Last week on this blog I brought you the story of a wonderful child in Utah whose school did not seem to think much of her and this week I decided to bring up similar callousness in Florida.
The youth in the Meth lab of Democracy was not disabled and excluded like the aspiring cheerleader out west. Instead, she is Black, was in the third grade and a new lawsuit reported on by VICE claims police in the state seized her for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation when a teacher mistook a drawing she did of someone hugging a rocket for some male genitalia.
Yes, you read this sentence right.
To be fair, the report does go on to note the child was alleged by police to have stated she wanted to kill herself. The child also purportedly said she dealt with abuse and told responders to take out a phone so she could show how she would kill them. All of this is eyebrow raising, but should necessitate speaking with a counselor at such a young age – this was recommended but not followed through on – and not being carted away like an adult offender by a weak grownup.
Yes, I will call such behaviour weak. It takes a striking level of cowardice and a tremendous lack of depth to come at a child with a stick before dolling out a carrot. It is alleged in the suit the child still has nightmares in connection with what happened and attorneys also claimed she “was bullied by other students, who knew she had been transported for a purported desire to kill herself and told her she should ‘just do it’. Unlike prior … she has had suicidal thoughts after.”
Such actions which can cause such trauma are unfortunately commonplace.
In March of this year an officer with the Montgomery County Police Department made headlines for detaining a toddler in Maryland who had ran away from school in January 2020 and did not want to return. The five-year-old, and again I want to emphasize, FIVE-YEAR-OLD, was handcuffed, picked up and directly screamed at and told he needed to be beaten by his mother. Therapy and a lawsuit followed and as always, I have to wonder how lazy and inept you have to be at your job as an educator to put someone best equipped to deal with murderers, rapists and drug dealers on the case of the young person who cannot tie their shows without some help?
In North Carolina towards the start of April a young man was arrested for picking a tulip at a bus stop. What seems like something out of a third-world dictatorship is very real. He was Black as well and lucky enough to have come before a judge who dropped the wholly absurd incident.
“He gets served with papers. His mom gets served with papers,” a report on the story reads.
The bottom line is if someone is under a certain age, they should not be held accountable for what they have done and enough is enough of folks with a different skin color from mine being punished for things I would have been called cute for doing growing up. If you sic the state on a child, you are less mature than the target of your pettiness and need to go back to school ASAP.
TOP IMAGE VIA STEVEN DEPOLO