"Zero Tolerance=Zero Sense"
by
Dusty Rhoades
The officials at one Minnesota high school have refused to allow the yearbook to publish a picture showing a female senior posing on a cannon. Seems that the young lady, whose ambition is to join the Army after she graduates, was photographed on one of those cannon displays you see outside of some VFW halls. School officials nixed the pic because, because school policy bans not only guns, but any image of guns, whether that image appears on shirts, hats, photographs or other pictorial representations.
This must make teaching the history of the American Revolution and the Civil War somewhat of a challenge. If the history books contain pictures of soldiers, do the teachers have to draw big black bars over the guns in their hands? "Sorry, Billy, you can’t see pictures of guns. The school board is afraid that you might take a howitzer and blow up the school."
You may also remember the flap a couple of months ago where a Jewish youth was told by the principal of a Mississippi high school the remove his Star of David pendant because it was regarded as a "gang symbol." The school board, as so often happens, first backed the principal’s absurd ruling, since school boards are loath to overrule one of their own. But they eventually backed down, probably after someone asked exactly which Mississippi gang it was that used the Star of David as a symbol. The Super-Fly Rabbis, maybe? On the bright side, I hear the school board got a real nice letter from the Islamic Jihad.
Welcome to the post-Columbine educational system, where paranoia reigns supreme and any semblance of good sense has gone right out the window. But some of the events going down these days aren’t nearly as amusing as the ones above. Some American youths are discovering that being a little different can get you more than just a wedgie from the jocks and warnings from the principal about your permanent record. Now, in the brave new world of the modern school, it can get you locked up.
A Texas seventh-grader named Chris Beamon was given an English assignment for Halloween to "write a scary story about being in the dark and hearing noises". His response to the assignment got a grade of 100 from the teacher (according to the Dallas Morning News) as well as extra credit when he read it out loud to the class.
It also got him locked up for six days.
The principal called the juvenile authorities because the story contained references to guns and the names of several classmates and the teacher. A judge immediately committed Christopher to juvenile detention. The district attorney tried and tried, but never could find anything to prosecute the kid for, other than the fact that classmates thought that he was " little weird," and the fact that the school had described him as a discipline problem. After six days of media scrutiny and threats from the American Civil Liberties Union, the judge backed down. So, even though he had committed no crime, a thirteen-year old was locked up for six days.
In perhaps the most chilling story on this topic, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has announced that it’s joining forces with a computer security firm to create a computer program called "Mosaic 2000". Mosaic will provide educators with "profiles" of students who might pose a danger, based on 200 questions on topics such as "alarming" talk, the availability of guns, and "reported" abuse of domestic pets.
Oh, lovely. Like it’s not hard enough to be a geek, now you have to worry about getting "profiled" by the people whose ham-handed approach to law enforcement helped touch off the Waco debacle.
I am so happy I’m not a high school student these days. I’ve always been pretty much like I am now: an incurable smart-ass with a sense of humor so dark, it veers into the infrared range. My favorite color is black. I grew up around guns, and I confess, I’ve been known to remove a domestic pet from the front porch by giving them a quick ticket on Nike Airlines. One ill-placed wisecrack, a run through the computer, and I’d have been off to the juvie gulag so fast it’d make your head spin.
Well, there’s one bright side. We can save the kids the trouble of studying Franz Kafka’s "Penal Colony" (where everyone is guilty, but no one knows what they’re accused of) or George Orwell’s "1984" (where the only crime is the thoughts in your head).
All the kids have to do is look around the classroom.
Dusty Rhoades is a Southern Pines lawyer, which provides him with an outlet for his own anti-social tendencies.
© 1999 by Jerry D. Rhoades, Jr.