WHO CAN DOUBT SOCIETY IS IN A MORAL CRISIS?

Police officers used to handcuff suspects only if they resisted or
were thought to be dangerous.

BBC News carried an item this week that seemed right out of Monty
Python. In the U.K. a yellow line parallel to the curb denotes a no
parking zone. A work crew was painting such a yellow line at a newly
designated location when it encountered - a parked car. Undaunted,
the workers painted the line to the front wheel of the car, then
underneath the car to the rear wheel, then continued down the road.

A few minutes later a traffic warden sauntered by, looked at the car,
wrote a ticket, and stuck it on the windshield.

Gotcha! Someone from a nearby office videotaped the entire episode,
that's how we know.

Another chilling illustration of why bureaucrats should have only
limited powers was displayed by a Texas high school 10 years ago. The
principal suspended an honour student and reduced her grades by 20 per cent.

What did Brooke Olson do? Why, she had a headache pill in her
knapsack. It was one tablet of Advil discovered by the school's
clever drug-sniffing dog during the mandatory morning search.

The rule said "no non-prescription drugs in school" - and a fellow,
who somehow got to be principal without being able to tell crack
cocaine from Aspirin, had the power to administer it. In October,
1996, he did so by suspending Brooke who made the mistake of packing
a couple Advils for her headache during the weekend, then taking only
one and leaving the other in her knapsack.

The school board - listen to this - upheld the suspension.

"Nothing is more important than keeping drugs off campus," trustee Al
Moore was quoted as saying. Whatever they did for the war on drugs,
Moore and his colleagues certainly put the Riverwood Middle School in
Houston on the map.

It is a toss-up what is the greater tragedy: The fact the drug
problem in our society has reached the point where high school
students have to be confronted with drug-sniffing dogs before class,
or that our institutions of learning are run by bureaucrats so
woolly-minded they can't tell the difference between headache pills and heroin.

Official acts of such idiocy may be rare enough to make the national
news but that's neither here nor there. The ranks of bureaucrats
always include petty martinets and we can count on petty martinets to
go on asinine or berserk power trips as long as we give them the
authority to do so. Whether bureaucrats work for the department of
education, city hall, or the police, they have one thing in common:
They cannot be trusted with power.

We have only two defences against officials. One is to limit their
authority and the second is to limit those areas where we have to
call upon their services. If, for instance, we did a better job of
exercising self-discipline and parental control, we wouldn't have to
turn our schools into maximum security prisons in the first place.

If we did a better job as citizens and parents, we wouldn't need to
subject our children to drug-sniffing dogs and body-searches for
weapons. It's when we abandon time-honoured values that we expose our
teenagers to drugs and schoolyard shootings - or to suspensions by
petty officials for headache pills.

But time-honoured (i.e., conservative) values are beyond the pale.
Values are deemed a "progressive" monopoly. Liberals can wax lyrical
about peace, inclusivity, or condoms, but pushing time-honoured
values is considered the kiss of death in public life. Prime Minister
Stephen Harper isn't the only conservative with a reluctance to sound
moralistic. When presidential candidate Bob Dole was asked in 1996 if
America was in a moral crisis, he famously dodged the question, lest
voters think that he was some kind of a social conservative, perhaps
with a right-wing Christian agenda.

But who can doubt that society is in a moral crisis when we feel the
need for uniformed guards and canine units in our schoolyards? What
more proof do we require than the sight of high school students being
patted down in auditoriums as though they were convicts about to be
transported to Devil's Island?

Police officers used to handcuff suspects only if they resisted or
were thought to be dangerous. Young cops have trouble believing this
because in our days handcuffs are routine. When we need to
body-search travellers before they board a plane to visit Aunt Betsy
in Peoria, trust me: we're in a moral crisis.