Kids Are Americans Too
Page 1
Kids Are Americans Too
Bill O’Reilly and Charles Flowers
This book is for Madeline and Spencer,
who hopefully will develop into great
Americans and improve their country.
Your Dad Loves You.
—B.O’R.
For Sharon Canup , whose dry wit and
good heart are missed, but essential to
these pages.
—C.F.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Welcome
First Up
1 How Can You Be a Good American?
Your Hero?
2 A Blast from the Past
Unintended Consequences
3 What Is Your Freedom All About?
Ask O’Reilly
Musical Interlude
Reality Check
Awesome Multiple-Choice Quiz No. 1
4 Last Piece of the Rights Puzzle: Listen Up!
O’Reilly Swings
Are the Supremes Your Friends?
Porn Judgment?
5 Your Life in the School Daze
When Is a Knight Not a Knight?
Awesome Multiple-Choice Quiz No. 2
On the Other Hand…
Musical Interlude
Ask O’Reilly
High Ideals?
Awesome Multiple-Choice Quiz No. 3
6 All in the Family
Parents Under Attack?
7 Your Rights vs. Their Rights
Prose and a Con?
Sticking Up for Others
Freedom of the Press?
Ask O’Reilly
Are Rights Always Good for You?
8 Gotta Keep Thinking About These Things
Careful What You Ask For
Ask O’Reilly
Final Awesome Multiple-Choice Quiz
Extra Credit
Ask O’Reilly
The Last Word
Defense Savvy: A Brief Guide to Terms
About the Authors
Other Books by Bill O’Reilly
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Could not have been done without ace
agent Eric Simonoff, purveyor of
calm Makeda Wubneh, excellent editor
Hope Innelli, and keeper of the domestic
flame Maureen O’Reilly.
—B.O’R.
Long ago, Brainerd Junior High School
teacher “Lassie” Munsey labored tirelessly
against great odds to teach a raucous
all-boy class about our rights. Hope this
book gets it right, Miss Munsey.
—C.F.
WELCOME
Welcome to the real world.
That’s right…The real deal: life in the United States of America, where you are a citizen. Millions all over the world would like to be in your sneakers…So together let’s begin looking at the countless reasons why.
A QUICK BITE OF REALITY TV
SETTING: Friday Harbor, a quiet village on an island off the coast of Washington State. Boats, gulls, waves, breezes—you know the kind of thing.
SCENE: The modest home of single mother Carmen Dixon and her daughter Lacy, fourteen. Mom’s home alone. The phone rings.
Mrs. Dixon: Hello?
Sheriff: Mrs. Dixon, this is Sheriff Cumming.
Mrs. Dixon: Is Lacy all right?
Sheriff: She’s fine, ma’am, so far as I know. But she’s got a boyfriend who may be in trouble.
Mrs. Dixon: I knew it. It’s Oliver. He’s too old for her. He’s seventeen.
Sheriff: Well, I think he mugged an old lady downtown and ran off with her purse.
Mrs. Dixon: Lacy would never be involved in something like that.
Sheriff: Yes, ma’am. But maybe Oliver—you know how he is—would brag to her, and tell her what he did with the purse.
Mrs. Dixon: I see. Well, I’ll do what I can.
Sheriff: Thanks.
Mrs. Dixon puts down the receiver just as her daughter walks in. The phone rings again.
Lacy: That’s probably Oliver, Mom. I’ll take it on the extension in my bedroom.
The girl walks into the next room. Her mother very quietly picks up the kitchen phone.
Oliver: (on telephone, laughing)—and then I took out the money and threw the old lady’s purse into those weeds near the railroad crossing.
CUT.
Okay, this little slice of reality TV might not make the top ten, but it’s all true. It happened, and so did a lot more than that, as you’ll see. I think the whole story is a good “tease,” as we say in TV, for this little book about your rights as an American kid.
Mrs. Dixon told the sheriff what she heard about the purse…He found it, along with other evidence about the crime. Oliver was arrested, convicted in a jury trial, and sentenced to two years in jail.
Justice at work?
Not according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sent lawyers in, mouths blazing, to argue to the court that Lacy’s constitutional rights had been violated when her mother eavesdropped on her “private” conversation with her beloved mugger. So what? Well, that meant what Mrs. Dixon heard had not been legally obtained and therefore could not be used as evidence in a trial.
Does that argument make any sense to you? Well, it did to the state’s supreme court. The judges agreed that the girl’s right to privacy had been violated, so Oliver’s conviction was thrown out of court. (He was convicted in a second trial without Mrs. Dixon’s testimony, but that’s another story.)
Now, it’s cool that we all have a right to privacy and that we are free to see to it that it’s enforced, but there are a couple of things to think about here. First, does a parent not have the right to protect a child from harm? And in this case, wasn’t Mrs. Dixon trying to do just that by overseeing her daughter’s ties with an obvious criminal? You have your opinion, and others will have other opinions.
Second, is a kid’s personal privacy such a basic right that it cannot be overruled by the parent’s right? And what about the mugging victim’s rights in all of this? Again, you have your opinion, and others will have other opinions.
But with so many different opinions, how can we ever make sense out of situations like this? And how can we know which rights are more important than other rights?
Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to find out in this book. By the time you’ve finished reading the final chapter, I hope you’ll understand the story of your own personal rights. It looks complicated, at first. But we’re going to have some fun with all of this stuff, I promise you.
FIRST UP
You see it all the time on TV.
On cop shows, on news programs like mine, someone is yelling, “Hey, I know my rights!”
Well, maybe that person does, but probably not.
Sometimes it’s just a lot of stupid shouting. Showing off. Like the Spartans and Persians in the movie 300. They give a bad name to “discussion of rights.”
But, hey, your rights are very important to your life. In this country, the reason they exist at all is because smart, brave, honorable people fought—and still fight!—to make them work for you and for every other American.
Especially you, kid.
Listen up: Even though you’re not an adult yet, you’re just as much an American as anyone is. That includes your parents, your teachers, your boss, and the cop on the block.
BUT…do you have the same rights as they do?
No, you don’t.
So, what’s the difference?
Well, there are many, many differences. Sometimes the differences exist for good reasons…sometimes those reasons
are debatable.
That’s what this book is all about. When we finish this trip together, I hope you’ll feel that you know more than most people your age (and maybe some adults, too) about what your rights as a kid actually are. (And are not.)
So, do any of these “rights” we’ve been talking about have anything to do with issues you really care about, like whether or not your school can keep you from wearing clothes that show off your bare midriff? Or whether your school locker can be searched by school officials without your permission? Or whether you can bring your date to the senior prom, even if she is enrolled at another school?
You bet they do. That is exactly what we’re talking about. All of these are cases where you think you ought to be able to do something that other people—parents, school, community—say that you definitely cannot do.
Let’s face it. Many American kids are complete morons. So are many American adults. As I say on TV, the Constitution gives all Americans the right to be a moron, and a lot of us exercise that right every day.
When I use the word moron, I am referring to people who are simply too lazy to figure out what their country is all about. Yeah, they like the freedom to have fun and have stuff, but they don’t want to learn about how that freedom came to them.
You, kid, are an American. You have an obligation to be a good citizen. That means that you should be honest and pay attention to what happens in the United States and in the rest of the world, too. The iPods, computers, cell phones, and Black-Berries are fine, but you need to get out of yourself once in a while and look around in order to see and understand what is actually happening here in your America.
Many kids simply do not do that. Don’t be one of them.
* * *
!PRODUCT WARNING!
In this book, I’m not going to talk about your rights under criminal law. For example, I’m not going to discuss whether or not you will be tried as an adult or juvenile if you are accused of committing certain crimes. I hope you don’t NEED to know any of that stuff. If you DO, you need a lawyer. What I want us to talk about are your rights as a law-abiding, hardworking, fun-loving individual kid. In other words, we’re talking about your rights to a fair shake in life, when you give life a fair shake back.
* * *
Knowing your rights and respecting them will make you a better person and a more successful one. Just by reading this book you are demonstrating that you are way ahead of the pack.
It’s doubtful that Britney Spears would have read this book when she was your age. And look what’s happened to her. The woman keeps forgetting her undergarments! I guess she has a right to do that but, I mean, come on!
I also want you to know a little bit about where your rights come from and (get this!) how, sometimes, you might be able to change things, when you feel that events controlled by someone else are unfair. Yes, that’s possible. It’s been done.
But don’t be a wiseguy or wisegal. Standing up for your rights does not mean you should complain about every little thing that bugs you. Smarten up and appreciate the fact that you have opportunities kids in most other countries don’t have. In China, if you mouth off to your teacher or parents, you could find yourself in a work camp. In the Muslim world, a bare midriff on a girl could get her a severe beating in front of the entire town. In Africa, millions of kids have little food to eat. Think about that the next time you pull up to McDonald’s or Pizza Hut.
So I want you to know your rights, but I also want you to appreciate them and use them for everybody’s well-being, not just your own. That’s my plan here.
The truth will let you know how free you are, but it will not allow you to avoid your responsibility. That’s correct: Kids have a responsibility to their country, parents, and brothers and sisters, as I’ve mentioned.
So, let’s understand each other. We’re going to be talking about your rights according to the law. If you know how to con your parents, your teachers, or anyone else into letting you have your way all the time, that’s something else. I don’t want to hear about it. Shame on you, shame on them. This is not a book for selfish, spoiled brats. This is a book for kids who want to do what is right. Kids who want to be good Americans! I hope that’s you!
1
HOW CAN YOU BE A GOOD AMERICAN?
Being a good American starts with knowing your rights…and respecting the rights of others. And by doing the right thing when many other kids are not.
First off, your rights were not delivered by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
That was the Ten Commandments, okay? (Hope you’ve heard of them.)
No, the rights you enjoy today were crafted by human hands and human minds. You have to get that straight from the start or you could go crazy. They were set down by a group of intelligent, difficult, argumentative, arrogant guys whom we officially call the “Founding Fathers.” You’ve seen the marble busts and statues, the paintings of the very serious-looking old guys standing in great halls.
Don’t be fooled by how they look.
Believe me, while they were Founding, the Fathers included brilliant thinkers, pains in the butt, more than one certifiable drunk, heroes who stood against the majority on principle, athletes (some of whom were skilled at chasing skirts), and speakers who could make the walls shake. In other words, this collection of true patriots (yes, I mean that term) was very, very human.
To repeat, you have to understand that.
See, your rights here in America were created by a wide range of people (except, owing to the times, they were all male and white). They differed because they had a diversity of human talents and human flaws. Not really so unlike the population of your school.
But what they shared was the most important thing. It can legitimately be called a “Vision.” Let me sum it up in my words!
The average person in America should be free from unjust interference in daily life…and should be protected from the bad guys, whoever and wherever they are.
These Founding Fathers wanted to express this Vision in writing so it would live on even long after they were gone. The document they created is what we know as the U.S. Constitution.
Simple? Sounds like it.
But something like this had never happened before in the history of the world.
So, along with everything else, the Founding Fathers—screaming and swearing at each other, laughing and celebrating and pounding each other on the back—were Patriots with a capital P. More than 220 years ago, they were looking out for you.
They wanted to establish some ground rules that would be really easy for everyone to understand and really difficult for bad guys to mess up. They wanted to make the best possible country for Americans forever. That would include you and me…right now.
But, yes, they were human.
And they knew it.
Let’s review: Well-meaning human beings created a set of rights and called it the Constitution. But they knew things would change over time. So what did they actually do for you?
Did they agree that you have the right to bring your iPod to gym class?
They did not.
Or maybe they did. Well, not specifically, but arguably.
That’s right—we have the right to debate how the Constitution affects our lives today.
* * *
!BREAKING NEWS!
According to a recent news report, a thirteen-year-old girl in Minnesota told her parents, who are devout Roman Catholics, that she would not go to church with them ever again. “I know my rights,” she said.
“You can’t force me. The Constitution guarantees me freedom of religion, and I’ve decided to become a Wiccan!” Is she right about her rights?
No. She is not.
In cases like this, there has been general agreement in the legal community. Her parents have the right to make her go to church, if they choose. Her right to religious freedom is outweighed by her parents’ right to raise her in their religion, until she leaves home.
* * *
Okay. This story has a kind of moral: As we talk more about rights, keep in mind that they are rarely absolute.
I mean, rights don’t belong just to you. Your rights and my rights have to be balanced against the legitimate rights of other people as well.
That’s easier said than done, I know. But here’s a case where a young man did just that…He came up with a way to balance his right, as he saw it, with the rights of his school administrators.
YOUR HERO?
Do you have the right to refuse to do your school homework?
No.
Does the school have the right to assign so much of it that your life is ruined?
No. But I know it seems that way a lot of the time, no matter where you go to school.
Well, a fifteen-year-old kid thought hard about those questions, and then he took action. No, he didn’t call the ACLU. He used his head. Read on—maybe Sean Gordon-Loeb will end up being one of your heroes.
As reported in the New York Times, Sean is one of the bright students at Stuyvesant High School, perhaps the most competitive high school in New York City. As in most communities today, the kids there often feel that they have too much homework. (When kids e-mailed me in response to my book The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, that was the Number One problem they wanted to talk about.) Some parents agree; others do not. Even the experts aren’t sure where to draw the line.