Golden Showers
The Schools’ Sick Fetish for Water Sports

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision on June 27 legitimizing the random drug testing of any of approximately seven million high-school students who engage in extra-curricular activities is a novel way to address the lack of funding available for such activities. By subjecting the youth to compulsory urinalysis (or, water sports) as a punishment for showing personal initiative—as opposed to, say, staying home and doing drugs—school administrators send but one message to “their” children: When the bell rings, get out! Or, even better, don’t show up at all.

That there are parents out there who will applaud the Court’s mistake only shows how complete is the failure of baby-boomer parents to protect their children from stuff as obviously dangerous as drugs and the central government. Children, you see, are pretty transparent in their behavior, however sneaky they think they are. Most drugs leave behind traces that are easily discerned by the sort of parents of who make a point of looking at their child’s face or smelling them every now and then. Absentee parents, too concerned with their own efforts at self-gratification, have passed on to their schools—which, I once heard, don’t do a very good job of education—the duties that once belonged to them.

If the schools really cared about minimizing drug activity in schools, they would encourage kids to be more open about such activity, and then move to eliminate the bad seeds. Instead, they announce that anyone who wants to join a club or play a sport might be tested, which either forces the likely suspects out or encourages them to lie and cheat on yet another test that proves nothing except, in this case, whether the child is so weak-minded as to submit to behavior that, if coerced in any other context, would be considered molestation.

We can only speculate how many career paths will be derailed by this decision, how many children pushed closer to the gaping maw of drug addiction. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because it’s obvious that no one in America gives a shit about public education anymore, except those who care about their kids’ lives. Such persons—the only ones worthy of the once-exalted title of “Mother” or “Father”—already know if their little boy or girl uses drugs, and should need no assistance from the same people who push sodas and candy at lunchtime instead of nutritious food and who pressure parents to shove pills in their kids after the effects of all that sugar and caffeine become too much for an overexerted and underpaid staff. Such persons (who will hopefully remove their kids from all after-school activities in protest) should feel not only insulted by the Court’s ruling, they should feel threatened. They should understand that nonsense like this is no solution to the problems that can lead to youthful drug abuse. The Court has voted to further undermine parental authority and further strain a public-school system that hasn’t been adequate since before this year’s graduating class was born.

Ignore the argument that educators (from, in this case, the southwest, which once had better instincts) merely want to reduce the amount of drug activity in their schools. There was no way to verify such activity until the Court gave schools permission to collect the piss of whomever looks or acts like someone that might need a lesson in humility. "We find that testing students who participate in extracurricular activities is a reasonably effective means of addressing the school district's legitimate concerns in preventing, deterring and detecting drug use," wrote Mr. Thomas, speaking for the majority in favor of methods that Ms. Ginsburg described as “capricious, even perverse.”

In this age of one-sided “zero-tolerance” rules, metal detectors, random locker searches and systematic espionage in the form of faux-“teenage” narcs, the people whom the schools want to detect have probably stopped going to school, and any reasonably-educated child knows enough to resist such temptation, at least on public property. For nothing will they destroy forever any suggestion that America trusts its children. Having chosen to make official what was until now a mostly theoretical generation gap, the Court must now answer those questions that flow naturally from their decision: What happens to the kids who test positive? Do they go straight to jail, since their drugged-up urine could itself be considered a drug? Or do their homes just get raided? And the most important question, the question that will most determine how much taxpayer money is wasted on this endeavor: Is Ritalin a drug?

We should have hoped that the schools did a better job of providing alternatives to drug abuse, instead of policing the proof of their failure. Now it’s too late, a tragedy that will be evident soon enough, after-school activity slides to nothing, which will please those conservatives content with the elimination of art, music, dance, debate and even sports, in school and everywhere else. Then they’ll need to manufacture more excuses to violate the Constitutional rights of children, in preparation for the sorry future that awaits them in a country that has abandoned its founding principles. It seems that the best education occurs by default.

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