twist of fait accomplis

School suspends teen for rap lyric

A 15-year-old Brookfield Central High School student's homemade rhymes earned him a five-day suspension and could get the honor student expelled because of a lyric deemed threatening toward the principal—perhaps the first such case in Wisconsin.

I said it before: if the sensitivity about kids' creative output was as high ten years ago as it is now, I would have been kicked out of school and charged with threatening students, teachers, and administrators. This goes far beyond being cautious. You can't just take words by themselves... you have to look at the individual, their history, their demeanor. The things I said (and sometimes still say) aren't indicative of what I'm going to do. If that was the case, every mystery or horror writer would need to be put in jail because their characters were doing something violent.

Fortunately, one person interviewed in the article has their head on straight:

"We're punishing kids for things that we adults never would have been punished for when we were that age," he said. "If we try to criminalize every comment that adolescents made, all our kids would be locked up."

In similar news, a student catches hell for posting "threats" to his blog and a teen is kicked out of school for a violent stick-figure drawing.