Aug 12
31
A Pointless Gesture: Rod Taylor
You’re three years old. You’re deaf. Your teachers and their supervisors freak out because when you make the deaf sign for your name (“Hunter”), it seems to represent a non-existent gun. With it—although you are only three—you might shoot non-existent bullets. In the fantasy world of public education, that might create real fear. What’s next? First a deaf 3-year- old boy’s identity comes under fire (excuse the allusion to violence) and then follows the inevitable hand-wringing about subtle messages, the threat of future violence and so on. The school board in Nebraska where Hunter Spanjer lives wants him to change the way he signs his name. Dim-wittedness has its own rewards. Now the ACLU is involved. Did I mention that Hunter is 3 years old?
Sometimes it seems that morally-deficient policemen, social workers and education-industry busybodies simply run out of ideas. This cruel and foolish focus on little Hunter is so similar to the outrageous arrest of a 26-year old Kitchener-Waterloo dad last February that one wonders whether these self-righteous attention-seekers have any real ideas of their own or if they are the “copy-cats” so talked about by police investigators. Of course, you remember the infamous Jesse Sansone? The father of four was arrested and strip-searched because his 4-year-old daughter, Nevaeh, drew a picture of a gun with a crayon at junior kindergarten. Maybe the initial reports were that the child “drew a gun?” Police have recently “apologized” to Jesse because of the intrusive strip search, rather than the ordinary frisk search that they still maintain would have been appropriate. How about the unwanted national attention? How about the removal of Jesse’s children by social worker’s while his home was searched? Mr. Sansone is not satisfied with a mumbled apology that still claims the police were justified in their warrantless accusations, nor should he be.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Hollywood continues to crank out filthy, sadistic scenes of torture and blood-spattered violence which continues to pull undiscerning children into the tangled orb of today’s hyper-sexualized, hyper-egotistical, emotionally traumatized and morally bankrupt script for defrauding a generation of its moral compass. Yet the politically-correct teachers and social workers who seem to occupy so many of those sacred posts are more concerned about a three-year-old’s gun gesture as he learns to communicate than they are about the purveyors of truly destructive violence–inciting toxic pablum.
Well, we’re not going to clear the streets of crooks by brandishing crayons. Neither will the well-meaning but “pointless gesture” of cramping Hunter’s name-signing style prevent violence in schools. The only thing that will restore sanity to the tragicomedy of public education is a return to a biblical understanding of mankind (including 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds) as individuals made in the image of God and worthy of respect, dignity and capable of comprehending their responsibility to love God and love others. Had their teachers been living with that knowledge they might not have embarrassed us all with their frantic and unseemly incompetence.