The Uvalde Paradox

Is the poor police response to the school shooting a result of poor schooling?

When I was in fourth grade, John entered our classroom as a transfer student. He was an aggressive boy who was kicked out of his previous school for unruly behavior. John was my first encounter with the real bully, and a very large one at that. Day after day, John proceeded to terrorize all the boys on playground. In defending myself and other victims, I got in multiple scrapes with him which always landed me (not John) in principle Lee's office. Eventually, knowing that I would not stand down, John's bullying receded and my trips to the principal's office lessened. After 5th grade, John's parents shipped him off to a military school and I never saw him again. There was a collective sigh of relief among the playground boys that a just God had put things right again at Lincoln Elementary School.

But what never happened in  my childhood encounters with bullies, was a single thought that my problems with John, or any other would be yellow-eyed Scut Farkus type individual, could or should be resolved by the authorities. First off, when you are getting your ass kicked on the playground there is no time to parlay until a higher authority can be summoned to intercede. Secondly, we all knew that school authorities were never interested in justice, school policies were only designed to keep the peace through heavy handed control. Finally, in the 70's even 10-year-old boys knew that appealing to authority is cowardice, and that label lasted a lot longer than a bloodied nose.

Learning how to deal with bullies at the tender age of ten has served me well throughout my academic and adult life. Bullies came and went over the ensuing years. I had more physical exchanges with bullies in Jr. High. And, by the time I got to high school the bullies still abound, but they became more verbal and less, "I will meet you outside after school." In the mid 1980’s verbal abuse by bullies continued in university, but instead of the bullies being fellow students, they tended to be professors, mostly of the disgruntled variety, longing for their summer of ’68 civil activism and upset by the fact that the Alex P. Keaton Reagan loving students were apathetic to their Haight-Ashbury Park libertinism. It should be noted, as I write this article, bullies are still about in my life, but now they mostly hide behind the facades of State and Federal bureaucracies.

Public school districts spend millions of dollars per year on anti-bullying programs and with over 13,800 public school districts in the US that equates to at least 25 billion dollars per year on these anti-bullying endeavors. The only thing that changed regarding bullies in public schools now verses 40 years ago is the anti-bullying industry getting fat at the public trough. My children had the benefit of these expensive anti-bullying programs, and it did not change human nature one single bit. Though their backpacks where stuffed full of anti-bullying propaganda and they spent countless hours in “expert” anti-bullying seminars, it did not stem the tide of bullies, nor change how their schools dealt with the issue.

In the fourth grade, my daughter was bullied by some other parent’s little angel, so she followed her seminar trained protocol and told her teacher about the incident. And the teacher’s response was, “don’t be a tattle-tail.” My daughter was crushed, but it opened the opportunity for me to explain to her that when you are in trouble, no one, especially a unioned and tenured government employee, is coming to your rescue. How you get out of a threatening situation depends on your intelligence and physical abilities.

Another bullying incident occurred with my youngest son around the same grade. His nemesis was a little red-haired girl who took to daily taunting of him and, whenever no one was looking, pushing or tripping him. Most of the time he ignored this “delightful” gadfly. However, on several occasions, he struck back. And just like his old man, when he defended himself, he won a trip to the principal’s office while the little red-haired cherub remained at large. Of course, my son’s plea that he was being bullied fell on deaf ears, and despite the anti-bullying policies, no action was taken toward his nemesis. I was, however, invited into the principal’s office along with a plethora of highly paid school social workers to discuss their professional opinion that my son had anger issues and wish to discuss with me how it should be treated. I demanded a meeting with the little red-haired girl and her parents to discuss bullying and all that happened was the school experts dropping the anger issue charge and freeing my son from elementary school jail. My guess is that little girl has a bright future in front of her as the head of some government agency. Hell, she is A-1 material to become an anti-bullying school officer!

What does all this bullying have to do with the Uvalde school shooting? From the time a deranged individual entered the school and started shooting at innocence, 376 law enforcement officer amassed on the grounds and in the hallways to confront the killer. For 70 minutes this overwhelming force lay idle not taking action to stop the tragic event. It was as if they were waiting from some divine school or law enforcement individual to appear on the scene to give them permission to engage. Where would these officers get such a notion? Well, if they are young enough and publicly educated, they would have received that message from all their anti-bullying training in school. For is that now not the go-to for all grievances? If someone breaks into our house to do us harm, are not we instructed to seek refuge and wait for the police to arrive? If one neighbor has an issue with another, instead of discussing the problem face to face, does not the aggrieved call the authorities to resolve? Standing up to bullies face to face is what fathers instructed their sons to do 40 years ago. That was of course, until the 25 billion dollar per year worth of experts taught children to run, hide and cry out for the authorities to solve the problem.

Now, let’s juxtapose the Uvalde police response with the Greenwood Park Mall shooting less then two months in separation. I do not know the educational status of the hero in Indiana that thwarted a mass shooting in the mall by preforming in 15 seconds, what 376 trained officers of the law in Uvalde could not pull off in 70 minutes, but I can assure you that if this young man was publicly educated, there are serious investigations going on right now. The educational elites must to get to the bottom of how anti-bullying (aka the noble cowardice initiative) eluded this young man. The educational industrial complex must investigate his teachers, coaches, mentors and parents to ascertain how he failed to retreat and wait for highly trained and authorized law enforcement officers to neutralize the mass shooting threat. Most importantly, Lord Nefarious along with the specter of Karl Marx, are at this very moment brow beating local, state and federal representatives to enact laws to ensure that any future public school graduate that fails to learn the lesson of compliant noble cowardice is duly punished. Lest any more of this good guy with a gun nonsense reaches the light of day.

The Uvalde Paradox question askes, is the poor police response to the school shooting a result of poor schooling? Something has definitely changed in our national psyche with regard to conflict resolution. Instead of fixing a dispute here and now, we are taught that a long and drawn-out process under the sharp eye of disinterested but highly compensated experts must ensue in order to intelligently resolve a dispute. It appears the Uvalde response time was due to that mentality. God bless the Indiana hero who must have been absent the day the anti-bullying “experts” visited his school to convey that lesson. Based on multiple demonstrable deficiencies in our educational approach to conflict resolution, the question is, how do we undo the Uvalde Paradox? Until we do, students’ lives are in danger and first responder valor is impossible.