We Need to Address the Profound Stupidity That Afflicts America

May 31, 2013
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It’s not as though a bunch of people in central Florida have been consciously conspiring about the best way to trash a 16-year-old girl’s life, but the effect of their collective personal and institutional stupidity may well produce the same effect. At first there was no sign that any of them much cared, but now there’s a ray of hope for a just outcome. Read on.

This cultural stupidity in Florida isn’t an all-American sort of thing that could happen anywhere–and probably has in a variety of forms similar to the recent mindlessness that led school officials to call the police who called the prosecutor who decided, over the phone, to have a 16-year-old girl arrested as an adult and charged with two felonies under state law because she did an outdoors experiment that blew up an 8 oz. water bottle with the force of a small firecracker, doing no damage and harming no one.

This is the case of 11th grader Kiera Wilmot, a Bartow High School honor student with straight A’s and a perfect behavior record, according to school officials. Sometime around 7 a.m. on Monday, April 22, she tried an experiment with a friend watching: she mixed hydrochloric acid (in a toilet bowl cleaner) with a bit of aluminum foil inside a plastic water bottle–a trick known familiarly as a “Drano bomb” or “works bomb.” As predicted (and shown in video), shortly after Kiera Wilmot mixed the ingredients and put the cap on the bottle, hydrogen gas was produced, with enough pressure to pop the top off the bottle with the sound of a small firecracker.

Arguably, that was a stupid thing to do, at least on school grounds.

So the Question Quickly Arises, Are There Any Grown-Ups Here?

Then the adults got involved and took the stupidity to higher levels, quickly producing a stupidity tsumani of an all too familiar American kind.

The first adult on the scene is Dan Durham the assistant principal in charge of discipline at Bartow High. He hears the bottle pop outside the building before the school day starts. He goes to investigate. He finds Kiera Wilmot and she tells him the whole story.

She tells him it’s an experiment she was doing in anticipation of the science fair. Apparently not believing her, perhaps fearing an international terror conspiracy, Durham calls the science teacher (who remains anonymous). The science teacher says that Kiera Wilmot’s bottle pop has nothing to do with science class, so his skirts are clean. Of course what she does for science class is different from the science fair, but apparently no one figures that part out.

Continuing his enforcement, Dan Durham calls in the cops, which is easy enough since there’s a “resource officer” on the premises.

At some point principal Ron Pritchard avoids involvement and allows the situation to continue to spin out of control. Faced with a bright young 16-year-old honor student with a perfect behavior record, who admits she just did an experiment that was louder than she’d expected, principal Pritchard doesn’t act to put Kiera Wilmot’s harmless behavior in perspective.

An Educator With a Passive-Aggressive Vicious Streak

Instead, with a kind of passive-aggressive viciousness, he ignores the best interests of a child under his care, he doesn’t exercise leadership or good judgment, he stays out of the way. Maybe he thinks he’s defending the institution, or himself, but whatever he was thinking, he lets law enforcement help make things worse.

And the principal knew all along what was real. Playing the kindly old duff on TV later, he said of Kiera Wilmot: “She just wanted to see what would happen and I think it shocked her that – because she was very honest with us when we were out there talking and I think, I think it kind of shocked her that it did that.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet