John Whitehead's Commentary
Making Men Without Chests: The Aftermath of Virginia Tech
The world, if you'll excuse the expression, is going to hell in a hand basket, and the grownups are busy handing out parking tickets. You'd think we'd have learned by now to differentiate between what a true threat is and what it is not, and yet we continue to major in minors.
Two recent events illustrate my point.
The first involves a class project that finds four college students facing jail. On April 23, 2007, the University of Virginia found itself on high alert after police received reports of a gunman outside an engineering building. Outfitted in black, with his face obscured by a ski mask and brandishing a broken plastic BB gun, the gunman was in fact the lead actor in a skit being filmed for a Japanese 102 class about a mugging on the streets of Tokyo. However, haunted by reports of the shooting one week earlier at Virginia Tech, passersby who caught a glimpse of the gunman were understandably spooked, enough so that several students barricaded themselves in classrooms while others suffered panic attacks.
The police (more than two dozen officers showed up with guns drawn), after securing the building and confirming that the students inside were okay, turned their attention to the "gunman" and his three classmates. The students explained that they were filming a skit for a class project and that the ensuing hysteria was due to an unfortunate misunderstanding.
Up to this point, the situation was handled commendably. However, after the police ascertained that no true threat was involved, things started to go downhill fast. First, police arrested the actor/gunman. He was charged with brandishing a firearm and spent two nights in jail before being released on $10,000 bond. The other three students, one of whom planned to start medical school in the fall, were arrested a few days later on the same charges. Despite the fact that the students wrote letters of apology admitting that they showed poor judgment in filming the skit on campus, the prosecuting attorney seems determined to prosecute the young filmmakers.
The second example involves high school honor student Allen Lee, whose future with the Marine Corps has been jeopardized because of an English assignment. Asked to write an essay on any topic without censoring himself, Lee described a violent dream in which he shot people and then "had sex with the dead bodies." It's doubtful that he would have written what he did had he not been warned against censoring himself. Yet even though Lee, who had a clean academic and no police record, dismissed the idea as a joke in his essay, the situation quickly deteriorated. Lee found himself under arrest, facing criminal charges for the creative writing assignment. As a result, he was discharged from his contract to enter into the Marine Corps.
In both instances, once it was determined that these were good students with no history of trouble and that no true threat was involved, school officials could have taken appropriate disciplinary actions or reprimands. Instead, both matters were handed over to the police. Most likely, these young people will have criminal records for the rest of their lives.
Thus, we find ourselves in the absurd position of innocent people's lives being destroyed simply for lack of a more sensible approach. Such bureaucracy is predicated on a kind of Catch-22 logic where no one wants to take responsibility for saying "enough is enough" and, as a result, everyone suffers. We see this in the courts with judges who, because they don't want to risk another Columbine, rule in favor of school zero tolerance policies against drugs and weapons. Unfortunately, many of the students caught in the dragnet of such draconian policies are guilty of nothing more than gargling with Scope and using their fingers as guns in a make-believe game of cops and robbers.
However, no amount of prosecution for thoughtless acts or speech will succeed in making us safer. All it will do is cause us to pre-censor ourselves and become fearful of saying or doing anything that might be misconstrued. Remember when we used to tell jokes at the office? This is yet another alarming sign of our society's commitment to total conformity and political correctness. And while we focus our time and resources on stamping out creativity, spontaneity and individuality--all the things we valued in the past--the real threats will continue to slip by unnoticed until it's too late.
In one of his classic essays, C.S. Lewis aptly described the absurdity of the mixed messages being sent to our young people. More than 60 years later, his words continue to resonate:
Two recent events illustrate my point.
The first involves a class project that finds four college students facing jail. On April 23, 2007, the University of Virginia found itself on high alert after police received reports of a gunman outside an engineering building. Outfitted in black, with his face obscured by a ski mask and brandishing a broken plastic BB gun, the gunman was in fact the lead actor in a skit being filmed for a Japanese 102 class about a mugging on the streets of Tokyo. However, haunted by reports of the shooting one week earlier at Virginia Tech, passersby who caught a glimpse of the gunman were understandably spooked, enough so that several students barricaded themselves in classrooms while others suffered panic attacks.
The police (more than two dozen officers showed up with guns drawn), after securing the building and confirming that the students inside were okay, turned their attention to the "gunman" and his three classmates. The students explained that they were filming a skit for a class project and that the ensuing hysteria was due to an unfortunate misunderstanding.
Up to this point, the situation was handled commendably. However, after the police ascertained that no true threat was involved, things started to go downhill fast. First, police arrested the actor/gunman. He was charged with brandishing a firearm and spent two nights in jail before being released on $10,000 bond. The other three students, one of whom planned to start medical school in the fall, were arrested a few days later on the same charges. Despite the fact that the students wrote letters of apology admitting that they showed poor judgment in filming the skit on campus, the prosecuting attorney seems determined to prosecute the young filmmakers.
The second example involves high school honor student Allen Lee, whose future with the Marine Corps has been jeopardized because of an English assignment. Asked to write an essay on any topic without censoring himself, Lee described a violent dream in which he shot people and then "had sex with the dead bodies." It's doubtful that he would have written what he did had he not been warned against censoring himself. Yet even though Lee, who had a clean academic and no police record, dismissed the idea as a joke in his essay, the situation quickly deteriorated. Lee found himself under arrest, facing criminal charges for the creative writing assignment. As a result, he was discharged from his contract to enter into the Marine Corps.
In both instances, once it was determined that these were good students with no history of trouble and that no true threat was involved, school officials could have taken appropriate disciplinary actions or reprimands. Instead, both matters were handed over to the police. Most likely, these young people will have criminal records for the rest of their lives.
Thus, we find ourselves in the absurd position of innocent people's lives being destroyed simply for lack of a more sensible approach. Such bureaucracy is predicated on a kind of Catch-22 logic where no one wants to take responsibility for saying "enough is enough" and, as a result, everyone suffers. We see this in the courts with judges who, because they don't want to risk another Columbine, rule in favor of school zero tolerance policies against drugs and weapons. Unfortunately, many of the students caught in the dragnet of such draconian policies are guilty of nothing more than gargling with Scope and using their fingers as guns in a make-believe game of cops and robbers.
However, no amount of prosecution for thoughtless acts or speech will succeed in making us safer. All it will do is cause us to pre-censor ourselves and become fearful of saying or doing anything that might be misconstrued. Remember when we used to tell jokes at the office? This is yet another alarming sign of our society's commitment to total conformity and political correctness. And while we focus our time and resources on stamping out creativity, spontaneity and individuality--all the things we valued in the past--the real threats will continue to slip by unnoticed until it's too late.
In one of his classic essays, C.S. Lewis aptly described the absurdity of the mixed messages being sent to our young people. More than 60 years later, his words continue to resonate:
All the time--such is the tragi-comedy of our situation--we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more "drive", or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or "creativity". In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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