The Kennedy High School incident...

I remember in my days in high school. My school was crazy with fools throwing food in the cafeteria, someone starts a fire in either the gym locker room or in a garbage can outside, a serious fight in the hallways which gets a crowd of spectators, or a pulled fire alarm that gets everyone outside to either see a fight or what have you. I was glad to have left that although things seemed to have been getting a little better by the time I had graduated. Of course in the years that I left the school made the news for a shooting but now a new incident but at another Chicago Public high school. 

Mary Mitchell wrote a column about this latest incident at Kennedy yesterday and said the problem might be disciplined at home. Boy did she call it looking at today's article in the Sun Times. It's OK for parents to stick up for their children but if you elect to turn a blind eye to their wrongdoing are you doing them a disservice. Certainly you are so in the aftermath of this incident where four black students beat a white honors student and smeared him with feces we find out that one of those perpetrators had also been accused of stealing some bus passes from another student. 

Yet this is what this guys mother said about these charges...

"One of [the parents of] those students who was involved in that attack actually was at our board meeting [last month] protesting the fact that we were disciplining her child and [saying that] her child was an angel," Duncan said.

There is a problem with discipline for sure. Perhaps the school isn't dishing it out but a school can only do so much. Perhaps it's the parents as well. Perhaps if a child does something stupid perhaps it's the parents job to humiliate them or discipline them. In fact it could be the community's. Consider this for a second from Mary Mitchell's column...

I ran across an article about a situation in Guatemala City that made me think. Four young men who were accused of trying to rob a school were publicly whipped by their parents in a punishment that was dictated by Mayan elders. Each of the offenders received 13 lashes. They were also forced to walk on their knees for a quarter-mile in the village of Barreneche, according to the Associated Press.

Now this may not just be a parental problem but a community problem. We hear stories about when (at least in the black community) that if you did wrong your parents will hear about it from a neighbor or someone who knows them. Perhaps that needs to be brought back somewhere. I think Mary Mitchell alluded to that in her column. Also Mary Mitchell brought up the perception of black males being nothing less than animals. That would be an unfortunate perception and one could say how black males are really struggling right now. Black males may not be going to jail but they may not be going to college either. Well I can bring up so many issues that can come out of this or so can other individuals. Either way if a child is willing to smear another human being with feces then there is an issue there. What is wrong?