David McElroy

I caught myself acting like an angry jerk the other day. I don’t like myself when that person comes out. It reminds me too much of some things I grew up with — and of things I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to escape.

It really wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few seconds. Nobody else would remember it. Few would have noticed when it happened. But it’s stayed with me since late last week, almost taunting me like something from the past that I thought was dead.

I was driving down a busy road near my house last week. I think it was Thursday afternoon, but it might have been Friday. There was a car trying to turn left out of a business, so the driver had to turn across a lane of traffic to get to another one. Instead of waiting for a time when traffic was clear in both directions — or turning right and then turning around — he instead pulled out and blocked one lane of traffic completely while he waited for the other lane to clear so he could pull out.

What he did was rude and against all traffic rules. He ended up holding up quite a number of people for 30 seconds or so, which seemed a lot longer while it was going on. But in the scheme of things, it wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t in the hurry. It didn’t affect my life one bit.

But I was angry. He was violating the rules. He was cheating. He was holding me up. I blew my horn in righteous indignation.

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The people of Bessemer, Ala., are finally free of the dangers of an old man and his friends playing the blues in an old back-yard garage each Saturday night. Police raided the “juke joint” known as Gip’s Place Saturday night, shutting down one of the last of the old-style musical roadhouses still surviving today. I know I’ll sleep better with this terrible threat gone.

Police are only saying that Henry Gipson’s place was an “illegal business,” but this strikes at the core of business licensing. Why does a man need permission from a city or state to transact business with willing customers. His place was known far and wide as a great place to listen to the blues, one of the last remaining places to hear authentic blues in a raw setting. A couple of years ago, NPR called Gip’s place “a blues lover’s dream.” And here’s a three-minute piece about Gipson put together by a local photographer.

But after letting Gipson run his informal performance space every Saturday night for decades, the city of Bessemer decided this weekend to shut him down, according to a post on the Facebook page for Gip’s Place.

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Cole Withrow is an Eagle Scout who was on track to graduate with honors this month from Princeton High School in Princeton, N.C. (That’s Cole with his sister in the photo.) But he’s also a fallible teen-ager who made one small mistake Monday morning — and that mistake led to his arrest and expulsion from school.

In a sane world, Cole’s mistake wouldn’t be a big deal and nobody would even know about it. But in the world of “zero tolerance” in schools, his small mistake has become an absurd tragedy.

When Cole got to school Monday morning, he realized that he had an unloaded gun in his vehicle. He had been skeet-shooting the day before and the gun was still there. It wasn’t until he picked up his book bag that he noticed the weapon was there. He would be late for school if he left campus to return home, so he locked the gun in his car and went to the school office to call his mother to ask her for help.

But someone in the office overheard his conversation with his mom and things quickly escalated. Police were called and he was arrested. He was expelled from school and banned from school grounds for one year.

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