Terry Sarten: I'm desperately seeking a time-out room for US voters

It's more like the 1950s than 2016, writes Terry Sarten of what's been happening worldwide.

The politically powered time machine has transported us back to the 1950s. We now find ourselves in some kind of celestial seclusion room, locked away for misbehaving.

Certainly, the Minister of Education must have been in one of these seclusion rooms as complaints were being made to the ministry by concerned parents about the use of small, dark, sometimes-locked seclusion spaces to manage the behaviour of children.

How could she have not been aware this was occurring? How could she not have known her own department was investigating an outdated, almost medieval, practice and then take so long to provide a meaningful response?

Hekia Parata's slow response to the revelations about the use of a seclusion room in some schools has been blamed on what she described as the "ambiguous" notion of what is a time-out room and when that becomes a seclusion room.

I am sure none of the children who have experienced being locked in a small room would be calmly thinking "this is ambiguous, so it must be okay".

Reports indicate she was aware of the issue and then failed to act as an advocate for children as soon as she knew.

It is even more astonishing that locking a frightened child in a small, dark room was even remotely considered as the beginning of a starting point of a rational hint of a possibility of maybe perhaps a good idea. It is the sort of thing that reeks of the 1950s. Most of us thought that treating children this way had vanished along with the strap.

We don't lock adults in the stationery cupboard for misbehaving. If we did, we would end up in court.

The other ghost of the 1950s is the election of a misogynist, racist, power-mad narcissist as President of the USA. Donald Trump is a throwback.

The language and attitudes he spouts are a return to a past which we had long thought was well behind us. Prior to the election, we thought he was one of those 1950 TV re-runs - a series of film clips of a dictator shaking his fist at the world, espousing ideas that carry us back to McCarthy, the Ku Klux Klan and the Cold War.

The thought was that this way of looking at the world would never be taken seriously in 2016. But, here we are, stuck in the past when America and the world really needs to be working on designing a future for the planet.

There will now be a powerful echo of the Brexit effect in the US.

The British politicians who campaigned to leave the EU, using the fear of immigrants as a key theme, got what they wanted but it was immediately obvious they had no plan and no idea of what they should do.

As the people in the US who voted for Trump come to realise that they have been told a phantom set of lies inside a series of hollow promises and that President Trump has absolutely no idea of what to do, they will start thinking - what have we done? If he throws one of his tantrums, it is unlikely he will be sent to a time-out room in the White House - but there are other consequences.

Past American presidents have been impeached or forced to resign for their misdeeds so there is still a precedent for presidents to be indicted for crimes. This may be how America regains its mojo as one of the world's vibrant and innovative countries.

¦Terry Sarten is a writer, musician and social worker. Feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz