Diane watched Bowling for Columbine Friday night, and Saturday morning deviated from her usual religious-like devotion to the Globe to describe most of the important scenes. One of them, the welfare mother who drives eighty miles to her two minimum wage jobs while her six year old, home without proper supervision, shoots his six year old playmate.

Reminded me of this scene from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Scout, in the first grade, complains to her father, Atticus, that Burris Ewell is forced to attend only the first day of school.

“Let us leave it at this,” said Atticus dryly. “You, Miss Scout Finch, are of the common folk. You must obey the law.” He said that the Ewells were members of an exclusive society made up of Ewells. In certain circumstances the common folk judiciously allowed them certain privileges by the simple method of becoming blind to some of the Ewells’ activities. They didn’t have to go to school, for one thing. Another thing, Mr. Bob Ewell, Burris’s father, was permitted to hunt and trap our of season.

“Atticus, that’s bad,” I said. In Maycomb County, hunting out of season was a misdemeanor at law, a capital felony in the eyes of the populace.

“It’s against the law, all right,” said my father, “and it’s certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don’t know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit.”

“Mr. Ewell shouldn’t do that –.”

“Of course he shouldn’t, but he’ll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?”

Malcolm Miller – 1940
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