The reality is undeniable. If I was in high school today, I would emerge a felon. There was the time I replaced the frog reproduction movie in biology with the reel of Sally Rand, the bubble dancer, I found in my grandfather’s sock drawer.
Then there was the time we took everything, and I mean everything, out of the algebra teacher’s classroom and she found us sitting on the floor when she came in. She cried, then got the gym teacher to berate us for making her cry. Or the time I grabbed the 20 gallon bottle that looked like a hookah from chem lab and tried to sneak it out without the teacher knowing. He saw and chased me (carrying this monster bottle) around the outside of the school, past every classroom window on the first floor. Yeah, I was a prankster.
Somehow, I was never arrested. Never suspended. Not even given detention. I was called to the assistant principal’s office to be chewed out for nearly giving Mr. Corso, the chem teacher, a heart attack by making him run after me, but the assistant principal found it impossible to keep a straight face. Yeah, I was a prankster then.
Today. I might be a felon. A recidivist. There’s a good chance the Sally Rand movie would place me on the sex offender registry. I wouldn’t be a lawyer. I wouldn’t have gotten into college. I might be forced to live under a bridge. My opportunities would be limited to street sweeper or a life of crime. That’s what becomes of pranksters today.
Three kids in Woodbridge, New Jersey, not far from where I grew up and went to school in Metuchen, pushed some live chickens through a window into their school.
Not bad on the prank scale. Live chickens running around the school in the morning. Pretty funny. Not quite as funny as putting the principal’s Chevy Vega on the roof (principals were paid less back when I went to school), but not bad.Cesareo and Tyler Bruno said they bought live chickens from a store in Newark and pushed the chickens through a window at Woodbridge High School in the middle of the night. A janitor found them in the morning before school started.
And now they’re facing charges.
“I am very worried,” Pater said.
Pater said he’s not happy about the charges and of not going to the prom.
“For us not to be there, it would just be heartbreaking,” Pater said.
“It’s not fun anymore. No one knows how to have a good laugh,” Anthony Cesareo added.
Kids. Anything for a laugh.
It may have been a joke to them, but police said it wouldn’t have been so funny if a student got hurt.
Get hurt how? Chicken flu? Slip on chicken shit feces? Feather allergies? Is there a significant chicken threat to the safety and welfare of students that I’ve missed?
I suspect there is. From just a bit of poking around, I see parents, police, politicians and especially school administrators speaking of catastrophic concerns for children. Apparently, everything is a potential threat. There is an expectation that by insulating children, bubble-izing them, they will never skin their knee (and become infected with a life-threatening bacteria), become overheated (and die of heat exhaustion on the playing field) or be exposed to language or ideas that will turn them into serial killers or drug addicts.
I’m a parent. I understand and appreciate the concerns a parent has for the safety of their child. But this “new normal” belief that we can simultaneously eliminate every potential threat that conceivably exists while affording them the joys of childhood (provided they enjoy playing “peacemaker,” by “creating ‘a roundtable with a mediator and write a peace accord “). Where does this fantasy world exist?
It’s not enough that children today will never have the horrible experience of falling down on the jungle gym and skinning their knee. Heck, they don’t even get cavities anymore unless their hygiene is just awful. They never learn how to deal with hurt feelings because no one is allowed to say a discouraging word. And if they push a couple of live chickens through a school window, they will be labeled criminals.
The more I think about it, I wouldn’t just be a felon today. I might be staring down the firing squad. What normal person who grew up when I did wouldn’t? And yet we facilitate, enable and empower those we entrust with our children to turn them into criminals. We have failed as parents, and we have done more harm to our children than a couple of chickens ever could.
H/T Turley
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I was pretty sure Chicken Little not only lives, but has been vested with a great deal of authority. If this had happened when and where I went to high school, I know who would have been cleaning up the mess, and would probably have been policing up the athletic field for several Saturdays to come, but court intervention would not have been imagined.
Thanks for posting this. I hope it gets wide dissemination.
Reminds me of a Frank Zappa quotation:
“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep.”
You are just brutal, Patrick. And yet again, Zappa nails it.
The idea of playing peacemaker doesn’t get any less ridiculous each time I read about it. It sounds like a potentially fairly interesting law school exercise but it’s never going to be a game that children play for fun.
It still amazes me that I used to carry a knife in high school. Because, you know, boys had penknives. Actually, I was a geek back then too, so it was a Swiss Army knife. Teachers knew I had it too, and you know what they did? They borrowed it from me sometimes. Because it was a neat gadget. And apparently because we were all psychotic by today’s more genteel standards.
I’ll call your SAK, and raise you a Buck 110, which I wore on my belt through much of high school.
Nobody even blinked.
I gave my son a Buck 110 for his 12th birthday. My wife was aghast. I told her it was a rite of passage. Plus he had swords, so what’s a Buck knife?
Ah, that Buck 110 wouldn’t have been allowed in my school. The rule was no blade longer than 3 inches, and no locking blades. If they caught you with a knife like that, they’d take it away from you and maybe give you a detention. And you’d have to ask nicely to get the knife back at the end of the day.
These comments are probably making some school administrator’s head explode.
Maybe it is time for an uprising here! Some civil disobedience, perhaps Chickens in every school?
Many, many times I have thought that all my relatives, especially my male ones, would not have been anything under modern standards.
This is a disgusting trend that gets worse and worse. Time to revolt, I say. Damn. No one has any sense of proportion & reason anymore
Damn disgusting behavior — on the part of authorities–people who are (supposedly)and ought to know better thn to react idiotically
Three girls in senior class back in 1978 waited until a big lecture was going and opened the door and threw in a rooster! It was crazy, pandemonium and quite funny. They got caught and had to write a paper about the error of their ways and I think they had permanent detention until they graduated. Crazy justice or injustice system in america these days. Let them pay the way kids pay with detention, dress them up like chickens and have them stand in front of an assembly and confess to their indiscretion..but civil or punitive damage that will be on a record….RIDICULOUS!
Now that’s an effective use of a rooster.
How about replacing all the chalk in the school with white Good ‘n Plenties? A memory to cherish.
That sounds like an excellent use of Good ‘n Plenty. I hated that candy.
Well bought a lot boxes of it and scarfed all the boxes of chalk in the classroom utility closets and hid them underneath the stage. Gosh we were thorough.
Today I suppose that little prank would have cost us our futures. ; ]
Are you kidding? Grand theft chalk.
They’d hector the DA to pile it on all right.
My senior year, couple of friends and I clipped a Hustler centerfold inside the director’s score for one of the songs for our spring band concert. There he was, conducting away in the middle of the song, and when he turned the page he almost fell off the stage. I wish I had that on video.
That would probably be some kind of felony these days.
Think of the chiiiillllldren! It’s so daaaaaannnnngerous!
I’ll use one teacher as an example of how I was in highschool. Keep in mind, this was my favorite teacher that year, and he was a good teacher, I think still genuinely interested in teaching those who wanted to be taught, and resigned to teaching those who didn’t – that is, I didn’t see him give up on anyone, and he offered enthusiasm to those who would sponge it up.
I would regularly create physics problems (it was highschool Physics) on the board involving his imminent gruesome demise, all using the principles we were currently being instructed in or had just been instructed in. Sometimes he would solve them before beginning class, sometimes he would just wipe the board clean.
But the important thing there is that I regularly depicted his imminent death. Several times a week.
A friend and I also built an entirely fake bomb out of some wire, road flares, a ticking timer, and a 9 volt battery, and left it in his driveway late in the school year. Nothing came of that and surreptitious inquiries into ‘how his morning went’ gleaned nothing of the fate of our Fake Improvised Device of Mass Destruction, or whatever a prosecutor would call it these days. I’m guessing his wife woke up first and just rolled her eyes and pitched it into the trash can, or he did.
And he was my FAVORITE instructor that year.
I know like I sound like another annoying old fart talking about the good old days – but I remember showing the Dean of Boys my new shotgun in the parking lot of high school. We were standing next to my car, shooting at imaginary ducks, then we went to his car to check out his shotgun.
I also remember walking down the streets of my subdivision, with friends, carrying 22 rifles and shotguns, headed to the local gravel quarry for an afternoon of target shooting.
We give away more and more of our rights for the ILLUSION of safety. My biggest regret at this point is there really isn’t any more frontier to move to to get away from the safety nazis.
Don’t worry about sounding like another annoying old fart. The young’ns need to know that this was once a country that knew how to have fun.