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We find extremely disturbing the alleged incidents at Rappahannock County Elementary School where students have apparently been “play-acting” with some substance which they were pretending was cocaine.
Though the substance confiscated by authorities was apparently not an illegal drug, our discomfort remains.
The questions raised by such incidents are profoundly unsettling. It reminds us of a news story last summer which reported that children (the location escapes us) were discovered setting up a streetside stand, but instead of lemonade, they were selling grass clippings as marijuana and sugar crystals as cocaine.
What sort of society are we becoming, that our children find masquerading as criminals to be more appealing than pretending to be heroes. We remember that, as children, we played cops and robbers — but we always fought over who got to be the cops. The reason was simple: the cops always won.
Maybe that’s the problem with our society and its war on drugs. Children today can see that the good guys aren’t winning — and the bad guys are making piles of money.
We’re not sure what the answers are. But when children in a community as protected as Rappahannock are discovered pretending to be drug dealers, something is terribly wrong.
There is nothing playful about this situation. It’s deadly serious, and deserves some debate about how we address it. This is everyone’s problem.
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