False start, faulty finish
Dad put through wringer after unwittingly giving son alcohol
Parents make mistakes with their kids. They let them play too close to the tiger cage. They leave them in hot cars while they go gamble. They smoke cigarettes while scrubbing the tar off their bare feet in bathtubs filled with gasoline.
(Bob Davis/Special to the Sun-Times)
But still, as a rule, parents generally do a better job of managing child welfare than the state, which seems to operate at one of two speeds when it comes to children: Too Slow or Too Fast.
We are sadly familiar with Too Slow -- the ignored warnings, the faked home visits, the shrugging judges delivering tiny victims back to their monster abusers to face unspeakable doom.
The effects of Too Fast might not be quite as tragic as Too Slow but are, in a way, harder to rationalize. We at least can understand how harried caseworkers miss warning signs. More difficult to grasp is how they can coolly study the facts, then go tearing into the lives of blameless individuals who innocently stray into their clutches.
Individuals like Christopher Ratte, a professor of archeology at the University of Michigan, who had the misfortune to take his 7-year-old son, Leo, to a Detroit Tigers game at Comerica Field last month without being up on every nuance of the beverage industry. Leo asked for lemonade, so Ratte bought him a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which contains alcohol.
"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte told Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson.
A ballpark security guard saw the bottle in the child's hand, and the wheels of authority began to turn. The police were called and Ratte's explanations batted away. Leo was taken to Detroit Children's Hospital, where he had a blood-alcohol content of zero, and was thus sucked into state care while his frantic family tried to spring him.
Two days passed before Michigan decided Leo could go home, and only after Ratte agreed to move to a hotel. There he stayed for three more days before sanity prevailed and the case was dismissed.
It could be argued this is just the system at work -- we don't want 7-year-olds swilling booze at the ballpark. The alert guard -- under other circumstances -- might have rescued a boy from reckless care. It takes time to sort things out.
But we have to be troubled to see a small slip lead to losing control of your child for days. The slowness of the state to respond reminds us we live in a society where authority too often trumps humanity, where zero-tolerance policies become more important than the people the policies are supposedly trying to protect.
Take a look at this photo, taken at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas last month before the wedding of Samantha Lerner and Nathan Boisclair. It was snapped by Bob Davis, a longtime staff photographer at the Sun-Times, who slipped the fetters of daily journalism to start La Storia Foto, the first national wedding photographer company.
The bride wanted Bob to take her wedding photos, but, alas, he was out of their price range. Rather than settle for someone other than Bob, she suggested he hold a master class. Thus 41 -- count 'em -- 41 photographers used the wedding to hone their technique under Bob's instruction. Imagine when the bride hauls THAT wedding album out after dinner. ...
Be prepared to die. Have your will in order, your executor named, your important papers in a convenient location.
I'm not going to prison for saying that, am I? But Katherine W. Loberg might. The 19-year-old Minnesotan is accused of scrawling "Be prepared to die on 4/14" on a bathroom wall at St. Xavier University, leading to a four-day shutdown of the school.
Were I her lawyer, I'd point out that "Be prepared to die on 4/14" is too ambiguous to be an actual threat. Couldn't that thought -- "Be prepared to die" -- be interpreted otherwise, perhaps as good legal sense, or a cornerstone of Catholic theology? Had she written "Be prepared to die -- go to confession today" she would be eligible for extra credit, not prison.
Rather, it was that specific "4/14," touching on the past school shootings, that have spooked us out of our reason and set off the fearful administration reaction for which she may be severely punished. They should never have shut down the school in the first place, and now, having done so, they are seeking to pursue a troubled girl criminally for writing on a bathroom wall. America in 2008.
Officials keep saying they must take these threats seriously -- and it's sad to see the mayor and the police superintendent baying for punishment for this poor student with a history of depression. "A very dangerous person," the mayor, a former prosecutor, called her. Does anyone believe that whether the punishment is a slap on the wrist or the electric chair will have any deterrent effect at all on the disturbed individuals who commit these kinds of brainless acts?
There is no reason to equate taking a threat seriously with shutting down whatever institution discovers a menacing graffito. This policy will not stand the test of time -- our schools will end up empty. Rather, it is a temporary madness, a safety mania, that will only end when school officials become savvier, not when they manage to rid their student populations of the occasional troubled youth.
Books have been written explaining adolescence. But my 12-year-old, perhaps reflecting a certain genetic concision, summed it up nicely in four simple words.
The topic was childhood dreams. I was trying, without success, to dredge up what mine might have been. I had the sinking feeling that the limits of my youthful ambition were merely to be a writer. Talk about setting the bar low.
"What are your childhood dreams?" I asked him.
He didn't miss a beat.
"To thwart your control," he said, without a smile.
