Getting a Second Chance |
| When I was a kid, I thought I was a lot older than I was. |
| And I thought my dad was the greatest guy in the whole world. |
| And quite often I would end up getting into trouble because I did things that I thought were okay because they seemed like the kind of things my dad would do. |
| Of course, I had the attention span of a gnat and an ability to ponder consequences that was similar to that of a lemming, and those limitations, I’m sure, created wholly unsafe situations out of perfectly innocent moments. |
| I was not a hellion, by any means. I simply followed the crowd and gently nudged everybody straight into trouble all the time. But I did foolish things, as any child does. |
| And I am grateful that my parents never over-reacted to poor judgment on my part by sending me to military school, parking me in a behavioral sciences center for vague experiments with electric shock therapy, or leaving me along on a highway while they happily continued their vacation. (This is something they threatened quite often, actually.) |
| Once, my friends and I were heading out to play after school by exploring a remote part of the neighborhood that to us was wild and uncharted but to everyone else on the planet was just part of the neighborhood. |
| I thought it would be a good idea to take along the huge knife that my dad always carried with him when we went on fishing trips and other adventurous excursions. |
| I was a teenager, but a small one, so the knife was roughly the size of my thigh, which was a huge coincidence because about half an hour later I ended up stabbing myself in an artery that runs that very same thigh and I started to bleed at an alarming rate. |
| Feeling the urgency of the situation, my friends made me leave my bike where it was, and I rode home calmly on the back of one of their bikes as they pedaled furiously, thinking me near death, while I bled a lot. |
| Dad, having been rousted out of work by an erroneous report that I had cut my leg off with a machete, rushed home. He was relieved to see me. I was alive and the danger was over. Everything was okay. We all took deep breaths. |
| Then it got ugly. |
| Dad got mad. |
| Nobody on earth can get as mad as your father. It doesn’t matter if he curses or not, Dad can scare you nearly to death with only a look. Sometimes he won’t even look, he’ll just lift his lip up one side of his mouth like a killer dog and if you are smart you’ll take two steps and be in the next county. |
| But the most intelligent thing my parents ever did was punish me severely when I did something that was a danger to myself and to others, and let me stew over the things I did that were simply irresponsible. |
| After all, childhood is the time to make mistakes. I will not, as an adult, carry around a huge knife for no reason and end up stabbing myself in an artery, I can assure you. I learned that lesson well. |
| But all too often today it seems that children are no longer allowed to make mistakes. Every month the Fairfax County School Board, under its so-called “Zero Tolerance Policy,” expels 10 or more students for various infractions of school rules and the law. |
| There was a case not too long ago where a middle school student was expelled for bringing a pocket knife to school. Now, I don’t know the history of that child, but at the age of 13 or so, all boys want to do is carry pocket knives around. |
| The boy should have been punished. But expulsion puts the student into the same category as true young criminals. It’s like sending a shoplifter to a federal prison, which does nothing to help someone who simply made a mistake become a better person. |
| What will childhood become if we impose on it the responsibilities of adulthood? |
