Archives for June 2012

Many schools have some version of a tradition involving a senior prank. Kenowa Hills High School in Walker, Mich., has such a tradition, but this year’s seniors decided to do something creative, fun and non-destructive. Instead of painting lockers or blowing up a toilet or moving furniture to the top of the building — or any of the typical crazy high school ideas — these kids decided that they’d all ride bikes to their very last day of school.

About 60 seniors rode bikes that day. They talked to local police ahead of time, who had a car meet them for the mini-parade and ride behind them for safety. They even invited Mayor Rob VerHeulen, who joined and rode along with them in the police car. It sounds like a great idea. There was only one problem.

Nobody was taking into account the giant egos and control freakery of the school’s administration.

After the students got to school, principal Katie Pennington suspended all of them for the day, denying some of them the right to take their final exams. She didn’t let them participate in a local tradition called “senior walk” and she even threatened not to allow them to participate in graduation ceremonies — all because they legally rode bikes on public roads with a police escort. Why? Because nobody told her about it ahead of time.

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Since last week’s funnies were all about cats, I’m giving equal time to the dogs today. Of course, the dogs in the audience aren’t likely to hear a word I’m saying, because what we say and what they hear have little to do with one another.

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Humans have always robbed each other, killed each other and done other evil things to one another. But as we became civilized, we learned that some things are right and wrong. Many of us believed in ideas rooted in natural law and natural rights. Other people rooted their ideas in different ways, but they still agreed upon most of the basics of what was right and wrong.

Sometime during the 20th century, that long-held shared belief about right and wrong started falling away among the public. It wasn’t just the immoral or lawless who were responsible. Those types had always had the willingness to hurt people and to do things that they knew were wrong.

The new belief to take the place of moral absolutes in the public consciousness was moral relativism, even if people wouldn’t necessarily know what to call it. The idea was that there wasn’t really such a thing as absolute right and wrong. Those were old-fashioned religious concepts, they said. Instead, right and wrong were said to be very relative and situational. I saw and heard this idea influence things I was taught in school, and I’ve seen more recent examples that were far more blatant.

I thought about all of that Thursday when I ran across some video that was uploaded to YouTube four years ago. I can’t verify it, but it appears to be the raw footage of interviews done by a TV news station with two young females about a crime they’ve committed. (Since the face of one of them is obscured, I assume she was still a juvenile.) As I listened to these girls, I found myself thinking that they’re the end result of teaching generations of kids that there aren’t any moral absolutes.

These two girls stole $150 from a 9-year-old girl who was selling Girl Scout cookies. Listen to them talk about it on the video below and notice that they have absolutely no sense of having done anything wrong. The only relevant thing to them is that they wanted the money. Even when the reporter pressed them — obviously trying to elicit some feelings of guilt or remorse at having stolen from a child — neither cared. They’re simply irritated at there being any consequences for their actions.

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