Homecoming

We escaped just in time, it seems.

America now has three jail systems: federal, regional, and public schools. Some wardens stroll cinderblock corridors with clubs ready to over react on our most heinous offenders: murderers and arsonists and terrorists, the guy who got popped with two grams of weed and the civil rights protestor who blocked traffic. Truly vicious people - to the gas chamber with them all, post haste, mop up the mess when their bowels release with the writ of habeas corpus, the slime. The villains. Other wardens stroll cinderblock corridors lined with hand-tracing turkey drawings and paper plates with seeds glued to the edges, clipboards in hand ready to over react to the other most heinous offenders: ten year old Jokari Becker, the squirt gun assassin in the Penn Hills School District, and Adam Liston the honor roll psychopath in Davis High School, California. These children are surely as dangerous as Charles Manson, and if school officials get their way, would probably share a cell with the serial killer. Or at least Liston would - he's old enough to vote and die in combat and be tried as an adult. Too bad he can't legally have a beer on his way to the electric chair. You see, there's this thing called "zero tolerance" in schools, and the "Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994," each of which bend about as far as rebar. Schools should be bastions of safety and security for America's youth, right? I'd vote for that. And schools are supposed to be social institutions as much as learning institutions, where children are rounded as well as instructed, where the lessons about fairness and honesty and how to interact with others they learn at home are reinforced. Or that's the ideal, anyway - school should take impressionable minds and ultimately produce young adults who can read and write, do math and understand science, and interact with other people. It's hard to interact with Dylon Klebold through the sights of his Tec9, so schools first try to turn kids into upstanding individuals and citizens, and then fall back on rules to provide justification for punishing wrongdoers while there's still time for small punishments to correct small problems before they turn into the headline story on Dateline. You catch a small problem, you fix it appropriately, and the kid adjusts and grows into a normal adult.

This is how it's supposed to work, but something has failed to the point where we have "zero tolerance" policies and a "Gun-Free Schools Act" to underscore what should be taken as a matter of course: don't hurt each other. What happened to instilling and reinforcing those basic concepts - don't hurt each other, don't be a dick - that we're at a point to need such extreme policies and laws? There seems to be an underlying, critical failure here, if such extreme measures are imposed as the "answer."
The problems that zero-tolerance addresses are myriad, and include Jokari running amok with his yellow squirt gun. And by running amok, I mean the published reports that he kept it in his book bag, didn't point it at anyone or try to terrorize classmates... There's a report that he was turned in by a girl on a school bus who said he was squirting people with it, which was refuted by the school bus driver. So, the girl who turned him in was lying about everything but the presence of his toy, a toy that looks like a toy, and presented no threat to anyone. Now, he's expelled.
And I suppose I should be glad - we can't have little terrorists going jihad in school with squirt guns. Squirt guns are gateway weapons, after all. Next thing you know he'll be swinging a spiked mace in a sea of friends and classmates, screaming "Ich werde Sie alle toten!" And Adam Liston, oh that silly scamp, thought he could hide behind his honor roll status, the lauds he's received for years for being a model student and citizen, the praise of teachers and friends and strangers, the esteem he built working long hours to save money for a college he was accepted to there during the senior year in high school when the stress got to him and he lapsed. His memory lapsed, that is, and he left his brand new sporting shotgun - unloaded and in its factory box - behind the seat of his pickup truck when he drove to school. He was pulled from class, the superintendent searched his truck, and six police cruisers responded. The 230 pound mountain of a young man was reduced to tears as he was shoved in the back seat of a police cruiser and driven to the Yolo County Jail. A bright kid, a model citizen, a sportsman proud of the shotgun he bought himself for his recent 18th birthday, the son of the former PTA president, is now expelled and faces two felony charges. So much for getting top-end jobs, ever working for the government, or, you know, being able to show his face around his peers. And even one felony bars you from ever legally owning a gun. You don't readily get up from falling that far from grace. He ran afoul of the zero-tolerance policy, and his public school is required - because it receives federal money - to adhere strictly to the Gun-Free Schools Act. No leeway. No second chances. Not for a ten-year-old with a squirt gun, not for an honor roll student with a memory lapse. Not for the kids we've heard about who are expelled for pointing their fingers and saying "bang," not for those who have paint ball magazines taken away from them in study hall. No mercy... and no sense.

So why do I care about what's going on in high school, an institution I escaped last century? 'Cause in a few years we'll be hiring the products of these new prisons, and I don't want them to be paranoid, fucked up psychopaths with years of rage and teen angst locked behind stormy eyes. I don't want them to be broken, beaten-down and underdeveloped automatons either. The last thing we need is to stifle and break an entire generation, the next generation we'll tap for mailmen and dentists and other professions notorious for violent outbursts that take friends and family with them into the headlines. And someday a lot of us are going to have kids, whether we want 'em or not, and they'll eventually go through whatever cinderblock mind-fuck we leave in place for them - prisons of expression, prisons of freedom of speech (it was suspended in a Westminster, Colorado middle school in April) - places through which they must pass to become anything substantial in life... and yet places from which one can be permanently cast for pointing a finger and saying "Bang!".
Is this what has happened to our country?

(Sorry this one was kinda serious, a co-workers 20 year old son OD'd this week, so I wanted to take a break from the fun stuff for a minute. Thanks for reading.)