Demon Clown Baby

According to this story, an 18-year old straight-A student was ARRESTED because an essay he turned in was “violently disturbing.”

He was charged with disorderly conduct. That’s normally what they charge if you pull a fire alarm or something, because making people think there’s a fire and they are in danger harms people. And, I think, the fact that we all know that’s the result is important.

But here the teacher was upset the content of the essay, even though all admit the content was not directed at any particular person.

How is that disorderly conduct? So the teacher was upset. How can writing an assignment which upsets someone but doesn’t threaten them, either overtly or subtly, be disorderly conduct?

If he had written it before the Virginia Tech shooter was shown to have written violent stuff, would anyone have batted an eye? I guarantee no one would have been arrested.

As if we don’t have enough of a hard time getting kids to do their homework, let’s let them know if they right the wrong thing we’ll have them arrested.

Some kids already don’t like to write assignments that call for revealing their thoughts and feelings. They don’t want other people to read them, even the teacher, but certainly not the class (since many teachers read excerpts, without permission). How much more will they feel that way now?

When I was a kid, I was told that we lived in a free country. Are kids told that any more? We see our freedom, our essential liberties, being stripped away, not for security, but for the pretense of security.

Arresting students for violent essays will not stop the next shooter. All it will do is harass a lot of innocent people, make them feel their thoughts are criminal, keep them from revealing them to anyone, and put an end to essays with any depth. (Okay, so school essays have never had depth. But I’m ranting here.)

When I was in 9th grade, I wrote a poem for English class called “Decapitation,” about how fun it was to chop off heads. It didn’t mean anything; I’m not violent, I don’t plan on being violent, I was just trying to be weird.

The teacher was grading the papers while we watched a film or something, and called out, “Who wrote Decapitation?” I thought I was in trouble, but it just turned out I hadn’t written my name on it. He treated it like any other assignment.

And that was fine. Why are we now so scared? 40,000+ people die in car accidents every year, but we are never scared to get in an automobile.

I’m tired of people getting scared and taking away freedom, adding unnecessary “security features” to everything to make us think we are more secure.