Another month without a blog entry. I’ve had my head out of the news for a bit… but this story is good enough to bring me back to write again. Its great…
A 2nd-grader got suspended from school for drawing a picture of a gun. Granted, the picture is of a stick figure pointing the gun at another stick figure. The figureds are labelled “Me” and the other had someone else’s name above it (there is no mention in the story of whose name it is, though, so I’d like to assume that its “Osama bin Ladin” for the sake of argument… or at least “Al Gore”). Upon futher investigation, the 90 degree angled crayon line that is the “gun” is supposed to be a depiction of a water gun according to the artist, but that is of no concern… you cannot draw what you want to in school.
I remember when I was in 2nd grade and we all made outlines of each other on huge butcher paper. You lay down and the other kids trace your outline, etc. My friend Owen Zahorczek and I added penises for realism, which seemed like a horrible funny gag when we were in 2nd grade. We didn’t get suspended though, we got told in a very stern way that this was inappropriate “for here” and had to re-do our tracings… We didn’t understand why it was wrong, just that the whole situation was horribly funny, but never did it again… even though I distinctly remember the teachers laughing about it among themselves thinking we couldn’t hear.
I remember a friend of mine from those days drawing guns and tanks, etc. all the time. I did the same. I think everyone did. We had GI Joe back then, not Tinkie Winkie, and my father taught me to shoot since I was very young (which was normal where I grew up) so this made sense. Of course, my generation never shot anyone in school either…
that’s striking to me. We’ve had schools in America since before the Revolution. We’ve been awash in guns since before the Revolution as well (if you don’t know anything about the American Revolution maybe you got suspended for drawing too many guns…). We also had fairly rigid nuclear family structures (sometimes more than one wife-figure in the family, though… hmm…) since before the Revolution, but have only recently decided that this was too old fashioned for the present day… and we’ve never had school shootings or civil violence from the sedated sub-urban youth population until just now. So its obviously the fault of guns, not the abandonment of the age-old family premise.
The kid also drew a cyclopes (much scarier than a gun), King Tut (responsible for the mass-murder of adversaries), a ghost and a tree. Luckily he didn’t draw a ghost-tree though, because that would get him kicked right out, as would a machine-gun version of King Tut.
But you can listen to disruptive, sexual-violence promoting music at school when you’re 10 yeard old and that’s freedom of speech.
Where are our priorities? I think we’re in denial about the responsibilities of individuals for their own actions. But that’s beating a dead retard… everyone says that without contemplating what that means.
Anyway, this isn’t organized at all. I’ll have to come back and fix this up to reflect the appropriate level of ridiculousness this situation is master of…