I let this feeling ferment for a while, until seeing one too many news programs and one too many talk shows led me to ask, What the hell’s going on here? Kids carry guns to school, doctors hand out drugs for every life problem, students graduate high school with a 6th grade reading level, heroin chic sells underwear. Morals, common sense, literacy are all things of the past.

Remember the good old fifties? The worst kids carried switchblades. (At least that’s what I heard, though I never actually ran into one of them.) The hardest drug anyone consumed was alcohol. Reading, writing and arithmetic were taught in the schools. And my grandparents didn’t have five locks on their door.

Now, alcohol is used as a cocaine chaser. Feeling good about yourself has replaced education. Many schools have metal detectors. And recently, a new phenomenon has raised its ugly head: young kids, armed to the teeth, opening fire on teachers and fellow students. Yeah, something has changed.

So how is it possible to alter an entire society’s moral structure in just a few decades? Well let’s take a deep breath and muster up the courage to look reality square in the kisser. Sometimes the answer is so obvious no one sees it. And sometimes people are intentionally misled by others who stand to lose a fortune if the truth be known.

In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt, father of psychology, decided that man had no soul. He claimed that man was a stimulus-response animal. That everything he thought, all of his hopes and dreams, were just a response to outside stimuli. Basically, no one was responsible for his or her actions. Shit happens!

The fathers of the American education system (John Dewey, Edward Lee Thorndike, James Earl Russell) were all disciples of Wundt, so the school system was based on the "man as animal" thinking from the start. But things got really bad in the 1960s when, due to heavy lobbying, Congress gave the mental health industry mega-bucks to change the school system. And change it they did! As a result the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores went down for 16 straight years. And what was it that the psychs changed? They replaced academic achievement with the Feel Good About Yourself movement and turned schools into mini psych clinics.

They felt it would hurt the student’s self-esteem to be marked wrong on tests. And according to psychology, right and wrong are only opinions anyway. It’s more important to feel good about yourself and explore your feelings than to learn math or history or science.

This form of "education" goes by many names and includes various psych programs such as the self-esteem movement, values clarification, sensitivity training, conflict resolution and encounter groups. But all these movements are part of the general heading "Outcome Based Education" (OBE). The students aren’t passed until they get the correct outcomes (values, opinions) —and the outcomes are determined by government psychologists and psychiatrists.

This would have been enough to turn America into a third world country, but now let’s add a little fuel to the fire. Those wonderful folks who determine who’s sane and insane have been hard at work drugging millions of your children for mental diseases they just make up!

In 1987 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) into being. That’s right, I said they voted it in. All of the mental illnesses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) were declared — not discovered. And once listed in the DSM your insurance covers it. How convenient. No wonder there has been an increase of epidemic proportions in the numbers of mentally ill. According to the DSM, which contains almost 400 disorders, everything from trouble with spelling to being late for work is a mental illness. (So instead of being able to fire that S.O.B. for never showing up to work, he gets therapy and you get sensitivity training to learn to deal with his "Illness." All run by psychologists, of course.)

These days the main form of treatment for these disorders is drugs. The "talking" therapies are becoming less used as it’s so much faster— and more profitable— to drug the patient. The only problem with the drug approach is that the side effects tend to make the patient crazier. Some of the side effects of Ritalin, for example, are nightmares, depression, suicide and violence. Same with Prozac and other popular psych drugs. As of this writing there are over six million children in America on Ritalin. Read those side effects again. The psychs and politicians want you to think it’s TV or easy access to guns that are turning kids into emotionless killers. But violent themes and weapons have always been around in one form or another. What’s new to the scene are mind-altering psych drugs.

And now the psychs have their eyes on a new source of revenue. It seems even five month old babies can be depressed. That’s right, their new target is to get as many babies and kids under seven onto mind altering drugs. Mint flavored Prozac? You bet!

So now we have the formula for the decay of an entire civilization: teach kids at a very early age that there is no such thing as right and wrong; keep them illiterate; invent diseases and convince people they are victims of these diseases; send them for therapy to the very people who have invented these diseases, then drug them with heavy mind altering drugs. Can a slave state be far behind?

The manufacturers of Prozac and Luvox (two popular psych drugs) state that 4 – 6 percent of children taking the drug will experience mania (madness.) With about one million people on Prozac, that’s about 50,000 walking time bombs.

If you find this all too fantastic to believe, I don’t blame you. Every day we are being bombarded with false information. Every talk show has a psych with book in hand. Every news broadcast brings you what the experts have discovered. And no one thinks of questioning "the experts."

If you’re concerned about the state of our world and would like it to be better, please don’t take my word for it. Read one of the books in the recommended reading list. Look around, see if it’s true. I think you’ll come to the same realization I did, the Emperor is butt naked!

And if at some point you want to do something to help, great. Your help is needed. It’s time to take back control of our minds and our lives.