A Russian diplomat after being expelled from the U.S./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Sabphoto.
Instead of jumping immediately to expulsion, both the U.S. and Russia should have tried keeping diplomats from the other country after school first. All too often, a minor infraction by a diplomat leads to expulsion from the country in which he’s posted. Expulsion is a permanent and destructive measure that should only be used in the cases where schools have tried every other option disciplinary measure available.
Expulsion can ruin lives. I should know. My son, Derek, was expelled from his public high school for passing notes in class. I got the call in the middle of a particularly stressful day at work. I was livid, at both him and the school. I saw him first, and laid into him. We were driving home as I screamed at him, he screamed back, and on and on. I was so busy letting him know just how mad I was, I drove off the road. This made me angrier. The two of us got out of the car to wait for AAA.
“Mom–since you’re already mad at me, I might as well tell you something else I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Derek said to me. “I’m going to vote for Bernie Sanders in November,” Derek said of the upcoming 2016 presidential election. I was crushed. I had done everything in my power to raise a good little Republican: kept Fox News on literally all the time at home, taken Derek to a super-right-wing Church every Sunday, taught him a love of guns and how the government would pounce on any chance to take those precious firearms from him. To hear that he intended to vote for a Socialist! It was almost too much to bear. If only the school hadn’t expelled him for passing notes, none of this would have happened.
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Later, at home, in perusing the Internet I found that many other parents had experienced similarly devastating experiences after their child’s school took far too extreme measures to punish them for a relatively minor act. I began meeting these parents, moms, mostly, and talking with them about their experiences. I learned that we really had very little in common, and even that my anger explosion was not the reason Derek was going to vote for Sanders. He would likely have done it anyway, and probably really did just figure he might as well tell me while we waited for AAA on the side of the road on that fateful day, because I was mad already. I had been guilty of the “correlation is not causation” logical fallacy, in which one assumes that two contemporaneous things are related by more than having occurred in temporal proximity to each other.
At this point, however, I had gone so far in organizing right-wing moms with the group Moms for Fair Disciplinary Practices (MFDP) to encourage schools to keep a cool head when a child breaks the rules and first try a warning, detention, suspension, then expulsion. As I said, I realized the same day that Derek’s intention to vote for Sanders had nothing to do with my yelling at him for being suspended. I’ve gotten so involved with MFDP, though, that I might as well stick with it. Also, it really does seem like jumping the punitive gun by looking to expulsion first when a student breaks a rule.
In Russia’s case, it’s even truer that Putin’s government overstepped by expelling 150 U.S. diplomats. As a good Alt-lemming, I’ve followed Trump’s lead in falling in love with Russia and Putin. How sad for the 150 U.S. diplomats who are simply being used as an example by the Russians in a childish game of one-upmanship, a reaction to the expulsion of a group of Russian diplomats by the United States. They won’t get to enjoy the wonders of Russia, like the possibility they could be poisoned with Polonium, just because Putin and his government wanted to make a big show of kicking them out.
I would like to take this opportunity, this Op-Ed, to ask both Trump and Putin to allow back into their respective countries the diplomats they’ve expelled. Maybe the diplomats could spend time in the countries they had been posted to after school scraping old, dried gum off the underside of the desks. Or perhaps they could be made to sit in a room and stare at a dot on the chalkboard for an hour. One time, when I was in sixth grade, I had to clean out test tubes full of saliva that the eighth graders had used in an experiment. You can better believe I thought twice about making mischief after that–blech!
“I’m not really familiar with disciplinary practices or, really, anything else school-related, dontcha’know,” said Betsy Devos when I reached her for comment. “All I know is I’ve got billions of daallerrs, and it makes me feel like I’m doing something worthwhile with my time to be Secretary of Education, despite being totally unfit for the position.”
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The Trump Administration, for its part, offered via White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that President Trump just expelled Russian diplomats from the U.S. so that when the Mueller probe finds he did myriad collusive, illegal, and unethical things related to Russia, he could say, “But see! I expelled all those Russian diplomats in March 2018–proof that I’m not soft on Russia because Putin has something on me!”
Still, I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t gotten a call from Derek’s school on a day when my boss was expecting the Andersen Files on his desk by noon, I had a migraine, and the 408 was closed for construction, things might have gone so differently. Maybe he wouldn’t have told me he was going to vote for Sanders. Maybe he wouldn’t have volunteered for Sanders’ campaign, and maybe he wouldn’t now be a Congressional Intern in Sanders office!
It’s true: hindsight is 20/20. But still I hope my story will encourage school administrators to pause and consider their options before they expel a student for a behavior that they might better address through less drastic measures, at least at first.
It’s too late for the Russian diplomats, and that situation is already “worse than in decades,” according to The New York Times. We can only hope, at this point, that it doesn’t get any worse.
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 © 2018 Akbar Khan
