If they had Leatherman Tools when Baby Boomers like me were in elementary school, we would have begged our dads to let us borrow them so we could bring them to class for show-and-tell.  With no more than a warning to "be careful with the sharp attachments" our teachers would have passed the Swiss Army Knife-on-steroids around the room, allowing each student to get some hands-on time with the marvel of the day. 

Back then, those who brought their fathers' potential weapons to school for education purposes would have received attaboys from their teachers along with, perhaps, the awarding of a few class participation brownie points, as well.

Today, if a student is suspected of possessing a Leatherman on campus, his school will be locked-down and a SWAT team will roll up to sort things out.  Under PC's Zero Tolerance Rules, possession of a Leatherman could be punishable by expulsion -- even for a first offense by an otherwise exemplary kid.

Then:  "Hello, Mrs. Donath this is the school nurse.  Edward is complaining of a headache (nurse turns away and whispers: "He probably just wants to get out of taking his math quiz...) but he has no fever and I'm going to send him back to class.  Just the same, do I have your permission to give him a St. Joseph's aspirin?  At least he didn't soil his underwear like that last kid did to avoid taking a test." 

Now:  It's OK to send your kid to school dosed-up on Ritalin but if you pack a Tylenol into Junior's lunchbox, for any reason, the PC Police will deal with him as though he is in possession of heroine or a deadly weapon like a Leatherman Tool.  In order for PC to work its egalitarian magic it must resort to an antithetical methodology known as Zero Tolerance.

Boomer kids asked their teachers a lot of tough questions...

"Mrs. Shapiro, if you can smoke cigarettes in the teachers' lounge why can't you smoke in our classroom?  Mrs. Shapiro, what does retarded mean?  Mrs. Shapiro, how come it says 'In God We Trust' on money?  Mrs. Shapiro, how come some kids get left back for getting low grades?  Mrs. Shapiro, should we hate Russia for making us go down to the boiler room for air raid drills?  Mrs. Shapiro, why do we memorize the Pledge of Allegiance? 

Sadly, our children and grandchildren ask very few questions today. Why?  Because their biggest in-school fear is of being ostracized for offending someone that may not even be present in the classroom.

Even at the height of Viet Nam war protest, when young adults were calling for their peers to distrust politicians and anyone over 30, the protestors never demanded the decimation of traditional, Constitutional America (with the notable exception of a mere handful of radicals like the terrorists who hosted Barack Obama's political coming out party in Chicago).  

Then: PC was synonymous with civil rights -- tolerance. 

Now: In order to enforce PC, its antithesis -- zero tolerance -- is the order of the day. 

The current administration is advancing an agenda that will ultimately abridge rights by redistributing wealth, socializing the private sector, manipulating the system of checks and balances and re-interpreting the Constitution while spinning the media and taking the propaganda pains to make it all look so civil.  The words "civil" and "rights" are in that mix but the actual practice of being politically correct has become a gross distortion of what was originally intended.

Is it any wonder that 40-and-unders are so prepared to let a typical PC professor dictate what they should believe about the responsibilities of the United States government?  Why would that be surprising in light of the cramming down their throats, from their first day in elementary school, of liberal ideology that has always sounded pretty much the same as what they are being told now by the highest office holder in the land?

During all the years that students have been hammered by PC dogma and its resultant revisionism throughout academia, truthful talk about such things as Cold War bomb shelters, Viet Nam, the Holocaust, communist tyranny in Europe, assassinated politicians and the actual politics of genuine Civil Rights leaders has been avoided for fear of offending someone's ethnicly sensitive ears.

As a result of the ironically iron-handed power of PC, today's elementary school teacher is hardly ever asked a tough question.  What would a teacher say on one of those rare occasions when some un-indoctrinated kid might ask:  "My grandpa says we have an air raid shelter in the cellar of the school building.  Would I get expelled if I brought a Leatherman Tool and bottle of Tylenol into it in during a survival emergency?"

The kid would be better off asking a simple question like "Mrs. Shapiro, what is the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx?"