Classical Values :: "So many bone-shattering idiocies, so little time."

"So many bone-shattering idiocies, so little time."

I usually don't start a post by quoting someone's comment to another post in another blog, but I did so here, because this is just too damned typical, and there are just too many damned typical examples of this too-damned-typical complete lack of common sense which now seems to have modern America in a deathlock.

No, seriously. Via Pajamas Media I just learned that when 13-year-old boys are caught engaging in horseplay (they slapped butts of junior high girls as they raced down the hall), that is now to be treated as a felony meriting ten years in prison with mandatory Megan's Law lifetime sex offender registration.

As I keep saying, there is no longer common sense, and that unfortunate fact is being drummed into children at an earlier and earlier age.

The only good I see in any of this is that the Protein Wisdom post (which I found at Pajamas Media) was written by Darleen Click, and I'm delighted to see her talent being recognized by another long-favorite blog.

Darleen addressed this latest bureaucratic horror with some of the inimitable wisdom to which I've grown fond over the years:

Reasonable people don't excuse obnoxious behavior. Reasonable people would expect the school not only to discipline Cory and Ryan, maybe a few after-school hours, or Saturdays, scrubbing graffiti off the walls, or scrubbing down the restrooms, but to exercise the judgment of alleged educational professionals who work with children on a daily basis. And such judgment would not be to involve the police.

But hey, public school admins are filled with people who substitute written rules for judgment, law for morality. And why should we be surprised that they would want to palm off two immature 13 year olds to the criminal system when some of the purported "adults" involved act as unreasonable as the prosecutor?

I wish I could say that these insane incidents were "excesses" or maybe "unusual." The problem is, I'm reading about them so often that there's no way to keep track (hence the title by the commenter). It's awful. The lunatics are running the asylum, and common sense is a thing of the past.

Naturally, the leftiesphere is chiming in about how these are evil white boys and deserve punishment a la the Duke "rapists." Darleen answers:

The abject stupidity of this writer is jaw-dropping. Only in the most fevered-imaginings of rape is however I define it of radical feminists is adolescent prankish, albeit obnoxious, behavior criminal and akin to rape.

But hey, even Jeffy's spearcarrying for VW's sounds reasonable when compared to one of his co-bloggers, Kathy, who not only picks up Jeff Feckes "prank = little rape" meme, but expands on it by comparing to a brutal gang-rape because...well...because Cory and Ryan are White Boys

The whole thing is sickening. Not to say the boys don't deserve severe punishment by the school authorities. But ten years? Megan's Law?

The systematic destruction of common sense in this country has gotten scary. I worry that the phenomenon truly has become the dominant paradigm I complained about earlier, because it's escalating, and taking on a life of its own. Avoiding the public schools, as Darleen advises parents, might work for now, but the bureaucratic tentacles are metastatic in nature. They grow and grow, and that is because we must pay and pay for them as they inexorably poke, probe, prod and expand, here and there, whether openly or by stealth, finding endless new ways to justifying themselves as they reach out and touch everyone, everywhere, in every last nook and cranny of this once free country, enforcing and reinforcing as they work towards the Orwellian, "democratically totalitarian" goal of zero tolerance for simple common sense.

No, it doesn't much matter who is elected president, or who is elected to the various state or national legislatures, because it is they -- the truly awful they -- who are really in charge and who seek to totally run our daily lives without so much as being elected. (What's really crazy is I don't even know who they are.... Alas! I liked them better when they were just a few kooks in Berkeley. Yes, I know it's an old rant.)

Nice work Darleen!

MORE: Via Dr. Helen (who points out that the girls were slapping butts too) here's Mark Steyn:

A world that requires handcuffs and judges and district attorneys for what took place that Friday in February is not just a failed education system but an entire society that's losing any sense of proportion. Without which, civilized life becomes impossible. So we legalize more and more aspects of life and demand that district attorneys prosecute ever more aggressively what were once routine areas of social interaction.

A society that looses the state to criminalize schoolroom horseplay is guilty not only of punishing children as grown-ups but of the infantilization of the entire citizenry.

Comments

the boys deserve severe punishment from the school authorities? From what I read girls were smacking other kids on the behind also. It seems pretty minor obnoxious behavior.

Doug_S · July 30, 2007 06:10 PM

Darleen wrote: Not to say the boys don't deserve severe punishment by the school authorities. But ten years? Megan's Law?

I guess, as a middle-aged man, I don't understand the need to punish these two boys with anything other than a stern "knock that nonsense off, young men, or the next time we're going to call your fathers."

Of course, as a young lad I lived in fear of a teacher or school administrator calling my father with a complaint about my behavior at school, because teachers had rules and inhibitions in how they could punish me, and my father had none.

Steve White · July 30, 2007 06:58 PM