Zero common sense

Wednesday, May 15, 2002 – Dry Creek Elementary school has disciplined seven boys for playing a game of “army and aliens” in which they used their fingers as imaginary weapons and pretended to shoot creatures in the background.
At least the boys weren’t suspended, as has happened in other districts for imaginary violations of the infamous “zero tolerance” policies for violence and weapons. But they did lose recess privileges for a week.

And, in an Orwellian touch, at least one student was interrogated by school officials who asked whether his family had real guns at home.

All things considered, it is clearly time to award Dry Creek and its parent Cherry Creek School District The Post’s uncoveted Doofus of the Month award.

Only a doofus or a true bureaucrat – sorry, we didn’t mean to repeat ourselves – would regard an extended index finger as a deadly weapon. Only a doofus would ignore the lesson of history – that when fingers are outlawed, only outlaws will have fingers.

We wonder if the zero common sense policy at Dry Creek bans all index fingers or metes out stonger punishment for assault fingers. Are fully automatic fingers a federal case? What about semi-automatic fingers? And will Dry Creek students be forbidden from wearing gloves on a cold day on the grounds that encasing their fingers would amount to carrying a concealed weapon?

More seriously, what gives bureaucrats the right to ask children to serve as informers on their parents, especially when the activities of the parents, such as owning a gun, may be politically incorrect but are specifically protected by the U.S. and Colorado Constitutions? Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany pressured kids to inform on their parents, but such violations of family trust have no place in Colorado.

Let us therefore ask all men and women of good will to pause for a moment, face toward Dry Creek, and emit a rousing Bronx cheer while waving our index fingers vigorously in the direction of what will undoubtedly be a terrified gaggle of doofuses. When the Cherry Creek School Board recovers from the shock of so much digital disapproval, they can pick up the Doofus of the Month award from any parent or taxpayer in the district.