I get angry enough trying to figure out the incalculable number of rules and regulations that the all-purpose, all-powerful “nanny state” imposes on us adults, but when that nanny state and the PC police that enforce its rules and regulations go after kids, I have a real problem.
Nathan Entingh of Columbus, Ohio, who is 10 years old, was suspended from school for three days for pointing a “lookalike firearm” at another student, and even though the other student didn’t even see him do it, their teacher did, leading to Nathan’s suspension. And what is a “lookalike firearm”? In this case it was Nathan’s finger, for which he was punished not by a “time-out” or an after-school detention, but a three-day suspension.
Likewise Josh Welch, a 7-year-old student from Baltimore, Maryland, was accused of “nibbling” a strawberry-filled pastry into a gun-like shape, and then saying “Bang, Bang.” He was banned from school for two days for “an act of violence.”
The 9-year-old daughter of Latoya Harris was arrested by police in Portland, Oregon, while dripping wet in her bathing suit. She was then handcuffed, placed in a police car and driven to the station, where she was photographed, fingerprinted and questioned for nearly an hour before Latoya Harris arrived. The daughter’s crime? A fight with another girl that took place a week earlier and that ended with both girls apologizing. And the origin of the fight was the young Harris girl’s attempt break up an earlier fight between her antagonist and another girl.
Still, the policy of the Portland police is that all juveniles must be taken into custody, fingerprinted, photographed and questioned for a “Class A misdemeanor,” and Latoya Harris’s daughter, being 9, was definitely a juvenile, and the fight she was involved in was considered fourth-degree assault, which is a Class A misdemeanor.
In Fredericksburg, Virginia, not far from where I live, 11-year-old Skylar Capo rescued a tiny woodpecker from the clutches of her own cat, nursed the woodpecker back to health and released it back into the wild. For her humanitarian deed she was visited by a Virginia state trooper, who made her cry while issuing her mother a $535 ticket for Skylar’s violation of the Federal Migratory Bird Act, which makes it illegal for anyone to “take, possess, import, export, transport, sell, purchase, barter, or offer for sale, purchase, or barter, any migratory bird, or the parts, nests, or eggs of such a bird except under the terms of a valid permit issued pursuant to Federal regulations.”
Four little kids, two suspended, one arrested, and one frightened and fined, for doing what kids do and have always done. The regulatory state and the PC police run seriously amok.
Yes indeed, that’s my baby. The world is nuts. Pure and simple.