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Satan’s greatest, or at least most effective, invention might just be the Zero Tolerance Policy. With it, he has been able to coax humanity into giving up on judgement entirely. It’s one thing to have poor judgement. Human beings have always struggled with poor decisions brought on by poor judgment. But nowadays we’ve invented a society completely devoid of judgement. We are like robots, only not as smart. Artificial intelligence minus the intelligence.

I bring this up because today has provided us with just the latest examples of our a-judgemental society, brought on in large part by “policies” meant to remove the humanity from the humans tasked with enacting them. In Baltimore, a student was suspended for biting his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. No word on whether it was an assault tart or just a normal weaponized tart. I assume the courts will discern that when it comes time for sentencing. In the mean time we can only thank God that he didn’t bite his breakfast to look like a cruise missile. They would have had to evacuate the entire city. Hey, it strikes me that Florida looks a bit like a pistol. Should we ban the whole state in the interests of safety and also, as a bonus, the electoral process? Maybe we could attach an orange cap to the tip of it, so people know it’s, in fact, a land mass and not a giant geographical death ray.

In fairness to the school, imagine the quandary they’d be in if a kid brought in an actual loaded gun the next day and they hadn’t suspended the other boy for the Pop Tart pistol. The one with the real weapon would have a legitimate case: “Hey, how can you punish ME when you let Johnny off the hook for his military style pastry?!” Remember, they’ve got a zero tolerance policy when it comes to guns. No real guns, no fake guns, no imaginary guns, no verbal guns, no edible guns, no frosted with sprinkles guns, no objects with names that include letters within a three letter alphabetical vicinity of g, u, or n. Policy is policy, right?

The second story comes from California and it’s about a nurse at an assisted living home who let an elderly woman die rather than perform CPR because company “policy” prohibited her from doing any form of “medical procedure”. She called 911 and the operator pleaded with her to save the woman’s life by simply performing CPR. The “nurse” refused. And the woman died. Policy is policy, right? I trust, at the very least, this facility will now remove “assisted living” from its title.

This is what we’ve become. Legally banned from recognizing the difference between spinal surgery and CPR; between a toaster strudel and an M-16. This is not good judgement, it’s not even bad judgement, it’s a prohibition of all judgement. It’s an attempt to turn our minds into a giant rule book. And, remember, the institutions with these policies are not entirely to blame. The policies are indefensibly stupid but they are an indefensibly stupid response to an indefensibly stupid society. We all know that this no CPR rule came about because some jerk at some point filed a lawsuit against a Good Samaritan for saving his life with mouth to mouth, after finding out his savior was unlicensed. We all know these zero tolerance gun policies came into being as a response to people who are perfectly willing to sue the school system because their little snowflake was emotionally scarred when Bobby brought a Super Soaker to school and pointed it at him.

That’s not an excuse for them. It’s merely an observation that every company, institution, organization and group in existence has been sued for every imaginable reason, and several unimaginable ones. There are consequences to this behavior. We are living them. If I were dictator I’d solve the problem by deporting most lawyers and banning most lawsuits. But, tragically, I’m not a ruthless and aggressive despot. I’m just some guy.

But I can dream. Until there’s a policy against it.