What a total load. I saw a junior high fist fight in 1976, a mere three years after this mythical 1973 where they shake hands be best friends. Only problem was that Nelson Cortez was hauled off in an ambulance and never came back. Later learned that he needed several surgeries to rebuild a cheekbone and that he had lost the sight in that eye.
Even the gun rack. That may have been true in small town America, but it was never the case in any urban area. Being from a city in the West, Colorado Springs, I never saw a gun in a rack at school, ever.
A lot of what this guy writes is a little over the top. For instance, they’re probably not going to call the FBI or seize a guys truck over a shotgun being in the gun rack, but he will get arrested. And if there is a fight at school, they’re not going to call the swat team. The school resource officer will probably detain them until other officers come and arrest him though.
Things have changed, and not really for the better. I’m a public defender and one of the things I have to do is juvenile court. It’s standard procedure at our schools to call the police and have kids charged with battery if there is a fight. They call the police over a lot of stuff they would have handled in school back when I was a kid. And not only are they always having kids arrested, but they are always getting the courts involved in other ways by filing what are called Family in Need of Services cases or Child in Need of Services cases, depending on what state you live in. They’ll do this over small disciplinary problems that do not rise to the level of criminal conduct, truancy problems, or what they call “family dysfunction.” Really what is often happening is they are trying to get the kids they don’t like shipped off to a facility somewhere, trying to get rid of them. Either that or they want to have kids sent to therapists and be under court order to take any medication prescribed. So many of our kids are doped up on all sorts of ADHD meds or other meds that turn them into zombies, often at the behest of the schools. I’m working in a smaller town now than I grew up in and a really high percentage of the kids here will have involvement with the courts by the time they turn eighteen, much of it for stupid things that never would have made it to court thirty years ago or more.
And what the original poster said about spanking kids is not too far off the mark. People are arrested for disciplining their kids now and what a lot of parents get in trouble for today seems like pretty darned normal disciplinary action to me, stuff that happened all the time when I was a kid that people would have never gotten arrested for. We even have a case pending in a local court now where a vice principle from a junior high has been charged with a felony battery because he gave a kid swats and the kid ended up with bruises on his backside. This vice principle is a really big guy, a former athlete. I’m sure he had no idea he spanked the kid as hard as he did. They don’t give these guys “spanking lessons.” This isn’t my case, but I’ve talked with both the prosecutor and the defense attorney about it. I’ve seen the pictures. The kid did get his butt tanned pretty good, but I think this vice principle just didn’t know his own strength. The prosecutor has offered him six years in prison! That is insane. This guy has never been in trouble for anything, never even been accused of any sort of abuse of a child. I was just arguing with the prosecutor about this case the other day. He’s a fool and I hope the jury shuts him down and he comes out looking like the idiot he is because I know this fellow won’t take that offer. He’s not going to prison over this and he can’t really even take any criminal conviction, especially a felony, or his career will be over.
It IS questionable in many areas, as after the ‘60s everything started going downhill. But, it was still alot less loony and more free then!