“Summer Camp” conjures up carefree days, kids freed from the shackles of their parents, swimming in lakes, rowing canoes, hiking, riding nags, weaving friendship bracelets and singing campfire songs while gorging on s’mores and bug juice. Not so at Tampa Liberty Camp – aka Training Camp for a Future Generation of Hippies – where a few unlucky Tampa kids will be spending their summer learning about the gold standard, the evils of European socialism and the Christian roots of the Constitution.
Tampa Liberty is a hybrid of vacation Bible school and Glenn Beck, modeled after a camp in Kentucky that seems to have taken its curriculum straight outta the teachings of Beck’s favorite author, the late W.Cleon Skousen, who authored some sketchy and racist histories of our great nation. Kids at the Kentucky camp learned, among other things, a key piece of Skousen dogma, that the early American settlers starved to death because they were communists.
Both the Kentucky and the Tampa camps are the brainchild of off-shoots of Beck’s so-called 9/12 project (symbolizing the day after the 9/11 attacks when the country put partisan differences aside and came together, apparently for the first and last time in American history. You know, that marvelous day in our history when families wandered through ash in search of their loved ones and George Bush zigzagged the country in Air Force One). The 9/12 groups are tea partiers, with the élan of even more crackpotty religious undertones.
Some particulars from on Camp Liberty from their site:
“Kids aged 8-12 years old will have fun while learning the principles of liberty, free markets, and limited government. They will also learn the values of personal responsibility, faith, and principles that include “America is good,” “I believe in God,” and “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable. We want to impart to our children what our nation is about, and what they may or may not be told.”
Red-white-and-blue confetti will be thrown. But afterward the kids will have to clean up the confetti, learning that with freedom comes responsibility.
Starting in an austere room where they are made to sit quietly, symbolizing Europe, the children will pass through an obstacle course to arrive at a brightly decorated party room (the New World).
You can’t make this stuff up.
Children will win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the “banker” will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value. “Some of the kids will fall for it. Others kids will wise up.”
Come ON. Anyone with kids knows that a Candy Economy won’t last a day! That is, unless the kids are able to use their candy to buy larger amounts of candy. All of the “gold” will be gone the first day. But, for arguments sake, let’s say the 8 year olds didn’t eat the candy and using the Skittles economy model: If little Jackson shoots little Madison in the arm during musket practice, she only has the right to go to the infirmary if she in possession of, say 1000 Skittles. If she is in possession of said Skittles, she will have to shell out another heapin’ helpin’ of Skittles up on entering the infirmary, and before seeing the camp nurse, who is only authorized to provide Madison with basic care, maybe a bandaid or and a shot of Bactine. If more specialized treatment is needed – say like bullet removal and stitches – the nurse will refer the injured little patriot to a different camp across the lake (only accessible by rowboat, which the injured party must row herself), for another whopping outlay of Skittles. If Madison does not have enough Skittles, she will not be permitted to visit the camp nurse. Nor will the other little patriots be permitted to loan her their Skittles or provide assistance to their injured friend, because that is the very definition of unAmericanism. Rather, the bleeding and increasingly dizzy little patriot will have to tend to her own wounds, stitch up her own damn bullet hole, sans Novocain and choking back tears of stoic responsibility.
Children will blow bubbles from a single container of soapy solution, and then pop each other’s bubbles with squirt guns in an arrangement that mimics socialism. They are to count how many bubbles they pop. Then they will work with individual bottles of solution and pop their own bubbles.
That’s right, they’re going to force small children to riddle their friend’s bubbles with bullets, and also to burst their own bubbles. Mimics socialism.
No word on whether the youngsters will also have arts and crafts to learn to make misspelled protest signs and lessons on revisionist history. Sound like a grande ol’ time? Sound like something that will provide cherished memories for children, and not at all the kind of thing that will make the campers resent and detest their parents for? Like 1950’s squares who spawned hippies, and 1980’s evangelicals who spawned undereducated meth users. If today’s kids find this stuff to be as transparently lame as kids did when they were indoctrinated into the “anti communist” movement in grade school back in the day, in 5 – 10 years, we’re going to see a huge increase in marijuana use and Rasta junk sales. And because by the time these under-educated, emotionally deranged kids are 18, their only employment option will be the Army and we will see firsthand how indoctrinating impressionable kids in this Randian crap isn’t really suited for folks who need to employ teamwork and the ability to adapt. The military is not exactly an objectivist state. Human children are shrieking, selfish tyrants. The whole point of parenthood is to socialize them to the point that they can be valuable members of society through commie lessons of sharing and “feelings” and fair play. So let’s just take a group of innocent kids who are just starting to develop a moral center and a consciousness about the world and turn them back into those pants-shitting, greedy, baby human animals that flailed and vomited on the floor a few short years ago. Since “sharing falls “under the ‘charitable’ category for 8 – 12 year olds, methinks these campers aren’t going to be too popular on the playground come summer’s end.
photos are not actually from Tampa Camp Liberty, which will by no means be so chimerically glorious.