For a lot of reasons, I have avoided commenting on this story until now. First of all, it is so stupid that if there is someone who wants to defend the conduct of the school in the matter, I don’t want to know them or read them, and I generally don’t post about the obvious. Second, we still don’t have a name of the victim of the anti-Wonder Woman attack, the school involved, or the teacher or administrator involved. Finally, I’m suspicious: a Wonder Woman movie is nearing release, and this seems awfully convenient.
The tale began with a post by someone claiming to be the parent of a little girl named Laura who was sent home is shame because her Wonder Woman lunch box violated school policy. The letter sent home with Laura, which someone supposedly photographed, is head-explosion worthy:
The violent lunch box allegedly looks like this (both sides):
I know.
The Horror.
I decided to treat this story as if it were true, because it seems plausible, and true or not, it is not inconsistent with trends that we have been seeing in schools and elsewhere, but especially schools, for several years. I also feel that I should maintain a relatively complete record of the most egregious examples of child abuse and exquisite administrator idiocy based on gun and violence phobias in society. Thes people tech our children, everybody, and we let them. This is right up there with the gun shaped pizza and Pop Tart, and the little deaf boy named Gunner who wasn’t allowed to sign his name.
Maybe it’s worse, because it is also superhero bigotry and cultural ignorance. Wonder Woman, at least the traditional incarnation of her shown on the lunch box, is as non-violent as a heroine can be. Her moves were defensive; the most she did to bad guys other than protect herself was to lasso them (which also made them tell the truth.) Yes, I’m sure the new, improved Amazon Princess will cold-cock someone. Good. But that’s not the Diana on the lunch box.
Do I have to give the Atticus Finch speech again?
Furthermore, the symbolic message sent by punishing a student for having such an innocuous image on a lunch box is not teaching, but indoctrination, and indoctrination calculated to produce a generation of timid, frightened, conflict averse weenies who cry for trigger warnings, protest that they can’t take laws school tests that reference violent events, like the shooting of Mike Brown, and grow up to become demented school administrators who freak out if a kid makes a gun with her hand and says “Bang!”
The culture of the United States is violent, and for all the problems that causes, it also is rooted in a national character that urges individuals to be strong, not weak, survivors, not victims, heroes, not passive wards of an all-providing state. Once schools communicated and spread that culture by teaching legends, heroes and icons: military victors, pioneers, explorers, Western settlers, law enforcement officials, political leaders, almost all of whom were forced to solve problems with violence. Who is objectionable under this school’s “violence must cause a visceral reaction of revulsion in all young Americans” formula” which is apparently aimed at converting the U.S. to Switzerland? (Cue Harry Lime in “The Third Man”: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”)
Let’s see:Davy Crockett and George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George Marshall, Grant, Sergeant York, Audie Murphy, every boxer, real and fictional (Rocky!) and football player, actors like John Wayne, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, virtually every cartoon character except Casper the Friendly Ghost and Little Lulu, including Mickey Mouse and Bambi….oh, hell, it’s easier to name the few figures of fact and fiction that would be acceptable to this school and the millions of Americans in sympathy with their fanaticism. Quakers. Mother Theresa and Albert Schweitzer. Martin Luther King. Gandhi. Ballet dancers. Not Jesus: can’t talk about him in a school. Simpering damsels in distress; Sleeping Beauty, but not her Prince; Snow White, but not the Dwarfs, Wally Cox, but not Marlon Brando.
And the America this plan would produce? Not the champion of the world, but the bystander, the patsy of the world.
You know, like it has been recently—but forever, and proud of it.
Most of the articles covering this episode joked about it. The cultural movement to remove our nation’s courage, backbone and swagger is no joke. There is a lot more at stake than lunch boxes and Wonder Woman.
__________
Sources: Imjur, Food World News, Independence
Ethics Alarms 
Wonder Woman’s lasso made people tell the truth, and they can’t be allowing any of that near the children – they might not vote the right way when they grow up…
Wonder Woman has been getting more violent since at least the 80’s. In 1996, in a comic called Kingdom Come, she carried a sword (sharp enough to shave electrons off an atom!) and she didn’t hesitate to use it to slay her enemies.
But you’re right, that’s not the Wonder Woman we see here. This is peace-and-love, victory-through-submission Wonder Woman. This makes me really wonder (no pun intended) if this is fake… But the confirmed stories are so bad that we cannot ignore the possibility that this, too, is real.
I’m actually hoping that the real reason the school banned the lunchbox is out of fear of trademark violation, but the school doesn’t want the parents to know. This is what passes for “positive thinking” for me these days.
“We have defined ‘violent characters’ as people who solve problems using violence, because we are educators and we feel that this gives us the magic ability to make people stupider by defining things any way we want to. Also, sheriff deputies who patrol our campus are asked to carry funny glasses and wigs around instead of guns or mace, because when a fight breaks out on campus we believe that the best way to solve that problem is with wacky comedy.”
What are these imbeciles thinking! Recently, we had two women qualify as Army Rangers which is not exactly a non violent occupation. I think this is a matter of some administrator engaging in cya. Who knows, the girl carrying the lunchbox could turn out to be “The Bad Seed” or something.
The women graduated from the Ranger school. They, however, most likly would not be accepted into the 75th ranger regiment. That they a execptional soldiers is without questions. That there are Rangers and then there are Rangers is also witout question.
A footnote: Both the Soviets during ww2 and the Israelis today use women as combat troops. Women were widely used as spies and resistance fighters in France and the occupied countries during ww2. The Vietcong during the Vietnam War also used them as combat troops. Perhaps some company should make Army Ranger lunch boxes for girls.
Few societies in history have made regular use of females as combat troops. None of them were ones we’d really care to emulate.
Really? Most of the following countries are using females as combat troops at present. And don’t forget G.I Jane: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130125-women-combat-world-australia-israel-canada-norway/
Women have served as auxilliaries in warfare quite often. Their central purpose, however, has been to free men for combat duty. There is no GI Jane and should never be.
Counterargument from the Strand Magazine, 1903.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604041h.html
The writing was on the wall over a century ago.
While there are many military tasks that require sheer brute force, and while most women are not physically up to the standard needed, a very few are, and rather more men are not.
While “every man a riflemen” has served the USMC well, I’d rather have someone 10% better at their primary task and lacking ability in bayonet combat than someone 10% worse who does have that ability.
“Auxiliary tasks” such as Intelligence, DivLocBats, etc now make up the vast majority of the most effective armies’ tasks,
I never said different, Zoe. We’re talking about women in COMBAT.
I can’t believe that the lunchbox wasn’t banned for being sexist or something. I was sure that was going to be the story at first.
At various times in elementary school I had Super Mario, The Fall Guy, Star Wars, and He-Man lunch boxes. Gloriously violent characters, all.
Dunno, the land of William Tell and Arnold von Winkelried was pretty badass in its day, it had its dark side as the Nazis’ bank, and the reservists take their weapons home, resulting in high gun ownership and low crime. I think the model they are looking toward is more New Zealand, whose air force has no combat capability and whose proudest moment was when they forbade American ships to dock, or maybe Costa Rica, who abolished its military in 1948 and act like that makes them saints.
All silliness aside, it should come as no surprise that teachers themselves taught by relics who hid from Vietnam by extending their student deferments and taught that violence is soul-destroying and “icky” would believe that anyone other than your above mentioned exceptions was not permissible in a peaceful classroom where the pupils probably meditate rather than playing tag.
The policies expressed by the school seem to be the same ones that have informed John Kerry’s negotiations with the Iranians. “Be nice and strangers will reciprocate.” Dumb.
Then there’s Sweden, Since the death of Gustavus Adolphus, their only claim to fame is that they sell armaments to both sides when there’s a war. In another 50 years, however, they’ll be called Swedistan.
And of course they give out Peace prizes named for and funded by the inventor of dynamite.
Alfred Noble thought that dynamite would make war too terrible to wage. He wasn’t the first to make that idiotic mistake. He certainly wasn’t the last.
Then why didn’t he just give it away for free to everyone?
I guess he wasn’t THAT stupid! However, he put his money into the Nobel Foundation. That idea apparently came to him after his brother blew himself up.
Then they will abolish same-sex marriage.
That’s because everyone who says different will have their heads hacked off by the ruling caliph!
If that is what it takes to make things right…
They would have a better argument about it being a metal lunchbox. Back in my school days I saw at least a couple of broken noses due to “accidents” with these lunchboxes.
…or kids getting ticked off and letting bullies have it.
They’re more concerned with Wonder Woman using violence to solve problems and less concerned with her appearance as what for all intents and purposes is just the drawing of a naked woman wearing body paint…?
Of course, if Wonder Woman was fighting for her “right” to have life-taking sovereignty over a tiny little super hero gestating inside of her and shut up Superman for insisting that she go through with the birth, then I think we’d hear a different story…
That’s one reason we have soft fabric lunch boxes now. We must protect ourselves and others from all dangers. Soft lunchboxes are the least of the many ways we soften the world for the little ones who manage to escape being murdered in the womb.
What a crazy bizarro world we live in.
Bizarro Wonder Woman would probably be perfectly acceptable.
She might even run for President and wear the lasso herself. It would, of course, compel the person to tell lies.
–Dwayne