Common Sense
Just when you think that the guardians of airport security, the TSA (Terminally Stupid Agency), can’t get any more obnoxious in the way that it treats hapless airline passengers, along comes this little gem. The arrogant TSA bureaucrats have now moved beyond frisking grandmothers and small children as possible terrorists and are now humiliating amputees as part of the airport screening process. Ah, our tax dollars at work. Our civil liberties RIP.
Yes, our zealous educational bureaucrats are at it again. This time, yet another school in Texas imposed a bizarre, one-week suspension on an elementary school student. Her offense? Possession of a Jolly Rancher’s candy that a friend had given her. It seems the healthy food police insist that possession of such evil contraband was a blatant violation of the rules and could not go unpunished.
Now, I love Texas. My wife and I lived in the state for 14 years in the 1970s and 1980s, and we plan to have our primary retirement home there. But after this latest incident, I was beginning to wonder if there was something in the water supply that was causing Texans to lose all semblance of good judgment. (It could also explain why they inflicted both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush on the nation.)
It soon became apparent, though, that the loss of common sense is not unique to Texas schools. School administrators in Georgia suspended an autistic student for drawing a stick figure gun with a caption that implied he would like to shoot his teacher. Not only did he receive a suspension, he now faces possible felony charges. Although the child is 14 years old, his parents and others insist that he has the mental capacity of a third grader. Nice way to show compassion and a sense of proportion, Georgia bureaucrats.
The good people of New York City have been saved from a pint-size criminal. It seems that Patrick Timoney, a fourth grade student at PS 52, dared to bring a weapon to school. That weapon was a 2-inch plastic gun from his Lego set. The PS 52 principal lectured young Patrick about the evil nature of his offense and threatened him with suspension.
Now, one might simply write-off this incident as the over-reaction of one school bureaucrat, except that a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education subsequently defended the action. She stressed that the district had a “zero tolerance” policy for weapons, real or toy, brought on school grounds. Apparently the district also has a zero common sense policy. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature should be able to tell that a two-inch Lego is not a weapon.
And these people are paid to educate our children?
Just when you think the “security” measures at the airports can’t get any more absurd, along comes this gem. It seems that the latest terrorist suspect is an 8-year-old Cub Scout, Michael “Mikey” Hicks. The practitioners of security theater (taking highly visible measures to make travelers feel safer without actually making them safer) are alert to the dire menace that he poses. They might have failed to stop the underwear bomber from getting on the plane, despite numerous warning signals, but they’re not about to ignore this lethal threat. Little Mikey is on their watch list, and they subject the poor kid to a pat down whenever he and his parents try to fly. Apparently, he has the same name as a real terror suspect. But wouldn’t you think that reasonably intelligent adults could figure out that an 8-year-old is not the person they’re looking for? Oh, wait… we’re talking about the TSA, where no intelligent adults need apply.
An update to last month’s decision by a school board in Mesquite, Texas to impose an in-school suspension on a four-year-old boy for the heinous crime of having long hair. You can always count on bureaucrats, especially public school bureaucrats, to stick to a dumb policy no matter how much the evidence mounts that it’s a dumb policy. True to form, the educational bureaucrats in Texas have offered a “compromise” to the parents of young Taylor Pugh, the miscreant who insists on maintaining a long hair style. They can braid his hair–as long as the braids don’t come past his ears.
How a boy with braids is less of a “distraction” in the classroom (the official justification for the suspension) than a boy with long hair, I will leave it up to the Texas hair police to explain. If this is the best that so-called educators can do with their time, I know a way that the hard-pressed Texas state budget could save some money. Eliminate those positions and divert back to the state treasury whatever funds are used to pay for them.
Repeat after me: We are not the Taliban. We should not try to dictate hair styles.
If you saw this story, you might assume that you slipped back in time to 1959. The educational bureaucrats of Texas have suspended a boy–a preschooler, no less–for having excessively long hair. The tot actually looks quite dapper–at least in any civilized part of the country. Furthermore, he was growing his hair so that he could later have it cut and donated to a charity that provides wigs to cancer victims who have lost their hair from chemotherapy treatments. One would think that he would receive praise, not be bullied, for such a generous impulse.
Even if charity had not been his motive, such idiotic regimentation should have disappeared by the end of the 1960s. But apparently it hasn’t in certain authoritarian precincts in the South. I have a suggestions for the Texas hair police, who apparently believe that every young male ought to look like he’s planning to have a career in the Marines. You have enough of a challenge educating the next generation, and most of the public schools aren’t doing a very good job at that task. Stop trying to dictate such things as grooming preferences. This is supposed to be a free country, and you might at least try to maintain that illusion a little longer with respect to your students.
Just when you think law enforcement bureaucrats can’t get any more irrational, comes this story (hat tip to my Cato Institute colleague Dan Mitchell) from Indiana. A grandmother ran afoul of the drug war laws by making two purchases of cold medicine for her family.
When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs.
Now, Harpold is trying to clear her name of criminal charges, and she is speaking out in hopes that a law will change so others won’t endure the same embarrassment she still is facing.
…Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week’s time.
Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period.
When the police came knocking at the door of Harpold’s Parke County residence on July 30, she was arrested on a Vermillion County warrant for a class-C misdemeanor, which carries a sentence of up to 60 days in jail and up to a $500 fine.
The good citizens of Indiana can now rest easier knowing this nefarious drug lord has been apprehended. Whatever happened to the concept of discretion by police and prosecutors? Whatever happened to common sense?
And then there is this story about how a young couple lost custody of their young children for a month after a Wal-mart employee forwarded “bath-time” photos they had taken of the children to the authorities. How many parents over the decades would have run afoul of such absurd suspicions of child pornography, if that standard had been the norm?
I’m interested in suggestions about how Americans can rein-in this runaway zealotry before it turns our country into something resembling the fascist and communist systems we used to abhor.
Parents who dare to be affectionate to their children had better think twice about visiting Brazil with them after this episode. I guess it’s nice to know that U.S. law enforcement bureaucrats are not the only ones who can be irrational zealots. That realization, however, is mighty small comfort. Why has common sense apparently died all over the world?