Tag: sedition

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Is LAUSD Run by a Fascist Mafia?

LAUSD Main Offices – Downtown Los Angeles

The school year hasn’t even started yet and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest school district in the country, has already hit the ground running with illegalities left and right, not the least of which is the systemic policy issue that I’m focusing on in today’s post. It’s hardly the only violation, but its a systemic one that stands to continue hurting a lot of children with disabilities, particularly our kiddos on the autism spectrum.

What I’m about to tell you would sound far-fetched if it was not for the fact that the United States is currently engaged in a soft civil war in which right-wing extremists are attempting to change us from a democratic republic to a ethno-religious dictatorship. The evidence indicates these decades-long plans were started at the local level in city councils, school districts, and various county agencies, then percolated upward into our federal agencies before culminating in the January 6, 2021 insurrection against our democratic republic.

The reality is that I’ve been dealing with these kinds of behaviors from local education agencies for the last 31 years, and there is no end in sight for many families in local education agencies as large as LAUSD. It’s the Titanic, it’s been on a direct course for an iceberg for decades, and it will collapse and sink under its own weight before too much longer at the rate it’s currently going.

This is particularly the case as the pro-democracy backlash to recent fascist efforts to overthrow our system of government is gaining momentum as more and more high-ranking fascist individuals at the federal level face the consequences of their actions with the J6 Hearings and related Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations. When the example is finally set at the national level and all of those responsible for J6 are either behind bars or being pursued by the feds and Interpol after fleeing the country, the trickle-down of legal consequences to State and local government agencies that have been engaging in fascist practices all this time will be severe.

But, we’re not there, yet. The only way to really get there is to make public what the heck is really going on so that taxpaying registered voters in Los Angeles can make informed decisions about the people they entrust with the responsibility of educating their children, particularly their children with disabilities. So, let me get into the actual issue to which I want to call immediate attention, that being LAUSD’s unlawful and unethical method of conducting Functional Behavioral Assessments (FBAs), which it has implemented as a policy, district-wide, according to District personnel.

Title 34, Code of the Federal Regulations (34 CFR) Section 300.304 describes the parameters for how special education assessments are supposed to be conducted. 34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4) mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education, which includes the assessment process. Taken together, these laws require that competent assessors acting within the scope of their qualifications conduct assessments according to the professional standards that apply to each of the various types of assessments being conducted, in conformity with the peer-reviewed research.

There is no standardized measure, like an IQ test, when conducting an FBA, though there are assessment tools and instruments that can help inform the process. Instead, the applicable science describes the types of critical thinking and lines of inquiry a properly trained behaviorist must apply when determining the function of a maladaptive behavior and the most appropriate ways of responding to it. The science used is referred to as Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA).

ABA is not a special education service, per se. ABA is the science behind effective behavioral interventions. ABA services requires scientists to think independently in applying the known science to the unique facts of each individual person assessed. It’s not a paint-by-numbers, one-size-fits-all measure. It’s not psychometrics in the sense that norm-referenced standardized tests will be administered to the student. It requires more thought and higher-level critical thinking skills than that, and the people who are certified to do it must prove their abilities to function that way.

There are no formal criteria for FBAs, specifically, but they are based off the Functional Analysis (FA) procedures developed by Dr. Brian Iwata and his colleagues in their published research. While being certified as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) is supposed to confirm that a behavioral scientist is adequately qualified to analyze behavior, BCBA certification is not required in California for conducting FBAs in the special education context. Anyone who has gone to graduate school for a school psychologist credential should have theoretically been trained on ABA just as a part of their grad school education.

My master’s degree is in educational psychology and I had to study ABA more than once during my higher education. It is not typically part of a special education teaching credential program, other than to mention that other professionals are available in the special education context to conduct FBAs and provide ABA-based behavioral interventions.

That is, except, in LAUSD, which is using special education teachers to conduct its FBAs. It will hire Non-Public Agencies (NPAs) that specialize in providing ABA services through and under the supervision of BCBAs, but it will not allow the BCBAs to actually conduct their own FBAs to inform their own Behavior Intervention Design (BID) services, which then compromises the quality of the Behavior Intervention Implementation (BII) services. This is a district policy, according to various LAUSD employees with whom I’ve been speaking about this since April, and they don’t seem to understand why I have such an issue with it.

First, the 8th grade LAUSD student I’m currently representing in which this issue has come up has been “assessed” under this model since the 1st grade and he still has the same behavioral challenges today that he had in 1st grade. He’s made no improvements and now he’s over 6 feet tall. His toddler-like tantrums result in significant property destruction, which has only gotten worse as he’s gotten smarter and bigger over time, and he puts himself and others at risk of injury when he throws them. Not only does LAUSD’s method of conducting FBAs fail to comply with the applicable science and law, it does not work!

LAUSD’s solution is to offer yet another illegal FBA conducted by an inexpert special education teacher who must then hand off their “data” to a BCBA who is then supposed to somehow magically engage in scientifically valid BID and supervise a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) who is supposed to provide the BII in conformity with the plan designed by the BCBA. When I point out the epic failure of logic behind this practice to LAUSD personnel, I’m met with the Orwellian Doublespeak of corrupt District administrators and the blank stares of ineptitude and rote recitations of District policy from school-site personnel.

One school site administrator actually tried to get me to lie to the parent and trick him into doing something he otherwise was not inclined to do. I analyzed her behavior according to ABA standards based on what information I could gather and ultimately concluded that she’s as stupid as she is corrupt; her behaviors were automatically reinforcing and externally reinforced by her employer, which appears to employ the dumbest people it can find in positions of authority well beyond their critical thinking abilities and professional skills so that they can be the clueless, easily manipulated henchmen of the mafiosos at the main office on Beaudry.

Basically, what we are dealing with here is science denialism and unconstitutional conduct on the part of public officials to the tune of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. LAUSD is the government, regulated by the rule of law and answerable to its local constituency, but the people generally have no voice against this behemoth of a self-serving institution, which is why I’m talking about it, here.

LAUSD is long overdue for a reckoning regarding its systemic illegal conduct across all aspects of special education, and it’s probably safe to say that if the District is willing to compromise its most vulnerable constituents, that being children with disabilities, it’s likely equally comfortable violating everybody else’s rights, as well. I can’t speak to the other social justice issues in which the District might be in the wrong, but it has historically failed on the special education front ever since special education and related civil rights laws were first passed in the 1970s.

Disability-related civil rights law is truly the canary in the coal mine for American democracy. The measure of how civilized a society is can be determined by how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, and children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable humans on Earth. If LAUSD is willing to treat children with disabilities this way, it’s top administrators should probably swap out their dress suits for animal pelts so that their lack of civility is adequately conveyed. Otherwise, they’re just wolves in sheep’s clothing, preying our our most vulnerable children.

The Chanda Smith Consent Decree came after decades of unlawful special education conduct and was in place for decades thereafter in an effort to end the District’s unlawful conduct, which it failed to do. The courts attempted to pull LAUSD out of the gutter with the consent decree, but LAUSD just pulled the courts into the gutter with it. An Independent Monitor was hired to oversee the consent decree until such time that LAUSD came into compliance with special education law, but that day never came.

Apparently, presuming that compliance would never happen, the Independent Monitor began engaging in equally corrupt behavior, assuming lifelong job security for so long as LAUSD continued to violate special education law and grifting the system by overpaying consultants who failed to make any kind of perceptible difference with respect to LAUSD’s compliance. The Office of the Independent Monitor was shut down and the consent degree was closed out following an audit that revealed excessive unnecessary spending by the Independent Monitor that could not be related to the District’s conformity with the consent decree.

Further, while it may be true that the District legitimately improved some of its special education programming, by no means had to come close to a reasonable degree of compliance, as evidenced by the number of families who have still had to file lawsuits to get services, and even that doesn’t guarantee they’ll get all of the right services for their children. Many get only some of the services their children need, making their IEPs as effective as watered-down penicillin in the face of a raging bacterial infection. For all the services they may actually get that they need, the absence of the other services they also need undermines any successes they may have in the areas in which they’ve actually received help.

Which circles back around to the question that serves as the title to today’s post/podcast, which is, “Is LAUSD Run by a Fascist Mafia?” From the outside looking in, this seems to be a legitimate question.

Let’s start with the fact that LAUSD hired computer coders to work with its in-house counsel decades ago to bastardize a piece of insurance software known as Welligent into its IEP software. As a result, LAUSD has basically bureaucratically obligated its school site personnel to break the law because of the software limitations of Welligent, or at least how it has been coded by the District, that fail to even offer compliant options to its users in many areas of special education.

For example, let’s look at the assessment plan, redacted for privacy, that was offered to my current LAUSD student, which was generated from Welligent, and compare it to another redacted assessment plan for another student on my caseload in a different school district who also needed an FBA.

Example 1, below, is the assessment plan offered to my LAUSD student, and shows the FBA as an “alternative assessment” to be conducted by a special education teacher. “Alternative assessments” usually refer to non-traditional assessment measures or methods from those typically used in the place of standardized testing.

For example, using curriculum-based assessments in the classroom to gather informal data on actual classroom performance can be a more reliable method of assessing academic achievement than a standardized measure like the WJ-IV or the WIAT-4. None of this assessment plan makes sense with respect to the FBA.

Example 1 – page 1

Looking at the table of “standardized” testing from page 2 of this assessment plan, which is referenced by page 1, FBAs are not listed. Item 7 targets “Adaptive Behavior,” but that goes more to independent living skills and self-care, like dressing, toileting, and navigating the school setting. FBAs do not fit that category and the LAUSD assessment plan has no category that FBAs would logically fit. This was a deliberate coding decision made in Welligent by the District that has absolutely nothing to do with adequately assessing children with special needs and offering them appropriate behavioral supports at school.

Example 1 – page 2

Example 2, below, shows a different student’s assessment plan from a different school district. This assessment plan offers the student involved an FBA to be performed by the school psychologist in collaboration with a district behaviorist. This actually makes sense.

In this student’s case, it turns out the special education teacher was the problem and she got reassigned to a different classroom. This student had gone without behavioral challenges until she was placed in this teacher’s class, and the FBA made clear that the teacher was the one provoking the behaviors. Objectivity is one of the most critical aspects of science that must apply to special education assessments. Can you imagine if she had been trusted to conduct the FBA?

I can assure you the quality of the outcomes using appropriately qualified people who actually care makes all the difference in the world. Whereas our LAUSD student has historically been assessed according to plans virtually similar to Example 1, above, and has now gone for over six years with next to no improvements in his behaviors, our student from whose case Example 2 was taken is now thriving in school with no serious behavioral challenges of any kind.

To be clear, it’s not like the student in Example 2 has never had issues with this school district. There were problems years ago when she was little that I had to deal with, but it had been smooth sailing until she ended up in that whacko teacher’s classroom, last school year.

Because the student’s behaviors were interfering with her learning, even though we suspected the teacher was likely the problem, we didn’t go in accusing the teacher of anything. We simply asked for an FBA to get to the bottom of the behaviors and the next thing we knew the teacher was gone. The FBA report we got back was very well-written and explained the facts without demeaning the teacher or doing anything else unprofessional.

We hit a huge bump in the road that had the potential to go really badly, but the District in that student’s case handled it professionally, compassionately, and responsibly. I’ve yet to see any of those qualities from anyone I’ve dealt with from LAUSD regarding my LAUSD student. The difference in handling is night and day, and I’ve caught both districts messing up before. The difference is that my other student was met with professionalism, while my LAUSD student is being met with science denialism and an utter abandonment of the rule of law.

It is this refusal to abide by science and law on the part of the second largest school district in the nation that raises the specter of fascism. It’s all very “Marjorie Taylor Green-ish.”

Consider that California has adopted the Common Core as its State Standards. The purpose of these standards is for our public schools in California to teach students how to use academic knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems, yet LAUSD doesn’t use academic knowledge and skills to solve problems. It denies science and breaks the law.

How can people who deny science teach our kids to use science to solve problems? How can people who have abandoned the rule of law credibly teach social studies, particularly civics, and educate our kids to become knowledgeable participants in American democracy? How is this anything other than fascism and when are the feds going to do something about it?

I tried filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), but it twisted my words into a narrower complaint than what I alleged and then declined to investigate its twisted version of my allegations, which is a first for OCR with me, I have to admit, and it makes me fear for our democracy even more, now.

If OCR is too intimidated by LAUSD to investigate such that it makes up lame excuses as to why it shouldn’t have to, how does that not also suggest the presence of organized crime within LAUSD so large and expansive that even the feds won’t touch it? DOJ is a little busy with the J6 investigations, but I suspect all of this stuff in inter-related as multiple spokes of a wheel-and-spoke conspiracy to overturn democracy in America.

Remember that Betsy DeVos tried to shut down OCR after she was appointed Secretary of Education by the 45th President until she had the snot sued out of her and subsequently reinstated it. She also admitted that her goal was to abolish USDOE as the Secretary of Education; she took the job with the specific intent of shutting down the entire agency from within.

How many people from the last administration continue to poison the well at USDOE? It’s the same question Americans have to ask about every single federal agency, but as pointed out in the above linked-to article from The Root describing DeVos’ desire to abolish USDOE altogether also describes the conference at which she recently shared her continued desire to shut down USDOE as teaching far-right parents how to build conservative-dominated school boards in their local communities, ban books, and a host of other undemocratic activities intended to deny the civil rights of children with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, students of color, and students from other protected classes.

It’s an anti-science, anti-democracy approach that includes anti-vax, anti-masking nut-jobs who are too dumb to know how dumb they are and/or are profoundly mentally ill, being manipulated by grifters like DeVos to vote against their own interests in favor of the interests of the grifters. It’s the “have-nots” falling for the tricks of the “haves” who know the only way they can have way more than what they actually need is to make sure others don’t have enough.

Today’s post isn’t about documenting how I’ve figured out a way to overcome whatever fascist mafia might control LAUSD. It’s about exposing what I’ve witnessed and adding my voice and the voices of the LAUSD students who aren’t getting what they need to the conversation in the hopes that it will spark others to also help hold LAUSD to account for its egregious violations of special education law.

I’m hoping that voters in LA will learn more about these issues, understand that special education social justice issues cuts across all other demographic groups, and no segment of society is safe for so long as our government is allowed to conduct itself in this way. If you are involved in any type of social justice issue in which LAUSD has engaged in discrimination and withheld services it is legally required to provide, consider getting involved with our Meetup Group, Social Justice Series – Everyday Local Democracy for All.

Our Meetup Group is not limited to people living within the LAUSD attendance area, but we certainly have Angeleños already in the Group. You can comment/DM us directly on Meetup or on our social media, or use our Contact Us form on our site with any questions/feedback. We don’t have all the answers, but awareness is the first step to solving a problem, so we’re starting there.

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Fecal Smearing, Disability, and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection

This is not a pleasant topic at all, so I want to start out this post/podcast with the understanding that I know this isn’t a pleasant topic. That doesn’t make it something to avoid, however. Problems aren’t solved by pretending they don’t exist.

For those of us who work with people with significant mental disabilities, fecal smearing, otherwise knows as “scatolia,” is a behavior we usually encounter among individuals with significant developmental disabilities and dementia. These behaviors often happen among these populations very frequently alongside other bowel-related health issues, such as constipation and encopresis. Simply put, constipation is poop not coming out and encopresis is poop not staying in.

The function of most fecal smearing behaviors appears to be communicative, especially among individuals who are nonverbal or have limited verbal abilities. In verbal individuals who engage in these behaviors, other significant mental impairments are still present, whether its the loss of mental functioning due to dementia; the failure of mental maturity due to developmental disabilities, such as intellectual disabilities and/or autism; or some forms of mental illness. Fecal throwing and smearing can also be seen among other primates. It’s a primitive, infantile behavior.

When I was 20 years old, I worked in a nursing home providing hands-on care to medically fragile and/or mentally compromised elderly people. All of us knew who the poop-throwers were. The one on my wing was also an Evangelical Christian who would sing church hymns while throwing her poop at anyone passing by and accusing them of being the Devil. The exception was the visiting Evangelical pastor who would stop by to visit the patients every week, but he would come down the hallway singing a hymn at the top of his lungs so she would know it was him before he walked into her room, or he would get it, too.

I encountered fecal smearing behaviors once again when I finished my undergraduate degree and started working as a job coach in the community with adults challenged by developmental disabilities. One of the young men on my caseload was a fairly capable individual with autism who, in spite of his many attributes that made him employable to bus tables, serve drinks, and perform general maintenance in a restaurant, would engage in fecal smearing whenever someone made him upset. What had started as a behavior when he was younger with less language abilities had become a deeply entrenched learned behavior that followed him into adulthood long after he had developed completely intact verbal communication skills.

The differences between these two examples from my own life were important to note. In the nursing home, the woman on my wing with fecal throwing behaviors was kept on laxatives so that her feces wasn’t solid enough to hold in her hand for throwing. Cleaning up bedpans was infinitely less work and trauma than jumping into the hazmat shower fully clothed and going home in scrubs from the supply closet because our own clothes had been ruined.

By comparison, the young man who struggled to hold onto a job and a group home placement because of this behavior was successfully broken of the habit through Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and psychotropic medication management to address anxiety and depression. Because he was verbal, he was able to talk with his therapist about the feelings he was having when he engaged in these behaviors and we were able to come up with a plan that helped him deal with those feelings appropriately, eventually extinguishing the scatolia altogether. He’s been employed every time I’ve encountered him since, mostly in the community eating at the restaurants where he has worked.

What we discovered based on what he was telling us is that, historically, he had found himself in situations where he couldn’t tell people what he was thinking for lack of language and, later, as the language started coming on, because he was afraid to complain about certain things for fear of retaliation or punishment. The degree to which he was correct in his perceptions about those past experiences is not as important as the fact that he was afraid to say anything with words, but he could express himself non-verbally through fecal smearing.

Fecal smearing behaviors tend to orient around protest, disagreement, and retaliation, based on what little research has been conducted on the topic so far. Most of the available research comes from mental institutions and long-term care facilities. I could find no research about fecal smearing happening in the general community, though such research may exist and I just couldn’t find it. So much of the research is hidden behind paywalls that it’s not accessible to everyday people, which is a topic of discussion all to itself for another time.

I brought this subject up in my book club last night (we’re currently reading The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, by Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW). One of the other club members shared that her home had been broken into years ago and robbed. The robbers also pooped on her wooden floors, ruining the finish, and she had to wait for a year-and-a-half to have the time and money to refinish her floors, with the damaged spot where the poop had been, serving as a daily reminder of the sense of violation she had experienced. Now that I think about it, the same thing happened to my grandparents in the 1990s while they were on an RV trip, only the poop was on their walls.

My book club friend stated the police officers who had responded to the call advised her that this was a common behavior witnessed among break-in robberies like hers. Law enforcement may be a better source of information about the prevalence of fecal smearing in the general community, which goes to the degree to which we have delegated the responsibilities of our mental health agencies to law enforcement. Behavioral researchers should look there for data about the frequency with which these incidents occur and how they are addressed.

Needless to say, there was no scholarly research I could find that was specific to the fecal smearing behaviors that happened during the Insurrection of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol of the United States of America. Only official records from the government and reports in the media capture the incident. I’m quoting the Trial Memorandum of the U.S. House of Representatives from the second impeachment proceedings against the 45th president of the United States, here:

Once inside, insurrectionists desecrated and vandalized the Capitol. They ransacked Congressional Leadership offices—breaking windows and furniture, and stealing electronics and other sensitive material. They left bullet marks in the walls, looted art, smeared feces in hallways,and destroyed monuments … [Emphasis added.]

This has been bothering me ever since it was first reported shortly after the Insurrection that fecal smearing had occurred during this incident as well. Based on what I already know about fecal smearing behaviors, what that tells me is that at least one person with profound disabilities was among the Insurrectionists.

Based on the other overt behaviors of the Insurrectionists, it’s safe to say that America’s mental health crisis reached an apex of sorts, though it isn’t done showing itself, yet, based on the continuing domestic terrorism threats we all still face. It’s an Extinction Burst of a sort, and one we cannot afford to reinforce. These individuals are seeking reinforcement for behaviors that were once rewarded and escalating their behaviors when the rewards are not forthcoming.

I think they’re all cries for help, but the behaviors are so off-putting to most other people that they are disinclined to help and eager to ostracize anyone engaging in them. I think ostracizing these people helps the rest of us avoid the unpleasantness of dealing with these behaviors, but it’s not a democratic response, much less an ethical one. We need a plan as a people on how to solve these problems, not punish people for having them. I’m not saying that people who commit crimes shouldn’t pay for them. I’m saying that the causes of criminal behaviors have to be addressed so they don’t happen in the first place. There is way too much money being made on incarcerating Americans instead of helping them.

The bigger concern for me, these days, though, is how many other people in positions of power actually understand the severity of our nation’s mental health crisis and choose to exploit these individuals rather than meet their needs, such as the 45th president of the United States, for example. Protest, disagreement, and retaliation are the usual communicative functions of fecal smearing, and the Insurrection-related fecal smearing doesn’t appear to be different in that regard. Everyone involved in the Insurrection was there to protest, disagree, and retaliate. What this specific form of communication tells us is that the people who engaged in it felt desperate enough to express their feelings through these actions rather than words, as if words had failed them and/or they didn’t feel safe to use them.

When people are mentally impaired and don’t fully understand everything going on around them, they can easily become confused, misled, and manipulated by others. They are often aware when others are mistreating them even if they don’t fully understand the hows and whys. They know when they find themselves in a disadvantaged situation and will harbor valid resentments about it, but they often don’t know who did what to make it happen, much less what to do to make things better.

When you have a right to be angry but you don’t know how to get out of the situation, and no one is stepping up to help you, it’s easy to become angry at everyone. You feel like the whole world is against you and there’s nothing you can do. At that point, you default to the highest stage of social emotional development you’ve completely mastered, which may be well below your chronological age depending on the degree to which your social emotional development was healthy or not. Once someone becomes so overwhelmed emotionally in the absence of a solution that they start freaking out, very childlike – even infantile – behaviors are likely to ensue.

In the name of “liberty” and “freedom,” we’ve absolved ourselves of any responsibilities for the welfare of our neighbors. Personal liberty becomes confused with narcissism. People pay lip service to the ideals of the Constitution while exploiting their neighbors for financial gain. Money is an imaginary construct that many people value more than human life.

Many of these same people claim to be true believers in Christ, effectively singing church hymns as they sling their poo at everyone else. I don’t recall any part of the New Testament encouraging that kind of behavior, but religious scholars who have studied the texts more closely than I have are welcome to correct me if I’m wrong.

Most of us understand that the people who got sucked into the 45th president’s own mental health crisis are also not well, but they also account for approximately one-third of our population. That makes them a dangerous minority that has now grown into a domestic terrorism problem. It puts the assertions by the majority of Muslims around the world that Islam is not a religion of violence into context, now that we’ve got our own violent religious radicals here at home calling themselves Christians.

The inextricable intertwining of religion and mental health problems in societies is yet another topic for a separate conversation, but I have to point out that there are many responsible faith leaders struggling to lead as many of their congregationalists abandon the teachings of Christ to follow every wolf in sheep’s clothing that steps into their path. American commercialism and its own brand of capitalism have created a competitive mindset about everything in our culture.

It’s “My high school football team is going to crush your high school football team.” It’s, “My church is made up of the chosen and all the other churches are full of people going to Hell.” It’s, “My neighborhood is the best and everyone else lives in a dump.” Where is this narcissistic drive to be “better” than everyone else coming from in a society that’s supposed to be democratic? Why do we feel driven to create a caste of “losers” to make ourselves feel like “winners”? How does hurting other people make someone a “winner”?

People have developed brand loyalties around things that aren’t actually brands. American consumerism and its obscene obsession with the pursuit of material wealth has grossly undermined the uniform message of every great faith. Wanting more than what one needs while others go without contradicts every pious teaching of every great religious leader the world has ever remembered. We’re all supposed to be collaborating with each other, not competing with each other, to survive as a species.

Raising children from birth under conditions that deprive them of developmentally necessary opportunities to reach adulthood physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually intact, is an uphill battle. The science is clear that the type of family support system an individual has is irrelevant; what matters is whether they have any type of support system at all.

Children growing up in homeless shelters with after school tutoring, social services, higher education and job placement services for parents, etc., remain as academically intrinsically motivated as children living in traditional family homes with access to resources. The gender identity and sexual orientations of parents have zero bearing on the quality of their parenting. Parenting becomes poor when it fails to nurture childhood development, regardless of the gender or orientation of the parent.

What we can safely deduce from witnessing current events as it relates to the known science is that being raised in economic extremes, whether extreme poverty or extreme wealth, deprives children of developmental opportunities that undermine their mental, emotional, and communicative growth. Extremely wealthy children are at risk of never learning how to do anything for themselves and will implode the minute they have to deal with serious life challenges. Extremely poor children are at risk of malnutrition, homelessness, and other hardships that make mere survival the priority without the opportunities to work on any other part of their development.

As the middle class in America continues to disappear, we’re at risk of more and more people ending up at one economic extreme or the other and their children growing up thinking that humanity is truly divided as a matter of nature into two classes: the “haves” and the “have nots.” If that’s all they see growing up, the divide becomes a hard and fast expected part of society. What do you think happens to a society that is made up entirely of people who failed to reach developmental maturity? It goes Lord of the Flies pretty quickly, after that.

In my ever-worried imagination, under such circumstances, humans will return to the trees if we survive as a species at all. I keep thinking, “Maybe the bonobos will have a better go at sentience than we did.” It makes me want to teach them sign language just so I can tell them all the mistakes we’ve made and what to avoid. The first thing I’ll teach them is, “Use your words, not your poop.”

Returning to the present issue of poop-smeared threats to our democracy wrapped in Confederate flags, I have a theory about one particular aspect of the problem that I haven’t seen discussed in the news about the Select Committee’s investigation into the Insurrection of January 6, 2021. In my line of work, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act come up quite frequently. When I see things that do not appear to conform with their requirements, they jump out at me.

Given that were clearly dealing with people struggling with mental disabilities of one type or another, and given that social media has been instrumental in feeding them misinformation while giving them the tools to organize, it appears to me that the social media algorithms are not coded in a manner that reasonably accommodates users with the types of mental disabilities that make them vulnerable to misinformation and recruiting tactics of foreign adversaries and domestic terrorists.

If anything, social media’s absence of reasonable accommodations in its coding for users with these types of mental issues is creating more domestic terrorists than we already had in the first place, suddenly taking them from the fringes of our society to a sizable, dangerous minority of violent people bent on overthrowing the government. In the absence of effective mental health interventions, the manipulators swooped in and weaponized our own neglected mentally impaired citizens against us.

What we don’t take care of will take care of us. That’s the whole reason that “being careful” is so important. “Being careful” isn’t about avoiding problems, it’s about being full of care. Being caring means being responsible for your community as well as yourself and your immediate loved ones. It takes a village, as they say, but if you neglect your village, you cease to be part of it.

We’re all different for a reason. Whether you’re a person of faith and see it as a component of our Creator’s Great Plan or you’re a secularist who sees it as a function of nature and evolution, or you’re like me and think that nature and evolution are parts of the Creator’s Great Plan, it’s an obvious fact that we’re all meant to be different by design.

The failure to appreciate the role that diversity serves for the balance of everything has led to efforts by a few unstable individuals who manage to acquire power and try to remake humanity over into a monolith, casting out those who, by design, cannot conform to their invented social hierarchies. This is the essence of discrimination. It’s what causes people with disabilities to be regarded as less than human.

Anyone who is discriminated against for any other reason should be empathetic to the discrimination experienced by people with mental disabilities that affect their behaviors, but our knee-jerk reaction is to be repulsed by the most extreme behaviors in which we see these people behave. These behaviors, while often intolerable and highly inappropriate, are still cries for help, we need to see them that way, and we need to collectively demand our elected officials to enforce the ADA and Section 504 when it comes to social media algorithms.

My theory is that, if we use the existing language of the ADA and, where applicable, Section 504, to compel social media platforms to stop preying on the weakest minds among us, it will not only create jobs for coders knowledgeable of the law, but also enforcement officials knowledgeable of the code. Rather than looking at the daunting task of coding the Code into social media platforms as an insurmountable challenge, it should be seen as a significant step towards true democracy that creates desperately needed jobs.

The solution would solve more than one significant problem in this country and serve as an example of adult-level problem-solving for the rest of the world. Marketing research tells us that customer loyalty is greater after a vendor has had to work with a customer to solve a problem than if there was never any problem at all. It’s not a source of shame for America to trip over its own feet and experience growing pains as it sheds the hypocrisy and anti-democratic practices of the past; what makes it shameful or not is how we respond.

If we can bounce back from the threats our democracy is facing right now with science across the board in every domain of need, including our nation’s ongoing mental health crisis, and enforce the ADA and, where appropriate, Section 504, on social media platforms, no additional regulations are necessarily needed. If any other regulations of social media become necessary above and beyond that, so long as the First Amendment is still protected while also preventing troubled people from getting sucked down the rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, we’ll redeem ourselves in the eyes of the world. At least, that’s my theory.