Reason Abandoned
Pointing A Finger Is Threatening?
Posted: February 27, 2013
Though, admittedly, there’s a ducks-in-a-rain-barrel quality to this editorial, we cannot resist commenting about a few recent developments on the zero-tolerance front. So ridiculous are they that we pause to wonder what on earth filters through the minds of certain people, allegedly mature adults.
For instance, what prompted the arrest, earlier this month, of a 10-year-old Alexandria boy. His transgression? Having a five-and-dime toy gun nestled in his backpack. Such a threat to society was this tyke that school authorities skipped past obvious and more temperate responses — such as a tongue-lashing from the principal, or even in-school suspension — and dispatched the kid to the not-so-tender mercies of Johnny Law. Can you spell over-reaction?
But then, that’s the way of the world these days, at least here in Virginia where, as The Washington Post reported, school authorities in Prince William county slapped a suspension on an 8-year-old for, get this, pointing “his finger like a gun in a school hallway after a friend pretended to shoot him with a bow and arrow.” Boys will be boys? Not when they “threaten harm to self and others.”
Have we totally abandoned our twin senses of differentiation and wholesome discrimination? In other words, have we lost our ability to differentiate between what is real and what is not? Newtown was real, and tragically so. And so, too, was a loaded gun carried onto a school bus by a second-grader earlier this month in Henrico County. School officials there reacted promptly, dealing with the situation and the youngster involved, as well they should have.
But a play pistol? And a pointed finger? C’mon. A generation that grew up playing childhood games of “cops ’n robbers” or “cowboys and Indians” in the backyard should know better — but, apparently, does not. Such people have let zero-tolerance policies become blankets for the abandonment of right reason.
For instance, what prompted the arrest, earlier this month, of a 10-year-old Alexandria boy. His transgression? Having a five-and-dime toy gun nestled in his backpack. Such a threat to society was this tyke that school authorities skipped past obvious and more temperate responses — such as a tongue-lashing from the principal, or even in-school suspension — and dispatched the kid to the not-so-tender mercies of Johnny Law. Can you spell over-reaction?
But then, that’s the way of the world these days, at least here in Virginia where, as The Washington Post reported, school authorities in Prince William county slapped a suspension on an 8-year-old for, get this, pointing “his finger like a gun in a school hallway after a friend pretended to shoot him with a bow and arrow.” Boys will be boys? Not when they “threaten harm to self and others.”
Have we totally abandoned our twin senses of differentiation and wholesome discrimination? In other words, have we lost our ability to differentiate between what is real and what is not? Newtown was real, and tragically so. And so, too, was a loaded gun carried onto a school bus by a second-grader earlier this month in Henrico County. School officials there reacted promptly, dealing with the situation and the youngster involved, as well they should have.
But a play pistol? And a pointed finger? C’mon. A generation that grew up playing childhood games of “cops ’n robbers” or “cowboys and Indians” in the backyard should know better — but, apparently, does not. Such people have let zero-tolerance policies become blankets for the abandonment of right reason.