| Meli's Ranting Ramblings |
| Hey all! Time for your visit from the crazy one we all know but not quite love, Meli. Here's my ZT (zero tolerance) rant. I'm against it, if you couldn't tell. I wrote everything here except what's within quotes, and those come from the website for Randy Cassingham's mailing list called "This is True," which comments on news stories. They're mostly reader comments... |
| I just noticed that this list has very few ZT comments from the POV of students. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a free thinker, as you should be able to tell by now. Want my reactions to ZT? Even if you don't, well, here you go. Luckily nothing has happened in my district. Yet. |
| Anyone out there ever read the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? The transformation to Brave New World is starting, and I refuse to fit in the mold. Censorship, ZT, racism, even your basic intolerance of a person, they all grow and turn from baby steps to jumps towards the dystopia that our world is turning into. Maybe, like in The Giver, they'll eliminate color next, or memories. |
| I'm a firm believer in the edict that you must have at least a little of the negative to experience the positive. After all, we have to remember that gray is made of both blacks and whites, and the solution is almost always in the gray. |
| "It was not something you would purchase in a grocery store, it was from a health food store." |
| So now we not only have to do the popular things to be socially accepted by the ditzes, (which I'm not, by the way), we have to eat the popular things too? Anyway, they're probably healthier than half of what the school serves to us at lunch. And the kid suspended for it was six! and do the most drug-ridden schools have ZT? No... There are drugs in every school and this is not the way to filter them ou. It just shows the intelligence of these people that, even with many fewer years of schooling, a 14 year old can see through what they can't. |
| "David Silverstien, 13, was inspired to build a model rocket after seeing the movie October Sky, a biography of NASA rocket scientist Homer Hickham. The boy took his rocket, made out of a potato chip canister and fueled with three match heads, to his Glendale, Ariz. school where it was found in a search of his locker. School officials classified the toy as a weapon. |
| What are they going to do next, not let us wear belts? After all, you could severely hurt or even choke someone with a belt! |
| Administrators saw three students at the Union Colony Charter School in Greeley, Colo playing with a water gun. |
| So confiscate the gun and give them a warning, at most! It gets to the point where schools would be better off if the students ran them and taught their teachers! |
| Terrorizing children with inflexible rules is NOT the answer. |
| Very true. Have you ever seen the movie "The Wave?" It is a film about how, in one school, a teacher starts a practically nazi classroom as an experimen, and everybody gets caught up in it, including him. It spreads through the entire school, and the people who don't follow it and badmouth it are getting hurt. Even in schools, children are forced into the white extreme, and rebel to the black. Has anyone realized that before ZT there were barely any shootings? Stop making such a big deal, and people with problems will find other ways to get attention. |
| Most cases call for, AT MOST, a stern talk in the principal's office - NOT suspension, expulsion, police involvement, or press conferences. It seems to me that if we feel a need to expel kids over water guns, there must not be many real problems our society needs to deal with. |
| No, it's just our way of covering things up. Be Yourself or Follow the Rules? A social paradox everyone has to deal with sometime, but if it's forced on too early, and not with rules like No Hitting, but senseless rules, anything can and will happen. We're going to run society someday. What a mess the world will be in then. This is where Tikun Olam comes in - a basic principle of Judiasm, translated to Repairing the World. The few of us who care enough to do Tikun Olam need help, and more and better things to work with than a mess left of conflicting values with no effort to be solved by our parents, teachers, and other role models. I am extremely lucky to have grown up in a flexible family. There's very little I'm not allowed to do, but I just don't want to. Why fit in the mold necessary to be popular? It's just not me. |
| I'd like to end this rant with two quotes particularly relevant to ZT and issues like it: |
| "If you're not part of the future, then get out of the way" -John Mellencamp in his song Peaceful World |
| Lord, what fools these mortals be. -Shakespeare, in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| ZT supporters? Anyone out there? GET OUT OF THE WAY. |