The Wussification of America, part the umpteenth

13-year-old girl suspended from middle school for saying she wished Osama bin Laden had killed her math teacher.

Back in the day, in the far off 1980s, a decade so full of danger almost no one survived, we used to sing this song on my school playground, as you probably did on yours:

Joy to the world, the teacher's dead!
We bar-be-qued her head!
If you're looking for her body,
We flushed it down the potty!
And around and around it goes...

Despite the manifest dangers of children thinking about killing authority figures, approximately 0.0% of teachers in my elementary school were decapitated.

Talking about how fearful we've become is pretty passe, but let's look at this from another angle- now, expressing contempt for authority is a punishable offense in our schools. Obviously this young woman had no al-Qaeda contacts and wasn't sharing possible targeting data with al-Qaeda's well-known New Hampshire branch. She doesn't like her teacher, and she said so on her Facebook. How dare she! She must be taught that all authority figures are the objects of reverence, and that any threats to authority, however benign, however laughable, however minor, will be ruthlessly quashed.

When I was about 20 I wrote a screed for a listserv I used to run decrying how servile my generation was, never questioning, always obeying, and annoyed a lot of my friends with it. This new generation is going to be even worse. But then, mass schooling wasn't designed to educate. It was designed to pacify and render docile. In this fearful age when even adults are expected to submit to having their genitals groped by strangers in public, how much worse off will the next generation be? For them, standing with your legs apart while some mouth-breathing TSA troll grabs your junk will be normal. What further outrages will the leaders of men be able to perpetrate?

Addendum: Where are all you readers coming from? Our little blog has a good day if we get more than fifteen visitors usually, and this post alone has nearly forty in the last two hours. How do I make this happen again?