Connections: Smoking a Joint

Connections

Yesterday I saw two teenage boys walking down the street, talking, laughing and smoking a joint. They passed the joint back and forth, not trying to hide it. They were very casual. Lawbreakers, I thought, but I didn't care; I was just a little surprised that they were so open about it. In a million little ways, people break the law--or at least the rules--all the time, of course. I also saw a woman sitting in a parked car open her door and dump some trash before driving away. Another car almost ran me over while I was crossing the street (legally). And people don't clean up after their dogs in our local park--Poop Park, as I call it. Law or rule breakers, all of them. Breaking rules can be good or bad, certainly; it has been called the essence of creativity. And we worship creativity, at least in theory. In practice, policies like the so-called "No Child Left Behind" act (another set of rules), which imposes a mania for standardized testing on the schools, squeeze all the creativity out of the classroom, many teachers say. I suppose if I was a student now, I'd think of every free moment outside of school as a sort of prison break. Maybe I'd even want to smoke a joint on my way home from school to relieve the pressure. I'd pass it to my friend and perhaps wonder, for a moment, what it is that they're smoking down in Washington.
_