Oh, I don't know-I can see where it is easy enough to mistake a brightly coloured plastic toy for an actual assault weapon.
"Omaha Public Schools spokeswoman Luanne Nelson commended the children who issued the alert. They spotted something unusual on school grounds and immediately went to adults in the building - just as they have been taught, she said."
They've been taught to abandon thinking in favour of hysterical reactions. Well done, kids! Actually, I take that back-the adults were hysterical. I mean, it is bright red, yellow and blue.
This overreacting is at least a generation old now, and thereby quite deeply imprinted, I'm afraid. In college (mid-80s) I did a weekly "reaction" paper (informal observations) for a sociology class: I saw some kid hiding in the bushes from his mother, giggling. Mom freaked out and started yelling for people to help her; "My boy was taken!" My "observation" in the paper was about the different definitions people put onto any situation. I miss the days when I was young when we didn't have hysterical definitions to everything.
ReplyDeleteI miss when we were young and didn't have our free time micro-managed in "play groups" where the other children and their parents have to first be vetted through a background check.
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