Class Reflection on the Mr. Fuse Case

The discussion on the Mr. Fuse case brought me back to a similar incident in fourth grade: The Case of the Missing Lenten Money.

At Sr. Adele’s suggestion, our homeroom class took up a collection for Lent. Every morning we would bring in our spare nickels and dimes to add to the collection box. By the fourth week of Lent, our meager contributions added up to about $65, a sizable sum of money at the time. But before we could donate the money to The Home for Crippled Children, the collection canister turned up missing. For two hours, the nuns interrogated us as we sat in our rows of wooden seats, glancing suspiciously at each other. At one point, they told us to remove our shoes and place them on our desks, so that they could check our shoes for the missing money. When this tactic failed to recover the money, they told us that unless the guilty party admitted to the crime, they were going to spank all of us, going in alphabetical order. It just so happened that the alphabetical system of doling out spankings would have meant that the two worst troublemakers in the class, Christopher Aiello and Jimmy Bosack, would have been spanked first. I didn’t think it would come to this, and I felt confident that they would never spank me. In fact, I found the whole incident rather amusing until I noticed Mary Ann Wood, the star pupil, seated beside me, reciting the Our Father between choked backed sobs. That got me thinking. Maybe I should take this threat a little more seriously. I formulated a plan. If Sr. Adele attempted to spank me, I would kick her as hard as I could in her bony shins. My parents would understand. I would explain to them that she was trying to punish me for something I didn’t do.

The guilty party never came forward, no one was spanked, and after lunch, class resumed as normal, much to my chagrin. When I got home that night, I told my parents about the incident. My dad’s reply was, “You tell that nun to go to hell!” I’m sure this conjures up an image of my father as a raging alcoholic, much like Mr. Pugnacious. To the contrary, my dad is a well respected member of his church and community who also happens not to indulge in even the occasional glass of wine. But he does have an acute sense of what is just and fair. In his view, even the threat of punishment was an unjust act. What did I learn from this incident? I learned that punishing everyone for the actions of one or a few is a warped application of justice that favors punishing blindly to not punishing at all. Also, this practice does not always ensure that the guilty are punished. Who’s to say that the janitor didn’t take the money? Or, maybe that explains why Sr. Adele showed up the next day in a spanking new pair of black shoes. ;)