Everyone Loses This Fight

If any number of scary articles and television shows are to be believed, the competition to get your kids into kindergarten is almost as tough as it is to get them into college. Apparently the days when you just called up whichever school was closest and showed up when the kid was old enough are long gone. After years of parents being beaten over the head with the idea that the only way to get kids a good education and subsequently a good life is to start when they are still just a fetus, you can understand why parents are so paranoid about making sure their little angels are beginning on the right foot. With that in mind it is probably right to expect tension to be really high surrounding all things having to do with kindergarten, so I guess you really can't be surprised when you read stories like the one out of Cleveland, where a full-out brawl happened between two families during a graduation ceremony after one teenager spilled punch on another and the two families started fighting one another. Police were soon called and as they arrested 8 people they found one person had a pipe on them and another was armed with a hammer. Fortunately most of the fighting took place outside and no kindergartners were involved, though you could question if these parents even have the intelligence of your average 5 year-old.

Whenever I hear about fights like this breaking out I can't help but wonder if there is a second while it is going on that one person has a moment of clarity, stops and thinks to themselves, "Wait, what are we doing? We're at a kindergarten graduation!" Or are they just so involved at that point they couldn't stop even if they wanted to? Fighting seems like one of those activities where you get very swept up in it at the time, but it also requires a lot of focus and determination and you can lose both of those things if you stop and think about what you are doing for even one second. If you had an out-of-body experience and viewed the situation as an outside observer you would (rightly) feel like an asshole, so it seems like the decision to engage in a massive brawl because someone spilled something on you and self-awareness do not go hand-in-hand. I can only assume it is my habit to over-think every thing I am doing that kept me out of so many fights in high school, because at that age boys are nothing but powder kegs of testosterone and aggression and it doesn't take much to set them off so the fact I escape unscathed is kind of remarkable. Apparently the parents at this school never really got out of that mindset. Sadly, this leads me to believe that it doesn't matter how early these kids started their educations, they are in for a rough life.