Thought Crimes And Pastry Guns

Recently, a school in the once great state of Maryland offered counseling to students “troubled” by a classmate eating pastry into the shape of a gun. You might think his offense was kind of silly, but the school considered the seven year old students triggering action a “Level 3” violation of the following code:

Any gun of any kind, loaded or unloaded, operable or inoperable, including any object other than a firearm which is a look-a-like of a gun. This shall include, but is not limited to, pellet gun, paintball gun, stun gun, taser, BB gun, flare gun, nail gun, and air soft gun.

His two day suspension was followed up with a letter to every parent in the school:

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I am writing to let you know about an incident that occurred this morning in one of our classrooms and encourage you to discuss this matter with your child in a manner you deem most appropriate.

During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.

* * *

As you are aware, the Code of Student Conduct and appropriate consequences related to violations of the code are clearly spelled out in the Student Handbook, which was sent home during the first week of school and can be found on our website, www.aacps.org.

If your children express that they are troubled by today’s incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.

Yes, let us discuss the mental devastation of dastardly pastry weaponry with our children, shall we?  Thankfully, the strawberry pop tart in question was destroyed before it could cause any further harm to the most vulnerable among us.

Now the child, to his credit, did take full blame for this ugly incident. He told FOX45, "All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn't look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda." When his teacher saw the strawberry tart he knew he was in trouble, "She was pretty mad…and I think I was in big trouble."

This, unfortunately, is not an isolated incident. It is instead just another example in a long list of examples of disturbing reactions to children simply being children currently unfolding all across the nation. Now as “scary” as pop tart guns, tiny action figure plastic weapons, pointy “finger guns,” and invisible pretend grenades may be to school administrators (who apparently don’t remember what it was like to be a child) their reactions to such child's play makes them an amazing embarrassment to themselves as well as to society at large.

I would further offer that if you are a teacher or school administrator afraid of legos, fingers, paper, active imaginations, rubber bands, spit balls, and the like then you have absolutely no business attempting to shape and mold vulnerable young minds. These and related incidents are certainly a stinging indictment of the public school system. Understand the reality that these are the type of people teaching your children, guiding their education, and indoctrinating them on how to think and act while you are off trying to make a living and provide for your family. It is simply disgraceful. The public school system continues to morph into the liberal indoctrination system at an alarming speed with its usual baggage train of illogical thought and actions.

I think we can all agree that no lives are saved, no tragedy averted, and no additional aura of safety added to a school campus by such classroom clampdowns. In this hyper-sensitive, progressive, nanny-state world where we are afraid of shadows and the innocent actions of small children one can only wonder what ever happened to logic and common sense. It is not this poor child with a twinkle of an imagination that needs counseling or punishment, but the principle and a teacher who made this into more than a five second incident. A stern “Josh, sit down and eat your food” would probably have been sufficient but no, not in “let’s scare the public that all guns are bad” overreaction land.  In this era of symbolism over substance sound thinking is really the only casualty in the classroom in this type of situation.

These same finger-wagging administrators should have seen my childhood toy gun collection, not to mention the full scale battles we waged at recess in elementary school. When I was a child playing full blown WAR at recess was normal and nobody gave it a second thought. We played Army, Star Wars, and staged epic reenactments of civil war battles during recess. We even had officers and ranks.

Often such playground clashes were elevated to class on class warfare. The fifth graders would wear their Boy Scout shirts on a certain day and be the Union, and the sixth graders would play the Confederates. If your position was “overran” you might get roughed up a bit but such play consisted mostly of the trading of volleys followed by Gettysburg like charges. It really was great fun. I think even pastry kid would have enjoyed it. Can you imagine the hysterics such a scene would cause today? “Little Billy Yank pretended to shoot a musket at little Johnny Reb at Barack Obama Elementary School today, full story at eleven.”  How things have changed in such a short amount of time.

And while it is easy to write such paranoia off to nervous ninnies and worry-wart weenies, the other alternative is perhaps even more frightening. A comment by JCM (http://twitter.com/JCM1776) suggested the following.

 This is not stupidity, laziness, on the part of school. This extreme intolerance of an everyday object has a purpose.

Indoctrinate an entire generation that guns are bad, bad, bad, that talking about them, having pictures of the them, the thoughtcrime of them is evil itself.

When this generation comes of age, disarming then enslaving the population becomes a breeze.

Now that is more frightening than any misshaped pastry could ever be.

Perhaps the school would just have been happy if little Josh had merely stated that he was transgendered and wanted to go change with his female classmates in the girl’s locker room. For that type of behavior is being strategically fast-tracked as normal and protected while at the same time playing with your government funded pop tart is not. Progressivism is indeed a confusing and detrimental disorder, and the proof is all around us.

Our enemies parade their children around in suicide vests and teach them to kill and hate all Westerners and Jews. We teach ours to be afraid of misshaped breakfast food and to tremble at the mere hint of something possibly representing a firearm. Even in obvious play. The educational system in the United States is beyond broken and is dominated and controlled by politically correct, busy-body Progressive administrators. What a shame.

In the end, Josh’s father said "I'll just call it insanity, it's a pastry." I couldn’t agree more.

David Huntwork is a conservative activist, blogger, and columnist and the proud father of three daughters. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Ministers of the Gospel he brings a unique blended background of theology and ideology to the great debates of the day. He believes that Faith, Family, and Freedom is the formula for success and the key to a good life and a healthy nation. David blogs and serves as the site editor for Constitutionclub.org. You can contact him at Davehuntwork@juno.com.