President Theodore Roosevelt Is Rolling Over And Over In His Grave

The Saturday edition of the Indianapolis Star reports here that four students from Knightstown High School have been expelled for making a movie. Well, that’s not entirely true. The article headlines by saying that two of the four students have sued to be reinstated at the high school - their expulsion was a result of having made a movie.

The name of the movie? The Teddy Bear Master. The premise? Killer teddy bears attack a teacher in the classroom. Seriously. Teddy bears. The problem? The teacher in the movie bears the same last name as an actual teacher at Knightstown High School. Not goofy enough, you say? Needs a bit more to be really ridiculous and over the top? Okay, here you go. The movie’s dramatic denouement (which is French for denouement)? The students in the classroom fight off the teddy bears (and presumably save the teacher, although the Star omits this information - in case maybe you were planning to buy a copy of the movie and wanted to be surprised?).

The real life teacher felt threatened. By teddy bears. From a homemade movie spoof that was as unrelated to school as possible, apart from the fact that the real life teacher and the character in the movie share the same last name. It was not a school project.

The ACLU is backing one of the kids who is suing to get back into school. (On the off chance that there were any conservative Republican readers of this blog, I have now lost them, by committing that most unholy of sins - defending people who are being defended by the ACLU, which, for conservatives, has apparently leapfrogged past money as the root of all evil.)

One more thing: apparently some of the movie had been posted on MySpace, and this was noted in the school district’s response to the ACLU in which the district gave its reasons for the expulsions. Seems the students, while at school, could have accessed the movie by way of MySpace.

I must be missing something. Right? The school district expelled four students for making a teddy bear slasher movie AND allows its students access to MySpace while they are at school? Paging Margaret Spellings: These children are being left behind!

Now, before this goes any further, let me make it very clear that I understand how difficult it must be to give the benefit of the doubt in a situation like this, in a post-Columbine world; but surely there was someone in the administration at Knightstown High School, who was in the know about this situation between when the fact of the movie became known and when the students were expelled, who thought to him- or herself that there is quite the difference between kids who talk about actually killing teachers or other students and about bringing guns to school, and kids who made a movie about killer teddy bears.

Did I mention that the teacher’s students fight off the bears at the end of the movie? How did this element of context wind up lost in translation? Or is there simply a black and white line, and once that line is crossed, there’s no going back? Did the people in charge at Knightstown simply conclude that the line had been crossed and then take the next step? Did it never occur to any of those people to sit these kids down and talk to them about it, maybe let them know that personal expression, while certainly a good thing, can sometimes make others uncomfortable? Did they give the kids the chance to hear that argument and respond to it? Did they give the kids the chance to tell their side of the story?

Or have we just gotten to the point in this country where every single thing that isn’t baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet must then obviously be turban-wrapped and muttering incoherent slogans from the Qur’an while fiddling with the explosives in its shoes?

Just because a kid has his wallet on a chain and buys all his clothes at Hot Topic doesn’t mean he’s a fucking sociopath - but if this is always the knee-jerk way that society reacts to the way he tries to express himself, how long do you think it will be before he winds up that way?

Know why there was a massacre at Columbine High School in 1999? It wasn’t because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were outcasts who had been picked on one too many times and hatched a plan to get even. No, Columbine happened because those two kids had access to guns. Period.

The kids in Knightstown were making a movie, not hatching a plot. Was the movie in bad taste? Yeah, probably. But it was just a movie. Maybe after the winter break the students in the Knightstown High School art class can teach the administration a bit about perspective.