One of the reasons I looked forward to being a grown-up was that I could point and laugh at children for being as much of a weenie as I was. I was the kind of kid who could deal with scary things like spiders and water as long as it was in a Nintendo game, and only then if all the lights in the house were on. So yes, I admit it, when I helped out at a haunted maze last weekend it made me feel a lot better about myself when every so often, we would get a five-year old who would crawl halfway through our arrangement of cardboard boxes before curling up into ball and crying for his mommy. Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that most kids are becoming tougher these days.

I get this hunch from the recent trend of using “zero-tolerance” policies when dealing with children. After Columbine and other school shootings, many school administrators decided it was time to take a hard look at the deep, underlying issue behind children becoming alienated and depressed to the point of killing each other. What did they find as the problem? Not enough suspensions. Here are just a few examples from the past year of school officials taking a stand to stop school violence:

* Two second-graders from two different Illinois schools were suspended last fall for three and ten days, respectively, for being caught with nail clippers (apparently long fungus-infected fingernails are not so much of a threat).

* An eight-year-old Arkansas boy earned a three-day suspension after picking up a chicken strip and pointing it at a friend and saying “Pow, pow, pow!” (Since when did ISU Dining Services start supplying food to elementary schools?)

* Seven boys were disciplined for using fingers to simulate guns with which to shoot aliens. It was not reported whether they were using the standard thumb-and-index handgun or the more deadly three-finger, semi-automatic version.

* A 16-year old honor student was expelled last March from a Texas high school when a butter knife fell into the bed of his pickup truck while he was unpacking boxes for his sick grandmother. Parking the knife-carrying truck at school sent him to an alternative school reserved for violent offenders.

* A Virginia eighth-grade boy was kicked out of school for four months when school officials caught him with a knife that he stole from a suicidal friend. (A few days after the incident, his friend attempted suicide by cutting her wrists.)

Maybe this is a case of people in power dealing out thoughtless punishment in order to save face and create a false sense of security. But who am I to criticize? Maybe I’m just a harmless sissy. Because when I was in first grade, I brought a pellet rifle for show-and-tell and fired it several times for my friends and no one complained — except for a teacher who politely asked me not to bring any more guns to school —and no one felt the need to lock me up before I hurt someone, probably because the pellets were too small to cause any real damage. Plus, you could fit a barn between where I aimed the gun and where the pellets went. Today, though, I suppose teachers feel that unholy hell would be unleashed if any one of the fiends listed above tried a similar stunt.

That’s why I find it funny how psychoanalysts and educators are talking a lot about how children today are unimaginably traumatized by the thought of al-Qaida and snipers running around, and that no other generation of children has ever had to deal with the amount of fear that today’s kids face (this theory obviously overlooks the days of possible nuclear annihilation and Michael Jackson’s rising career). My thought is that if anyone should be scared, it is terrorists. Osama couldn’t hold a finger to our kids, who, with pieces of fried chicken, would be taking their schools hostage and flying them into skyscrapers if it weren’t for vigilant school officials keeping them in check.

And I imagine this Halloween was probably old hat to kids today. I’m sure the usual paranoid warnings were given out to parents this year, such as: Don’t let the kids go trick-or-treating alone. Tell the kids not to enter a stranger’s house or car. Candy that looks unwrapped is probably laced with enough cyanide (or anthrax, in today’s case) to kill a buffalo herd. I bet parents were even warned against apples as treats. Back in my day, this was because the apples might contain razor blades that would cut us up. I bet today, the danger, if school officials are correct, lies in kids using these weaponized apples to take over the world.

Dan Nguyen

is a senior in computer

engineering and journalism

and mass communication from Iowa City.