A uniform perspective
Thursday, October 18, 2007 2:03 PM PDT
Roy Hicks
A few weeks ago I was struck by a letter to the editor. The writer, the concerned parent of a sixth-grader in the Ontario Middle School, approved that school’s recent institution of a uniform dress code.
“As parents, we agree wholeheartedly with what the school is trying to accomplish through the new dress code,” he wrote. “For one thing, the dress code eliminates the confusion of who belongs on campus and who does not. That makes for a safer environment for all of the students.
“Secondly, having all the students wear the same attire removes the possibility of less fortunate children having to compete with fashion accomplishments. And lastly, a dress code means less focus on butt-cracks and breasts, and more focus on school. In these times of gang violence and random attacks, I applaud anything the school can do to refocus our children on scholastics.”
I couldn’t agree more. It’s damned high time we begin restoring stern, calm and sensible order to our school grounds, and a simple and enforcible dress code is one of the easiest ways to start.
A few months ago I was shopping at our local supermarket, as I do almost every day. Imagine my state of mind when I rounded a corner to spot a fat kid of about 15 dressed in what I call the “full doofus uniform:” baseball cap on backwards, sloppy tee-shirt, ragged sneakers and baggy pants hanging half off his behind exposing the crack of his ample buttocks. He also had the obligatory chain dangling from his belt to his knees, and his spiky hair was dyed bright green.
Even more amazing was his mommy: an obese woman in an oversized black dress. If I were the father of that young slob he’d have been shaved bald until his natural hair grew back, and he’d have his baseball cap on straight and his pants full up around his tubby waist. Surprisingly this mommy was not only utterly unabashed by the bizarre appearance of her bloated boy; she actually seemed proud of the young rascal: defiantly stalking the supermarket aisles as if to say very loudly “So what?”
Terrific, I thought sourly. This is a future citizen of our country ... doubtless a soldier who will march off to defend us in the years to come, right?
I see these young numbskulls all the time and never fail to wonder at what our country has come to, especially here in otherwise peaceful and conservative Idaho. I, likewise, never fail to wonder at what young people of both sexes mutilating themselves with such disgraceful spectacles as tattoos and “body piercing” with rings through their noses, lips, eyebrows, tongues and ears are thinking about. As far as I’m concerned such mindless self-mutilation is committing graffiti on God’s property. “They’re just making individual statements!” their liberal supporters proclaim. Individual statements of what — “I’m a nincompoop, hear me roar?”
This phenomenon used to baffle me until my razor-sharp daughter gave me a whole new insight into this bizarre behavior. “These people have such low self-esteem and hate themselves so much they want to brand themselves as outcasts and invite further contempt,” she observed. For the first time this current phenomenon of self-mutilation began to make some weird sense.
Nevertheless, it’s time to call this lemming-like march to insanity to a halt. Demanding strict adherence to a simple school dress-code is but the first step toward restoring peace and security in our public schools. Let’s start right now.
