Letter of Appreciation
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@lneilsmith.org

Attribute to: The Libertarian Enterprise http://www.ncc-1776.org

[Author's note: please feel free, dear reader, to rework this letter appropriately, attach your name to it, and send it to your not so friendly neighborhood educational commissar. Either these stupid incidents will stop, or public schools will—a no-lose situation!
— LNS]

Superintendent Stephen Borgsmiller
c/o Matthews Elementary School
Sikeston, Missouri

Dear Superintendent Borgsmiller:

I've been meaning for some considerable time now, to write to various individuals in your line of work and thank them—sincerely and profusely—for taking yet another bold step in the direction of saving the children of this country from the vile scourge of public education.

I refer, of course, to the sinister case of the little girl you punished—and rightly so—because she gave her best friend a gift, a little bag of dirt and leaves she collected surreptitiously from the school playground. This sort of dangerous behavior simply can't be tolerated. How many lives do you suppose you've saved through your actions?

It's been so long now, I can't recall how this noble crusade began. Was it, perhaps, with the little boy who kissed a female classmate on the cheek and got punished as if he'd committed rape? You certainly knocked him off the crooked path to anything resembling heterosexuality.

I say, let that be a lesson to him.

Or maybe it was the little girl whom you treated like a drug pusher, because she offered an aspirin to a friend who needed it? Or the one who brought a deadly butter knife to school to eat her lunch with? I just don't remember, there have been so many monumental achievements over the past nine or ten years in the name of "Zero Tolerance".

I recall some young miscreant you dealt with as if he'd been one of the shooters at Columbine High School, because he had one of the minuscule plastic machineguns in his pocket that came with his G.I. Joe. Also, I seem to remember half a dozen kids—mostly boys, of course—who drew pictures of guns or knives and were severely punished for it. And another who chewed his sandwich into the shape of a gun and "shot" his playmate with it. You have even taken measures against kids who simply pointed their right index finger and said, "Bang!"

Naturally, it's important to take action against atrocities like these. Confiscate these deadly fingers and turn those nasty boys into little girls as quickly and thoroughly as possible. If administrative punishment won't do the job, and involuntarily drugging the children fails, as well, then perhaps it's time to look seriously at corrective surgery.

Have there been any studies on the effects of castration, versus the simple, straightforward prefrontal lobotomies so popular a century ago? This is an era in which cost-effectiveness is all important, lest we run out of money to bomb all those widows and orphans in the Third World.

Not that you haven't built on a firm foundation provided by your predecessors. American parents, survivors of public school themselves, have been rendered so ignorant and stupid by the experience—twelve years of relentless brainwashing—that they willingly voted for two of the worst presidential candidates ever shamelessly foisted on the electorate, and still believe there's a meaningful difference between them.

I'm sure that even greater things await this generation. While it's undeniably true that you can't teach children responsibility by denying them every opportunity to exercise it, who wants responsible individuals in the welfare-warfare nanny state being built around them?

But forgive me, I have digressed.

What I really wanted to thank you for was bringing us that much closer—through your policy of Zero Tolerance for freedom, dignity, independence, and common sense—to the day when children everywhere will refuse to be dragged off to the day-prisons that you run, and parents refuse to make them. Shortly afterward, the public school system will be abolished, its buildings razed to the ground so that not one stone is left standing on another, and salt is sown on the ruins.

Meanwhile, you and your hundreds of thousands (or is it millions) of colleagues will be free at last to fulfill yourselves in the vocation that suits you best, in security, groping people at the airport.

It is something to look forward to, and you are helping to make it happen. I can only stand in admiration and say, "More power to you and yours!"

Many thanks again,
L. Neil Smith

Three-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith is the author of 23 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collection of articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at http://www.lneilsmith.org. Autographed copies may be had from the author at lneil@lneilsmith.org.

Neil is presently at work on Ceres and Ares, two sequels to his 1993 novel, Pallas, a decensored and electronically published version of his 1984 novel, Tom Paine Maru, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May. A 185-page full-color graphic novel version of The Probability Broach has just been released by BigHead Press.
You can order The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel from:
Laissez-Faire Books and Amazon.com