Insane! Even the smiley faces couldn't save him.
Posted on 08/26/2007 4:27:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
There's the real world, and there are representations.
I don't want to get into heavy-duty metaphysics, here — I gave that up for Lent years ago, and never took to it again — but some truths are just basic, pie-in-the-face obvious. So, I trust you'll agree: there's reality, and there are various ways of depicting reality, indicating reality.
And (I know this is a stretch) some representations represent nothing, really. They are fantasy.
I draw a picture of, say, a gun. That picture is of a gun; it need not be of some actual gun. It's just a . . . well, as a character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer once once said in response to a witchhunt, "A doodle. I do doodle. You, too — you do doodle, too."
A real gun, now, that might excite some interest. It might, in some circumstances — say, when pointed straight at somebody, fully loaded — constitute a threat. But a doodle?
This being the case — that doodles differ from real threats — then why was a 13-year-old boy in Arizona suspended from school?
He drew a gun . . . on a piece of paper. He didn't point it at anybody. He scribbled next to it no hit list. He didn't draw a target. He didn't say "Bang." No one even got a paper cut.
But school officials treated it as a threat, lectured his father on the shooting at Colorado's Columbine High School, and suspended the lad.
Actually, if you look at the picture, it wasn't quite a drawing of a real gun. It was supposed to be of a lasergun, that is, a fantasy gun. It looked, well, like . . . let's be generous, barely a weapon at all. A high-tech jet comes to mind. Or maybe a flag. What are the people doing on the gun?
It was, like the kid said, like his parents said, a doodle.
And yet the district spokesman insisted that the doodle was "absolutely considered a threat."
So who feels any safer, now that this threat is no longer in school?
When our teachers and administrators can no longer distinguish real threats from doodles — doodles most boys do, doodles we've all done, since (as has been said) we all do doodle, too — then what are they teaching the kids? To overreact to everything? To not be able to distinguish small problems from big ones? To treat every symbol or representation as real things?
It's elementary: the map is not the territory, the representation is not the thing represented.
You'd think, then, that teachers would be trying to impart (not erase) that notion from the minds of students and parents. After all, this distinction is what sanity is all about. It is schizophrenics who have trouble distinguishing signs from things signified. (Schizophrenia was known, earlier, as "dementia praecox," a "disease of language" wherein metaphors get treated as literal and similes shipwreck in a logical shallows of compressed, black-hole mentality, on the rough shores of irreality.)
It's really sad to think of educators and schizophrenics in the same sentence.
But even if we kill that thought, even if we just take the event as over-reaction, pure and simple, well, you'd think that educators would not be in the business of blowing things out of proportion.
Still, that's what the school did, it blew something up all out of proportion.
Oops. I have just used a violent phrase: "blew up." And before that, "kill."
Will Homeland Security target me now?
Of course not. Not even the federal government is that stupid.
The awful truth then dawns: the people in charge of America's children are more foolish than the federal government.
Now that's dangerous. I don't think I need to draw out this picture any further.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
The only answer to this government-sponsored insanity is to homeschool. If I had young kids I’d yank ‘em out of that brain-dead hellhole faster than hell.
When sketching or doodling is grounds for expulsion and arrest it would seem that the time has come to act.
I would also see this school and principal put on the carpet for gross stupidity and malfeasance. Unbelucking fievable!!!
Insane! Even the smiley faces couldn't save him.
The stupidity of these folks is amazing
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
The administrators who suspended this child ought to be suspended for their complete lack of common sense.
Ya wonder if they were ever kids?!
If I were that boy's teacher I would give him advice on how to fix up his drawing.
As for the father being lectured on the Columbine shooting, those school administrators should be damn glad this wasn't my kid, because that conversation wouldn't have gone very far.
When my elder brother said that to me, I went and donned my Civil War uniform I had gotten for Christmas (Confederate!), and strapped on my holster (leather), readied my Colt revolver (all plastic), and returned to the dining room. There, my brother had a sheet of paper and a big black Crayola. He beat me, drawing his revolver while I stood there in utter frustration.
We drew representations of weapons all through our growing up years, and probably a lot of them sitting at school desks.
My grandfather had American Rifleman and other shooting and hunting magazines on his coffee and end tables, and nobody had better throw any of them away or walk off with them. We looked at those magazines along with his antique gun books (and big railroad books), and gaze through the glass of his well-stocked gun cabinet. In there was also a .22 rifle that he had given to my mother for her 17th birthday. She was married at 18 and left the rifle in her dad’s cabinet, but when we were in our teens, it came to our house. We put, I’m sure, a thousand rounds in it ourselves at ranges that were then in the hills north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I don’t remember the names of those camps
We own the real thing today — a half dozen: hand guns and rifles. We wouldn’t be without them. And our boys now “do doodle.”
The boy learned an important lesson: never draw a gun unless you’re ready to use it.
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It is more than that.
The solution: permanently shut down government schools.
Why?
Answer: Government schools and free of conscience are utterly incompatible. That is why the government schools should be permanently shut down. Free of conscience takes precedence over compulsory, police enforced, government owned kiddie prisons ( Oops! ¨schools¨)
Every minute of every school day government schools trash free speech, free press, freedom of association,and free expression of religion. Also, since it IMPOSSIBLE to have religiously neutral curriculums or school polices, government schools establish the religious worldview of some while destroy that of others.
On another level, I am reminded of Nurse Ratchet in the book ¨One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest¨. Our government schools are filled with Marxist teachers ( and their useful idiots) who hate men. Their goal is to emasculate little boys. The Marxist society that will surely come if we allow government schools to exist needs weak and confused men.
Government schools are the most important weapon against freedom that the Marxists and their useful idiots have at their disposal. They are more of a threat to freedom than any other single issue. We can survive an oil embargo or nuclear suitcase bomb. BUT,,,we can not survive the up and coming wave of voters that the Marxists are indoctrinating every day in our government schools.
The death of common sense on display.
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To the Marxists and their useful idiots punishing this child makes perfect sense and fits in perfectly with their long range goal to destroy freedom.
The reason it does not make sense to you, is that you don´t recognize these evil people for the Marxists that they are.
It could blow a hole in my monitor
:^)
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Really?....So just exactly what would you have done? Threatened them with violence? Acted on that threat of violence?
Think about this for a movement and you will understand the police power that Marxists running our government schools have over our lives. Government schools have at their disposal police with real bullets in their guns, foster care workers with real power to remove children from the home, court orders that have the power to put children and adults into prison, and if you are resistant enough, they can kill you.
If as a non-parent you refuse to give your money to support the government school monstrosity, armed sheriffs will sell your home or business at auction. Don´t even think about resisting or you will soon be in prison or dead.
When it comes to the police power of government schools there are only two options¨:
1) Ransom your child by paying big bucks in tuition to a private school.
2) Ransom your child by homeschool and there you can pay with time and lost income.
Anything other that this is merely muttering under your breath, and I am sure plenty of that was done by the slaves who existed in the old Soviet Empire.
OK maybe it's not, but it's just as good a description as anything else.
Apparently there is another doodle about the same incident and same boy in this case...
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/images/photos/p4yfi6mm.jpg
There might be a “one doodle a month” law that the kid violated...That may be what the big stink is about...
/sarc
With all due respect, they aren't stupid, your point is completely off base.
These people are not stupid, they are purposely indoctrinating our society though our children in Marxist dialectics paraded as zero tolerance among other things.
No, of course not.
He would have drawn a AK-47 with a couple of extra clips on a piece of paper.
The awful truth then dawns: the people in charge of America’s children are more foolish than the federal government.
Now that’s dangerous. I don’t think I need to draw out this picture any further.
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After reading that, I probably won’t sleep for a week. I had already reached the point of fantasizing about a cave back in the hills somewhere.
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