And after slamming Boortz, I’ll agree with his attack on more school stupidity.

But as Gailes, an honor student, crossed the stage last month to accept her diploma, the members of the audience cheered. According to school administrators, the celebratory display for Gailes and four other students warranted punishment. They withheld the students’ diplomas because family and friends violated a no-applause rule during the school’s graduation ceremony.

Apparently, some people made too much noise so they banned all noise. This is typical government school thinking. Deal with the guilty by punishing everyone. It’s the same mentality that says that if a student fights back against a bully, both are suspended. And it’s garbage. You can define acceptable and unacceptable cheering. And you can find better ways of dealing with it than a “guilt by association” punishment of the innocent student.

Reading between the lines, I suspect they were trying to avoid charges of racism as the rowdy cheering was from some of our nation’s more exuberant minorities. Ironically, they stumbled right into that nest as the punished students were . . . members of more exuberant minorities.

Boortz also links to this wonderful story about a Polish man coming out of a 19-year coma to find that Communism has fallen and Poland is vibrant and alive. I’ve often thought about how amazing it would be to take a time machine and jump every 20 years in history, familiarize yourself with the world, then leap again and see how it solves its problem. I suspect the man would happily have lived through those years. But his medical time machine gives him a perspective that no one else has.

When this man fell into a coma, I was 16 years old, a miserable loner in high school who hoped he’d one day be writer. The menace of nuclear war still hung over everything but Reagan was still President. In the last 19 years, I’ve gotten a Ph.D., moved a million times, watched my team win the World Series, witnessed the fall of the most vile system known to man (Communism, not the three-network TV oligarchy), seen the rise of the internet, continued to write in small dribbles and today had a daughter of my own.

Funny old world. Not too bad most of the time. And pretty fucking good when you smooth it out over a 20-year time-span.