Do you ever get the feeling that this entire country is being run by whacko, reactionist parents? I certainly do.

You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones who won’t let their kid play video games, or listen to rock music, or do any of the other things that make life worth living. It seems like their narrow, reactionary frame of mind is taking over the entire country.

As a result, we have armed guards, metal detectors and all the other amenities of prison at most every high school in America. On top of that, we now have 13-year-olds being arrested for writing violent essays.

Last week, 13-year-old Christopher Beamon of Ponder, Texas, was arrested for writing an essay about shooting two classmates and a teacher. The boy was to be held for 10 days but was released early when family and lawyers got involved.

If I had any doubt that policies in the public school system were taking a drastic turn for the worse, this put them to rest. If the atmosphere in this country was like this 10 years ago, I might well have found myself in the same shoes.

When I was in elementary school I wrote some pretty foul stuff. I remember one day when I was in first or second grade, we had to draw a picture. I elected to draw myself on the playground punching another student in the face.

In hindsight, there were two major flaws with this idea. One was my choice to graphically depict blood flying everywhere, and the other was that these pictures were going to be hung up for the parents to see during conference week.

I learned an important lesson that day: Don’t let your parents see certain things. But I certainly didn’t stop horrifying my teachers with my creativity.

When I was in fifth grade, I had a teacher who required us to write a short essay or story almost every week. One week we read a Chinese folk story called “A Grain of Rice.” It was about a peasant who saved the Emperor’s daughter. The Emperor tells him he can have anything he wants, and the peasant says he wants to marry the Emperor’s daughter. The Emperor says, “Anything but that.” So the peasant asks for a grain of rice, followed by two the next day, then four, eight, etc.

Eventually, the peasant has so much rice he is wealthy and can marry the Emperor’s daughter. Anyway, our assignment was to write a sequel to the story.

So, I threw together a little yarn called “A Grain of Crack.” It followed pretty much the same premise, only the peasant and his wife had moved to New York City, and this time, she was working the con on her dealer.

On top of that, I threw in the twist that the peasant has become a cop and is torn over whether he should bust his wife for her coke habit.

Now if you ask me, that’s a pretty interesting story — especially for an 11-year-old. Of course, if you asked my teacher, it was completely inappropriate and had to be rewritten.

I can look back on things like that and laugh. I can see now they were done primarily to get attention and to test how far I could go. It’s horrifying to think that doing something like that today could land a kid in Juvy Hall.

What happened to Beamon wasn’t the result of just a few trigger-happy administrators, either. It sounds as if half of the small Texas town was in favor of lynching the boy.

According to The Associated Press article, District Attorney Bruce Isaaks told the Dallas Morning News that the boy had been “a persistent discipline problem for [the] school, and administrators there were legitimately concerned.”

Being a “discipline problem” in grade school is not a sign of a potential threat. Many people, myself included, got into a lot of trouble when they were young. This type of behavior is more a sign of hyper-activity and restlessness than it is a predisposition for violence.

The AP reporter also felt it was important to mention that Beamon’s essay included several misspellings. I can only assume this bit of information was included to condemn the boy as a delinquent, rather than a bored genius. But for Christ’s sake, how many 13-year-old’s essays don’t have misspellings? For that matter, how many adults can even spell proficiently all the time?

These are all signs of the terrifying atmosphere that exists in our schools. What’s terrifying is not the threat of violence, which is low and has been blown out of proportion. Instead it is the extreme fascism being exhibited by school administrators in order to ensure that theirs isn’t the next district with a P.R. nightmare on its hands.

Despite the media blitz over the last few years, school shootings are about as common as music videos on MTV. But in order to appease the reactionist parents of the world, schools have reallocated millions of dollars to provide the illusion of safety.

The result of this mentality is to crush the freedom and creativity of this nation’s young people and to instill in them a mindset of conformity and fear.

When a mischievous essay can land a young boy in jail, it is obvious that what we are destroying in this country is far more tragic than the token acts of violence we think we are avoiding.

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Ben Godar is a senior in sociology from Ames. Would somebody please set the freaking Campanile back an hour? Thanks.