In an earlier part of my career, I spent time working as a psychiatric trainee within the prisons. It taught me much: how 15 minutes with a person could hold them, how to document in front of someone who does not like you, and that the inmates do not care about their environment. They care about the people they are incarcerated with. They have no allegiance to the prison. It is not their home.

This is an appropriate and natural reaction to the fact that prison is a punishment. It is also why modern psychiatric units are designed so they don’t have locks security, and have enough space that people can get away from each other.

But consider what happens if a state makes a nation into a prison.

The paranoia or anxiety at any misstep is a milder version of the daily stress of prison life.

Older white Americans worried about the heightened racial awareness of their children and pundits decrying the young flocking to ethnonationalist parties, movements, websites or even jokes, share this same blindness.

They fail to see that the idea that building a perfectly policed sandbox forgets to account for the children placed in it. They fail to see they have recreated the prison set up in countless other realms. An open office with empowered HR units and harassment lawsuits is Bentham’s panopticon. Schools with zero tolerance but a heavy dose of anarcho-tyranny are corporate gulags in training. One hour inclusion seminars do not change the minefield that is daily interaction in the American melting pot.

It is no longer 1955, and the kids are noticing.

It is not the kids. IF there is no ownership, no adult will care. If the adults do not care for society, the society is as doomed as the Soviet was.