Yes, I know, isn’t it a major crime when somebody a few months under the drinking age decides to drink.
There are crimes and there are CRIMES. The lesson I see being taught is not one of responsibility, it is one of hating authority.
Of course, I have to agree, posting evidence of you breaking the rules is a stupid thing to do, but at the same time I’m surprised the schools feel it is their duty to spend tax dollars monitoring for such evidence.
We have law enforcement agencies which are designed to do that… don’t we? The school is not expected to be a law enforcement agency, seeking out evidence of misdeeds and exacting punishment outside of the legal system, is it?
At my high school, kids would show up drunk (underaged) for school dances. If it was detected, they would be sent away and perhaps parents would be notified. The school did not feel it was under any compulsion to exact punishment for personal behavior conducted outside of school grounds.
I can’t stand the feeling that seems to pervade these days concerning authority and behavior. Is there some concept of utopia out there made up of automatons that never break any rules, no matter how minor, that we are trying to achieve?
Seriously, one of the highlights of my high school days is when the vice-principal called me in to discuss the fact I had skipped some classes. I was a smart kid, my grades were fine, I was used to making my own choices. Anyway, this guy asks me where I was on a certain date.
I thought I was cooked. Hey, it’s the chance I took, I was fine with this. Then I realized I had a major quiz that day in economics. This was one of my favorite subjects and I was doing very well in it. I told him so. I told him that I was missing that favorite class of mine right now even.
When he apologized, I was a smartass and told him not to let it happen again… then returned to my class.
Ahahahaha. Now that was priceless.
I know the school was trying to help look out for me, such that I didn’t skip and fail and get drawn into a life of crime, but there was never any danger of those things happening anyway. If they hadn’t of goofed up I might have faced some discipline, which I would have accepted, but as it was I wasn’t inclined to stop skipping class to go play frisbee down at the beach.
The world is doomed because I stole those moments of enjoyment. I know it. Sorry guys, all the ills of the world are obviously my fault.
If you are a kid out there, my advice to you is to make sure you have your shit together and keep your ducks in a row. If that means you don’t have the ability to drink and otherwise misbehave, then fine, don’t do it.
If you do decide to misbehave, you can at least do that responsibly as well. Don’t take unnecessary risks and make sure there are competent people around you looking out for your best interests when you aren’t in a position to do so. I think this last point is overlooked and leads to a lot of the tragedies that we hear about.
I don’t think the misbehavior will ever stop, but there are certainly some ways to misbehave that are much safer and have much less consequences than others.
What a bunch of power hungry authoritarian squares. No wonder kids think their parents are zombies or aliens – they barely qualify as alive through the behavior they exhibit or ask for.
