David McElroy

Is this the face of a criminal? Apparently so, because the Pinellas County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office has charged 16-year-old Allie Scott with stalking after she made an innocuous Facebook post.

Allie’s slide into “stalker territory” started with a simple mistake. She parked her brother’s car in the school parking lot in another girl’s parking spot. She was told to move the car, so that’s what she did at the end of the day. When she went to the car, though, she found that someone had scratched the body with a key.

She didn’t name any person who she thought did it, but she posted this on Facebook: “Oh, so you keyed my car. Your karma is going to be a whole lot worse than that.”

The school’s crack administration sprang into action, summoning this evil young woman to the office. Her mother was called to the school, too, in order to deal with the heinous crime. Then they were sent to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, where she was charged with the crime of stalking. Allie faces a court hearing next week. She was handed a three-day suspension at school.

This isn’t the face of a stalker, but it is the face of a victim of “zero tolerance” policies run amuck. Some school administrators today are so afraid of exercising any judgement that they’ve developed draconian policies that are applied with one-size-fits-all idiocy, whether the circumstances fit the “crime” or not.

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Chelsea Hess was 20 years old when she walked into a South Carolina bar and ordered an alcoholic drink. The legal age for drinking in the state is 21, but the bar didn’t check her identification. On her way home, she drove her car off the road and is now a paraplegic. She’s suing the bar — because clearly the bar is responsible for her drinking and poor driving.

Hess’s lawsuit is emblematic of a trend for the last few decades of people looking for anyone else to blame for their troubles. We’re supposed to live in a risk-free and no-fault world, at least from the point of view of certain individuals. These people are so self-centered that they can’t be at fault. If something goes wrong in their world, someone else is to blame.

Contrary to what Hess believes, the folks at the bar aren’t her parents. The bar owner has a legal obligation to the state to obey its rules about alcohol sales, but that doesn’t — or at least shouldn’t — make it responsible for her actions. If the state insists on fining the bar for failing to check her ID, that’s an administrative matter between the bar and the regulators. But it doesn’t mean the bar is responsible for the series of actions that Hess took that led to her own problems.

When I was a child, my father was an executive in the safety department of Southern Railway (which is now Norfolk Southern after a merger). Every now and then, he would have to get out of the office and travel in the cab of an engine to observe safety procedures. Even though these occasions were rare, he still saw serious safety violations — but they were mostly by the public, not by the engineers.

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I’ve always been unimpressed by money. I know I need it to survive, but I care little for most of the things people spend money on. The idea of accumulating it for its own sake has always left me cold. But I finally have a motivation for making money, so it suddenly matters to me. It’s an odd feeling to care.

A year ago at this time, I knew I was embarking on a year that would bring serious change, even though I didn’t know exactly what the change would be. I had an experience in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day last year that changed my perspective on where I was going with my life. It forced me to start moving away from politics. It also led to the creation of this site.

This week, something else has added a new layer to the changes I’ve been going through. Suddenly, I have an urgent need to pursue material success. It’s not for the luxuries of life that it can provide — because I still don’t care much for those — but it’s because of what it has the hope of leading to in another way. (No, I’m not going to be more specific about this one.) With this two-year oddity of post-Christmas timing, I’m now eager to see what God might have up His anthropomorphized sleeve for the same week next year.

Although I don’t want to talk about the specifics of what led to this, I do want to talk about the thoughts it’s sparked about money. We live in a society that worships money. On the surface, that’s a criticism, but I think it’s really a double-edged sword.

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