I think back to some of the things I did in grade school and high school...and 2 incidents vividly stick out as things that I would probably get expelled for now.
The first was in 8th grade: We used to write in a journal in English class, and you could do just about anything--talk about personal things, write poems, etc. As a joke, I took the song "Janie's Got a Gun" by Aerosmith and reworked it into "Terry's Got a Gun." It was strictly meant as humor, and my teacher (who was young and hip) got it. These days, I'd probably get a one-way express ticket to alternative school.
The second time was when I was a junior in high school. I got stuck in a class of seniors, and was tormented mercilessly by them. At the same time, I had an ex-girlfriend who had some of her friends making my life miserable. As an offhand comment one day in the cafeteria, I blurted out, "I feel like I need a gun to keep shit in check around here." I would have never seriously done this...I wasn't that crazy (or stupid). But one of my well-meaning friends reported this to our class coordinator, who pulled me in for a chat. I told her about what was going on, and that the comment was just some b.s. Everything was cool...parents weren't called...life moved on.
Later that day, as I was walking out to my car, some of the seniors that were in that one class with me walk up and apologize, saying, "We were just fucking around man...we don't want you to get a gun and kill us." Apparently she pulled them aside too.
The only bad thing that came out of that was that I wound up on the coordinator's shit list for the next year and a half. (Fuck her...she was a cunt anyway.) Of course, had that shit happened today, I would probably be in jail.
Good thing I had the stars in my favor.
