Last night’s big event was heading to Spaghetti night, where not only was it highly social, but also productive for me.
I got to learn about a new role playing game, say hello to Alex, get a hug from Laurie and Barb, arrange a discussion night tonight with Danny, and got some great advice on drawing.
I decided to bring along a laptop and twiddle with some code while I was there. James helped me figure out some X-Windows and MySQL stuff, and he also managed to locate a subtle, but easily correctable, bug. This held my attention through most of the main movie, which turned out to be a remake of Night of the Living Dead.
The first time I saw the original, it was on a snow day in the 7th grade. The night before snow had fallen pretty deep, and the snow plows were working hard to make headway. School, for what ever reason, wasn’t canceled, and our bus showed up and after about 2 hours we arrived at school.
Once there we learned that of 5,000 students, only about 800 had made it. And since many of the teachers couldn’t make it in, classes were canceled, and we were trapped.
We were shuttled to the math department, primary because it had the best heat. One of the teachers suggested we spend the day doing math problems, but it’s amazing how fast 80 booing seventh-graders students can turn into an angry mob. Another teacher fessed up he had ordered Night of the Living Dead through the school system, and was planning on watching it after hours. If we wanted, he’d go get it and play it.
It was an easy sell.
So, out went the lights, and we all watched the creepy black’n’white version flicker on the side of the classroom wall. As I recall there was a lot of laughing and throwing of paper wads. Most people were cheering for the zombies.
Eventually the storm let up, the plows got through, the busses showed up, and we got home about 5pm.
The next operational school day we learned that many of the parents called in to report their children waking in the middle of the night, crying, saying something about dead people trying to eat them. The political skirmish was extinguished when it was pointed out that students were allowed to leave and do other activities, no one was forced to watch the movie, and it was only brought out by a unanimous vote anyhow.
Today I can’t help but think that teacher would have been strung up and flogged.
It appears I went to school right when common sense was just going out the window. Many of the rights / privileges my senior class enjoyed were extinguished as a it-takes-a-village mentality started to take hold. Students could no longer sit on the cafeteria stage, because we might fall off. Hall passes started appearing. And it wasn’t long before metal detectors, underwear checks, and students being expelled for having aspirin emergency kits in the glove compartment were to follow.
I still remember the day my Physics teacher looked at the head of the president of the body and said “Stacey, do you know the difference between sex and a grilled cheese sandwich?” She looked up, playing along as we did our random joke ritual every single day, “No, Mr. B., I don’t.” He smiled and said, “We should do lunch sometime” in perfect delivery and turned to write the lesson on the blackboard.
Stacey instantly blurted out laughing and turned a little red, not at what was said, but the fact that she’d let herself get suckered. Everyone else joined in, and no one thought of it after the fact. It was clear, from context, that Mr. B wasn’t serious (or interested in Stacey), but that it was humor plain and simple. Stacey understood. We understood. And that was that.
Today I can’t help but think that if this had happened in present day the teacher would be fired on the spot.
Somewhere along the way Americans have lost the ability to distinguish between reality and the imagined. We’ve been taught to play the role of the victim, and it’s our job to be hyper-sensitive to every offense out there. Doing so invites more attention our way, and quite often I wonder if it isn’t really inspired by greed for sue-happy lawyers or a spineless segment of government catering to the whims of the loudest complaint.
Funny how we look back at our grand parents and their parents and we see that these people grew up just fine, had a stronger degree of ethics, were far more educated (even when self taught), and they just seemed to be made of a better metal than nowadays. Our socialistic tendencies which are designed to protect us from every conceivable harm, even those brought on by ourselves, has left us with college students who graduate and can’t function in the real world without government handholding. Doesn’t this bother anyone else?