Illegal Use Of Imagination Gets Dangerous 5-Year-Old Girl Suspended
This 5-year-old, Caitlin Miller -- dangerously free-thinking in an age when free thinking is less and less welcomed (along with free speech) -- was suspended from school for a day for normal child's play.
This involved pretending to be storybook characters and use of a stick as a pretend weapon -- something I must have done at some point when I was a kid.
Minyvonne Burke writes in the New York Daily News:
In the note Hoke County School stated that Caitlin could not return to school until Tuesday, March 28, because she turned a stick into a gun and threatened "to shoot and kill other students."Miller told ABC 11 that Caitlin, a kindergartner, was playing a game called "King and Queens" on the playground with two of her friends when she saw the stick on the ground and used it as a prop.
Caitlin explained to the outlet that one of her friend's was the queen, the other was the princess and she was the guard.
She innocently crafted a weapon to protect the queen, unaware of the consequences.
I hope that the consequences of this are that she questions authority and stands up against idiocy.
It's got to be traumatizing to be a 5-year-old who gets suspended from school.
The really awful thing here? It's that.
Got to exercise that authority early and often to keep the peasants in line.
Bob in Texas at March 31, 2017 5:43 AM
Good thing im in TX. If my 7 yr old son cant find a stick or rock to turn into a gin, he will walk up to me, grab my elboy and wrist, bend my arm up next to him like its a rocket launcher, and shoot people with it.
Momof4 at March 31, 2017 6:58 AM
I'm glad I'm not a kid in school today. I was slinging grenades, shooting guns, and ramming swords into people's chests. Most kids can tell the difference between an imaginary game and real life.
Joshua Dempsey at March 31, 2017 9:19 AM
Kids know perfectly well the difference between pretend and real life. They know a stick isn't a gun and that no one is in danger. I must have had 1000 shoot-outs with fingers, pea shooters, and rubber-band guns and never once thought I was actually going to die, nor did any adult around me. It takes years of indoctrination to convince adults that words and fingers and sticks are the same as a real gun, and that people's lives are in danger from them. It is a serious disconnect from reality to believe that words are the same as actions.
Children NEED to pretend. It is how they learn about the world.
cc at March 31, 2017 9:29 AM
My high school had 232 M-14s in the ROTC armory. Yeah, real, select-fire, capable of full-auto. Firing pins removed, lock device installed in the selector switch port.
Nobody cared.
We cleaned and oiled them all for training about once a semester.
Today? Panic and endless counseling would ensue, right? Eeeek! Ghuuuuns!
Radwaste at March 31, 2017 9:33 AM
Pretend gun = penis.
I think we can all see the danger here.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at March 31, 2017 10:00 AM
Especially when wielded by a five-year-old girl?
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at March 31, 2017 10:29 AM
"Especially when wielded by a five-year-old girl?"
Exactly.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at March 31, 2017 11:21 AM
Caitlin's mother said because of school shootings that have happened across the country she understands the policy...
What hope is there for Caitlin?
The worst part of the story is that she returned to the school where she will be under the control of and "educated" by really, really, really stupid bullies.
Ken R at March 31, 2017 12:06 PM
I read about a 5 yr old, I believe autistic boy who had his name on his t-shirt. It was deemed to be a micro aggression and he was sent home. His name? Hunter.
The number of things and words that could remind one of death, conflict, body parts, race, or oppression are nearly endless. I am amazed that these delicate flowers are able to leave the house. I've heard people even objecting to accounting terms (in the black) and astronomy terms (black hole). You can't have sports without aggressive terms (hit, foul, violation). It is scary out there. Reminds me of the Woody Allen movie where it is woody as a kid who won't do his homework because he read that the universe will end in 10 billion years, so why bother?
cc at March 31, 2017 12:21 PM
This is what you get with top-down government - rigid enforcement of arbitrary laws and regulations with no judgement on the part of the enforcement agent allowed or desired.
If we don't stop this government scope-creep, we'll end up with a world where the primary day-to-day activity of normal citizens will not be the pursuit of economic or social gains, but the avoidance of a byzantine morass of rules regulating every aspect of human activity.
You can see it already in Europe, where a sizable amount of their economic activity is tied up in avoiding the VAT, and not in producing outputs that enrich the nation, the people, or the culture.
Reading about the bureaucracy in the old Soviet Union, one wonders how anything was accomplished at all. Rail districts would unhook trains at the border to avoid having another district steal the newer locomotives and replace them with old ones the other district wanted to discard. Factories took impossible-to-meet annual quotas and broke them into 11 reachable and 1 unreachable monthly quotas. A horrific, but easily avoided, space program accident happened because no one wanted to tell the higher ups that the space craft was not yet ready for use.
We're seeing it in the US with a TSA that fails to stop people getting on planes with guns, knives, and explosives, and not only keeps its power, but gains authority to conduct even more invasive searches.
We've started wasting way too much of our economic activity in bureaucratic activities that add nothing to the overall wealth of the nation, the people, or the culture.
Conan the Grammarian at March 31, 2017 12:22 PM
From the linked article: "The school told the outlet that it stands by suspending Caitlin because it does 'not tolerate assaults, threats or harassment from any student.'"
Of course not. That's the teachers' and principal's job.
Talk about instilling guilt at a young age -- that's enough to embarrass even the worst preachers.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at March 31, 2017 12:44 PM
"It is a serious disconnect from reality to believe that words are the same as actions."
Apparently Hillary voters have this disconnect, and it is welded in place. What Trump said was the act itself, by their descriptions.
Radwaste at April 3, 2017 12:33 PM
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