is swept aside, lost in legalisms and officialese in general. Beware when ethics is reduced to a department of ethics, and barbarism gets an official stamp of approval. That doesn't mean it deserves approving, only that another way has been found to avoid our moral/ethical responsibility for the evil committed in our name.
In the meantime, a united group of responsible officials--like the Arkansas Sheriffs' Association, Association of Arkansas Counties and the Mental Health Coalition of Arkansas--is pushing for the state to create a program that would pay for at least one 16-bed unit for the mentally ill who otherwise would wind up as just another part of the prison population instead of getting the special attention they need.
To quote Sebastian County's sheriff, Bill Hollenbeck: "We've reached the point now where we know what we are doing is not working. I can't understand why we're continuing to do things the same way when we know we are getting the same bad result."
Maybe that's because barbarism can be habit-forming. Yes, there's always an excuse for it, like the cost of reforming the system, but there's no excuse for it.
Editorial on 12/01/2015