Cartooniverse, you seem to want to pigeonhole children into the ‘good’ ones and the ‘bad’ ones. I’ve got news for you - it’s not that black and white.
Sure, when I was a kid I did some stupid things. I was a little pyro, and had plenty of ‘fun’ with firecrackers, homemade gunpowder, you name it.
But I’m also the kid who quit the football team after seeing my fellow team members kick a younger kid off his bike and laugh at him. I helped the kid back on against immense peer pressure, and quit the team rather than associate with the creeps. And lost my girlfriend to boot, who wanted to date a football player. I was always a champion of the weaker kids, standing up to the bullies who wanted to abuse them.
I was a good kid. I got good grades, I had all kinds of rewarding hobbies (ham radio, model airplanes and rockets, typical male kid stuff). And sometimes I screwed up. I tried pot, I skipped classes, I snuck out at night with my friends and caroused. When I got a car, I did some stupid things in that, too.
Adolescents are complex. They are subject to a lot of conflicting emotions and knowledge, and they lack the education and perpective to fully understand things around them. That’s why we have PARENTS, for god’s sake. And yes, sometimes kids step over the line and do things that indicate that they are beyond education and pose a danger to others, and they have to become part of the criminal justice system. If you can show me that this kid has a history of criminal acts that involve injury to others, I’ll agree with you that he should be tried as an adult. But if he’s a good kid with good grades and no record, involving the criminal justice system is way out of line.
Before you take a kid away from his parents, his friends, his role models, and stick him in some juvie hall or adult jail surrounded by criminals, and before you give him a permanent chip on his shoulder by meting out such extreme punishment, you’d better be SURE that there are simply no alternatives.
This prank doesn’t even make it onto the radar screen. Part of your problem here may be that you have bought into the demonization of pot and other drugs. Never having tried them yourself, you think that this kid did major damage to others, and exposed them to something horrible. But I’ve got news for you: Eating a brownie with a little pot in it will make you a little giddy, and give you a case of the munchies, and if you eat a lot it might even make you feel queasy and distort your perception a bit. But it’s no big deal, and you can distort your reality more by having a double latte’ on an empty stomach. And pot has NO known permanent side effects. None. It’s safer than aspirin.
BTW, I very clearly remember my grade 9 Christmas dance, because some kid spiked the punch bowl with alcohol and a couple of the teachers got drunk on it, to everyone’s merriment (including the other teachers - they tried to look outraged, but you could tell they were having a good time and didn’t see the harm). And the teachers would search you on the way in, and find a joint on probably one kid in ten. The teacher would just confiscate it and give the kid a lecture (and no doubt smoke the joint later - the teachers on joint confiscation detail were invariably the ‘hippie’ teachers). A friend of mine managed to sneak a joint in. When we asked him where he got it, it turned out to be from his parent’s ‘stash’.
I’m not condoning drug use, but most of us kids grew out of it, and society didn’t collapse around us. And I don’t think our generation carried any more drug or alcohol problems into adulthood than any other generation. You may think that spiking some brownies with pot is just on this side of murder, but it’s not.
Perhaps my perspective comes from growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when ‘kids are kids’ was all you needed to say. If a kid got in real trouble in my school, the principle would give him the ‘strap’, which was a spanking on the hand with a leather barber’s strap. It hurt like hell (or so I’m told - the threat of it meant it almost never had to be used, and I never got it), but left no damage. Then the kid’s parents would come and get him, and he’d probably get another spanking at home. I’m firmly in favor of this.
If a kid did get caught doing something illegal by the cops, they would take him downtown, scare the daylights out of him by telling him what could happen to him if he didn’t smarten up, and then parents would come and get him, take him home, and administer the appropriate punishment.
Nowadays, the police get involved when little 6 year olds give a little girl a kiss, or when a kid comes to school with a pocketknife. And the school can’t physically punish the kids, and the parents don’t believe in it. So lacking those ‘big guns’, the only way they can get the message across to kids is through suspension, expulsion, and finally throwing up their hands and bringing the cops in.
None of this is good for the children. In my day, an expulsion was almost unheard of - exploits that would get you expelled were the stuff of legend, and stories would go around about the kid you heard about a few years ago who got EXPELLED because he did something outrageous. Nowadays, they seem to hand out expulsions right and left, and suspensions for bringing a nail clipper to school. This sends a message to kids that they belong outside of society, and creates little sociopaths.
It’s far better for the punishment to come from the children’s guardians rather than some faceless bureaucracy. And once the kid is punished, it’s important for him to be surrounded by people he loves and who love him, and be able to go back to school and try to forget he was ever that stupid, not to wake up alone in some detention center without parents, surrounded by other troublemakers, with his life changed forever.
