A <i>Water Pistol</i>?

Just as a psychopath has no conscience, some people seem to be born with utterly no common sense. Consider, for example, the school administrators in this report:

A New Jersey second-grader's drawing of a stick figure shooting a gun has earned him a one-day school suspension.

Seven-year-old Kyle Walker's mom told an The Press newspaper of Atlantic City that her son was suspended for violating the district's zero-tolerance policy on guns. She said her son told her he'd drawn a water pistol.

Kyle gave the picture to another child on the school bus, and that child's parents complained about it to school officials.

The case is not the first in New Jersey in which students were suspended for depictions of weapons.

Four kindergarten boys were suspended in 2000 for playing cops and robbers, even though they were using their fingers as guns.

It's no wonder boys are becoming increasingly disaffected and alienated from our schools. The people that run them have no idea what a boy is and are trying to turn them into something they're not. Either we start weeding out the administrators who make school a form of earthly purgatory for these kids or we start segregating schools by sex and staffing boys' schools with men who were themselves once boys and who understand that you don't suspend a boy from school for drawing a picture of a water gun.

I wonder if Kyle would have been suspended if he'd drawn a picture of two men engaging in lewd conduct. I doubt it. They probably would have put him on the honor roll. No wonder people home school their kids.

HT: Hot Air

Devolution

A friend passes this along to me, and I thought it interesting enough to post:

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government."

"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."

"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years"

During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
   
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
   
3. From courage to liberty;
   
4. From liberty to abundance;
   
5. From abundance to complacency;
   
6. From complacency to apathy;
   
7. From apathy to dependence;
   
8. From dependence back into bondage"
   

Where do you think our society falls in this progression? I'd put us somewhere between 5 and 7, but maybe I'm being unduly pessimisstic. I hope.

RLC