Halloween Special

 

Happy Halloween Everyone!

Feel free to sit by a fire or a dimly lit lamp with a cup of tea or glass of whiskey whatever suits your liking. I have some spooky history to tell you about that can be quite haunting.

It begins in 1883 When a scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin named Francis Galton comes up with the term Eugenics which is the belief in the perfect race. Many intellectuals and political leaders backed this theory such as Alexander Graham Bell, Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, and Woodrow Wilson. These are only a few of the many people that backed this concept, turning it into a movement where they promoted compensating those who marry and conceive children by the government's approval that they have met the expectation of what is deemed as fit. Those who were not deemed as such were allowed to live out their lives once they went through forced sterilization.

This movement helped to spark many other disturbing events that changed the world forever.

Due to this movement mental hospitals popped up all over the world. Two of them are the: Pennhurst, and the Byberry Insane Asylum located in Philadelphia. Like many other institutions, they began with good intentions but then they became overpopulated and understaffed and the thing just kept spiraling down to the worst of nightmares. Patents found themselves locked in a dark room with no windows for days and days. Teeth were pulled out as punishment when the patients bit the doctors and nurses. Many were left to lie in their own stool for days. Shock therapy along with many other inhuman treatments were practiced immensely. Children grew up never leaving their cribs nor learning how to walk. Patents were even raped by not just other patients but also doctors and nurses. Thousands and thousands died from these practices without seeing any beacon of hope and those who lived only in the shadows of fear through the 18 and 19 hundreds ending just before the 2000s. Very few saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Those who never have still remain there today hiding in the shadows of fear.

Here is a list of more of these hospitals: Pennhurst, Byberry, Eastern State Penitentiary, Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Athens Lunatic Asylum, Norwich State Hospital

During the 1940s there was another who became influenced by the Eugenics movement, and we all know the name. Hitler studied the eugenics movement and began to not just believe in the perfect race but also began enacting it by creating prison camps and forcing those who did not meet his standards to these camps or to death. The very first camps that he created were for people with disability. The Nazis formed what is called the T4 or the euthanasia," program. At the beginning of the War, the T4 took people with disabilities deemed them unfit, and killed them all. Adults were sent to gas chambers and the children were drugged and/or starved to death.

Still do not believe me! Here are a couple of web sights that I have found during my research:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-murder-of-people-with-disabilities

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757926/#:~:text=It%20was%20Francis%20Galton%2C%20a,individuals%20by%20providing%20monetary%20incentives.

Are chills going down your spine yet?

In today's society, we still have many issues when it comes to people with disabilities and how we are being treated. Even though we no longer have the same abusive treatments in hospitals or the mass murdering of the ones deemed unfit, we do still have the same expectations of the Eugenics movement. Even today people withhold such standards for society. In the early 2000s and still continuing today if you have a mental disability you are told what you are incapable of doing, and then get placed into Special Education (special-ed). In special-ed you don't graduate with a diploma. A lot of times it's like being placed in daycare. They don't even bother to teach you anything. I shadowed a special-ed class once during my lunch hour in high school and during my time in the class I overhear the students asking about graduation and getting a diploma, and the teacher responded with your not getting a diploma, a diploma is not for you. The teachers aren't even specialized to work with kids with disabilities except for a few.

A student is considered lucky when they end up with a teacher that is specialized in working with their disability. A lot of times a teacher only gets the job because it was the only one available regardless of training. They even take the students out to stores and just walk around with them, with no other interaction except walking around with them. Basically, the same thing a parent can do when they go shopping. Two years after graduating high school I got a job at Kroger and saw the same group of students just walking around with their teachers from my school since my freshman year. There was no explaining what was around them, just walking around. People should not be paraded around like this. They also like to pool students into special-ed that don't even belong in the program just so that they can get more money. Yeah, they get paid more when they have a larger amount of students. It's all about the money unsurprisingly.