Synchronicity

"Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, where they are unlikely to be causally related. The subject sees it as a meaningful coincidence, although the events need not be exactly simultaneous in time." This is how our friends at Wikipedia define the fifth studio album by the Police. As it turns out, Carl Jung's notion is the place where I tend to dwell a good deal of the time I spend writing this blog.
Let's take today for example: Officials at Devonshire Alternative Elementary School defended their decision to suspend ten-year-old Nathan Entingh, whose hand they designated as a “level 2 lookalike gun.” Gun play at the school had become a problem, they said, and students and parents had been warned against it. Nathan was suspended for three days. The officials were defensive because, believe it or not, the community found this a pretty ridiculous response to a pretty ridiculous situation. “He said he was playing,” Nathan's father said. “It would even make more sense maybe if he brought a plastic gun that looked like a real gun or something, but it was his finger. I would have even been fine with them doing an in-school suspension.” Making sense is the hard part. It does make me wonder what a level 1 lookalike gun would be. It is certainly not what I was thinking about when I got into the education biz seventeen years ago.
The other piece of coincidence to which I will now attempt to ascribe meaning is the story from Florida, where a couple was arrested for abandoning their three young children in the woods.Police said the children, ages ten, eight, and six, had walked nearly two miles before they were found. When mom and dad, both aged thirty, were taken into custody officers found crystal meth in their car's glove compartment, along with a syringe and a burnt spoon. I'm guessing that would be a "level 1 lookalike."
I'm bringing these two events and mashing them together to try and make sense of the ten-year-old's experience in America. I'm having a hard time with it, but maybe it has something to do with those of us who aren't ten. I wonder what Sting would have to say.