We are a nation that has lost our way.

In our quest for a utopian ideal that we can never realize, we have bulldozed over the Constitution repeatedly. We have sacrificed the first amendment on the grounds that my free speech might hurt your feelings; we have sacrificed the second on the spurious notion that somehow by removing legally owned weapons we are making our society safer. The fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments have suffered similar defeats, as we've begun to consider warrants all but superfluous in our apprehension of suspected criminals, and allowed anonymous reports to carry weight, something that has NEVER been an acceptable practice in the justice systems of ANY civilized society, with the exception of certain totalitarian regimes (raising the question of how far we are from becoming one ourselves.

Nowhere have these intrusions been more evident than in our "family courts" and with government agencies carrying such noble and seemingly well intentioned names as "Child Protective Services", "Family Support Services", and the like. These agencies terrorize families and remove children based on spurious, often anonymous, complaints, trumped up charges, or other equally dubious reasons. Babies have been stripped from mothers' arms in maternity wards because of past involvement with these agencies, and older children often find themselves shuttled from home to home until society says they are old enough to fend for themselves, despite the fact they haven't been equipped with the tools to do so. All too often the less than perfect homes where some of these children lived are far better than the hellholes that they find themselves in as so many foster parents take in as many children as the government will allow to make extra income.

I have given the numbers before, but will repeat them here: over 580,000 children in US foster care; only 44% of those children will ever be returned home, despite the fact that only 3% of their parents will ever be charged with abuse or neglect, let alone convicted. By these agencies' own estimates, over 60% of the cases referred to them are retired completely unfounded, and a strong number of the cases are "founded" on such shaky grounds as dirty dishes in the sink, unmade beds, etc. The majority of these households are lower income families unable to afford legal representation. We have, in effect, criminalized poverty.

Many of these children will grow up with an extremely poor sense of self worth. They will hear lies told by their foster parents about their biological parents; most notably that their biological parents don't care enough to visit with them or send them birthday presents, when the simple truth is, in many cases, the biological parents are EXTREMELY limited in their access to the children, and letters and gifts are all too often intercepted so that a case worker can screen them for hidden messages. When the gifts are forwarded to the children, the children are often not told that their parents sent them.

These children will hit the magical age of adulthood without a support system. Their foster families are no longer receiving a paycheck, and therefore, do not provide a community support for these young adults, and years of estrangement from their biological parents makes it unlikely these young adults will receive the family support that is so essential to development in those years. The determined will make it; they always do, but too many will be lost to drug addiction and other chemical dependency, and, too often, to a life of crime.

This problem is especially appalling because the "big two" parties won't address it. To the Democrats, it is everything they ever wanted: the children are being raised by a nanny state, and will become dependent on that state for entitlements rather than achieving self sufficiency. After all, as one high ranking Democrat once famously demanded, "it takes a village". To the Republicans, it is a poitical nonissue. The affected families are predominantly poor and unlikely to vote for their candidates, and the Democrats have so successfully spun the issue that the few principled Republicans that remain are afraid of speking honestly out of fear of being castigated for defending child abusers. After all, their own pundits successfully destroyed Michael Dukakis on the strength of Willie Horton, who knows what cases Democratic pundits could use to destroy a Republican who stood up to the system?

It is time we begin to think of the children. They should be our foremost concern. Unless a parent is provably incapable or unwilling of raising a child in a reasonably safe environment, they should ALWAYS be, not only the first, but the ONLY choice for placement. We have made a horrible mistake in empowering Child Protective Services as we have, and now we need to remedy that mistake.

Too many children will cry themselves to sleep tonight, tomorrow night, and onward until the situation is resolved. It is our DUTY to ensure that their tears are not shed in vain.