On The One Hand…

…no matter how crappy school is, kids should not do this:

A school administrator got a blast of pepper spray in the face Wednesday when trying to intervene in a fight brewing between two students in the Rosemount High School cafeteria, said Principal Greg Clausen.

The altercation took place about 11:20 a.m. in a cafeteria/student center filled with more than 400 students, and the pepper-spray-wielding student continued to spray the chemical after being grabbed by the administrator. Officials decided to end the school day early at 12:45 p.m.

Clausen said that he didnt believe it was possible for students to eat in the cafeteria. “It was amazing how big an area that pepper spray permeates,” he said.

Yes, pepper spray is nasty stuff.

On the one hand, I’m encouraged; the entire school district (presumably) didn’t “go into lockdown”, which schools in the metro will do these days if a student writes “gunnysack” (there’s a “Gun” in there!).

On the other hand, five’ll get you ten the Rosemount Schools will adopt a “Zero Tolerance for Spray” policy; soon, if  a kid brings a Binaca to school, they’ll call the “liaison officer” and lock the place down…

5 thoughts on “On The One Hand…

  1. I visited a local video store s couple of years ago, just as the local police were hauling out some low-life who didn’t get the concept of paying for things. They had pepper sprayed the fool, and his face was covered in tears. the store was fairly large, but after ten minute of browsing the racks my nose was running and I was tearing up too.
    That stuff is nasty.

  2. Reminds me of an experience I had in high school which is part of the reason I get why the underdogs resort to terrorism.

    I was small and scrawny in high school. Freshman weight was 101. Senior weight was 130. I got punched and beat up a lot. I had a number of other friends who were also for whatever reasons (ugly, thick glasses, pudgy) regular targets of certain folks.

    After lunch every day, there was one guy who’d come along with his friends and find us and harass each of us in turn. Finally, one day as he started shoving the pudgy guy and I knew my turn was coming, I asked the blind guy for his glasses lens cleaner.

    When the bully got to me, I gave him two eyes full of lens cleaner, kicked him in the nads and then jumped on his back and started punching him in the head/face until his friends and a teacher managed to pull me off.

    I got much detention for this little act but the fucker never touched me or my friends again. He sent a couple of his hench bullies after us once in a while, but I’d learned that it was well worth the detention to fight mean and dirty (if you got beat up, they got detention, if you both fought, you both got detention, if you fought mean/dirty, you got lots of detention or suspension. I had good grades so they usually gave me detention rather than fuck my classwork). Screw honor, I was sick of being picked on.

    If pepper spray had been available to me at the time, I’d have used it. When schools can protect the wimps from the assholes they crowd them in with, we’ll stop getting some of these sorts of problems. Until that happens, kids who are put in the situation that I was are going to find equalizers where they can get them.

    Nobody should be forced to go to a place where people hit you and no one does anything real about it. Before I learned the use of weapons, there were many days when I was ready to just blow the whole damn building up after getting “wally-knobered” or having my books dumped or being slammed into a locker or being “charlie horsed” or just plain being punched once too often. Only tried once though and they never found out which is pretty much lucky for everyone involved. When I heard about Columbine, my first thought was “there but for the grace of God go I”.

    I wasn’t there, I don’t know what happened, but IF the kid was being tormented, they did what they ought to have done and fuck the administrator for not protecting them enough that they didn’t have to use the pepper spray.

  3. (BTW, I don’t support what the Columbine guys did. Between the nazi/racist stuff and shooting people who had never been part of their problem, they lost even the slightest justification for their actions. I sympathize with the pain they went through to get them to the point where they were, but what they did was wrong.)

  4. Phaedrus, I think the terrorist situation is more like killing random children because they come from the class of people whose parents are the taxpayers that fund the school administration that allows bullying to happen. ” Anger leads to fear, fear leads to hate, fear leads to suffering” as Yoda said :).

  5. I was much like phaedrus, beat up in elementary school, teased in jr high, ignored and sometimes mocked in sr high. The only time I got my licks in better than they gave me was 7th grade band (no not “one time at band camp….). I played trombone in 7th and 8th grade band. The guy sitting in front of me jabbed his arm back, which caused the adjustable music holder part of my stand to go straight up, and my folder of band music spilled all over the floor. I just sat there for a moment, noticed the teacher give us a look like “oh geez, here we go again”, but didn’t do anything. Then I realized, “Hey, the little rubber cover on the stud at the bottom of my trombone slide is not present. Oh, you asked for it, and now you’re gonna get it”. Said unprotected stud at the bottom of my trombone slide met the lower lumbar region of this kid’s back rather forcefully. Nothing happened after that, either from that particular kid doing anything to me, or the teacher taking further disciplinary action against either of us. I’m sure she saw what I did because the kid yelped and was squirming, and I think she decided that he deserved it.

    One short glorious moment in 10 years of school hell (started at that school in 3rd grade)

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