Problem Child

Attribution: DonkeyHotey, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Geoff Carter

I was a high school teacher for thirty-four years before I entered the blissful ranks of the retired. Most of my time as an instructor was spent in Home and Hospital, a program designed to provide instruction for students too gravely ill to attend school. We were assigned our students and went to their homes to teach all of the core curriculum. During that time in my teaching career, I taught everything from English to Civics to Algebra to Biology to Economics to US History to Physics. 

A big part of my job was working around my pupils’ medical conditions, which sometimes included seeing them during chemotherapy or in the hospital. Some were gravely ill, even terminal. Some were too psychologically fragile to attend a traditional school. Some had problem pregnancies. Yet others were suffering from schizophrenia or paranoid delusions. It was tough—and interesting—and I did the best I could to give them the best possible education. 

I did it for a good many years and was pretty successful at it, but I’m not sure what I would have done with a student like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., our present Secretary of Health and Student Services. 

Here is a man—a grown man, not a child—who sawed off a whale’s head with a chainsaw, lashed it to the roof of his car, and took it home to “study”. He also, on another occasion, he found a dead bear cub on the side of the road. What did he do?  He threw it in his trunk and before taking some photos with it, he then dumped the body in a park, staging it to look as if the cub had been involved in a hit-and-run bike accident. I’ve read that one of the first symptoms of a budding serial killer is to go after small animals. Not that Mr. Kennedy killed any creature deliberately (that we know of), but he did seem to enjoy playing with dead animals, kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer performing his “experiments” on roadkill with his dad. 

If I would have had a student who told me he brought home the head of a rabbit or a squirrel or had a dead cat lying in his trunk, I would have made sure his parents knew what was going on. Then I would have gone down and scheduled an appointment for him with the school psychologist. 

If I had a student who told me he took his younger siblings and cousins swimming in a creek that was commonly used for sewer runoff, I would have sat him down and explained why swimming in a place like D.C.’s Rock Creek (where Robert Kennedy, Jr. took his grandchildren swimming) is unhealthy—and dangerous—because of sewage runoff and bacterial contamination. I would have been very concerned because not only did he fail to read the clearly displayed signs, but he also obviously couldn’t smell the raw sewage flowing under the feet of his grandkids. This lack of common sense would have set off alarm bells for me. I would probably have called social services for his own safety. 

If I’d had a student who deliberately put other students’ health and lives at risk, I would have stopped him immediately and taken him down to the principal’s office—and maybe have notified the authorities. When the people of Gaines County, Texas, suffered one of the most severe outbreaks of measles in recent history, Kennedy downplayed it. After hundreds became infected and two children died, he backtracked on his anti-vaccine stance, saying that he recommended MMR vaccines to combat the disease, contradicting his long-standing reputation as a vaccine skeptic.

Then, in yet another turnabout, Kennedy recommended using steroids, cod liver oil, and Vitamin A to treat the disease, none of which is treatment recommended by the medical community. In fact, according to NPR, a number of children who were administered high levels of Vitamin A (as recommended by Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers) suffered severe liver damage. One might argue that Secretary Kennedy meant no harm and was trying to help the victims, but ignorance—especially willful ignorance—is no defense. And this a member of the presidential cabinet who is a supposed expert on health

If I’d had a student who made grandiose and blatantly false claims about being abducted by aliens or befriending Bigfoot or reeling in the Loch Ness monster, I might have sat him down and talked to him about knowing the difference between the truth and a fib. When RFK, Jr. makes his absurd and scientifically unfounded claims about the dangers of vaccines, he is not telling the truth—and he knows it. Whether or not he truly believes vaccines are bad is not the point. Years of scientific research and empirical proof has shown that vaccines have saved (and might to continue to save) millions of lives. It is his responsibility as Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve the greater good, not just his personal ideological agenda. 

RFK Jr. also claimed that chemicals in drinking water caused children to become transgender, that radiation caused “leaky brain” syndrome, and that a worm had eaten part of his brain. He texted a friend a photograph of a roasted animal carcass, claiming it was a dog, and that his friend stated Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul” (TheGuardian). Most recently, lascivious and somewhat gnarly emails between Kennedy and his mistress emerged. I will not go into details here, but suffice it to say that his fascination with odder aspects of biology is fully addressed.

Any of these behaviors by themselves would be cause for concern for any teacher or parent but all of them combined into a single student signals a personality with problems telling reality from fantasy, who might have a possible personality disorder, and shows pronounced self-destructive tendencies. In short, somehow suffering from mental illness.

President Trump, along with RFK, Jr. and the other jokers in his cabinet—people like the vastly underqualified and chest-thumping Pete Hegseth, the publicity-crazed puppy-killing Kristy Noem, and the sickeningly illegal and unethical Pam Bondi. Together with their exaggerations, denials, evasions, and downright lies, they have whittled away at our incredulity at their stupidity. 

RFK, Jr., ironically, is immunizing the American public from standardized behavioral norms. No matter whatever new outlandish—or asinine—thing he does, we shrug and say, “Well, it’s RFK. That figures.”  He is vaccinating us with stupidity.

The same is true with the president and other member of his merry little band. They are making bad behavior and bad ideas if not acceptable, then tolerable. And that is simply intolerable.

Notes

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/rfk-jr-rock-creek-bacteria.html
2. https://www.axios.com/2025/04/06/kennedy-measles-vaccine-texas-visit#
3. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/06/g-s1-58624/second-child-dies-from-measles-related-causes-in-west-texas-where-cases-near-500
4. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/23/rfk-jr-wildest-campaign-moments
5. https://apnews.com/article/rfk-jr-kennedy-whale-investigation-09c494d8164c6f9bde9ece39637ea4d3