Is There A Grown Up In The House?

We are two weeks into school for Mr. Monkey and he is home sick, so there are germs on my writer mojo. That means for today, you'll just get what I thought about as I read the paper this morning.

In our little pull out local section there were two big articles, both of which made me think, wow, we waste a lot of paper and ink, not to mention energy being worked up and angry about nothing.

The first big article was about the "big" changes at one of the local high schools.  The first change mentioned was a blip in the article.  They now do a breath test on the kids attending school dances.  I read that and thought are you kidding me!?!  I am way out of the loop.  Oddly, this seems to have given pause to no one at all.  The thing people are upset about?  The kids can't carry backpacks, purses or other bags around with them all day.  They have to actually just carry their books in their arms, store the unused ones in their lockers and trade them out between classes.  It's radical.  I know.

I'm surprised this is a big deal.  They compromised and let the kids carry pencil bags.  I am assuming this is to give teen girls a little, um, privacy.

I know I'm old, but I remember middle school and high school.  We just used our arms to carry our books and nothing bad happened to us.  We went to our lockers between classes to trade books, use the bathrooms and still made it to class on time.  Yes, we had a 4 minute pass time.  Yes, it was a large school.  And yes, we had to plan ahead.  You sometimes had to carry books for two classes or even three.  Sometimes you carried books for more than one class to be able to have that bathroom break, or because 2 or 3 of your back to back classes were on the opposite side of the building or your locker was on the first floor and your classes were on the 3rd floor.

I'm telling you, we lived.  It didn't hurt us in any way.  And the pencil bag thing? I get it.  It's nice.  It allows a girl to have a little privacy in her life, but still, how many pens and pencils could you really need?  Even if you go overboard and have a pencil, a blue, black and red pen, plus a highlighter, I'm betting you could manage somehow to carry those or stick them in a pocket or maybe, we used to do this amazing thing where we jammed them into our spiral notebooks....yeah, sarcasm.

The second article was about our local politicians and business leaders.  There are some committees around here that seem to have a hard time being functional.  In fact, for two weeks now, I've been reading the drama in the paper.  It's very similar to a Facebook drama or a high school drama.  Amazing how similar they all really are.

There is a whole lot of finger pointing and snide commenting going on.  Grown up "leaders" are having public tantrums.

Meanwhile, the paper is reporting it, so that means a few people are reading it.  They are making opinions about all of us here in our city based off of this.

Now that I think about it, there's an ugly baseball thing too.  That one is odd to me, but I'll leave it alone.

I think people like to get their own way.  They like to complain.  People are happy when they can be unhappy about something.  It's almost like our lives are too good to be true even when they are so much better than they could be.  We are so unhappy with not having our ideal fantasy of perfection, we go about ruining the better than good we do have.

In a bigger way, all these things left me shaking my head over my coffee and thinking if this is how the adults, the leaders are behaving and these are the issues we are spending our time and energy on, it's no wonder our kids are the way they are and grow up to become these very adults we are shaking our heads about.

If we are unwilling to make our kids carry their books with their arms because they don't like it, even though there are already some positives coming out of the whole thing, I don't know what to think.  In just the few weeks they have gone this route, less people have tripped and fallen over the bags, there is less theft, less drug transactions, less PDA in the schools and more kids on time to classes.  So how is this so terrible again?

I'd say it's OK for us to be adults and tell our kids what the rules are and simply stick with it, but then I flip the page and read about the local "adults" and "leaders" and I think, oh yeah, this is why.  Our adults are barely adults.

Come on people, I know it's tough, but buck up and grow up.