One great thing about being a grown-up is that you help decide who the enemy is this week. When the American colonies were founded, for example, it was witches, because they kidnapped our kids. Then it was "injuns," because they forced our kids to make treaties that small children just end up breaking. Then we hated the commies, because they tried to make our kids share their toys.

But now we know who the real enemy is — our kids. And by gosh, we're beating 'em good:

•  In a well-publicized case, an 8-year-old boy in Nova Scotia was suspended from school briefly because he pointed a breaded chicken finger at a classmate and said, "Bang." Some people have unfairly blamed the chicken strip. But I say that if chicken strips are outlawed, only outlaws will have chicken strips. And let me add that chicken strips don't kill people, people kill people — with chicken strips. Also, you can take away my chicken strip when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands. It'll probably still taste all right.

•  This year at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, children ranging in age from 3 to 6 were frisked for stun guns by the Secret Service. Bad little boys who try to kill the president should be given a "time out."

•  An honors student in Estero, Fla., was barred from her high school graduation because school officials found a kitchen knife in her car in the school parking lot. She said it fell out of a box while she was moving. But because of the arrest, she may lose her state-sponsored scholarship to college. And it serves her right — going to school, reading them books, thinking she's all hot.

•  Children all over the United States are being suspended for doodling pictures of weapons or writing about committing acts of violence. Officials isolate these students because, as psychologists have shown over and over, violence can be averted only if children can learn to sit by themselves and fester.

Local and state zero-tolerance laws are notorious for inspiring these kinds of incidents. But we actually don't have these laws to make schools safer, since they don't really do that, according to a recent study by the Indiana Education Policy Center. In fact, they can even increase high school drop-out rates. So why do we have these policies?

Apparently, we hate kids.

We hate their chubby little faces, their enthusiasm and their wonder. We hate how they rediscover the world and make it new again. We hate, hate, hate their music

So we're hitting them hard — stigmatizing them and kicking them out of school and dragging them into court for using a dirty word in class.

And by gosh, we're drugging them.

Last year, almost 600 Florida Medicaid recipients under age 6 were given powerful psychiatric drugs designed for schizophrenia and other psychoses that kids that young basically never get, according to published reports. Up in British Columbia, a few infants age 2 and under are being given anti-depressants — Prozac and Zoloft. For if there is one word that describes most toddlers, that word is "brooding."

Elsewhere in Canada, they're feeding them Dexedrine and Ritalin, which are two forms of speed used for treating Attention Deficit Disorder. Oh, those wacky Canadians … Oops, strike that. Researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles are initiating a study of Ritalin for preschoolers in this country as well. So I guess no matter where you live, everybody loves a drooling little baby who can recite Tolstoy.

Sure, I could tell you we're doing this to make the kids happy. But anti-psychotics don't make kids happy. They make them shut up so we can hear the ball game. That is how we are protecting our way of life against those who would usurp it — not from the commies or the beatniks, but from those who would ask us how come the sky is blue and where rabbits go when they die and why Daddy doesn't make as much money as Grandpa and why we have to live in a cruddy little apartment that smells like cats. We're going to dope them up and put them in jail for that kind of talk.

We're going to fix them real good — right now, while they're still small and they can't run away.