In the late '60s, I was called into the principal's office at the gritty downtown High School of Montreal for having the provocative nerve to wear sideburns. This was a grave threat to the existing order.
Lots of establishments at the time were desperately hanging on to their conservative, largely traditional European religious sensibilities while the city was being invaded by heretical U.S. anti-war draft dodgers and assaulted by French separatist bomb-throwers.
Even though my facial hair was a wispy and pale imitation of the real thing, I had to go home and shave it off.
No one took a First Amendment/free expression stand on my behalf then, or when I got ejected from a class for making raucous, ill-conceived comments to a teacher who said that Robert Kennedy's murder had been payback for his bootlegging father's sins against God.
I didn't lawyer up or dress down the principal to my friends. This was just standard old school, after all. Order vs. disorder.
But that was then. Last week my oldest son wore an African motif at his school's International Day. Usually, he's dressed in military-style, all-camo outfits, a little incendiary in peaceful, harmonious Marin County. It's all OK, however, and fully accepted.
I figured this was proof some things had changed over that vast gap of time, including schoolhouse tolerance.
Maybe not.
Last Wednesday, on Cinco de Mayo, five students were sent home from Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill for wearing American flag shirts and bandannas. Presumably they either wanted to incite, or might have incited other students looking to enjoy the full celebratory glow of an historical Mexican battle victory over the French. Too potentially in-your-face, the Assistant Principal, Miguel Rodriguez, told the boys, and he gave them the option of removing the items, turning the potentially offensive American imagery inside out (isn't that against some law?) or going home to change. Their parents were outraged, and everyone from Fox News to Roger Ebert dug in with opinions.
There are good questions being haggled over here: What does a pride day mean and does everyone have to join? Where's the line between dissonance and offense? Is it free speech or calling fire in a crowded theater if you go rebellious on these theme days?
Maybe the boys were guilty of contextual insensitivity.
But no interesting debate was served by Live Oak's hair-trigger response. And by the next day, the Morgan Hill school district was calling the whole thing "extremely unfortunate" (read: we were wrong). They are submitting to an "investigation" of some kind.
Of course a Fox News analyst defended the five kids while Ebert mildly assailed them. Maybe President Obama should call for a middle ground town hall meeting on empathy.
But the revealing action took place, as it often does, in the audience portion of the show.
After Mr. Ebert tweeted that "wearing American Flag t-shirts on May 5 should have to share a lunchroom table with those who wear a hammer and sickle on 4 July" the real rabble started rousing.
What Gawker, no stranger to provocation, called "the nut bag right" attacked Ebert by commenting viciously about his face, severely disfigured by cancer.
Huh? Really? Now that's offensive. Right, Left or wrong, Ebert never got that kind of irredeemable allergic reaction to his pans of popular movies.
My old Montreal High principal would have whacked those commenters with a leather strap - standard punishment at the time - and sent them home sobbing, humiliated and rubbing their painfully reddened hands together.