Were We Ever Like This?

by Robert L. Gisel


An antisocial person can be expected to shoot the wrong target. This is an evidently unknown behavior trait that is destroying fair play in our schools.

In a Delaware school a first grader is given 45 days suspension for bringing his favorite camping utensils to school to eat his lunch. He is an alive, bright, and high IQ lad, I'd say, judging by his photo look. He looks a lot like myself as a first grader, when I topped all third graders in the county on my SAT scores.

Even then I was guilty in a first grade incident of bringing guns to school. Playing with my favorite 2-gun holsters, cap guns I won in the church bingo game, I forget I'm wearing these when I get on the school bus. At school, to cover up my embarrassment, I hide them behind the hot water heater in the basement. Great plan, until the teacher decided to have the students all help clean the basement for the upcoming box lunch raffle. When these are found and the question is put forth whose are these, in front of the entire school body I have to admit they are mine. Very embarrassing moment.

In today's school district I would have been suspended from school or expelled for bringing guns into the school. Zachary Christie, 6, was suspended for 45 days and relegated to the alternative school for grossly bad kids. All Zachory wanted was to eat his lunch with special three-way knife-fork-spoon utensil. Actually, I'm surprised he wasn't arrested, the way attitudes have degenerated so far in our school system.

A friend reminded me recently that when we were in Junior High in Alaska we'd watch the High Schoolers bring their guns to school for the fully sanctioned Rifle Club. I almost joined that one myself but was too busy working after school, participating in the bowling club and performing in our dance band and also a folk group. These students though, they'd walk into the school carrying their rifles which they would store in their school lockers until time for the Club meet. Then they'd take their guns out of their lockers and carry them through the Junior High School to the basement rifle range.

Try that today with Security standing guard at the door with metal detector screening and frisking. How did it get so crazy? Psyche influence.

This is a stark new reality previously unviewed. The sequence goes like this:

1) Trying to study past misunderstood word and concepts,

2) Nervous and other non-optimum reactions occur,

3) For which the psychiatrist gives a bogus prognosis of ADHD or ADD,

4) This is always followed by a prescription for psychotropic drugs,

5) Which cause more violent reactions like suicide or school shootings and

6) Now the school grounds are placed under martial law and cloaked in an atmosphere of intolerance.

There are very real physiological reactions proven to result from barriers to study. Studying past misunderstood and undefined words causes disinterest, a not-there-ness, and blankness. One can feel washed-out with a nervous sort of hysteria. After numbers of such bypassed definitions one gets pretty detached, starts looking out the window and then gets rather irritable, even quite critical of the subject and the area of the subject and you want to blow from the premises. Sound familiar?

The psychiatric solution is to label the student on the spot. With no testing or scientific support of any kind whatsoever. This process is so arbitrary it is genuinely crazy.

The handling is simple: ban the fraudulent psyches from the schools and refuse to allow psychotropic drugging of the students. Implement a scientifically correct study technology. Our schools would calm instantly and common sense would again prevail.

Zachary's mother refused to let him be degraded by the ready injustice at the school. My hat is off to her.