HoodaThunk?

I am so astonished that a legion of alleged adults involved in this incident arrived at the conclusion that their actions were correct and proper as opposed to being a farce and a hideously bad satire. In Ocala, FL, a 10-year-old girl brought her lunch to school. That lunch contained a piece of steak which – surprise, surprise – called for the use of a steak knife, so named because it’s specifically designed to be used in the civilized consumption of steak. The girl was spotted, the knife confiscated, the police called, and the girl arrested and taken to a juvie hall!!

I honestly wish that I were reporting one of Scappleface’s wonderful satire posts. The school spokesman is reported as admitting that the girl did nothing whatsoever with the knife that was inappropriate or threatening. She did exactly what one is expected to do when eating steak – she used it to cut the food. To think that an entire school-load of people, to say nothing of the law enforcement personnel who responded, would abdicate their adult responsibility to critically assess the situation and respond in a thoughtful, adult manner is just impossible to fathom.

And before anyone climbs up on the “they have no choice but to follow the law” soapbox, I’d say they exercise some pretty wide discretion when it’s one of their own guilty of breaking the law, and that’s with a law that applies anywhere not just in a school zone.

Reasonable people would never view having a steak knife available for eating a steak as a problem to even be considered. The reasonable course of action would have been to go ahead and confiscate the knife (and do the kid a favor, please, by using the knife to cut up the food before you take it away), notify the parents of the issue and advise them that they need to send lunch with their child that doesn’t require anything more scary to our school officials than a plastic spoon. Put out a general notice of the incident and clarify that big, scawey knives can’t be brought into school for any purpose at all lest the teachers and the idiot parents that allowed such rules to be put into effect get a case of the vapors.

This was truly a situation of no-harm, no-foul that has been ruled non-existent by nanny-state morons across the nation. The overriding assumption, here, is that the people we make responsible for teaching our children aren’t intelligent enough to make a judgment call like this. Perhaps this should be a wake-up call for us to put a little sense back into our rules-making process.

And please, for God’s sake, someone do the right thing for this child who had no intention at all of causing a problem. If she’s not already out, get her the hell out of the juvie hall and wipe her record clean of this ridiculous over-reaction.