Kids Are Americans Too by Bill O'Reilly

WELCOME
    Welcome to the real world.
    That’s right…The real deal: life in the United States of America, where you are a citizen. Millions all over the world would like to be in your sneakers…So together let’s begin looking at the countless reasons why.
    A QUICK BITE OF REALITY TV
    SETTING: Friday Harbor, a quiet village on an island off the coast of Washington State. Boats, gulls, waves, breezes—you know the kind of thing.

    SCENE: The modest home of single mother Carmen Dixon and her daughter Lacy, fourteen. Mom’s home alone. The phone rings.
    Mrs. Dixon: Hello?
    Sheriff: Mrs. Dixon, this is Sheriff Cumming.
    Mrs. Dixon: Is Lacy all right?
    Sheriff: She’s fine, ma’am, so far as I know. But she’s got a boyfriend who may be in trouble.
    Mrs. Dixon: I knew it. It’s Oliver. He’s too old for her. He’s seventeen.
    Sheriff: Well, I think he mugged an old lady downtown and ran off with her purse.
    Mrs. Dixon: Lacy would never be involved in something like that.
    Sheriff: Yes, ma’am. But maybe Oliver—you know how he is—would brag to her, and tell her what he did with the purse.
    Mrs. Dixon: I see. Well, I’ll do what I can.
    Sheriff: Thanks.
    Mrs. Dixon puts down the receiver just as her daughter walks in. The phone rings again.
    Lacy: That’s probably Oliver, Mom. I’ll take it on the extension in my bedroom.
    The girl walks into the next room. Her mother very quietly picks up the kitchen phone.
    Oliver: (on telephone, laughing)—and then I took out the money and threw the old lady’s purse into those weeds near the railroad crossing.
    CUT.
    Okay, this little slice of reality TV might not make the top ten, but it’s all true. It happened, and so did a lot more than that, as you’ll see. I think the whole story is a good “tease,” as we say in TV, for this little book about your rights as an American kid.
    Mrs. Dixon told the sheriff what she heard about the purse…He found it, along with other evidence about the crime. Oliver was arrested, convicted in a jury trial, and sentenced to two years in jail.
    Justice at work?
    Not according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sent lawyers in, mouths blazing, to argue to the court that Lacy’s constitutional rights had been violated when her mother eavesdropped on her “private” conversation with her beloved mugger. So what? Well, that meant what Mrs. Dixon heard had not been legally obtained and therefore could not be used as evidence in a trial.
    Does that argument make any sense to you? Well, it did to the state’s supreme court. The judges agreed that the girl’s right to privacy had been violated, so Oliver’s conviction was thrown out of court. (He was convicted in a second trial without Mrs. Dixon’s testimony, but that’s another story.)
    Now, it’s cool that we all have a right to privacy and that we are free to see to it that it’s enforced, but there are a couple of things to think about here. First, does a parent not have the right to protect a child from harm? And in this case, wasn’t Mrs. Dixon trying to do just that by overseeing her daughter’s ties with an obvious criminal? You have your opinion, and others will have other opinions.
    Second, is a kid’s personal privacy such a basic right that it cannot be overruled by the parent’s right? And what about the mugging victim’s rights in all of this? Again, you have your opinion, and others will have other opinions.
    But with so many different opinions, how can we ever make sense out of situations like this? And how can we know which rights are more important than other rights?
    Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to find out in this book. By the time you’ve finished reading the final chapter, I hope you’ll understand the story of your own personal rights. It looks complicated, at first. But we’re going to have some