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"Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up." - The Rev. Martin Niemoller, WWII concentration camp survivor

My first encounter with social engineering -- at least, the first I can recall - came when I was in the first grade. I began attending public schools in New York in the 1960s, where many of the institutions and practices Red State folks fear today were already well in place. I'll clarify: When I first heard the phrase "Political Correctness," my reaction was one of recognition rather than perplexity. The analogy to Orwell's Newspeak was definitely not lost on me.

I was oblivious to what was occurring at the time, of course, but here's what happened: I was in the first week or so of grade school when I was pulled from my class and placed in one of less than a dozen children. I was puzzled, but I was only six, so I went where and did what I was told. The kids in this class were ones I recalled having seen before, but never in a regular classroom setting. I recall that none of them communicated particularly well, to put it politely.

To put it impolitely, I had been placed in a class of children who were one step away from the local home for the mentally retarded. The school had not yet finished determining if these kids, with an assortment of speech impediments, behavioral anomalies and yet-undiagnosed learning disabilities were going to be able to assimilate into the mainstream academic environment or need to be transferred to a facility more appropriately equipped to educate them, such as it was.

At this point the reader might be wondering how a mental defective such as myself managed to overcome a terribly limiting handicap, particularly during the Civil Rights era, and ultimately develop into someone who can put more than a few words together at a time.

In all humility, there really wasn't that much to overcome. You see, a few weeks prior to the beginning of school that year, I had lost one of my front teeth; consequently, I had a very pronounced lisp. The enlightened, sensitive educational professionals into whose charge I had been placed quickly surmised that I was probably retarded and off I went. No official notice was given to me or my parents.

When my parents discovered this horrible (but oh, so characteristic) blunder, they were understandably infuriated, and demanded I be returned to my first grade class. The properly-chagrined school administrators happily complied. These days, my family would likely have netted an easy few million in the civil settlement behind this unfortunate occurrence.

At the risk of waxing Dave Barry-esque: I am absolutely not making this up.

Later in my grade school career, I experienced being whisked off to the school psychologist's office and Rorschached (inkblot-tested) on more than one occasion for such things as cursing out a bully as he physically assaulted me. "Do you realize that you could permanently damage his psyche?" I was asked.

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