Their prejudice is showing Column By Warren Bluhm Sometimes people reveal more about themselves than they intend when they use their imaginations. Other times, they know exactly what they're doing. Last month emergency response officials and school districts in Muskegon County, Mich., ran an exercise designed to test their readiness for an unthinkable terrorist attack. According to a story in the Muskegon Chronicle, the role-playing exercise imagined a bomb placed by a domestic terrorist group on a school bus. Firefighters, law enforcement, emergency room personnel and students all took part. Grants from the Homeland Security Department funded the event. Here's where more was revealed than intended: Designers of the scenario decided to give the terrorist group a phony name and a cause. They decided to call the group Wackos Against Schools and Education. They decided the phony group's mission was that all kids must be home-schooled. This is the fictitious group that detonated a fictititious bomb on a school bus full of kids. Surprise! Home-schoolers were not amused. The newspaper, which put the preview article on its Web site, ran a follow-up article two days later after getting inundated with angry e-mails and letters from across the country. And why not? The law enforcement and education community of Muskegon had declared that parents who home-school their kids are a) wackos; b) opposed to schools; c) opposed to education; and d) possibly prone to a violent act of terrorism. Most people might be a little irritated, let alone the parents who care so deeply about their kids' education that they're willing to take on the primary responsibility themselves - and they're not inclined to impose that belief on other people, let alone commit violence over it. Daniel Stout, chief deputy for emergency services with the Muskegon County Sheriff's Department, told the paper he never meant to offend anyone. "That's just what I decided to use," he was quoted as saying. "It may have been a poor choice, but that's what was used ... I'm the one who wrote the scenario." The Muskegon Area Intermediate School District went a step further, apologizing to home-schoolers while claiming it was not told the mythical terrorists were called "Wackos Against Schools and Education." "We sincerely regret offending home-school educators," the statement said. "We believe that all parents are educators and do important work at home with their children." Well, at least the words are right. More likely Stout's choice for the imaginary terrorists reflected the real prejudices of the people who were running the exercise. You don't have to dig too deep below the surface to find some school officials have a real disdain and anger directed at parents who educate their children at home. I was intrigued the other day to find one of those parents portrayed as the villain on a rerun of the television show "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit." The woman was a psychotic mother who yanked her kids out of school to protect them from the violence of the real world after her husband was murdered in a street crime. When police started to investigate the possibility that she was starving her kids - the episode begins with one child being caught eating chicken scraps from a garbage can - she convinces one of her two sons to kill the other and turn the gun on himself, to rescue them from this awful world once and for all. The plot unravels when the son is unable to bring himself to commit suicide after murdering his brother. The investigating detectives have a heart-to-heart talk with a public school social worker who is frustrated by her inability to monitor home-schooled children because of a lack of regulations. This is what one Hollywood writer - and the show's producer, director, actors and crew - feel about home-schoolers: They are out-of-control psychotics. I hope you remember this from English class: People who create fiction aren't just trying to tell you a nice little story that isn't true; they are also trying to send a message about some profound truth - or at least what they consider a truth. Always think carefully about the "truths" you are being fed by these imaginative folks. A couple of quick hits - Has anyone else noticed the soup commercial that shows tailgaters before a football game chowing down on some mm, mm, good soup - with the old green-and-yellow facade of Lambeau Field in the background? - Has anyone noticed that the National Hockey League is in the middle of a shutdown caused by a labor dispute? Does anyone miss them? Warren Bluhm is editor of the Door County Advocate. Contact him at [email protected] or 743-3321.