“Paranoia strikes deep; into your heart it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid…” go the words of Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 song. Apparently, in today’s society, fear and paranoia are rampant. Paranoia is defined as: “a rare chronic psychosis characterized by systemized delusions of persecution or of grandeur….” A second definition given by Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary is: “a tendency on the part of individuals or of groups toward excessive irrrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others” (611).
Several examples have surfaced in the news lately, but we begin with an incident which occurred in Troy, Alabama four years ago. A grade school student had as a hobby writing scripts for his favorite television series. [Schools once encouraged this kind of creativity.] He spent a great deal of time at the computer writing and revising until it was in the form he wanted it. He had in mind asking a few classmates to take the roles of the various characters and video-taping it; so he handed out copies of the script and asked them to read it and see if they wanted to be part of this project.
Big mistake. One boy took it home to his father, who called the school principal, and (like the marshal of Dodge City ridding the town of outlaws and rustlers) the courageous man confiscated all of those “dangerous” manuscripts the very next day. [Fortunately, he could not impound the lad’s home computer.] Citing and misapplying a general rule from the student handbook, he said he was authorized to take such actions to deter the school from gang activity. Say what? A harmless television script was construed as gang activity?
No, there were no gang members even in the context of the play; it was a futuristic science fiction story. The student was severely reprimanded for his creative mind, and his parents were called in for a conference to make sure this “reprehensible” behavior was not repeated. Some readers may be thinking, “There must be more to it than what we have been told; no one could be this paranoid.” Think so? Read on.
In Lexington, North Carolina a six-year-old boy was suspended from school for kissing a girl on the cheek. [It’s a good thing this policy was not in force when the author was in school; he would probably have been locked up in a Feminazi concentration camp.] The Dallas Morning News reported this story on September 27th, from which come the following facts (6A).
*The formal charge was sexual harassment.
*The girl’s parents did not complain to the school.
*The boy says the little girl asked him to kiss her, and she had kissed him before.
* School officials said they did not punish the boy for sexual harassment but for breaking a rule prohibiting “unwarranted and unwelcome touching of one student by another” (did they check with the girl?).
*The principal had previously told the boy’s mother, however, in clear and unmistakable terms that her son was in trouble because he violated the sexual harassment policy.
More Paranoia
How can schools and principals possibly be so paranoid as to see evil in the most innocent of deeds? Writing a story or kissing a child on the cheek are considered punishable offenses when in some schools weapons are brought into classrooms? Are we experiencing the emergence of power-hungry control freaks in administrative positions, or just people without any common sense?
Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician and nationally syndicated columnist, said, “I think it’s crazy going so far,” and added, “I would want to look at the adults in that situation, because I think they need help.”
Two weeks after this event a second-grade boy was suspended five days from Public School 104 in Queens for sexual harassment. He not only kissed a girl; he ripped a button off her skirt. Now granted that such an action constitutes inappropriate behavior (and he has had other problems), but a five-day suspension? Older students who have cussed out teachers only received three days. Drunk drivers who killed someone have served less time than that.
Someone might think that his action was sexual (even though it was in public), but he said he got the idea from his favorite book, Corduroy, which is about a bear with a missing button (Denton Record-Chronicle, October 2nd, 2A). The kid is either telling the truth, or he’s a very fast thinker. In either case, he was treated as a major felon with a twisted criminal mind rather than a child who had not thought through his actions.
The Great Drug Caper
Here is another one of those events that leaves a person scratching his (or in this case particularly, her) head, wondering, “Do we really have all the information on this issue? Apparently (and unfortunately) we do. The way the school system dealt with this problem, one would think the story should read as follows.
A big-time drug dealer and her victim were caught in Fairborn, Ohio. The “user” was suspended from school for ten days, and the vile wretch who gave her drugs was initially suspended for four months. Yes, it’s time we got tough on this problem. The Fairborn school district should be applauded for this bold action.
So what was the dangerous drug these girls were caught with: crack cocaine, marijuana, LSD? No-it was a Midol tablet. That’s right-just a plain, over-the-counter Midol tablet. Have school officials finally been driven over the edge by the pressures of their jobs, or did they just lose all their marbles during recess? How can any sane individual (let alone a group of them) possibly react in such a way?
Somebody is probably thinking that even though the punishment was excessive, the girls violated a school policy. They certainly did. No one is to receive so much as an aspirin without the parent’s permission. [Of course, if it were an abortion, the mere destruction of human life, Planned Parenthood could take a girl of the same age to an abortion clinic and back without her parent’s knowledge.]
So maybe a girls’ counselor should have called the two girls into her office and explained, “You are not allowed to share aspirin tablets, Midols, or any other medication (does that include cough drops?); next time come to the nurse’s office when you have a problem. But instead they made the school look ridiculous by giving the two girls ten-day and four-month suspensions (the “dispenser of drugs” is punished more severely).
According to the Denton Record-Chronicle of October 9th, “The school district’s drug policy does not distinguish between legal and illegal drugs, or prescription and nonprescription drugs” (9A). So how rational is that? Is it too difficult to write the words prescription or illegal into a drug policy? What is the matter with these people who occupy positions of authority?
The Dangers of Irrationality
The anger that many people feel at the various school officials involved in all of these absurd actions is not misdirected. Their indefensible actions help to sustain poor attitudes that already need correcting. The first is a lack of respect for authority. We have progressed considerably since the sixties when enlightened hippies addressed the police as “pigs.” But there is still progress to be made..
Children need to be taught to respect the authority of their parents, their teachers, the school principal, the police, elected officials, their spiritual leaders, and most of all, God. When children exhibit unruly behavior and violate school policies, they ought to be punished. But if the violation is questionable and the punishment excessive, what kind of message does that communicate? It tells young people that it doesn’t matter what the rules are-they are arbitrary. “Whatever I say they are is what they are.” What does someone learn from this kind of system? He learns that the one in authority is the one that gets to exercise the power. If such an individual is to be respected at all, it will be that he somehow achieved that power. Authority will not be viewed as a way to keep order, but to get one’s way and order others around.
Suspending students for writing a play, kissing a classmate on the cheek, or for handing a fellow-sufferer a Midol tablet can hardly be considered fair; thus respect for authority will not be engendered.
Not only does respect for law and order (and the authority behind it) break down, but serious concerns become trivialized. What worse punishment would a real drug dealer receive than a four-month suspension-perhaps execution? Students may say to themselves, “It isn’t going to matter what I do that’s wrong; I can’t fare any worse than the girl who was suspended for sharing her Midol tablets.”
And the sad fact is: we have a serious drug problem. The September 27th Dallas Morning News highlighted our nation’s current problem.
The U.S. Customs Service, which protects America’s borders from illegal drugs, money, and weapons, has cut 662 investigative jobs and brought thousands fewer criminal cases since President Clinton took office, records show (6A).
The very next day the same newspaper printed a chart with information supplied by the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse showing the sharp rise in the usage of tobacco, marijuana, and other illegal drugs since 1992 (11A).
The point is that there are real problems that need to be handled with appropriate penalties. There must be a more effective way to alleviate the problem of drugs in the schools than making examples out of girls with Midol tablets.
The ironic thing is that most of the students know which of their peers are in gangs or using drugs. Could not something be done about these problems if we were really serious about fighting them? Or are these situations used as an opportunity to strike a pose of being concerned about these matters?
And isn’t it hypocritical to suspend first and second graders from classes for an innocent kiss and then three or four years later bring in Planned Parenthood to demonstrate birth control devices and hand out condoms? As Dr. Brazelton suggested, perhaps we ought to straighten out the adults before picking on the children this way.