Hooligans in the Making

When I think back to my days of high school I often remember the various ways that certain students tried to get out of going to classes, sometimes taking the entire school down with them. The method of choice when attempting to mass vacate the school was to pull the fire alarm. It was virtually impossible to get caught given that the alarms were everywhere. After the alarm was pulled it was always mass chaos - we knew damned well that no one bothered to check the bathrooms until the firemen arrived and it was a great place to hang out in the winter and do all sorts of naughty things that we couldn't get away with otherwise. It wasn't like we were going to set off the alarms smoking in the bathrooms - they were all ready going. The greatest thrill was always getting escorted out of the bathrooms by a couple of hot firemen, definitely a thrill as a teenage girl with hormones raging.

What triggered my reminiscence is a comment that a friend on facebook left me. In our current era of paranoia and certainty that the average teenager is a psychopath hell bent on mass annihilation of his peers either by setting off explosives in our schools bathrooms or by showing up to school packing enough fire power to start and finish world war III single handedly, it seems that the schools are responding to the writing on the bathroom wall with a ridiculous amount of overkill of which I am sure we would have taken advantage of when we were young. As soon as the average teenager realizes that writing a bomb threat on a bathroom wall gets them out of school for a day as the teachers go into a complete nervous breakdown, "Oh My God Jonny Doe is going to knife us in third period and blow up the school", I am sure the cogs begin to turn and the joy of the ability to single handedly get the entire student population out of a day of classes becomes a source of great pride. The evidence of which is the mass of high schoolers that are no doubt gathered outside the school in the immediate aftermath giggling about someone getting them all a free pass for the day again. When this type of reaction to graffiti becomes a regular occurrence as is happening at St. James Collegiate and I am sure at any other number of schools in the city, it becomes a mockery of safety for the kids and undoubtedly a situation severely overblown by a paranoid faculty that is terrified of its student population.

And yet we continue to accept the school divisions spewing drivel about how safe the schools in Winnipeg are. If they are so safe, why the massive overreaction to bathroom graffiti? Or, maybe it is that the kids overall haven't turned en mass into the next Hitler or Ted Bundy but really are just as they have been for centuries, loving a free day off school granted to them by some harmless student with a slightly naughty streak in his or her personality who is bright enough to be able to manipulate the entire school faculty, and the Winnipeg Police service with a number 2 pencil? Lighten up Winnipeg!