If it were true that "man exists by instincts," I'd be up a creek with no rudder, and a paddle would be a liability, a weapon. Living by my instincts would get me, and probably many of you, in a lot of trouble. My instinctive reaction to a lot of things nowadays is just too bizarre, but I've so far managed to stay in control. One contents oneself with only the instinctive/animal gut perforating emotional reaction [that's an ulcer, boys, I'll explain this whole thing] that our society permits. That is, when one wants to "ring necks," but does not actually "act out," to use the commonplace psyche term, one ends up with ulcers and high blood pressure and writing columns. Yet, it's sometimes not easy to control those Teutonic genes lurking around in my Kraut psyche. Consider some examples of how brutal instincts fight for control of one's mind.

When a police officer shouts, "Stop! police," and after he fires a warning shot, and a suspect does not stop, the out-of-breath officer should be able to shoot him, but not with the intent to kill him. That's my honest to God "flash" instinctive crazed opinion. Yet, I know that the odd deaf person would be injured or killed in such a scenario. I also know that if such an action by police officers were to be made again legal, quite a few fleeing "low-level" drug dealers would have to be shot, before the word got out that running from the police could get them hurt. Nevertheless, when I see (on a TV reality cop show) a suspect refusing to stop when ordered by a police officer, and see the resultant chase, I confess my first reaction is, "shoot him." That's one of my overwhelming, but controlled, impulses. So you can imagine my joy in reading (Steve Hankins, Daily Dunklin Democrat, Jan. 8, 2006) that after a thrilling three-state car chase to catch a suspected felon, Pemiscot County Sheriff Tommy Greenwell is quoted as saying, "As he was coming at me, I had all intentions of taking him out ..." You go Tommy! Shoot that sumbitch.

To continue with my confessional concerning the "basic me,"when I see televised documentaries describing how incorrigible convicted murderers use their idle hours in solitary confinement to stuff empty toothpaste tubes with their feces, or see how they hoard cups of their urine, to be spurted and thrown on the guards who bring them their food, my crazed impulse-suggested solutions include lacing the inmate's food and drink with massive overdoses of Thorazine, Haldol, Lithium, and every other psychiatric "drug of compliance" that one could get into their systems. I would reduce their id, ego, and libido to that of a retarded earthworm. But, I know that's just another example of my fleeting, and crazed, flash impulses. I know that drugging those inmates would be illegal, and one realizes that the lives of prison guards and policemen are thought by the ACLU, and other lefty prisoner-rights weenies, to be inferior to the licenses of imprisoned murderers to mug and mutilate their keepers. I also know one can't actually act on such solutions, no matter that the idea is pregnant with success. Nevertheless, a good chemical "solution" to the problem of controlling such murderous fiends would save the health and lives of countless prison guards and policemen.

While we're on the subject of the care and feeding of subhuman vicious killers, especially those who rape and murder innocent children, the way we execute those particular murderers is not nearly indecent and frightening enough for their crimes. We "put them down" like one would compassionately put an incurable beloved pet to sleep. That's way too easy. It is much better to keep them in prison for life with as little human contact as possible, and no television, nor any reading material whatsoever. Ok, so that's just yet another crazed thought, or is it?

My crazed instincts further lead me to the conclusion that when a juvenile commits a crime his record should be treated exactly as if he were an adult. Most "career" criminals have extensive juvenile records. The "juvenile court system" is an unfortunate failure. The "gut" tells me that a better way of treating juvenile crime is to lock up both the juvenile and his primary care giver. For example, if a juvenile is locked up for the crime of stealing or vandalism pending arraignment, the primary care giver should be required to spend the first night in jail as well, no matter the social status of the "parent." Call that crazy, but I'll bet locking up care givers for just one night would dramatically reduce juvenile crime.

I've saved "education" for the last confession of gut instincts that haunt my mind from time to time. Many good teachers have told me that they are appalled at the results of their own work. They beat their brains out, yet keep getting about the same results from their "mix" of students.

The reason for mixed results appears simple. The school curriculum (I write here of schools across the nation, not just our county schools) is not fitted to the different hereditary characters of individual students. Children having different talents, tastes and capacities are not receiving training based, even in part, upon those differences. Finances have caused school administrators to develop school "machinery" based on the false assumption that all minds are alike and therefore should have the same training. They know better, but school administrators also know that taxpayers vote as if they expect teachers to instruct fifty or sixty-pupil at once, in mass formation. MAP scores (one promised oneself never to write of MAP again, but?) are useless in evaluating and directing school improvement, for the premise that all children have the same brains is clearly false.

What is needed is to classify students according to superior, mediocre, and inferior mental capacities, and to note their home environment and the educational level of their parents. Only by doing this can instruction be given (and its success reasonably measured) to the individual on a basis of economy and efficiency. Right now we're forcing the superior student to wait for the mediocre or inferior student. While it is necessary and right to give the mediocre people and even those with inferior minds all the education they can grasp, it is not right that the national educational system should force the neglect of superior learners. For it is the better (smarter, and often brilliant poor children) class of students that makes human progress possible for all. We cannot blame teachers and administrators for having our present system. The fault, as they say, belongs with us, for buying into the "one size fits all" goofy education theory of teachers' "colleges" and teachers' unions. I would abolish all Departments of Education in universities across this great nation, and make it illegal for teachers' unions to prevent otherwise qualified professionals, such as doctors of medicine, mathematicians, engineers, etc., from teaching in our schools. As it is now a doctor of medicine cannot teach biology in our schools, without taking some useless "education" courses? A lawyer can't teach "business law," even though he might be a successful corporation lawyer, without taking the same sorts of superfluous "education courses." The best teachers, and we all know there are many in our communities, are the ones who know the most about their subject matter, not those who went into education as the easiest way to graduate from college.

Sometimes, we dare to dream of a world without socialistic (meaning unworkable and damaging) camouflage.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.