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Are Kids Turning Your Kids Into Killers?
What makes big news -- and what doesn't -- is always telling. We hear a lot about kids who get gunned down in schools by their peers. We usually hear even more about the evil influences on their lives, from gaming to violent TV and movies to the Net. Yet a vastly greater number kill themselves because of their peers. That doesn't draw many headlines or stories on the evening news, or denunciations from the President.
In the past 15 months, four students have been killed and a more than a score wounded in a series of U.S. school shootings, the most recent in Santee, California, where 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams allegedly opened fire from a bathroom in Santana High, killing two and wounding 13.
As usual, the government has tended to blame video games and violent movies and TV shows. Aschroft said "the entertainment industry, with it's video games and the like, which sometimes literally teach shooting and all, we've got to ask ourselves, how do we as a culture ... be more responsible."
It's a good question, but not in the way Ashcroft means. Many kids, like Tempest Smith of Lincoln Park, Michigan, simply couldn't take being teased and bullied any longer
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 2,000 school-age children aged 19 or younger take their own lives each year. The rise in suicides by children ages 10 to 14 is especially alarming, say CDC officials.
Psychologists and researchers report that bullying, taunting or constant ridicule by peers is often a major factor in these suicides, as well as a constant thread running through the horrific series of school shootings.
The Detroit News recently told the story of 12-year-old Smith, who hung herself from her bunk bed in February, leaving behind diaries describing the continuous harassment she faced daily about her shyness, her clothing and religious beliefs. She wrote that these taunts made life unbearable. And hers is not an isolated case. In recent months, I've gotten e-mail from the parents and friends of an Ohio hacker who shot himself at 14 after continuous jeering about his gaming. He was suspended for writing an enraged essay criticizing the values of his school, a piece that contained threats to retaliate against kids who had been bullying him for years. I've also heard from the parents of a 15-year-old Goth in Pennsylvania who slashed her wrists and died after years of teasing from classmates. Kids who are non-conformist, rebellious, individualistic or different in other ways are routinely subjected to harassment all kinds, as well as life in schools that cling to outdated curriculums, punish non-conformity and isolate individuals.
"Everyone is against me," Tempest Smith wrote in her diary. "Will I ever have friends again? ... Will I ever live in peace?"
More than 90 percent of people who commit suicide suffer from clinical depression, according to studies by the American Association of Suicidology in Washington, D.C. "Often, it's these mental conditions that cause children to be teased in the first place," an association official told the Detroit News. Taunting also is cited as a factor in many of the cases -- including the horror at Columbine -- in which kids kill other kids. Yet 81 percent of Americans told the Gallup they blame the Internet for Columbine.
A handful of schools have instituted anti-bullying and harrassment programs, but the popular media and most politicians seem much more interested in kids who go over the edge and shoot others than in the many more who are driven over the edge and kill themselves. Maybe it's time to shift focus.
"Heathers" seems to have gotten both of us through a bad time.
Perhaps the imagination of the filmmakers in this case actually *prevented* violence.
In my case, I took martial arts and anatomy. When I knew six ways to kill someone quickly, it became and remains much easier to be polite.
However, I remain antisocial - I own my own law firm.
Yet Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
Something appears to wrong with studies that correlate video games and cartoons with behaviour.
Well I have a new approach. Anyone who sums up the problem as having one single identifiable root cause, or offers one single, simple answer to it, I will ignore with prejudice.
"Well they didn't have religion." "Well they didn't have parents." "Well they were bullied." "Well their hearts turned dark because of the Internet." "Well they weren't spanked." "Well they listened to Eminem." "Well there are so many guns around." "Well they were medicated." "Well they watched Hollywood movies." "Well their complaints were ignored." "Well they were mentally ill." "Well kids these days have it TOO easy." "Well they played video games." "Well they listened to Marilyn Manson." "Well this is a violent society." No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The only single answer that I will accept is: PROBABILITY. Given the number of students in schools and the number of combinations of, well hell, ALL of the above, once in a while one or two of em will freak out and start killing everybody.
So why don't we SEPARATE the "kids killing kids" problem from the bullying problem, because even if there are no school shootings, I should hope bullying would remain a concern.
Note that he said "traditional christian morals", not beliefs. UltraBot2K1 could have meant the morals that christianity (supposedly teaches). I have no problem with this. I'm an athiest (I guess), but I have a set of morals that roughly corresponds to christian morals. Don't steal, don't lie, don't kill people, be nice to people, forgive people, etc. I disagree with any bible bashing or religious dick-size wars, but I do not agree with teaching people (kids or just people in general) to have a good set of morals.
... "traditional (insert religion here) morality" as a need for children, it really does nothing. it might keep kids from killing, but think of it this way - the most christian people in my school were the most cruel to me, and the hindi and agnostic kids were the most tolerant of me.
I think that there are bad people in either way. I've met some really awsome christians that I would gladly trust my life, children, and possessions with. I've also met some that I haven't even wanted to stay in the same room with. Same with non-christians. Same with people with black skin, red skin, yellow skin, and white skin. I think that anyone of any race or creed or religious belief can be a total ass, or a great person. I'm not discounting your experiences of course, but I think that people can go either way.
While begging America to solve all their military problems and provide their police and militaries with those iky weapons. Give me a break. When push comes to shove you sleep better at night knowing that there are big mean nasty people with guns protecting you. And most of the time, those are American guns held by Americans and even, every once in a while, by your own countrymen. So don't be all high and mighty. Some one has to do your dirty work to keep your country safe and provide your police and military with weapons. Its so convient for you to sit there in your nice safe little home in your nice safe little neighborhood, with your good police departments and presumption that your police are beyond corruption and tisk tisk us poor misguided Americans and our silly gun culture. Tell ya what, why don't you just disarm your entire country and see how far that gets in this big mean nasty world? Oh? Whats that? Guns are OK for some and not for others? You trust your government without question? Whats that you say? You're not a native American going toe-toe with the Canadian military because you won't leave your land? Bah. Take your santimonious crap somewhere else. You Candanians have your own dirty laundry and unclean hands too. Not to mention you hide behind the US to keep your country safe.
So you live in a society where people are nicer to each other and where you can trust your cops. Guess what, in America you can't trust the cops, they end up being crooks too often. Crooks with guns and badges and the courts on their side.
Americans cops are well known to be some of the more racist and corrupt in the world. Just look at the latest in a long and proud string of scandals involving abuse of police power in America with the DC police e-mail scandal. Opps! The cops got caught speaking candidly. Just a little insight into their racist and corrupt little worlds. Black cops talking about huntings "whities" and White cops talking about "niggers". Oh yeah, I REALLY wanna trust the police now.
But wait! Theres more! The glorious US history of using the police to oppress minority groups of all kinds! BE they political, racial, religious, it doesn't matter! If you can be tyrannized, we'll do it! How many first world countries do you see with the sorts of riots, lawsuits, beatings and even murders caused by of police corruption? When was the last time Canada had a race riot because your criminal justice system let off four corrupt racist cops that beat a black motorist almost to death? And you expect Americans to trust the police?!
Did it ever dawn on you that many Americans keep weapons because they are afraid of the very police you think everyone expects to protect them? Many Americans have really good and personally earned reasons to be afraid of the police. The police are the bad guys too often in thise country and they get away with it too often as well. I myself had the misfortune of being attacked and beaten by some corrupt cops because I wouldn't do what they wanted me to do, and was not legally or morally required to ask they commanded. They were just thugs with badges and they knew they could get away with it. So don't tell me about how I or anyone else that has felt the horror of that trust in the police evaporate in an instance, only to that horrific feeling get flogged over and over again as you desperately try to seek justice in the very system that is supposed to wield it only to find out that the system protects the corrupt and racist in the police force. Until you have seen it yourself, you can not expect someone that has to implicitly trust the police to be the only ones with weapons - and too many Americans have seen the ugly face of bad cops. Now do you understand why this country is so heavily armed? Why this country has some many militias and conspriacy nuts ranting about not trusting the government? Hell, how many of your leaders have been impeached? How many of your presidents have committed felonies to get themselves relected? Bah. Trust your own damn government, don't ask an American to trust theirs. Its too ugly a thought.
Again, perhaps you live in such an idealistic society that you can blindly trust your leaders to hold the power of life and death over your head, but its not like that in the US of A.
Bah. All this "the US is violent why can't you be like us civilized people" is such a load of crap. The world is a violent place and US is not unique in that regard - nor is it truse that the US is the most violent country, or that countries with lots of guns are violent (look at Switzerland, they have LOTS of guns, and not much crime). For example, I've heard to many British citizens wax eloquent about their gun-free and mostly non-violent culture, while the British military has been violently oppressing Northern Ireland for decades. No violence there. No sir. To blame violence exclusively on access to weapons is totally missing the point. Where there is violence, people will find access to virtually any weapon. Again, just look at Northern Ireland. Where did all those machine guns come from? They're not legal in Northen Ireland, yet there they were.
There had to be something there first to justify the need for the weapons and then their use. Communities aren't all peaches and roses until weapons show up. Weapons are tools. They get used in ways that illustrate the problems of that community. Take away the weapons, and more weapons will find their way into any violent community, no matter what you do.
And that, is the point. Guns are not allowed in schools and kids, even in America, and not allowe to have them, and somehow no matter what right thinking gun-grabbers do to ban guns, they find their way in there. Even in Canada.
Python
Python
Because there are violent people there. DUH.
Python
Python
Speaking as a Wiccan, I can tell you that I've had pleanty of Christians quote from the bible about why they would be morally right if they killed me. Something about Lividicous "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" sends chills down the spines of any Wiccan. There is the popularized WASP version of what it means to be a Christian, and then there is the fundamentalist and literal version of what it means to be a Christian. The latter is not nice at all.
I wonder how many Christians have actually read the entire bible and considered what it really has to say about other religions if taken literally.
Merry Meet, Merry Part and Merry Meet Again.
Python
Python
The bit about daycare and kids learning to socialize by the law of the jungle, I think you're stretching it.
And also the bit about "the me generation". Every "generation" as a group, tries to characterize itself as somehow different and better than the preceeding and following generations. Human nature. Duh. "my homeez is better dan your homeez". They're no different than any other humans.
However, the general overall trend of this industrialized society is, from large families with dozens of kids, where individuals are less valued than the family, towards families with fewer and fewer kids, greater competition for industrial and service industry jobs, and therefore, more intrusion into time that would otherwise be spent socializing kids for the group. Part of that is the demands of life in this age, and part of it is declining fertility rates. We don't know what causes that yet. The large family, etc. Now, individualism becomes more and more a factor, which in of itself is not a bad thing - it's the lack of guidance in that individualistic leaning, I think, that's a bad thing. And it's simply a side effect of industrialization.
Fewer kids do mean that the parents have less kids to divide their attention upon, but sometimes that means that they have more time to spend on their own pursuits, like their careers. And competition in the labor market drives that to extremes. Making matters worse, parents often compensate materially. That is, they take their stock options, cash them in, and buy their only child a pony. Spoiled fucking little brats.
Another BAD factor, in my opinion, is when people wait until they're 40 to start having kids. How is a 50 year old going to identify with a 10 year old? Or a 55 year old with a 15 year old? I personally think it should be a crime to have a kid after age 30. How are these kids going to develop the emotional skills to deal with situations like, that kid over there stole my legos and scratched me? TV? And the kids don't have as many brothers and sisters to identify with, or learn from. Who can they commiserate with? A 45 year old?
Then, when this little individual begins to join society, and is asked to conform, if they can't or won't, the wolfpack chases them out. How the fuck do you think they're going to deal with it?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
No, the popular jocks just date rape their girlfriends.
Or did we all forget that one of the jocks at Columbine was involved in a situation where he raped his gf, and when she went to the authorities, they tried to hush it up, and offer her "early graduation" because they didn't want to lose their football star?
This isn't about a few sick kids, or social hierarchies and conformity. It's about a sick system. Fitness and teamwork are important concepts, but they should NEVER be above or at the expense of an academic or intellectual focus at a SCHOOL.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
they make that choice when they tease another kid. It may not have been obvious a few years ago, but it should be obvious now; if you tease that scrawny geek, you take the risk that he's going to come back with a gun and pop a cap in your brain pan.
It is now a stated and obvious risk. When one child teases another, they are taking that risk. It's just a fact. Not a threat.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I live in Kansas, and I'm homeschooling my kid so I can teach him about evolution and cosmology, and he won't have to learn about that creationism bullcrap!
(warning: This is a test of the emergency trollcasting system. If this had been an actual troll, it would have been a little more subtle, and from an account that has not previously been associated with pro-religious rants)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
not every fulltime housewife wants to be a good parent either. My mother-in-law is perfect proof of that.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In fact, one of the school shootings a few years back was a kid who felt harassed by the Christian prayer group in his school. They told him that because he didn't join them, he would burn in hell.
Left with no hope, he decided to take them with him.
Some (most) Christians just don't "get it".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
yes, go home, or to your privately funded church and worship freely.
Do not take MY tax dollars, and spend it on your twisted fucked up perverted interpretation of Christianity.
Or how about this: "render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's."
That is a quote from the dude himself, saying that you should give to God from your money BEFORE taxes. Your Taxes are money that belongs to Ceasar. So tithe from your gross, get a healthy good private school and church going. Don't give money to God that was rightfully Ceasar's. God doesn't fucking want or need it.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Every time one of these teased kids goes postal, it enforces the notion;
"an armed society is a polite society"
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'm working on it. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
no, because a decent sized police force is often more dangerous than NO police force. Then people need to carry around weapons to protect themselves from the police. Or haven't you been paying attention to LA or Wash. DC issues lately?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
dude, say bye bye to legal flag burning in the US. #43 is pro flag burning amendment. I'm sure he and the republican dominated congress will get around to it after they outlaw abortion and eliminate environmental regulations. (I voted for Nader in a state where it made no difference).
Personally, I think that it should be mandated as part of our independence day celebration, that we should celebrate our freedom by burning a US flag. The practice would quickly come out of fasion as an act of protest.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
if you open up the definition further, "arms" can be economic. or even laws.
Imagine that #43 signs a law that relaxes the amount of MTBE that is allowed in drinking water by 500 parts per million, and as a result, one additional person each year, statistically, will die.
Now imagine that the law was not signed, and that the chemical company that made MTBE had to shut down operations because cleaning up the enviornment was too costly for them to pursue MTBE production, and 50 families were unemployed, and statistically, that means that two of these guys were going to die robbing a liquor store in an attempt to make their house payment.
Why can't I keep and bear THOSE arms?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I drew cartoons of the people I hated getting killed by fiendishly ingenious devices.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
oh shut the fuck up!
Name one AGE of human history where life was revered and respected. Stop kidding yourself. Society and civilization is an illusion we all try to pull off to forget about the law of the jungle. But no matter how much of it we pave over, the jungle remains. No biblical scripture, no laws, no touchy-feely talk will EVER change that one fact of reality. Get over it.
We can as individuals, try to act civilized and pretend we give a damn what happens to our neighbors, but the societal problem as a whole is not going to change because you wish we all cared.
When I was in HS back in the 70's the solution was not to go on a killing spree, but killing sprees happened, and have happened since time immemorial. The newsmedias coverage may have made it more common and frequent, but the root cause remains the same. The solution when I was in HS, was not to go on a killing spree, but ask anyone who was in this situation back then and most of them will tell you that they thought about it. Fantasized about it. Wrote about it. Drew cartoons about it. It's hard to judge a life as sacred and revered when you're treated as a subhuman for no other reason than you think for yourself. Why not read the hundreds of posts here supporting these points? Moron.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I hate that my kid's best freind is a lying little spoiled punk, and that I am more of a parent to him than his parents are. Fucking pisses me off when rich people have kids because it was on their list of things to do.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You must be British!
Yup! It's a subversive attempt to make Americans' teeth look as bad as the Brits'!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
unfortunately, not every kid is going to have the emotional skills to deal with that.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well, perhaps these kids are just out of control because they have too many bad thetans? Bring your troubled teens (and checkbooks) to our Church, (TM) and we'll apply some of our special techniques to rid them of these bad thetans, so they can get on the path towards being "clear", as the great genius L. Ron taught us!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It is a complicated problem and it might even be one that cannot be solved today or even ever.
Thank you -- that's absolutely right. It's so frustrating to see most people try to oversimplify the issue and forget that we're really dealing with people. People that need to feel like they belong. People that need to feel valued by others. And this cannot be accomplished by a simply structural change.
Remove the guns -- the bullying will still be there
Abolish the games -- the agression will continue
Sanitize the movies -- they'll just find other things to do
Indoctrinate with <insert moral code here> -- they might feel a little more guilty as they do it
If we want to deal with these issues, we need to dig beyond the superficial structural factors so we can expose and fix the cultural attitudes that foster this behavior. We can only deal with these issues by changing the village attitudes.
A root of the problem is the village attitude that a person's value to me (or society) depends solely on what I (or society) can get out of them. This crops up way too often. You see it in families where the parents' affection depends on how proud their kids make them. You see it in marriages that are based mainly on how good the spouse makes me feel. You see it in cliques where popularity depends on conformity and mutual self-congratulation. You see it in bullying, because the bully can get a sense of superiority, however fleeting. Frighteningly, you can even see it in Bush's "teacher accountability" plan, where a student's value to a teacher is defined by their score on an exam.No, I'm not saying that this is the only attitude that drives our society. However, it is far too prevalent, and especially in the United States. Somehow, it seems that the mystique of "rugged individualism" and the "self-made man" has often been defined as someone who derives all of their value from what they give to others, without having to get anything from anyone else.
The sad thing is that this attitude is so easily accepted and propagated, even in the face of the teachings most moral philosophies.
Kant has his "categorical imperative": treat every person as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. Christianity says, "love your neighbor as yourself -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Buddhism... Hinduism... humanism... it seems like this is a very common teaching. So why isn't it followed? Why does it seem like the worst offenders come from moral philosophies that stress this more?
Sorry, ranting a bit there...lemme bring this back home. I'm starting to realize that the only way I can hope to see a difference is to work on my attitude towards others in my own village. Make sure I value others just because they are, not for what I can get from them. I can only hope that if I can do it, that others will be encouraged to do it as well.
I couldn't possibly agree more. My parents passed on the chance for me to skip a few years when I was younger because an advisor told them that I'd miss out on the socialization. That's just what I f'in needed: to be stuck with a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots who tortured me because I was smarter than they were. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to be miserable for most of the formative years of my life.
My children are going to be of school age in a few years, and my wife and I are seriously considering home schooling. I couldn't care less if they don't learn how to fit in with the jackasses of the world - I have bigger dreams for them than that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What causes one to kill while another under the same circumstances does not?
Same reason some kids GET bullied while others ARE bullied, really - no two kids are alike.
Nature vs nurture - anyone who ever went to school and met actual people knows it's both, in varying degrees, depending on the person AND their environment. Some people never quite rise above their environment; some are born with a certain disposition and never outgrow it; some people are dynamic enough to adapt, learn, or even reverse themselves as they grow; some people are just weird and seem to develop contrary to either nature or nurture. And as I said, no two kids are alike - two genetically identical kids raised in identical families may STILL develop differing ideas about the world.
That said, I agree about outlets - and not just for the victims who may snap and go postal. Bullies and asshole school officials tend to use kids as outlets for their own inadequacies. Isn't there a better way for THEM to deal with their feelings than pushing kids around?
And last, here's a thought that just occurred to me: going postal on one's school is a form of suicide (whether they intend to point the gun selfward at the end or not). It's the point of greatest confusion, greatest desperation, and greatest anger and fear - it's the point where a violent solution is the only one simple enough to make sense. A kid who puts his brain on the chalkboard with a handgun is trying to scream in the land of the deaf - a primal yell, an attempt at making someone, anyone, look at them for one second so they can say "here's what kind of pain I'm in" (and usually "and you caused it"). An MIT-style prank (slinging cow hearts all over the lockers of known bullies for example) might work much better, but these kids have already fallen through that, reached a point where the only scenarios that make sense are the ones where they can vent their anger, on themselves or on someone else or both.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
If guns are the problem, why hasn't this always been a problem throughout history?
It HAS - and long before guns were invented. Thing is, in the past, angry kids waited until they were adults before snapping - though when they snapped, it was usually in the form of building an army and destroying whole nations, cultures, and races.
What's different today is that we've raised a generation of kids so emotionally stunted they couldn't pass Deckard's test in Blade Runner. With a spinning top instead of a moral compass, and emotions in monochrome (no color, just intensity), is it any wonder kids have started to select violent options as the simplest ones available?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I really don't mean to be dismissive of your argument or seem harsh, but blanket (and self-contradicting) statements like that invite blanket repudiations.
What you call a blanket statement, I call a fairly good description of the political party currently in charge of the country.
You know what I think? You aren't looking for intellectual Christians- in fact, you've reason to be afraid them. You are looking to find people who call themselves Christians yet live clearly unchristian lives so that you can call Christianity itself a religion for the weak-minded hypocrites of the world and thereby reinforce your own prejudices.
Well, since I can't very well go refer to the Book of Life and see if someone's listed or not, all I really have are their word and their actions.
Racists do the same thing by focusing their attentions not on the accomplishments of the best and brightest African-Americans (who would undermine their own prejudices) but only the most egregious failures the black people have to offer. That way, they can keep telling their friends and peers, "Man, blacks are reprobates. Did you know that 1/3 of the males are in prisons? Hey, don't call me racist man, my boss is black. I know blacks."
Then what would you have me do? For one thing, I'm not complaining about a race or people born of that race - I'm complaining about people who have chosen a particular set of beliefs that seem to make them a) forget how to exercise rational thought, b) take an us vs them attitude and begin to isolate themselves from the world, and c) consider it a GOOD thing to sweep the 1st Amendment under the rug since obviously their religion should be the official one in America. Would you have me pretend I haven't seen what I've seen, that I don't know who I know, and that the Bible doesn't say what it says? That Christianity in America isn't what it is? I'm willing to accept that you, if your beliefs are what you say they are (love for all people, tolerance of people who are different) are the good side of the issue, but I'm afraid I simply can't take your word for what the other 99% of Christians in America are.
OK, so I sound like a racist to you, substituting Christianity for race. I know what I sound like. But lemme put it to you like this: would you defend a racist? Shouldn't we both be more open minded and tolerant of other people's belief systems that differ from our own? Shouldn't we focus on the GOOD things that racists have done, like the works of Wagner, T.S. Eliot, or many of our founding fathers? No? We SHOULDN'T accept racism if we can keep from it? Hmmm.
Maybe that means there's a dividing line between the determinism that says "all belief systems must be respected" and the reality that some belief systems aren't all rosy and we're justified in complaining about them.
You're offended that I might compare Christianity to racism - that's a valid reaction, but put it away for a second. Racism sucks and is an extreme. It's a destructive force in society and it hurts people. It's rather obviously bad to most people reading this - even those who, as you say, go "hey don't call me racist" think racism is a negative thing and will try to distance themselves from it. In short, even some racists think it's bad. Do racists have the right to hold their beliefs? SHOULD they have the right to hold their beliefs? If yes, should a line be drawn between holding their beliefs and trying to exercise their beliefs? Obviously we can't get away with making it legal to go around lynching other ethnic groups, but a vocal and devout Klansman would see it differently. We know he's wrong and we're right (on the subject of racism anyway) because... well, he just is.
Back to Christianity - just HOW far afield have I gone by comparing it to racism? Are there good, intelligent people who are Christians? Yes, Don Knuth and Larry Wall are two names Slashdot readers will recognize. Many cool things have been done in the name of Christianity.
But my own take is that there's a MUCH longer list of horrible things done in the name of Christianity - many of them IN the Bible (before there was a Christianity whose name to do them in) - all of them the perpetrators apparently found justifiable biblically in spite of the Commandments they violate. (And a fine point this brings up: the holy book may say one thing, but the religion as practiced by a couple billion people worldwide tends to say something slightly different. What IS Christianity if not what people make of it?) Christianity has become the antithesis of moral and intellectual progress - whether it's being used to dismantle 150 years of science, or being used as justification to undermine the civil rights of any number of social groups (other religions, homosexuals, women), or being used to justify racism, or even becoming an excuse to declare war (the Crusades, anyone?) it's obvious that mainstream Christianity - the Christianity of record, the Christianity that America seems to want in charge, the Christianity that calls itself Christianity and from which your open-mindedness is apparently an isolated sprout - is a giant step BACKWARDS for the progress of humankind away from primitivism! I add to this what I've personally seen and experienced and I find that I am rather compelled to think Christianity is on racism's end of the spectrum. Not as bad as racism, but then, considering how often it gets used to justify racism and things far worse, how do I measure? When Christians do really cool things, it seems to be DESPITE the doctrine, direction, and momentum of the religion - it's always the radicals, the ones on the fringe of the religion, be it classical painters using religion as a sneaky way to get away with painting nudes, or Luther with paper and nail, or Mother Teresa with an interpretation of "missionary" that didn't involve destroying the native culture. Rather a strong indication that individuality plays a greater role in the ability of humans to transcend their condition, actually - and mainstream Christianity (in its various flavors) seems not to value individuality. Which sorta brings us circuitously back to the Slashdot story that started it all, the way America and its almost-theocracy treats anyone who's different.
What you think is a hidden theocracy is instead a mostly powerless small minority of devout and vocal Christians who are pilloried by that even more vocal part of the citizenry (which I regret to say seems to include you) and media that feigns open-mindedness while simultaneously justifying their bigotry against people who believe in God, sin and the resurrection of Christ.
I don't think I said the theocracy was hidden, merely that it hasn't taken over America's government yet.
And from where I sit, the most vocal part of the citizenry seems to be the part that says we SHOULD merge Christianity into the government. I don't see Christianity as a minority - nor is the mainstream Christian mindset, the one I'm railing against, a rarity.
It's been said that the true test of tolerance is its reaction to intolerance. I'm reacting to the institutionalized intolerance that is mainstream Christianity and I'm not doing such a hot job of it - but what IS the right answer? And for that matter, how do I separate those who call themselves Christians and embody everything I condemned earlier, from those like you who also call themselves Christians and seem to embody something else? If your Christianity is TRULY different from theirs, why do you take the name of their religion? You know people do shitty things and call themselves Christians, I condemn the mainstream that seems to be comprised entirely of such people and you a) think I'm talking about you, and b) defend THEM. What do you expect me to make of all this?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Today I figure there are already enough guns, in working condition, in private hands in America for every American to have one. Restrictions on gun sales mean NOTHING because if you can't buy one, you probably know where the parents or neighbors keep one hid. If nothing else call Chuck Heston, he'll lend you one. :-)
If anything, the violent trend today is because kids HAD guns in the 1950s. Not that I'm saying this is a good thing, but perhaps 50 years ago anyone with a violent streak and aggression to take out, could take it out on helpless woodland creatures.
Of course the real problem is that today kids have no handle on their emotions.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The question, however, is HOW someone can make every parent better. Should the government send every parent to parenting school? Should we try to de-evolve to the 50's when there was a housewife whose full-time job was to raise kids, or should we just forget the issue and hope the parents solve it themselves?
:-)
:-)
That 50s mindset is part of the reason we have a problem: the 2.3 kids ideal is the reason there's whole generations of people who had kids they don't know how to raise, because it was a STATUS SYMBOL.
Granted that's no worse than having 14 kids just for the welfare check. Or having kids because you actually want to pass on your alcoholic, heart-diseased, inbred genetic material. At least if you have a kid by accident you're coming by it honest.
The solution, near as I can figure, is to establish a NEW ideal - it should be "cool" to have kids only if you're prepared to put down everything and be a parent for 20 years. (I mean dads primarily - especially in married couples where the man has assumed authority to tell the woman to stay home with the kids.) It isn't cool if a kid grows up with parents as a distant entity. It isn't cool if a kid grows up having had no social interaction - and I can think of a lot of "status symbol parents" whose kids are socially undeveloped because of their parents' lifestyle. It isn't cool to, as some yuppie families do, treat the kids as pets. It's certainly not cool to have kids for financial reasons. All these things make a kid grow up feeling worthless. And the kid, having never seen any examples of actual parenting, will be incapable of figuring out what to do with their OWN screaming bundles of poop when they arrive.
I don't think a parenting school or a 'kid license' is the right answer - parents should be able to select their own parenting style, especially since some kids will have unusual dispositions, unique problems, or worst of all, be smarter than their parents - a government-endorsed "here's how you raise kids" will fail more often than it works. But on the other hand, if it's irresponsible to let a kid go buy a pet rabbit before making them read up on what it takes to keep one alive, what do we call it when adults go buy a pet baby before actually considering what demands it makes of them? Any couple who wants kids should at least think about what kind of ethical and moral standards they want the kid to have when it grows up - and hell, most adults don't even know their OWN ethical and moral standards until after they've done something naughty and can't sleep afterwards. No wonder censorware and raise-by-television are so popular - it relieves adults from having to figure out how to turn the screaming bundles of poop into functional human beings.
I think peer pressure could be used to our advantage. Figure out what the ideal should be, and then take over the media and popularize it subtly in sitcoms and car commercials.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Can you name ONE "fundamentalist Christian theocracy" on the planet at this time? No, because there are no significant Christian theocracies in this era.
America isn't a theocracy now, but has one hiding under the surface that pokes its nasty head up repeatedly. Lots of people in power in America - and presumably the people who voted them there - WANT America to become a Christian state, and seem perfectly happy to propose (and vote for!) laws that are rather blatant violations of the First Amendment. Thus I don't think it's at all out of line to use America as an example when talking about theocracies or how they go wrong - America has enough theocratic influence in the way it's currently run to serve as an illustration.
Do you really believe this, or are you just saying it because it seems like it must be true because the alternative is to imagine a large body of people sharing an absolute religious worldview- a concept that, in our post-Christian agnostic consumerist society is too alien to fathom?
Put it like this: there are a LOT of different ways to interpret a book as complex and symbolic the Bible or the Koran. When whole countries follow the same interpretation, something else must be going on.
As a Christian, I disagree stongly with their religious worldview. But try to have a little more respect for people with differing beliefs, and allow for the possibility that the fact of someone else's differing opinion may not be indication of their inferiority as individuals or thinkers.
I was a Christian. I probably understand your beliefs better than you understand mine. And my girlfriend thinks I'm TOO tolerant of Christianity - she considers it a mental illness, and after what she's seen, I can't say I blame her. Me, I got out because although there are some VERY smart people out there who are Christians, the norm seemed to be people who used the religion as an excuse not to think. I personally WATCHED people drop in IQ after they joined a church - I had to quit a job once because the boss got religion and became an asshole, and I don't mean he became an asshole on issues of morality, I mean he began insulting me verbally on a daily basis and started blaming me for everything that was wrong with the company. I have my reasons for saying the things I do.
And I do like conversing with people whose beliefs differ from mine - I know I'm fallible, I know I'm probably wrong about certain things, and if I know I'm dealing with someone who isn't an idiot, I try to entertain the possibility I may learn something from them. The problem is, it's kinda hard to find a Christian whose religion hasn't dulled their intellect. (Note about that last statement: if I'm not talking about you, you shouldn't be offended by it.)
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I think that school should be year-round.
:-) That said, meeting-happy corporate types seem to have learned this skill from watching boring teachers. Make lecture-type classes optional and this kind of stuff will start to go away.
Have you considered what this does to a kid? You can't be a kid in school, you can't be yourself - the environment is too structured, it's just like prison or the army and for the same reasons. Lock a kid in there year-round and they will NEVER figure out who they are outside of that context.
If parents aren't raising their kids during the summer months, work on the parents.
Remember the one thing school can NEVER teach you is who you are. (If it does, you're nobody worthwhile.) You have to know thy OWN damn self. Some people may, within the school building and the social contexts it provides, find some answers (as I did - I became an artist while trying to keep sane in a boring class), but to expect that all kids will find this in school is wrong. Kids are better equipped to develop social skills during summer vacation, assuming your parents weren't like mine, living in a part of town where there simply weren't any other kids. Eliminate summer vacation and kids will grow up and only ever make friends and have social interaction within the structured framework of a job.
As for your idea about kids getting work experience, I'm not real sure how that would work, but I DO know there are "lab" type classes that allow each kid to work and learn at his/her own level in that particular subject, and from what I've seen, they work GREAT. Couple this with some elective lecture-type classes (for those who want to learn high-level calculus from a teacher at a blackboard - would work best in a bigger school where you can choose a teacher) and you have an adaptive learning environment. Schools fail when they assume all kids are alike.
Well, what kind of social skill practice is it to sit in a room of 30 kids listening to some adult drone?
Sounds exactly like the last eight staff meetings I attended.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I don't agree that long summer breaks are useful for anything. Especially given the trends towards double-earner homes where children are increasingly less supervised or simply shuttled to care centers which deprive them of any of the real benefits of a summer vacation. I certainly don't think much of ultraregimented schooling to begin with, I thought my bias was pretty obvious (any and all lecture classes should be eligible for some sort of testing out). And I think a proper school environment would be nothing like being "locked in" anywhere.
Then WORK ON THE PARENTS. Seriously. School is not supposed to substitute for parenting, and what you're proposing IS that school should serve more or less as the child's home year round! If the problem is that the parents aren't home enough to raise their kids, deal with THAT problem, and don't just turn the teachers into parents instead.
One of my major complaints with most schools is age segregation. It's not useful. It stigmatizes brilliant students (or at least bores them) and it stresses the less apt. Given that most kids are average this isn't a huge problem, but it remains. Even worse is the notion that your friends have to be your own age. The segregation that occurs due to the notion that children should only socialize with other kids their age is a major handicap. Society has people of all ages in it and children seem to be increasingly losing interaction with that (maybe it's not the case, this is just my perception).
This I'll agree with. Age does NOT equal level of development. Classifying someone as a freshman may be useful only if the nature of school differs radically between one year and the next (i.e. middle school to high school may be a big shift) - but even that shouldn't be based on age! No two kids develop at the same rate, so let them advance through at their own pace. Dispense with years as a grouping mechanism, put kids in the classes they can handle, even if that means a gifted 12-yr-old is taking advanced calculus while also taking an entry-level language skills course. Allow graduation once a student has reached a certain level in all their subjects, so at least colleges know what they're getting.
I never got along with people my own age. I got along best with people a couple years older or younger. Dispensing with the years classification (itself apparently just a way for older kids to feel superior and smug) would have vastly increased my opportunities to make friends.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Christianity is a teaching of love for all people.
Then you REALLY need to get busy on the dominant religion in the United States that's using your religion's name without permission.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
TrevorB wrote:
Maybe I'm stupid and Canadian, but in an urban population with a decent sized police force, there should be no good reason for people to have to carry around weapons.
This is true, to a point. However, there is a balance: there are many things the US police are not allowed to do, or are supposed to go to a great deal more trouble to do, compared to Canada or the UK. Greater citizen freedoms mean less police power, including less police power to stop criminals. That means in some cases citizens feel (and actually have) the need to supplement police protection with self-protection.
I mean, Jesus, I remember driving in LA on vacation and seeing a cop in her squad car with the shotgun holster mounted right in the front seat. I mean, holy shit, that thing's loaded.
OK, but a) that was a cop, not an ordinary citizen, and b) that was LA. LA can be a dangerous place, especially for a cop. Ditto New York, Chicago, Detroit, or DC.
An aside here to all you kiddies who like to get up in "the man's" face: I don't like getting pulled over. But by god I'm polite about it. There are bad cops out there, but the good cops outnumber them at least 10 to 1, and what's just another speeding ticket to you is (to the cop) potentially a life-or-death situation. Next time you get pulled over, don't give them a reason to be afraid of you, OK?
I try not to think about how many loaded weapons there must be if I enter into a family restaraunt in the states with my kids.
Probably not as many as you think. Most of the people I know don't own guns. Most of the ones that do don't have concealed-carry permits or own more than one gun per adult in the house. And most of the ones who have concealed-carry permits have them more as a just-in-case measure, rather than actually carrying a gun 24 hours a day in an armpit holster. Our concealed-carry laws are really strict and just transporting a gun in your car (say from your home to the shooting range) that's not in plain sight can run you afoul of them. If I ever feel the need to buy a gun for my own safety, the first thing I intend to do before buying it is get my CCW permit.
Yes, there are a lot of guns in the US, but the numbers are skewed by criminals who have nests of guns (far too many think they're going to be all macho and have a real gun battle with the cops one day) and by legitimate collectors who have a lot that they might or might not ever actually shoot.
Another aside: here in the state of Virginia you have to have completed an NRA (National Rifle Association) or other state-approved gun-safety course, or be in a special category like police or military, before you're allowed to carry concealed. This tests not just general safety, but proficiency. You have to fire 40 shots in a designated time and hit a target on at least 37. It's not military-grade proficiency, but it's harder than you think.
Virginia also has a program called EXILE with mandatory minimum sentences for possession of a gun by a convicted felon and other things. I don't like mandatory minimums in general, but the program seems to be working well (it was implemented after heat came down from other states accusing Virginia of being the source for guns used by felons there).
The bottom line seems to be: places like Canada and the UK have a cultural trust of their governments, while we have a cultural distrust of ours. That translates into our desire to be more capable of using personal force to protect ourselves -- by our own choice, we need to.
-- Old Man Kensey
There's something to be said for bullying, though...
(bear with me here -- obviously this doesn't apply to everybody, nor every situation -- but it is a datapoint to be plotted)
My cousin had a minor speech impediment as a young child. He still does, though you can barely notice it. He went to a speech therapist, which helped, but as a stutterer myself, I know the kind of torment young kids could inflict on somebody "different". However, you develop defense mechanisms.
His mechanism (as was mine) was to not talk very much. I had a reputation for being very quiet, and as a consequence, I did a lot of *listening*, as did my cousin.
My cousin, now, is working on finishing his Aerospace engineering degree, with a 4.0 average. He is one smart dude -- and I believe it came from his youth, when he was listening, rather than talking.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Life is never easy for anyone, but it does get better after high school if you're one of us geek types. Stick with it. If you need the ear of a complete stranger to spill your guts to, drop me a line (email address above, take out the spaces).
> Right...high density....like Littleton?
Was that your attempt at a pun? Littleton is one of the largest suburbs of Denver, though I'd say it's much more sprawled than dense. Do at least consult a map next time, Littleton isn't some tiny little hamlet in the country.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
It's worth noting that concealed weapons probably have increased in availability. The family of the 1800s might have owned a shotgun, but smuggling such a thing into school is not easy.
Good point. Check out http://www.users.drak.net/Homepages/whitedragon/ba th_bombing.html. Don't confuse this one data point as something close to "evidence" but it does point out that bad stuff has happened in the past. That was the worst school disaster *ever*, but unless you lived in Michigan in the Lansing area, I doubt you would have heard about it. Go ahead, ask your grandparents if they remember. They probably never heard of it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What you say?
If you had a point in there, musta got lost somewhere down the line.
All you've proved is that some people know about it today, but back in 1927, news was slower to travel.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Media coverage has nothing to do with the rage, disaffection and abandonment that these kids feel.
It also has bugger all with teaching them right and wrong.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The cause of most of this crap is that parents don't teach their kids the difference between right and wrong, don't instill any sense of responsability and don't teach what's acceptable behavior.
Kids grow into sociopaths because they weren't socialized in the first place. An IQ of 100, an underdevelopped sense of where the line is that you don't cross and knowing where somebody's dayy hides the guns is a recipe for homicide or at least grevious bodily harm.
Are these parents lazy, ignorant, stupid? Yeah...
What are you going to do with them? They grew up as kids of parents who were rebelling against authority and the believed the "advice" columns written by people whos' own kids grew up totally screwed up (those who didn't off themselves early "a la" Art Linkletter's daughter.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That one in these situations would just suicide quietly, Now, for whatever reason, they have decided to take quite a few people with them.
Does violence in media have anything to do with this? I don't know. All I know, is it sounds earily like what Heinlein wrote in 'Starship Troopers', in 1959.
You say you want a revolution....
But this is one of the reasons the rest of the first worls looks upon America with bafflement and disbelief.
Yet we have to constantly police our borders trying to keep illegal aliens out. Yet we have waiting lists of people who want to legally immagrate here. Odd, for a country the rest of the world looks down upon.
Finkployd
Unfortunately, this doesn't explain it all. There are still the nature vs nuture tendencies out there. By nature, some personalities are more violent than others. By the way we are raised we may be more or less tolerant of others.
But the more outlets one has - the better the chance one may reach a nonviolent solution.
but in an urban population with a decent sized police force, there should be no good reason for people to have to carry around weapons.
Why have a first aid kit in the home? After all, you can call 911 and get an ambulance ten times faster than any police will show up.
if the number of bears in the forest surrounding your log cabin outnumber the number of children in your family
Guns have always been more useful against people than animals. Most animals will stay away from humans by themselves, if you're living in the middle of nowhere your greatest danger is and always has been the threat from other human beings. That hasn't changed in the least, which is why we still have guns (and armies and missiles and other wasteful things).
Go ahead, mod me down. I don't care. But this is one of the reasons the rest of the first worls looks upon America with bafflement and disbelief.
Along with freedom of speech and religion, yes it is. The Chinese are amazed when we insult our president, burn our flag, and get away with it. The Taliban thinks it is foolish to allow other religions to coexist with the official one (heck, they think its foolish not to have an officil religion!).
Indeed, we are odd ducks and always have been.
That said, i agree with you that population density is probably the single greatest factor that has changed. Density and mobility -- which cut down on the amount of respect and discipline, and the familiarity people used to have with their neighbors...
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dude, say bye bye to legal flag burning in the US. #43 is pro flag burning amendment. I'm sure he and the republican dominated congress will get around to it
You'll never get 3/4 of the states to ratify such an amendment. At most they can have a symblic vote in congress and get a majority, but not enough to actually amend the constitution...
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He said the first world, which does not include any communist regime, by definition
/. ridiculing Microsoft -- I'm sure Bill Gates can console himself somehow at being such a "loser" in the eyes of the GNU community.
That depends on your classification system somewhat (there are several political or economic ones). regardless, Canada and Britain, as well as France, Germany and the rest of the "first world" are constantly stymied by our annoying predeliction for free speech (see Yahoo France, Compuserve Germany, etc). Its not limited to undeveloped countries, I just didn't feel like being as obnoxious to Europe in my first post as everyone else is being towards the US.
And believe me, we're all laughing at people like you
We know, we're just too busy running the world and keeping people out of our borders to much care. We've been laughed at pretty consistently ever since the first folks here said we didn't need a King anymore (shocking!). Quite frankly, its a lot like people on
And don't go off spouting about Freedom of Speech when the American people so blatantly use it to bludgeon the rest of the world
Huh? How can speech be used to bludgeon? We like to think of it as opening eyes. But I guess this is just one of those differences between us -- we believe that the more someone knows and faces, the smarter and better they'll be. You believe, I guess, that maybe people should just not have to hear some ideas that people find distatseful (like the idea we shouldn't have a king?).
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The cycle of violence has turned outward from what it's been. We recognize this, we understood it all the way back to Columbine. Why, though?
The slashdot community, self proclaimed nerds, has had a wide variety of reactions to these troubles - from elder statesmen telling the younger ones "hold on, life gets better, they sell used cars and you sell your used cars to them" to "violence is never the answer" to "yeah, I remember that, I remember being stuffed in a locker and spit on and tripped and beat up after school because I told a teacher, who did nothing to protect me because I looked different than everyone else, and the football players that did it to me were untouchable in the school." We've been over this before.
The most frightening bit is not the suicides, which are tragic, but happen to everyone at all ages. It's not that the Internet is being blamed, either.
It's the freedoms that are being taken away from children in the name of protecting them. California's recently enacted shield laws, for example, allow finger pointing _at_ outsiders, the exact people who have been picked on. In fact, they encourage it by disallowing defamation suits even if the claims are demonstrably false.
The witch hunt against children has intensified. There isn't, however, a good solution to this. It's not just nerds that are being picked on, there are gays, minorities, and so forth. It has been ever thus. But the fact that the picked on are fighting back in such dramatic fashion, well, the legislators passing these new laws and the media covering them were not using a TRS-80 in class, they were busy playing football and picking on geeks. Except Ted Kennedy, who was busy doing other things. They're scared.
There is, of course, never an excuse for taking a life, but this is not a soluble problem. When someone is going to snap has to do with such a myriad number of factors that you can't pin it on the Internet, bullies or anything else.
Perhaps we need to follow Ashcroft's suggestion: ban violent video games, violent music and the rest of the violence in the media. When kids continue to kill other kids, perhaps we could then dispel the persistent myth that kids can't tell fantasy from reality.
Mind you, to _really_ eradicate violence from our kids lives, we really have to do away with the bible, too, what with all that smiting, going down into other cultures and wholly wiping them out, and so forth. But you don't see Ashcroft censoring that, it's "tradition."
Anybody proposing a viable solution to this problem would be a nobel prize winner, I assure you. Until that time, we're going to have to face the facts, outsiders will get picked on and attacked by both their peers and the government. It's sad, depressing, and has been ever thus.
As one who also had a really rough time in HS, including living with a deep depression, I can also attest to the fact that things do get better. As it happened I took a couple of years off after HS and finally went to university where the universe really opened up. I went from few dates during HS to more then I could handle in any one week. I also started friendships then, that are now entering their third decade, including ones with professors and TAs.
The culture of HS is at best repressive and narcassistic, with some of the most narrow-minded, authoritarian individuals you will ever meet (read teachers/principals) in control of your life. The pressure to conform is extraordinary, largely driven by powerful personal needs to both conform and prove one's individuality, all done in a caudron of hormones and peer-pressure. You are at a point where your conscious is also driven to understand who you are -- and it can be easy to believe the bullshit others may tell you if there are many of them and too few of you.
Please do try and talk with someone about how you feel, preferrably outside of school (parent, minister, doctor, psychologist), if you need to let off some steam or have to express something that you don't otherwise want to share with someone you know, then please write to me. I will do my best to offer a friendly, helpful ear.
All that's best,
James (james@jamesk.org)
I put some humility into one of my jr. high school tormenters with a swift kick to the nads. He was much less of a problem after that. Of course, these things have to occur without adults around to avoid being suspended.
Actually, getting in a fight and engineering it so you get caught is a great tactic. You save face because you aren't technically snitching, but at the same time, you force the teachers to do something about the bullying. The only price is a couple days of suspension. Small price if you ask me.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
If someone is committing suicide because they're lonely, or depressed at the loss of a loved one, I don't think it's very likely they'll try to take anyone else out...
But if they're suicidal because of constant humiliation, physical violence, taunting, and general bullying, I think it's fairly likely for them to try to hurt the attacker. If the attacker is making them feel they're ready to die, they'll probably be ready to kill.
I think in every case in the media, the shooter has been bullied. We haven't heard of the popular jock (who did the bullying) going to school and shooting the place up. These are obviously desperate acts by despressed people. If bullying depresses people I think the link it fairly easy to see.
Hah. What a cop out. Would that be the "I'm gonna lose, so I'll pretend it's on purpose" strategy? Practice it well, you'll need it.
The difference is that the killers themselves said that the bullying was a problem. In diaries, to teacher, parents, in essays. Never did the kids say that Doom was causing them to want to kill.
I think I'll accept the words and actions of the people involved.
There have been plenty of home invasions in Vancouver. Most have been gang related but they could easily go to the wrong house...
I know I'd feel more comfortable in a confrontation if I was armed as well as the assailant... preferably much better.
btw, don't talk about how you're going to lose karma. It's an obvious beg to the moderators.
Dude. Unless you're 200 years old, you weren't involved. Neither was the poster you're responding to. There are many things that *we* didn't do. We didn't keep slaves. We didn't imprison the japanese during ww2. We didn't drives the Indians off their land. We didn't break off from the British. etc.
It's all this sins of the father thing. I *ONLY* take responsibility for *MY* actions. If I wasn't there agreeing that it should be done, and helping it to happen, it's not my fault.
It's like this whole social contract. I didn't agree to it. The only thing keeping me in check is that I happen to believe that some of the laws are just, and that I'll get shot/imprisoned for breaking the rest. (For example, I think copyrights *could* be good, but I didn't agree to this continually extending term bullshit, so imho, copyrights have no more than moral force. That means I'll respect the authors rights to a living, but I'll be damned if some corp bribing a politician is going to dictate how I run my life.)
And in that note, an armed populace is the *ONLY* thing preventing this sort of thing from getting out of hand. Just the memory of the french revolution and many like it, keep the corrupt in check. But if they could completely disarm the people, they'd be acting just insane monarchs committing the worst injustices you can imagine.
Your logic is flawed.
I didn't compare drunk driving to harassment. I compared drunk driving influencing accidents to harassment influencing violence (specifically killing).
Harassment could very well be the primary cause - which would just mean that there are no more important influences.
I would tend to think that harassment is the primary cause of *school* shootings. If someone is feeling like killing someone, enough that they often diary their feelings before the event, and/or seek specific targets, it suggests that those people had a large influence. Being that the largest influence a nerd is likely to have with a jock is harassment, it seems to suggest that harassment is the primary cause of the shootings.
The shooter might have been slightly cracked, or otherwise influenced in such a way as to make them kill when others (myself included) responded in lesser ways. That doesn't change the fact that the harassment would be a bigger influence than other, like potentially video games or TV.
So, whose word will you accept?
You won't accept that of the actual killers.
And you won't accept the words of people like myself who went through the same harassment.
So, who will you listen to? Anyone who agrees with you? Any 'expert' on network TV?
Some of the killers had diaried, for years, about the harassment at school, and how they were getting more and more upset about it. Then they committed suicide after the act. What do they stand to gain from tricking you? And how much work do you think some kid is going to put into it? Years of their time?
Sometimes, Mr Psychologist, a cigar is just a cigar, and a suicide note is an honest view into the despressed person psyche.
Certainly they must be mentally unstable, but when looking at outside influences, what do you say is the likely cause when someone seeks, in their own word, vengance against the bullies... tv perhaps? Maybe NAFTA? Or, perhaps, bullies and harassment?
Besides, I think it's reasonable to wish death upon people who harass you with the intent to make you hate yourself and perhaps commit suicide. Bullies know the effects they can have, they see the news too. If they bully someone, they deserve everything they get. My only regret is that kids wait so long to retaliate that they end up taking out bystanders. A little bully killing isn't necessarily a bad thing; the bully intends to hurt you as much as possible...
If adults don't step in and prevent this - if they give the bully free reign to torment, how can they claim to be suprised when one or the other gets hurt? And very few people are ready to admit their precious little jocks could ever be at fault.
Oh well, once that one gets a few holes, maybe they'll watch what their next kid does a little more carefully.
If every child in this situation that the media has covered has complained, often endlessly, about bullying and harassment, it doesn't take a genius to see the strong connection. So why can't you see it?
> Do you know even one thing about psychology?
You say that as if it would be relevant either way. It's the falacy of irrelevant authority. I should ask if you know anything about psychic spoon bending for all the matters in this case.
Even if psychology was a science, a degree would hardly be required to recognize that proding someone endlessly can drive them crazy. (Any fields where a great number of the 'experts' follow the teachings of Jung or Freud and actually get any respect from their peers isn't a scientific one. Imagine a bunch of physicists, some of whom believed that a large stone would fall faster than a small stone.)
>Great, an eye for an eye. So much for being civilized. Killing is always a bad thing and I
>feel bad for you that you're too ignorant to realize that.
And I feel bad that you're too ignorant to see how right I am.
There, I win the argument.
What? It only works when YOU do it?
First, killing isn't always a bad thing. Often it's a GREAT thing. Had Hitler's generals been able to assasinate him early in the war millions of lives would have been saved. Sure, it's an outrageous case, but it proves that a blanket "killing is ALWAYS wrong" statement is false.
Killing is a good thing, when the consequences are more positive than negative. Like *everything* else, it depends on context. Eating chlorine is ALWAYS bad, unless it's bound to sodium. Having your leg eaten by weasels is a good thing, when the alternative is waiting in the trap to be completely eaten by a bear. Context is everything.
If a bully is causing the deaths of others, and is likely to keep doing this (I know some people who were bullies in school and they're just the same as adults, still with a complete contempt for everyone else) then I really don't see why it's a bad thing if the bully dies and someone else lives instead.
As for "an eye for an eye", that refers to punishment. Killing a bully seems much more like self defense.
Now, had the adults in these cases actually attempted to help the victims in their often repeated cries for help, then maybe resorting to ultimate measures like killing wouldn't have been too bad. But if you force a child to spend every day with someone who torments them, punish them when they respond, and reward the tormenter, you don't expect to drive them crazy?
Killing the bully will prevent that bully from hurting others, and may serve as a warning to others. Now, if that little nerd who was being pushed around had belted the bully in the nose as soon as it started, the bully might have learned and the only casualty would be a sore nose. Ditto if the bully had been suspended by the authorities. But if it's let progress to this point a simple suspension won't seem like punishment to them or anyone else; we'll be teaching them that their actions are without consequence.
Adults have choice, they can leave and get a new job, they can call the police and claim they're being criminally harassed. Children have no good options, their only recourse is to parents and teachers, both of whom are trained to believe that the way to cure these problems are to ignore them. They just keep sending the kids right back to school with a little pep talk.
And you'd blame the children for taking the only option left to them and trying to stop the bullying by stopping the bully...
I'm just glad that they took the right way out and shot the bully before shooting themselves. One less social disease for us to clean up later when the bully would become an adult.
I mean, if a bunch of young ruffians harasses some old lady on the way to market, The Police will at least stop by and tell the ruffians to stop doing that.
If the same bunch of young ruffians were to harass someone of the same age, most police would do nothing -- because there is nothing illegal or culturally untoward about the act.
Bullying in the workplace is illegal (or at least you can get fired for it, or sue if the bully isn't). Bullying at home is illegal. Bullying strangers on the street is illegal.
Now comes the strange part. Teenagers bullying adults is illegal, but teenagers bullying teenagers isn't.
Until it is illegal, or until one of these afflicted kids decides to sue, and sue big (rather than killing themselves), this will continue.
... we may have the highest ratio of lawyers to non-lawyers in the world [here in the U.S.], but there's some actual content in all that legislative noise.
The whole point of law is to legislate morality. Society/culture determines that some things are desireable (life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness), and that others things less so (murder, theft, arson). Where society begins to engage in activities that some folks do not like, but others do like, there is the resort of torts (suing the pants off someone). The conduct of corporations has been affected quite well lately by lawsuits, and occasionally results in the sorts of things that get made into popular movies starring Julia Roberts.
So, the whole point of suing someone is to say, "yes, you can legally act that way, but it is still morally wrong." The judge and jury get to decide who's in the right. Eventually Legislative acts may follow, and make such behaviour illegal. It is impossible for any Legislative body to write rules that apply perfectly to all situations. It's then that the tool of civil courts and lawsuits becomes wonderful, and one of the things unavailble in more restrictive societies. (The old saying, "If you want peace, work for justice.")
And I know. I worked for someone who never paid me (I was young, poor, and really stupid to keep working like that without getting paid). I sued. I won. I paid for six months of college with the award. It wasn't much, but it came when I most needed it.
I'm not saying there aren't frivolous lawsuits. Lawyers are a lot like guns. Most of us hope we never have cause to use one. Some people want to use them for good, and some for evil. Some never want anything to do with one, and some covet them -- perhaps having an unhealthy fascination.
But most of all, we hope no one aims one in our direction.
Oh damn, I'm going to kick myself in the morning, but "Me too!" I was assaulted on a daily basis in Jr. High.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Someone please mod this up!
In our society it's "right" and "just" for people with more money, power and beauty to treat everyone else like shit. Capitalisim is more than how we trade goods and services, it's deeply engrained in our psyche, shaping our ethics and morality.
Polls show that most people in the US feel that the govenment is mostly concerned about the interests of the wealthy, yet there is no moral outrage. Our congress critters don't give a shit about the poor, racisim, sexism and homephobia - but then the talking heads on the TV are gonna get in snit over Quake and Eminem - PUH-LEEZE!
Perhaps this is why they treat adults going postal as a totally seprate phenomea from school shootings? Seems to me that lots of people *of all ages* are shooting up the places where they feel foced to spend their days with a group of people they didn't choose. Yet the media and govenment folks keep their focus on only the youngest culprits, ignoring data on the adults, and possibly missing the big picture. I guess looking at the big picture might take the spotlight away from blaming videogames and rap, and we can't have that now can we? God fobid we have to deal with our real problems, like mental illmess and our wolf pack mentality.
- bridgette
Read in the original languges too. While our knowledge of ancient Aramic is obviously not perfect, there is considerable schollarly opinion that Ex. 22:18 would be better translated as 'Thou shalt not Suffer a poisoner to live'. (Reposted due to accidentally hiting the anonymous coward button)
John,
You are close this time, but not quite hitting the mark, the question that begs asking is "Why do kids bully other kids?" This is the big question. In my experience almost every bully has had either a broken home environment, ie divorce, or signifigant emotional and or physical abuse.
So the question should be, "Why are kids harassing (abusing) other kids?" Because they need to feel good about themselves. How do children learn to feel good? Mainly from their primary care givers, in most cases their parents, and what they have learned? Abuse.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Since I'm too late to get noticed and moderated up, I'll just put this one in because I think it's important.
For a LONG time now, I have been considering the lack of distributed education for our children. Thanks to the kind folks at the US Senate, and Reagan, Bush, and Baby Bush's Ideas about "trickle down economics" and "local control and _accountability" Our children have been deprived of most funding to teach them anything about the arts.
"But wait," you say "this is SLASHDOT, the arts have no place here" and you're right. But, Katz brought it up, so here it is. Our children, since the inception of educational cutbacks, and adminstrational overhead increases, have been the victims of a continual "re-organization" of schools away from funding those educational departments which do not lead to high salaries, or at least good job fields. While English, Math, and Sciences barely maintain their tenous grasp on funds for their classrooms, Drama, Art, Music, Dance and any other "frivoulous" classes are ignored.
So what? That's the next logical question, and I say that these classes are the _only_ pathway these children have to direct expression of their ideas, desires, and frustrations. They are also the only classes in which there is no right or wrong answer, and as such are the only classes in which the student him/herself has absolute control over. When you take away a child's right/ability to express him/herself, and all of their control, they will try to get it back, the only way they know how.
just my $.02
hmmmm?
First you blame the schools for not doing the parents' job (religious education of your children), and now you think the solution is parents doing the school's job? I don't buy this one bit. If you want kids learning about "God prayer, and the Ten Commandments", teach them yourself, and leave MY tax dollars out of it. You don't want the government to be Mom or Big Brother; you want it to be the godfather.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
It only takes one lawyer, troll.
Funny, where are the people who always scream "It's THEIR company, not YOURS, they can do WHATEVER THEY WANT and you have NO right to complain." (as if someone's right to do something eliminates the right of others to complain). Where are they? Why haven't they spoken up on this subject?
Funny, I worked at a company owned and staffed almost exclusively by Orthodox Jews who had regular prayer sessions (yes, I know that's not the term, but I don't want to confuse these lunks) on company time. So why didn't someone sue them? Because of the Jew lawyers? Silly me, I thought it was religious freedom or something.
And yet, I can't think of a single European I've met who would do anything but snort in disgust at the notion of prayer at work.
Check your facts, bub.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
It still wouldn't help; people who snapped would simply burn down the school instead. What then -- ban gasoline?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You make an interesting point about outlets for agression. It does seem that, aside from sports, the most popular activity is watching TV(but that could just be me being jaded) :).
I wholeheartedly agree with you about the real problem, but please remember that puberty is a rough time for everyone(having recently finished myself, I know this very well). It's hard to have a handle on your emotions when you're caught in between child and adult, with hormones raging throughout.
Visit the
I've noticed that myself. A juvenile bully gets a slap on the wrist, but when he goes to college, he gets jail time. And, of course, defending yourself gets you suspended.
Best Slashdot Co
"A teenager in a small country town in New Zealand called in the FBI to stop what she worried could have been another school shooting in Pennsylvania"
"We eventually got his real name, his e-mail address, the city he lived in and the name of his high school."
Best Slashdot Co
I remember back in high school taking an x-acto knife in sight of the teacher, and drawing patterns in my arm senior year. I remember when we had to do the 'build a tower from straws and pins' project freshman year, and using my arm as a pin cushion. [again, in front of the teacher].
Each time, the teachers didn't blink.
For some reason, the substitute teachers seemed to have more of a problem with my actions than the full time ones did. [Something about flipping a desk over with a kid still sitting in it when I was having a bad day, and he pissed me off more]
Most of the teachers just shrug it off, as they've seen too much of it over the years. Sure, I never killed anyone over the years, but when I was picked on, I didn't tend to back down, either. If it wasn't for the satisfaction of grabbing some prick by his throat and shoving him up against a wall, I'd not have had any form of release, and might have snapped worse than I did.
Personally, I still want to kill the bitch yearbook editor who made me edit my entry twice, and then said nothing, and changed the thing to 'Don't do drugs and strive to succeed' for the 'blatant drug references' in my message. However, I know that she's going to take care of herself over the years, as shown by the kid who pushed her down the stairs a few years later. [People _do_ get what's coming to them if you're patient... and you don't have to do the time for it]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Actually, I remember an attempted stabbing at my high school in um...1991?
I was working in the darkroom, trying to get my negatives developed. One of the pricks in the class (whom I later learned had been responsible for stealing my walkman), was flipping on and off the red light. [So it was going from red to pitch black].
Someone else went to come in through the revolving door, and tripped over the lip in the darkness, dropping a text book which flew across the room [darkrooms are small], leanding near me, knocking back the bottle of fixer. Once the red light came back on, I found the book, and as the fixer was missing (knocked under the sink, I later found out, but it didn't tip over), got pissed and through the book at the wall near the door.... right as someone else came into the dark room.
The prick who was still fucking with the lights started pulling the 'I wouldn't let him get away with that if I were you' shit, and I ended up in a staring contest with the guy who had just come in. I thought I stared him down, but right as he broke my glance, he swung at me. [naturally, breaking my glasses, and leaving a nice gash where they hit against my face]
Of course, that was the only hit he got in, as I then got one of his arms behind him, and his throat. What I didn't know, however, which the dick playing with the lights did, however, was that he had a knife on him, which he had been showing off earlier. My only saving grace was that it was a floding knife that he couldn't open one handed, so he tried stabbing me with a closed knife.
After a few minutes of a stalemate, as both my hands were occupied, and he wasn't doing much good with his, and he was having trouble breathing, we both gave up and left the darkroom.
And I still want to beat the shit out of the prick who was playing with the lights, too. I hold no grudge, however, for the person who actually hit me, as well, I just have to feel sorry for him for trying to stab me with a closed knife.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Humbling people does not make them humble. Humiliating people does not give them humility.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Waitaminit.
The majority of kids don't learn to treat each other that way from their parents. They often do get the impression that it's OK with adults to do so, after they do it and don't get in trouble.
No, a very few kids learn it from their parents... but then they "teach" it to their peers, and that's where most kids "learn to treat each other that way".
Violence behaves like a contagion, and we know virulence varies with population density. Take one kid who is getting knocked around at home, and lock 19 other kids in with him, and soon you have 20 violent, acting-out kids.
While it would be nice to "blame" the parents of the "patient zero" kid, it doesn't actually solve anything. You can't prevent crazy, sick people from having kids, and you can't prevent people with kids from getting crazy or sick. There will always be kids in any school system who are "carriers" for violence.
The way to ameliorate this problem is simple: reduce the population density of kids. Don't put them in large groups. The violence won't spread as rapidly, and may die out before it becomes endemic.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for telling the parents who let their kids become absuive what crappy human beings they are -- "BAD PARENT. NO BISCUIT." -- and would gladly string up someone who abuses their own kid.
But I'm far more intrigued by ways to actually reduce human suffering. Pointing fingers is, as emotionally satisfying as it may be, not really a substitute for logical problem solving. This is precisely one of those cases where changing the functioning of the system can have dramatic "tipping point" effects, and it has nothing to do with who is at fault.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I take it you've never visited a "Sales pit", have you? :)
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Wow! Thanks for the pointers.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Nah. The reason you think that is because the vast majority of US kids that find healthy ways to 'externalize thier frustration' don't make the 6 o'clock news or have Jon Katz write about them.
I used programming to get through the daily high school frustations.
One of the funny things about the USA is that the drug war has given people easy access to organized crime - even those in high school. If you want a gun, you just ask someone who sells drugs. If they don't know where to get a gun, the person they buy their supply from will - and so on. Finding someone to sell you drugs in high school is NOT a very hard thing to do.
Funny how the harder you crack down on drugs, the more risky it gets to traffic, hence the more lucerative, and the organized movements become even more entrenched. More of the population needs to understand basic economic principles - supply side economics don't work for anything, including the drug war. Heh.
..don't panic
I have to add, though, that oftentimes people in working-class situations can't do all this stuff. They just don't have the time.
Well I'll get beaten down for this but... if you don't have time to be a parent you shouldn't have kids. I know I'm a selfish person and would be a horrible mother, so I've chosen to let my gene pool stagnate. Half in jest, I offer this link: www.vhemt.org.
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
One of the reason why the average urban citazen still needs a gun these days is for the potential to protect ourselves from the government.
Then later...
That or else I'll be moving to Canada which has slightly saner laws on freedom to my understanding.
Dude, we (more specifically, the British) WERE your government!!!! You down in the south decided to rebel and cast off the evil government oppressors. You even went to war with us in 1812 to try to get us off the continent. Then you make a claim that Canada has more sane government?!?
I wonder if you would have been better off if you didn't have your revolution!
;) (smilies galore, must stop the flames somewhere...)
Ignoring the tastelessness of the first post...
:)
Now that I have kids, I want to make a "Proud Parent of Another Brick in the Wall" bumper sticker, with two walking red hammers to one side.
If anyone knows where to find one ready made, let me know...
Law-abiding citizens use (not necessarily fire) guns millions of times each year to protect themselves from criminals. (As someone correctly pointed out above, the police can usually only respond after the crime.) States with concealed-carry laws tend to have lower crime rates, since a criminal has to consider the possibility that the little old lady he's thinking of mugging may be armed.
If there were no guns in the first place, we wouldn't have to own a gun to protect ourselves from other guns.
If there were no such thing as guns, the world might be a better place. But we can't choose to live in that world. Like it or not, the bad guys are going to have guns. In response, we can either unilaterally disarm, or ensure that we are able to defend ourselves.
Why do countries maintain military forces? Generally not because they intend to conquer their neighbors, but to defend themselves from potential attackers. The principle is exactly the same.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Bullying and teasing are a fundamental truth of life. There is NO WAY to avoid them. They WILL happen. Especially during middle school and high school.
:-).
Depression however is purely voluntary, with the possible exception of chemical/clinical depression.
At some point in your life someone will tease you. You have to realize though, that their teasing does not hurt your feelings. Words can't affect your emotional state. They are not directly related. The way in which your mind processes the words can affect your emotional state however. Notice that extra level of abstraction there. Your brain, of course, is something which you control.
What I am trying to point out is that becoming depressed is a strictly optional side-effect of being teased. I wish more people realized this.
I wish these kids had had parents who had let them know that they were being teased not because they were wrong but because the other kids were immature. And that they had no reason to feel bad about themselves, that instead they should feel bad for the bullies for being emotionally immature enough to do the bullying.
That philosophy is, of course, easier to say than to live. But that's true with everything. Nothings easy anymore... even being a kid.
Justin Dubs
Last week I woke up to NPR on my alarm clock stating that Oregon Legistlators are trying to setup a hotline for kids to report their troublesome peers. The thing that makes this hotline unique? It's to report bullies, not bruised introverts on the edge of destruction.
I'm torn as to whether or not this is still a witch hunt. It still seems much better than calling in potential school shooter..
Trevor,
Thank god somewhere out there there's still a responsible press system. You country's reaction to youth violence is sensible and will probably go a long way towards fixing it.
Here in America, we are surrounded by venomous hordes of finger pointers, half pointing at the internet and the other half pointing at guns. I don't know which is worse, the damage to our country that they are doing in crusading against symptoms rather than causes, or the neglect of our children that they are perpetuating by ignoring the real problem.
But I do know that for once, I envy Canada. I can't convey to you the peace of mind I would feel if America would grow up & buy a clue from your country.
Maybe one of these kids will bomb his school with propane instead of using a gun, and once the "Anti-Propane" movement starts, America will awaken to the insanity...
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
How do you get the Washington Post to write a 2-page spread about your life, times, and problems? For 2 days straight? Please choose only one answer:
1) Overcome testicular cancer to win the Tour de France 2 years running.
2) Win an Olympic gold medal
3) Launch a satellite
4) Invade a country
5) Go to school & shoot your friends
5) Hack a defense department web site
6) Get a perfect score on every test & a perfect attendance record for all of high school.
7) Become a high-school all-american in 3 sports.
What's the correct answer?
No peeking!
The correct answer is:
5) Go to school & shoot your friends.
Everyone is entitled to 15 minutes of fame, unless you're a total psychopathic fuckup, in which case you get at least a week.
Think about it. Our villians are our heros.
But the kids aren't fooled
"I think it's so overplayed, this issue of guns in schools," said Kathryn Pizzuto, a 17-year-old senior from Tucson. "Those shootings are about some kids trying to get their 15 minutes of fame."
What if high school shooters never had their names released? What if Newsweek didn't slobber over them?
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
I had a _very_ loving family, with a mother who stayed home and raised us. We were part of a whole-some Catholic family and I didn't even start swearing until mid High school.
My brother and I would tell stores about our day to our mother each and every day, so there was little or nothing kept from our parents.
On occasion, when I was heavily picked on, my parents would find out (because they were inquisitive and attended school activities), and actively coerce the school to rectify certain matters.
On paper, it's an ideal childhood by nearly saintly parents.
Guess what.. I hated my peers. I was the brunt of mockery; a loner until mid-high school where I found people like myself. Being smart, but not wealthy basically meant your life was hell in our school. The cool people were most of the bullys because of psychological war-fare (though there were the occasional brute-force bullies as well.. My books were stolen, I was tripped.. You know, the whole 9 yards). I felt great depression at times, and my brother had it even worse; he was nearly suicidal (if not for the religious up-bringing, I'm sure).
Now, the two of us would most likely not have gunned down a school, but if it hadn't been for a few supportive peers, suicide wouldn't have been out of the question.
I balk at people who say we need better teachers, support groups, and more responsible parents.. Yes these things can and are great.. But the problem is peer-interaction. Plain and simple.. Visual appearences, sexual motivation / identity, the human nature to reject deviants. These are the sources of the problems.. Anything that does not directly address the problems in this class are insulting kids to lived my life.
I have ideas for solutions, but I'd have to research it further before proclaiming any answers..
School Uniforms reduce the amount of visual distinction between peer-groups.
Segregation of the sexes during the peek years of high-school might alleviates much of the grand-standing and devotion of time by the masses during "institutional hours".
Physical punishment (a la extra phys-ed hours) might also help "break the will" of externalized deviants. (where-as detention/suspension has failed)
-Michael
-Michael
I really don't mean to be dismissive of your argument or seem harsh, but blanket (and self-contradicting) statements like that invite blanket repudiations.
You can't have a partial theocracy, any more than you can have a partial dictatorship, a partial decapitation or partial open-mindedness. Inherent to the definition of theocracy is absolute, complete control of all governmental authority by a religious body. (Want to read about a real theocracy, find a bible belonging to some loony Christian you know and read about Old Testament Israel, after they escaped the enslavement of the Egyptians. THAT'S a Theocracy.)
It is alarmist ignorance that would lead someone to accuse the United States (of all countries!) of having a hidden theocratic authority. What the United States has instead is something entirely different- a pluralistic, ostensibly democratic governmental system largely owned and operated by the enormous influence of multinational corporations who purchase political influence from legislators and elected officials.
What you think is a hidden theocracy is instead a mostly powerless small minority of devout and vocal Christians who are pilloried by that even more vocal part of the citizenry (which I regret to say seems to include you) and media that feigns open-mindedness while simultaneously justifying their bigotry against people who believe in God, sin and the resurrection of Christ.
I was both religiously agnostic and morally relativistic earlier in my own life, so you might be surprised how well I understand what it means to embrace the comforts of believing there isn't any absolute truth, isn't such a thing as sin, and isn't a reason to be afraid of judgment by a Creator who embodies the former and despises the latter.
Thanks to you and your girlfriend for making my point better than I ever could. Selective tolerance is a solipsistic form of selective prejudice. Just because your intolerance is based on religious beliefs and not skin color, why fool yourself? You are what you claim you are not- close-minded and intolerant.
How does this sentence sound?
Change the subject of your derision from a religious belief to a skin color and you've just gone from being 'enlightened' to a hardcore racist. And how about this?
And the coup de grace:
I'm trying to be comforted by this insult that you kindly gift-wrapped with your parenthetical disclaimer, "Christian makes people stupid- but if you aren't one of those it has made idiotic, don't take offense."
You know what I think? You aren't looking for intellectual Christians- in fact, you've reason to be afraid them. You are looking to find people who call themselves Christians yet live clearly unchristian lives so that you can call Christianity itself a religion for the weak-minded hypocrites of the world and thereby reinforce your own prejudices. Racists do the same thing by focusing their attentions not on the accomplishments of the best and brightest African-Americans (who would undermine their own prejudices) but only the most egregious failures the black people have to offer. That way, they can keep telling their friends and peers, "Man, blacks are reprobates. Did you know that 1/3 of the males are in prisons? Hey, don't call me racist man, my boss is black. I know blacks."
I'm not trying to be inflammatory and I'm not trying to insult you. I do think it is important though to show you, using your own words, how you may be deluding yourself as relates to your openmindedness (not evident from your postings) and how you may be unfairly representing Christianity (incorrectly represented in your postings). I hope that in saying all of this you won't think my intentions were to try and be a jerk. I just hope that maybe the next the subject of Christianity comes up between you and a girlfriend, or maybe other friends, that you don't fall into the same ingrained habit of bashing and dismissing that you seem accustomed to. I hope my entreaties in this reply are at least substantive enough to convince you that there are thinking Christians out in the world, right now, who aren't buffoons simply because they believe in Christ.
(insert obligatory Monty Python reference here, cross-referenced to earlier comment about the past theocratic nation of Spain, in hopes of picking up a couple extra points to catapult my Karma into the stratosphere, where I may commune with Cowboy Neal, Karma Theocratic.)
Sorry. Just because nations have higher percentages of Catholics doesn't make them a theocracy. They aren't even close!
Incorrect. The bigger-is-better approach only applies to hand-to-hand. Had you chosen to think rather than merely react, you would have realized that firearms combat is rather unlike melee combat. In the latter, size, skill and choice of weapon give an advantage to an attacker who may be able to not only hit harder, faster, and further away, but also to thwart attacks. With firearms, having a bigger gun does not help you survive a 0.45-calibre slug from five feet away -- you're still going to be badly hurt, if you survive, even if you're toting a PSG-1 or a stolen OICW prototype.
And, FWIW, Kleck's research is supported by Lott's, which has in turn been published in peer-reviewed journals, which is more than can be said for most of their opponents... and Lott's academic background as a criminologist and statistician lends more weight. They're not empathic talking heads such as, say, Streisand and her ilk.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I agree, HS was the worst point in my life. And things did get better once i went off to college. I hung out with the geeks also, but we never became popular. Well we sort of did a little, i think we were more respected and liked. It was only by a few maybe, but those few seemed to have grown up and realized, well something. The others, well, i haven't heard anything about them, so i guess nothing amounted of them.
My mom always told me also it would be better, andto just keep going, and she was right. That is the best piece of advise you can give your kid at that time. She did tell me when the best time of my life would be; she said it would be college and beyond, and she was right.
"Kids who are non-conformist, rebellious, individualistic or different in other ways are routinely subjected to harassment ..."
This is a very obvious statement. Sure, I was picked on because I was a geek, and for other reasons too. Face it, kids will be kids. If your young, and different, you deserve to be picked on, your asking for it! I'm not saying that its right, but that's just the way things are! There have always been bullies and there have always been the bullied. It's the reality behind this that is so scary.
So we should be asking ourselves; what has changed? Well, I'm not going to rant about how video games, the net, and TV are all causing this because that is absolutely NOT true! Show me the proof, and I'll believe you! So where are the parents in all this? Are they talking to their kids? Supporting them? Helping them through it?
Also, how do these kids get guns in the first place? It is strange how we have laws to protect our right to own a gun, but shooting someone is illegal. I see a big contradiction there! So what is the purpose of owning a gun in the first place, for anybody? Self protection? If there were no guns in the first place, we wouldn't have to own a gun to protect ourselves from other guns.
I think there are a lot of things we need to look at as a society before we go and blame the net, or video games or TV because that is the easy way out. Censor, censor, censor and your problems magically disappear. NOPE! We need to start teaching morals in school again. What I'm saying is we need to do something!
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Unfortunely, The "Village" in Hillary's context was the government which that witch meant not your community. The Ten Commandments are the basic building blocks of understanding and following the rules if you bothered to read them. "White Christians" are fine if they don't breath fire and brimstone and pretend that they are the only way. Banning guns would cause an even worse rise in crime in the U.S. and NRA have it right - if everyone has guns and knows how to safely use them, then the world will be a safer place (or lots of dead criminals).
Anyone that could be pegged as the new nazis is the liberial crowd (the ones who started the P.C. crap). People need to relearn that they are responsible for their actions not some distant past memory of youth or some TV show that made them do it. The Old and Tired as you put it worked, not the "lets use whatever fits the moment" to judge what is right. It allows what is wrong be considered right just because of whatever. The ending of Se7en is a perfect hit on this concept that the liberals have latched on (John Doe was messed up, but the line hits the mark).
To blame White Christians or the NRA is just an uninformed opinion, since it helps put the blame on a certain group and not the individual or the parents that should know better about raising their kids. Don't shift the blame to others, just because it fits your world view.
I love and hate high school simultaneously. What I love about high school: I'm taking a few AP courses, and I actually have real *work* to do for a change, not busy work, not stupid common sense stuff. Real, interesting, challenging work. Real research. Real responsibilities. On the other hand, a lot of people at my high school are immature. I try to step carefully, and I usually get away with just being another person that they know (I have a good sense of humor, too, so I get some respect for that) without being their target. Plus, I'm careful not to dress like a nerd. I dress neatly (although our school does have a embroidered polo shirt / generic khakis uniform) but I tie a few unique rebellious elements into my style, and (usually) people respect me for that.
A lot of girls are immature. They can make good friends, but they won't make good relationships. Too many girls I know can't accept a guy that likes them if they don't like him: the idea makes them uncomfortable, and they become incapable of even a simple friendship at times. It's even worse if the girl has convinced herself that she's in love with another person; not only does she not accept you, but she feels like you're competing with that person in her mind.
Junior High... is a good place to do all your homework, but at the same time be mildly cruel to your classmates. Not provoking, but cruel if provoked. Don't try to fight back, don't give in, but remember how much everything sucks and you'll have the right attitude. When you get to high school, you can accept people again, but you shouldn't ever go farther than friends. Most high school relationships, unless they're with someone that you would've been really close friends with anyway, are just going to suck. You're going to be lied to, cheated on, disrespected, and you're going to have your heart broken and your feelings hurt time and time again, even when you're doing everything you can for her. That's just how it is in high school.
I've been told college sucks a lot less, although there's a higher frequency of losers. People are more mature, the academic environment isn't as f***ed-up, and you'll actually find some people who really enjoy being your friend.
--TheOrangeSquid
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Maybe I'm stupid and Canadian, but in an urban population with a decent sized police force, there should be no good reason for people to have to carry around weapons.
Maybe because the police force is for the most part reactive, not proactive?
Think about it. It takes, on average, five to ten minutes for a police car to make it to a scene after a call comes in. I'm guessing here, but I don't think I'm too far off. PLUS, the call generally comes in AFTER the incident. And to be quite blunt... our society has created criminals that WILL kill you, regardless of whether or not you're armed or not. The police won't do you much good if you're already dead. This isn't a gun problem, it's a social problem.
Also, keep this in mind... carrying a concealed weapon in public may or may not be legal depending on where you are. Here in Texas (where Dubya got us a concealed handgun law), we CAN carry concealed firearms, but we have to have permits for them, plus we're somewhat restricted as to where we can carry them. Finally, a tale of two areas: crime went down in Texas after the concealed handgun permit went into effect. Crime in Australia skyrocketed after they started outlawing THEIR firearms. Remember, criminals don't like to target people who they might suspect of being able to fight back...
Okay, that's my rant for the day... mod up or down at your leisure. :p
Perhaps we should start a push for boxing rings in schools. Remember the old stereotype of the catholic priest dragging students into the gym to fight it out in the boxing ring? That is what all of out schools need.
is that our culture discourages hitting back. There was a time when if a child in this country was bullied, his father would take him in the backyard, and teach the son how to beat the living shit out of another boy. The boy would return to school, and the next round of bullying would result in the bully getting into a serious fight. Sure the bully might not always win, but fighting back usually gained one enough respect that future bullying and humiliation were drastically reduced.
Unfortunatly, those halcyon days are no more. Now a child who hits back is as likely to be given a long term suspension as the bully is. Kids are taught to seek out peer mediation, or to just turn the other cheek. The problem is, however, that these strategies do not fit into the hormonally charged mind of male youths. Humans are a violent species, especially teenage-boys, and they have an instinctive need to fight. This is why teachers and school administrators often have a "boys will be boys" attitude toward bullying, but at the same time pressure from concerned parents forces them to allow children to be drastically punished for natural behavior.
The real solution to this problem is to just go back to letting the kids fight out their problems. Sure boys will get hurt. Egos will be temporarily crushed. But in the world of teenage boys, no amount of talking things out will ever earn a boy the respect that punching a bully in the eye does.
Well it's so nice to know you had such a good HS lifestyle... I had conservitive parents (meant no parties & drinking was out...) & at school I was hugely unpopular that they felt they could beat me at will... Oh & before you ask why I didn't fight back I'll give you the answer... I did on a few occasions, here is an example:
kid (known bully) decides it's time to haress & physically abuse me... after 30 mins of being tormented I snap & deck him hard enough he landed a couple feet away... He then gives me evil looks until we happen to be in front of a number of teachers & then proceeds to pound on me as fast & hard as he can, with a few kicks for good measure & I try to fight back as best on can against the barage... well a teacher comes over & seperates us & we see the principle who tells us that we should never do that again & if we do we will both be expelled indefinately... Well when I get back to the class with my regular teacher (this was middle school actually, but the principel for HS & middle school was the same) he proceeds to pull me aside & tell me "I wish I could help you, but I can't. He's a popular kid & I can't get him in trouble without being embarresed or face getting canned. Your just going to have to face up to being beat on til they get tired of it. If you try to fight back I'll have to toe the party line & lie saying you started it & try my hardest to get him out of trouble. Don't let this happen again."
This is the repsonse from a friendly teacher... Can you imagine a teacher who doesn't like you (& their are a few no matter what) getting involved?
Oh & as for your 'or had more sex' part... Well the trailer trash sluts at my school had alot of sex (25% where pregnant at or around graduation), but none of it was with me (which I'm kinda glad about)... I in the meanwhile never even had a date during HS... See trailer trash sluts go for popular guys so they can latch on to who they think will 'make it' in the world (which is normally the guy who works at the gas station later on, but some get 'lucky'). If you don't hodl a high social position you are a thing to be dispised... The girls at my HS were cruel & vindictive to people they felt were social pond scum...
It's almost 7 years later & the scars I carry from how I was treated in HS are still with me to this day... My life hasn't gotten much better wither due to the clinical depression (try being motivated while depressed) I've lived with for over 9 years... I still wish a painful, violent, & agonizing death on all of my ex-classmates to this day & for me life can only get better because their is no such thign as 'worse'...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
There may be a relation. I too suspect they have cause and effect (if they are such) reversed. The idea of the body using a non-ideal state as a baseline is intriguing.
And quite right, there is no escape. One can't (couldn't) simply walk away, go home. So flight was out. Fight? Only works if you have an overwhelming advantage - and often backfires. So many stories have been posted (other articles) along the lines of "..and when I finally did fight back, it was me that got punished, not the.." Just ignore them? Only rarely, and only in the mild cases does this work. Been there, tried that. "Just ignore them and they go away" is either wishful thinking or psychobabble.
So what's that leave? Stress. The bad kind. And then people wonder "What went wrong?" when someone remains in low spirits, feels that 'the world" is against them, or snaps.. whether they aim at others or themselves.
What would solve this? I'm not absolutely sure. I know what won't work though. Restricting (censoring?) games won't. More gun laws won't. Profiling really won't. None of these does more than try to appear to Do Something.. with easy yet useless metrics. None actually solves the problem.
Responsible parenting would certainly help, but how is that acheived? And it would have to be at least near universal. Being "raised right" isn't of much comfort when those around you are not. Teachers and school administrators not playing favorites and not turning a blind eye to things would help. Even better if they dug when an "incident" occurred and found out not "who threw the first punch" as it were, but if it was brought on. Some means of escape, beyond living in a world of one's own, just between one's ears, would also help. Alas I have no idea how to make that workable.
I'd love to see a clever hack. This is a problem that is hard to solve and will take people of much greater cleverness than those who inflict it. The solution, in the end, may even be simple. Getting it implemented will be the real trick. I wish I was clever enough.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
This isn't that hard to remember: objects are HUNG, people are HANGED. Basic English construction.
I guess you could say a person was "hung" in slang contexts, but you would never call a 12 year old girl "hung," and if she were, that would mean she probably may not be a girl after all.
The solution to the problem is here.
Bad parents turn their kids into killers.
Parents are wholly responsible for determining the how their children are raised, what they learn, what they do, and how they fare in life. Playing Starsiege: Tribes didn't turn little Johnny into a serial killer -- his parents did, for failure to raise him into a fully functional human being.
Perhaps we're noticing a sort of de-evolution. The least responsible people are the ones having the most children, and so every generation there is a higher percentage of children with unqualified parents. It would be interesting to note that in a hundred years, perhaps only a small minority will not be born to unwed teenage mothers.
Anyway, it is the parents' responsibility to determine the cognitive, social, and ethical upbringing of their children. Don't blame Beavis and Butthead, when the problem is that the parents let their kids watch it. If you give a machine gun to a monkey, and the monkey kills someone, you don't blame the monkey.
Got Rhinos?
That said: Christianity is a teaching of love for all people. Right or wrong lots of religions have these and its a very good thing, PARENTS need to teach children moral value, and that value should be reinforced by SCHOOL. This entire movement to remove all religion from our culture is wrong and it is demoralizing us. Kids shoot themselves and each other because they have nothing to turn to, nothing to put faith in. No matter what religion you subscribe to, having faith in anything can change a person's entire outlook and help them deal more effectively with abuse
To the posters above that have a negitive view of Christians I sincerly apologize for those people who have taken the name and twisted it into a hate field group of judgemental hypocrites. I for one LOATHE this attitude
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
Now, I'm not just trying to say "The parents aren't watching the kids, so they watch bad TV and it makes a bad influence"; and I don't think you were either. I think that the role of parents (and teachers) is huge; but not nearly the whole of it. Why, pray tell, do we now work more, sleep less, and cut back on leisure time? Why do we, as the MSNBC article says, "live to work" rather than "work to live"?
I'm sure Katz would put the finger at Big Business, evil corporations, something like that. But greed, ambition, even big corporations (Standard Oil?) aren't new.
I think, that, really, the problem is in electronics; but more importantly, they're really changing the way we CAN live our lives. And we're further than ever from the way, genetically, we SHOULD be living our lives. Take for instance (an old example, but still), indoor lighting. With this amazing invention, we can now work, play, or whatever, nearly all night. Sure, we still need our 8 hours - but did ancient humans only sleep 8 hours? Almost certainly not; light was pretty hard to come by; you certainly didn't do your work (food gathering) at night, you didn't go places, nothing. And food gathering has changed too; we see obese people, people who don't exercise, because, well, we don't have to any more. Recently, the advent of easily accessible PCs has caused Carpal Tunnel - we weren't built to spend 8 hours a day typical. Technology taking care of the "need" to hunt, many males feel a need (I know I do; my shrink said it wasn't that rare) to engage in some kind of battle; part of the problem we are discussing. More importantly, though, new electronics, are replacing not just the physical things (after all, food, light, transport - these burdens were lifted from us decades ago), but social things.
It's becoming easier and easier to detach from the world. In fact, I'd be interested in seeing that "Sleep less, work more" article as applied by profession; probably the more wired the profession, the less sleep. Because, well, it seems like, as you become more wired, you spend less time physically engaged, especially with other people. This would make sense for the social problems kids face, also; they desire to detach and return to their "online" world, as I'd suspect many geeks can/wish to do. And there, they don't learn how to interact as people; at least with others outside of their group. Now, what does that have to do with working more? Well, if you're not the social type, you can very easily latch on to your work. It gives you something to do. Did you see what other activity they said had gone down? Sex... of course, a very physical, very social activity. Myself, as a very detached person, know how good being at work can feel - since you don't have to deal with people (depending on your job, of course; as a programmer, I don't have much, but as a salesman, you would obviously). Less time spent doing leisure activities means less social life. Plus, the more you can get the chance to detach from the world, the less you learn to "Deal with" people you don't like; you can "ignore", "block", or whatever them, which you can't do as much in a "normal" life. Most people who work with you are probably peers to you; you don't work with the boss that much. Parents can escape the kids by shipping them off to day care (which wasn't nearly the accepted option now that it was before). People can isolate themselves from things they hate, by being at work; minimal true social interaction. (You can have a social life at work, of course. But that's not your purpose for being there, and you can get out of it. After all, spending a night with friends is far more social than working late).
So, then, what do we do? Force people outside? No, of course not. It seems odd that technology, which should make life easier and happier, has made life worse for people. People who can do more in less time wind up spending more time at work and less time asleep. They aren't in tune with their physical bodies, but with their work. But trying to get people do things just doesn't work. Peoplpe we always shirk; that's part of ancestry, too. It's pointless to burn extra calories, in fact, the problem with that should be obvious (in a society where food is limited). Although many exercise programs tout increased energy (which is altogether believable), we won't enjoy doing it; since, burning calories for the sake of burning calories is something that, genetically, is a no-no. So what do we do? We've already begun to create alternate sources of interaction, thigns like video games, to fill the need. For instance, again, the role of the male hunter - let's be honest, there aren't that many female gamers. Socially, we can keep kids from coming into contact with people they dislike as much; creating more schools like mine, and for other focuses also. But ultimately, the only real solution is in genetic engineering. Our world has changed - for better or worse, nobody is going to rid the world of lights. We can do some things to adept mentally, but ultimately, I think, physical changes are the only way for us to continue peacably.
Here are a few points that I'd like to raise because they (for me) lead to the conclusion that the easy fingerpointing is pointless.
1) There have been a lot of guns in this country since it was founded. There have been a lot of guns that a teenager could use to kill a number of people since John Colt was in business.
2) As much as we idealize how good parents were in the past, there is a reason it took a long time to get child labor laws passed. Same thing with child abuse laws. The past was not filled with morally perfect people who spent all their time bringing Johnny up perfectly.
3) The overall indication from the events is not that these people had abnormally bad backgrounds. What I find odd about that is that one would expect that the people who have cause to be head cases, who have been really and awfully abused by their parents, are not the problem here. It is not some readily identifiable 'top tail' of a normal distribution.
I just think that we're going to be 20-50 years sorting this one out, and that as much as we like to vent and opine, everybody's desire to pick their knee-jerk cause/effect relationship isn't going to get anyone anywhere.
It's unrealistic to expect the government to enforce good parenting. For one thing no one can agree precisely as to what that is. Here's things the education system can do. Smaller schools. Most of these shootings occur in big High Schools. I didn't say smaller classes, I said smaller schools. School uniforms (I don't care what they look like; they don't have to wear ties for example, but everyone should wear the same thing to school). Separate the boys from the girls. That will take a lot of the social pressure off the bullies. An all male school will also taylor their way of teaching to males. The feminization of schools has probably had an indirect affect on these incidents. Some elementary schools have canceled recess. That's a good policy, maybe, for girls, but boys are too restless for that. By the way, I read an article recently where a (female) elementary principal has banned tag during recess. What not to do? Cut the crap on all the "zero-tolerance" policies that have cropped up. I don't mind a zero-tolerance policy against REAL guns, but finger pointing? Or even a small pocket knife? There's been a lack of common sense lately. One other thought: Winston Churchill was picked on mercilessly in school according to his auto-biography. Admittedly, it occurred in an all-male school, which belies one of my arguments.
The truth as I see it is that there is no one root cause to why one kid turns violent, why another kills themself, and why yet another turns out normal. I'm surprised with all the people in this forum that have programming experience, that more people don't realize that there's a billion and one things that can go wrong with a programs execution which may or may not be forseeable; compared to the human brain, the most complex of computer programs seems like a simple for loop that outputs its index on each iteration (oversimplification maybe, but helps make my point). Like a person who points to one cause for all the problems with all programs, it should seem almost laughable to think that one cause, could be the reason for all kids who act out against social stigmas; whether acted out against themselves or others.
Do bullies make people feel small, insignificant, or worthless - certainly. Do some parents fail in their parenting duties - absolutely. Do movies/games expose kids to elements that they might not be exposed elsewhere - unequivocally yes.
The 'village' is relied on to help kids deal with and learn from what they are exposed to (both good and bad exposure). The 'village' is relied on to reinforce socially acceptable behaviour, while discouraging socially unacceptable behaviour. Bullying is unacceptable, shyness is, while not unacceptable, not viewed as a good trait to have. So both these behaviours need to be influenced to change by the 'village'.
Now some people will say, 'How dare the 'village' determine what is and is not acceptable behaviour. I want to be an individual, unique from all others'. To this I'm not sure how to respond, save that uniqueness is at the same time impossible to attain and a forgone conclusion regardless of what you do (resolving that oxymoron is left to the reader, ... it's taken me 11 years to fully understand that myself... I thought my teacher was insane when he first postulated it). And also, if you decide to be unique outside the view of the 'village' you need to accept the outcome of that decision (i.e. be accountable for that action as well).
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the 'village' is no longer just a physically constrained set, it is essentially WORLD - {people such that said people have no Internet access}. This makes it harder for the 'village' to agree on what is socially acceptable and not. History is not in favor of there ever being agreement either (ref. crusades, inquisition, et al).
Maybe its time we all accepted our responsibility in this global 'village' and start working towards helping those that exibit socially unacceptable behaviour rather than 'flame them'. Next time your working at a theatre where a 14 year old tries to see the latest 'massacre' flick, tell them no go. When you see someone bullying someone, stand up for the oppressed. When someone posts flame bait, give it its due and ignore it.
Thanks for reading this, curious what everyone thinks.
Dan
A moments thought would have shown him, but then again, a moment is a long time and a thought a painful process. - Author unknown to me (if anyone knows post it in reply - I think it was Lord Byron)
G
"Plurality should not be posited without necessity." - William of OccamThe media does nothing less than make all these kids who shoot up their schools anti-celebrities by creating a circus around every shooting. Kids who are getting bullied at school lash out in this manner to get attention.. and what better attention than worldwide attention.
Let some kids shoot up their schools a couple more times and give them no media coverage, no attention, and I guarantee the shootings will stop. Of course the media will never do this because big news is big money. And the bigger deal they make of these shootings, the more they happen... and the more they happen, the more the media profits.
-gerbik
That's kinda my point; speaking as a parent, I know that you simply can't expect kids to think like that. Hell, you can't expect most adults to act like that. On any given day, I expect to get almost killed at least three times a day simply driving to work; lots of other drives just don't stop to think that by cutting across three lanes without so much as a look or a signal they might actually endanger other people. The other problem is that everybody is looking for the One True Problem; the one problem that can be fixed, and all will be well. But it's not that simple. It never is.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Lots of schools are implementing a 'words equal actions' sort of policy, I'm afraid.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Hang on in there.
One hint - it worked for me. Find a martial arts class, one NOT attended by anyone from your school, and for preference a more "traditional" type one rather than a "freestyle beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other" one. What you get out of it isn't necessarily the skills to fight back (although it does help!) but it gives you back your self-confidence. It's not an overnight thing, but you look round in a year or two's time, and suddenly find someone's poured a couple of pounds of guts into you.
It doesn't mean that other kids won't take the piss - nothing stops that. But it teaches you to control yourself, and to know that whatever they say, although it hurts, it's not important. Self-respect is the single most important thing you can have.
Grab.
Fascinating, really fascinating. Like I haven't heard this a billion times before.
The question, however, is HOW someone can make every parent better. Should the government send every parent to parenting school? Should we try to de-evolve to the 50's when there was a housewife whose full-time job was to raise kids, or should we just forget the issue and hope the parents solve it themselves?
What do we do?
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
The teasing isn't going to stop, and stricter enforcement of rules against teasing isn't going to help anything. It's these zero-tolerance policies that cause the problems to escalate. What could have ended in a student's poetry expressing how he hates the world is instead suppressed. I saw it happening in my High School 6 years ago. From what I hear it has only gotten worse since. Every year someone writes a poem for the school's literary magazine expressing something taboo. It's rarely an actual threat, which I can understand being punished, but it's something about hating the world, or uses harsh language, or some other similar topic. Invariably, the student gets expelled, and probably later beat up for being "weird". Then some stupid psychiatrist comes and when it comes out that the student has suicidal thoughts (c'mon, *most* everyone has suicidal thoughts at some point during their adolescence), but once it comes out, the student is not permitted to return to school until undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. His/Her parents find out about all this, and beat or punish or sexually abuse or whatever it is they do to the child even more now, and the problem of the child's self-esteem only gets worse and worse.
We have become a perfectionist society. Any hint that a person has thoughts which are outside the norm (let alone actually morally wrong) and that person is immediately cast away from society. The only way to deal with your imperfections in today's society is to hide them, and hiding your rage is only going to make you eventually explode.
I'm not defending any of the young murderers at those High Schools. Ultimately, it is our own responsibility to learn to deal with our rage. But like most any other problem in our society, the only ultimate way to deal with it is through education. No one should be punished for his or her feelings, or for expressing those feelings through words. Rather, the person should be taught how to deal with those feelings in a positive or at least neutral manner, before they become actions which must be punished.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Why are non-American kids not blowing away their classmates?
Or for that matter, why has this started in the U.S.? I don't think it used to be that common. Part of it is that the current situation has been blown out of proportion. If you listen to the media, there are millions of school kids walking around out there intent on killing or blowing up their school. That's just not the case. I actually heard of some first graders who were suspended for playing cops and robbers because "they were making threats against students".
I think a signifigant issue is media coverage of these events. Things like this most likely did happen in the past, but I doubt they were as as common, and I doubt they were as well reported. I think there is certain vicious circle going on here. The situation feeds on itself. Kids hear about other kids who have done what they have thought of doing, and decide to take action themselves. The media reports these instances and more kids get ideas. This is hardly the only cause, but I think one can attribute a certain amount of the "rash" of school shootings to copy cat crime. Most of these kids would not have had the guts (or perhaps not even the idea) if someone else hadn't done it first. There are many contributing cuases to crimes like this, but at this point, and in this time, I think a major factor for the sheer numbers of these crimes is the fact that kids see other kids getting away with it (note: I realize that in most of our minds these kids are not "getting away with it" they are either killing themselves as part of the deal, or getting lengthly prison sentences. It would seem however, that in the minds of certain of their peers, they have in fact gotten away with it.)
Unfortunatly, i do not know that there is real solution to this particular cause. Any attempt to prevent the reporting of these events is doomed to failure, and counter to what most Americans (including myself) consider right. "Protecting" children from the news of these events wouls most likely be counter-productive, and exacerbate other contibuting causes (most of us here would agree that if anything children are already to "protected" from real life). Perhaps an effort to really talk to kids about these crimes, and how they make the kids feel would be the best measure (not a "How to spot the Phsycos in your class" talk, but rather a real parent child "what do these events say to you" talk)I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
My point, which I continued arguing, was that I do not have a right to plant mines in my garden because of either the 2nd Amendment or the fundamental RKBA. I also said that mines were not primarily for self-defense. You said...
But mines by their very nature are not targeted against an individual. Once they are set, they hurt anyone who comes along. The right to defend life does not imply a right to hurt innocent people! Someone using a firearm for defense is obligated avoid injuring bystanders, such as by knowing what is behind his target before firing.Furthermore, mines are limited by being stationary. They could only offer dubious protection in one location. So in almost every conceivable situation for an individual, they are not effective self-defense tools.
Arguing about the right to use mines as a way of undermining the RKBA is still a strawman.
The line is drawn at the point where a self-defense measure violates the rights of another person. Using a firearm responsibly does not violate anyone's rights, and certainly just possessing it does not. The line is a moral one that exists for us to discover. It is not a line that we can make up to try to get to whatever results we might want. If there is not something morally wrong with owning a gun, then you are morally bound to oppose a law that forbids it! Even if it were morally wrong to own a gun, you would still have to make the argument that it was morally right to use the force of law to forbid ownership. Not everything immoral should be illegal.To pass a a law because of "social advantages" rather than because it is the right thing to do is disgusting. (And yes, I am aware that we have a lot of disgusting laws in the US. I oppose them.)
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
If you are not a parent...
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
I personally don't rely on the 2nd Amendment to make my arguments for the RKBA. I assume a right to life. From that right, I derive a right to defend innocent life. From that right I derive a right to possess effective tools to defend innocent life. Firearms are very effective defensive tools. Hence, the RKBA. Nukes and biological weapons are not effective tools for individuals to use in defending life. Hence, no right to keep and bear weapons of mass destruction.
You have knocked down a strawman. That proves nothing, but thanks for trying. ;-)
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Mining my garden is a bit of a different story. First, you don't "bear" mines; you plant them. Second, planting them in my garden would make me responsible for any harm that came to someone who accidentally wandered through. Third, mines are not primarily used for self-defense, but rather for denying access to a piece of land.
Ah, but moral grounds is exactly where this argument belongs, as do all arguments that involve using the force of law to bend folks to your will! If a law is not moral, then it should not be a law, no matter how much we want the results that the law might achieve. The ends do not justify the means."Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Why do you fear something that has a record of not being dangerous?
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
The not-so-original poster (he of the strawman) countered by saying the guns used to be more expensive and less powerful. He went on to say that 200 years ago, no one could have imagined modern weapons of mass destruction. Then he said that we already abridge the right to "arms," and now we are just arguing about where draw the line. He actually didn't even address the argument of the even more original poster, but instead countered what he thought was the standard RKBA position.
His is a version of a common anti-2nd-Amendment argument that goes like this: 1) Nukes are "arms" in the context of the 2nd Amendment. 2) No one in his right mind thinks folks should have the right to bear nukes. 3) So the 2nd Amendment is no longer valid.
The strawman is in saying that 2nd Amendment supporters argue for private ownership of nukes. If you read a little history of the Constitution, you will find out that the framers probably meant infantry weapons that one person (or maybe a squad) could "bear." This would have been firearms, grenades, maybe small cannon, etc. It would not have included warships, for instance, which unlike nukes were known at the time. (Note that it is not enough to look up "arms" in the dictionary, because you must understand the context assumed by the authors of the amendment.)
This is too long...I'll cover your other points in a separate post.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Along that line, I suggest putting a no parking zone in front of every bank. That will ensure that bank robbers won't have a getaway car waiting there, and thus will stop bank robberies.
If you believe all that, I have this nice bridge up for sale on Ebay...
Criminals break laws. They will break gun laws too.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
This serves their interests. We have bullies in adult society too. They are in government, where they have our tax dollars and have the ability, and sometimes the legal right) to kill. They include corporations which can fire us, unethically crush competitors, and send the gov't thugs after us to lock us up or rob us of our assets using the intermediary of the courts. They include lawyers who aid in the above. They include media conglomerates who censor viewpoints they do not like - "step out of line" and we will make it so no one can hear you (*). They include marketers who have tricked us into our changing what we want into what they want us to want. This list goes on and on...
Bullies in school serve (unknowingly) the interests of the bullies in society. They "soften up" the kids and get them ready to take it for the rest of their lives.
(*) Regarding media censorship: Look at how Tavis Smiley got fired from Black Entertainment Television right after Viacom bought them up. Makes one wonder...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It quite obviously had everything to do with it's small size. If there had been 10,000 people at your school would have been like that? Not at all.
For those of you being harassed.. please read the whole thing. I know /. cuts off, but trust me.
Here's my rant about you "Christians".
There is no such thing as a "Christian" in Western churches. You have Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, Quakers, Puritans, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
And to be fair, there are not "Christians" in the Eastern churches; however, at least they are closer to the original Christian religion, and all identify themselves as Orthodox, with only ethnic lines causing distinctions.
They may share the same basic belief that Emmanuel (aka Jesus) was the spawn of the Deity, he did some amazing things (like turn a small set of code, err.. fish and bread out onto a cast of thousands and still received plenty to fill twelve baskets of waste and that trippy water-to-wine thing), was crucified by the Romans (NOT THE PHARISEES! They were so minor in 30 AD they were unimportant, and they were added in a later Gospel because the Pharisees had gained some power and authority by the time it was writen, in the 70's!) for spreading a message which was 'subversive', was buried in a tomb, and walked outta there three days hence. (That's what Easter's all about, for those of you who have been living on Mars and are unaware of this whole Christ-based religion.)
HOWEVER.. All the various churches have their own spin on things. The Orthodox and the Catholics have the most in common, but are completely different in history. (Example: Orthodoxy kept the Byzantine Empire together for a thousand years plus. Catholicism was the only tie that the feudal society of the West of Europe had with each other.) And unlike Western Europe, the former Byzantine Empire had scholarly debates on theosophy which were more accessible than the arcanum of Rome (At least all the people in the BE could undersand Greek, as opposed to the West where only clergy and the most highly educated knew Latin well enough to converse in it.) and had a small problem called the Ottomans to prevent and preclude fragmentation. (Religion, because it was culturalised (meaning: it was unified in spirit but fragmented in language (if the word is wrong, correct me!)), became the only force that kept community in an age where people were treated like cattle, bartered and sold and moved frfom place to place.)
The Western Christianity is, IMHO, such bullshit. You have fundamentalist bastards trying to anti-prove Darwin with the Bible, which is historically stupid because the first six chapters of Genesis are myth. ("Religion has no place within these walls, just like facts have no place within organized religion." --Supt. Chalmers) These fundamentalist folks are the real threat to America.
(I wonder what would happen if someone was to swap out all their churches' Bibles with copies of the Kama Sutra. Hey, It's a holy book!)
The there are the ones that at least try to interpret the bible, but in their own way. (Abortion, anyone?)
I hate it when people just call themselves "Christians" because, in all likelyhood, their religion does stuff which would be considered very un-Christian. Take missionaries for example. "The Bible says to spread the word." No, it says to show people your faith by doing it and living it. There are some basic tenets to Christianity.. like the rule of doing onto other as they would do to you. How would YOU feel if some native tribesman came to you to pitch your faith? Hmm??? Especially if they had the food and your sorry ass was starving.
Calling yourself a Christian is like calling yourself an American: it only gives an idea of what your deal is. It means much more to say you're from Manhattan, or Boston, or DC, or Chicago, or Denver, or LA, or SanFran. Your religion is not Christian, unless you are following the practices of the early Christian cultists which were very close to the mark. (Invite anyone to your home lately to break bread and share wine?)
And as far as the intellect deal.. I'm Greek Orthodox. In order to be a part of an Orthodox church, you need to learn the language spoken there, be it Greek, Serbian, Russian, Ethiopic, or Korean, to understand the service. I am a polyglot (I can converse in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Greek; I know a little German and can read Korean.) and am learning more languages to get the real deal on the religions of the world by reading their holy books in the native tongue. (Comparing the Torah to the Koran sounds like fun.)
I am in practice a mystic. I have eccentric proactices, like going without food for three days just to experience it. I believe that there is magic in the world... I know there's much more to reality than this (and the science backs me up; most of the stuff in the universe is so-called dark matter, which is FOIAP invisible [jk]), with things like the astral.
There are people who are dumbed by religion, true. And there are the dumb in religion. (Please note that fundamentalist religions carry these people en masse, regardless of which faith they are in.)
The only people who are really stupid are those who refuse exposure to other religions with the "My God Is better than Your God" argument. Bullshit. No one's deity is bigger, faster, stronger than anyone elses, because in the end religion is supposed to provide the framework for a morality which is supposed to RESPECT ALL PEOPLE, REGARDLESS OF THEIR BELIEFS.
Reading over my rant, I'm left to wonder, how does this relate to the problem of bullies?
I think it would be interesting for the larval-stage hacks (the real ones doing code and sharing knowledge wrather than the w4r3z d00dz and the skript kiddies) to call in the cops when they are abused by other students. I wish I had thought of that in school.. I was picked on from the time I was in kindergarten to midway through junior year. That sort of shit really screws with you.
The only reason, I think, that people stopped picking on me was that by junior year, I knew my way around the Internet well enough to have literally hundreds of pages of documents on how to build explosives or guns out of pens and Zippos etc. (Fortunately, this was in the pre-Columbine era. Now, a kid does that, he's expelled. Anytime i think of this, it freaks me out to think I may have been one of the first to call a school violence incident happening on such a grand scale..)
Most of the people hear talking about this probably feel as tied as I do recalling this drek.
It sucks to be the outsider.
But.. on the bright side, those of us who are extremely computer literate will have the last laugh at those godforsaken reunions.
Bully: "hey, I know you. I picked on you in school."
Me: "Yeah, well, that's in the past. What are you up to?"
Bully: "Uh.. well.. I'm a manager at a convenience store. And you?"
Me: "I'm CEO of a consulting firm. Clearing seven figures per annum."
Others around: They drop their conversations and swarm around me. (I went to a private HS and am *highly* doubtful anyone there will beat that within a few years. Success is the best revenge.)
For those of you who are being harassed, evidence is a Good Thing. If you team up with others being picked on, you could become part of the Camcorder Truth Jihad and put harassment on tape. That's what's called, in layman's terms, evidence.
La policia can be your friend. Last I checked, unless the bastard[s]/bitch[es] is a part of a gang or organized crime syndicate, the long arm of the law and a trip to Juvie (or County if they're older) isn't too appealing. (A criminal record will hold someone in sports from an athletic scholarship.)
They will screw with you unless and until you screw them harder. The cops are a force of sufficient size to scare most folks. (Especially if you have a friendly contact in the local police deparetment or the DA's. office..)
Also, please note that most bullies do so because of insecurity. Discern the ir triggers. If you can find out what their deal is, you have an element off control over them. Just don't do anything illegal.
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore, MD called Catonsville. There is a small church/ school in Catonsville called St. Timothy's Episcopal.
A hundred years or so ago, a young man named John Wilkes Booth was a pupil at St. Timothy's -- which was called St. Timothy's Hall Military Academy.
A few student pranksters at the Academy rounded up some of the headmaster's chickens, slew them, and positioned the gory remains where all could see. Needless to say, the headmaster was irked, and threatened to revoke the weekend privelages of all students if the conspirators refused to come forward (they never did).
In repsonse to the headmaster's threats, a group of Academy students (including Booth and one fellow who later became a Congressman) raided St. Timothy's Academy's armory, gathered rifles, marched out into the woods and formed what's now called a "defensive perimeter" in protest.
The headmaster gave in. No shots were fired, and the students got their way.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell
Insects and Grafitti Photos
Redundant comment, I know, but America truly is in a rut when all our Disinguished Gentlemen in the government can do is point at things and say "see? Look, that video game has a gun in it. Get rid of that thing!" What these social dunderheads can't seem to get through their skulls is that guns and violence are part of not only today's society, or American society, or recent history, but are indicative of the slaughter and power struggles dating back to cavemen, to the Roman Empire, to the Crusades, to Alexander's Conquering, to the Witch Trials, to the Third Reich, to Middle Eastern feminist oppresion, to minority oppresion here on our own goddamn country, to the Spanish Inquisition, to the Copernican Revolution, to the Communism vs. Democratic struggles, and back to Jerry Falwell talking about getting a children's television show off the air because one of the characters carries a purse!
Jesus H. Flynt! You're not going to solve problems that have been plaguing homo sapiens for all time by banning violence in video games. Good sound bite, bad idea Ashcroft. How about, next time you send your son, or grandson to school, let him know that its not kosher to laugh at the kid who likes Dungeons and Dragons today. How about you teach your kids, or grandkids, that in life sometimes individuality is wanted, is needed, and that good companies and great potential spouses look for intelligent people with insight, not a buffoon who plays right tackle well and gives good swirlies to the AV club!
A world with no power struggle is a fantasy, don't think that I envision that. But if there is one thing that I could teach every single person on earth, it would be respect. Respect my home, respect my right to dissent, repsect my right to like computers, respect the fact that I'll raise my kids the way I damn well please, respect my disdain for religion, respect the fact that I have an intelligent, researched reason why I hate religion, respect my wife, respect the fact that my son is smarter than yours, and I'll respect the fact that your son plays basketball extremely well (maybe I'll even buy tickets to go see him), respect all of these things and more, and I'll forgive any of your opposite opinions or questionable actions (but perhaps not without injecting my own thoughts into the mix).
I certainly think that our governing system is broken. Exactly how many of Slashdot's thousands of readers reasonably expect that they could be President? Be a U.S. Senator? Be the Speaker of the House? Dubya was born into his role just as the Kings of Medieval Europe were born into theirs. That definitely needs to change. We need soccer moms debating their thoughts on bills. We need the former mechanic deciding on defense spending. We need fucking computer literate people deciding on legislation like the DMCA. America needs all those things if it wants to quit deluding itself that our country still runs on the tenets founded upon by Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, John Adams, and many others.
I'll get down off the soapbox now, but only if someone else volunteers to pick it up, carry it down to the next street corner, set it down, and proceed to lecture the corner of 5th and Main St., and then someone else lectures all of Broadway St., then someone else lectures Times Square, then Tian'anmen Square, then 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and then Paris, England, Baghdad, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, until a form of government about the people, by the people, and for the people impeach George W. Bush and put someone there who actually cares about the people.
I'm pissed.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
Nice demonstration of how coincidence does not qualify as evidence. Sure video games look like they cause violence, but the actual causal element has not been demonstrated. There are hundreds or thousands of cases (like myself) of people who can play violent videogames for eighteen years running and never once go out and shoot someone in a fit, but evidence that does not support this thesis is discarded out-of-hand by the likes of Ashcroft. But take the logical structure of the "video games cause killers" and substitute cheese for videogames, as you have done, and the absurdity of the chain of reasoning becomes evident.
Others have repeatedly posted in this forum that we need more Christianity for our kids, and that the country is just plain goin' to hell in a handbasket, and that 40 years ago the biggest problem in school was chewing gum and talking in class. None of this is backed up by any real evidence either. As a parent yes I'm concerned that there appear to be more school shootings than ever before, but in reality I think the chances of my child being shot by another child are probably less their chances of being hit by the bus that picks them up to bring them home. We are probably more victims of media hype than anything else, and the best way to combat this is to reduce the rewards to the media for sensationalizing the crime by not tuning in for the news, and not buying the newspaper. I haven't done so in years, and frankly I haven't missed anything important.
>Maybe because the police force is for the most part reactive, not proactive?
So? What do you expect them to do? Walk two paces behind known villains till they do a crime?
>Think about it. It takes, on average, five to ten
>minutes for a police car to make it to a scene
>after a call comes in.
Cops have to be on the beat for 65 years (roughly) before coming across a crime in progress! In the modern world we have this technology called, wait for it, the MOTORCAR. You should try one sometime, they're much faster than walking. No, really, they're pretty good!
>Finally, a tale of two areas: crime went down in Texas after the concealed
>handgun permit went into effect. Crime in Australia skyrocketed after they started outlawing
>THEIR firearms.
Proves nothing. There were tax changes by the government both years. That may have triggered the crime spree! (Sure. Probably not... but nobody can prove that it didn't and it conceivably could have) Correlation only proves something if you do it enough times that the random variations cancel out. Twice is about 100x too few times to work something like this from that sort of data and its simply not provable if you have deliberately chosen the only examples that happen to 'prove' the point you were trying to prove and ignoring another huge set where your theory didn't work. Not that I'm accusing you of doing that but in 10 other cases in Outer Mongolia that was the case.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"In that case, if the law allows, I suggest you carry a fake gun. 90+% of the advantages, few of the disadvantages.
And no, I wasn't referring to Kellerman.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I SINCERELY hope you delivered a savage beating to your bully. It's the only thing they understand, and once you fight back, they leave you alone. Same thing happened to me, more or less.
Here's today's lesson in modern civilization:
1. Sometimes, violence IS a solution.
Human culture will never reach a place where that is not true.
Wow! That rules. Not that I like hunting personally, but that story speaks of a time when people were more personally responsible and conducted themselves better. Amazing how far we have fallen in some ways.
I wouldn't have necessarily compared the "gun culture" to the "psychedelic culture," but well said nonetheless.
I'm going to try and keep this from turning into a gun-nut rant, because I'm not a gun nut. However, I do believe in the 2nd amendment.
:)
Let's see... a well-reasoned, non-hostile response from someone who believes in the 2nd Amendment. Sorry buddy... you ARE a "gun nut" to anyone who disagrees with you. Welcome aboard. Glad to have you.
It's a shame you were taught not to fight back. I had to resolve a couple of schoolyard problems with fisticuffs, and it turned out the be the best possible solution. The problem went away, and I got a much-needed dose of self confidence.
Sucking up abuse in your young years doesn't make you a better person. It makes you an angry, vengeful person, perhaps a timid person... parents who train their kids to be victims are doing them a terrible disservice.
But what is it that you and other anachronistic people tend to believe that they have to defend themselves from?
When I was a kid, the folks that were my babysitters opened a convenience store in Los Angeles. They worked the night/early AM shift, and then took care of me during the day.
One day, my mom was driving me in to their place, and we heard a report on the radio news about how there was a holdup and shooting in the part of the city where their store was. And when we arrived at their home, we found that the husband had been injured and his wife had been killed. They cooperated with the robbers, too -- the guys were just animals and decided to shoot them up on the way out. The family had 2 daughters and a son, and they all lost their mom at an early age.
Could the police have done anything in this situation? Of course not. It happened too quickly. The fact is, when something like this happens all you have to rely on is yourself. And, as horrible as it may be to some people, sometimes your best option is to use force to defend yourself.
YOU may feel safe, but the world can be a dangerous place. If someone tries to rob a store, or a home, the victim has every right to defend themselves -- because even if you cooperate, you can get iced.
If my shopkeeper friends had been armed, maybe one of them wouldn't have been killed. I still think about that to this day, and I'm sure this was a formitive event in my young life.
I am sincerely glad that you feel safe. I hope you are, and I hope you never even come close to violent crime. But don't try to take away someone else's right to defend themselves. No matter what your view of the world is, I hope that you can at least agree that self-defense is a pretty fundamental human right. There's nothing anachronistic about that.
Don't second-guess yourself. You did the right thing. It was the only (reasonable) choice that could have freed you. Your bully learned a valuable lesson, and perhaps some humility. Trust me, you didn't scar him for life. But you did teach him not to fsck with you, and by extension, maybe he learned not to fsck with as many other people. Huzzah! Believe it or not, you did a great thing for yourself and society at large.
I'm not a violent person either. I haven't had to raise a hand to anyone since my last scuffle in high school, over a decade ago. But like they say... if someone has to start a fight with me, I'll make sure I finish it. To do otherwise is to cheat myself. We should all stand up for ourselves and refuse to live in fear.
Yes, thank you for that analysis.
It was kind of a two-sided statement. On the one hand I would be criticizing the NRA/Christian Right for being stubborn / untrusting, but I was also careful to criticize the Left for name-calling.
I could have also written "Not that gun control advocates aren't nazis, but that they are too unrealistic. Not that teachers' unions aren't self-interested socialists, but that calling them names doesn't allow them to trust the administration enough to concede their culpability." Then I would have gotten letters from other people.
At some point there will be a crisis real enough that we see the need to stop pointing fingers and come to love our children as parents, educators, law enforcement and entertainers alike. To me it's like being a toxic polluter: maybe if his child developed respiratory problems due to the sludge he put into his own drinking water, he would stop polluting because it was wrong, the bottom line be damned.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Density?
We have more cities with high density, but density is certainly not new. New York City, Boston, etc all had extremely dense populations at the turn of the century.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Now years later, when they are grown up, and go to work, say, in politics, what kind of solutions will they looks at? They sure as heck will not be inclined to blame the bullies, because for them, it was not a problem. After all they were on top, even if they were not the top bully. To do otherwise means they would have toi admit they were wrong.
It is interesting to speculate on their management style, although that crawls off into another topic.
In Any Case, because of the blind spot, they will tend to protect their own blindness.
Yes, shootings happened. But the root cause in the dangerous enviroment that the kids find themselve in. I do not blame them for wanting to strike back. In that enviroment, it is quite easy to go numb, to shut down the emotions that make you feel bad about different things. Toss in the psych drugs that make you feel like everything is alright, and it is just icing on the cake.
boom.
But the bullies will only blame the shooters, and never see how they caused it themselves. and so endangered innocent lives.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here (warning, it is a big, 4 MB, file) are some homicide rate statistics that suggest that you could safely live in many places in the US, although there are a few scary places also.
well hey here in Canada, lots of parents get about 2-3 years in prison for killing their own little kids. Their's just too many cases like that.
Kids usually get 20 years in prison, more recently a 12 year old kid got a life sentence for killing his siter or his neighbour. I don't remember the details.
For God's sake why make such a big deal when a few kids die from a school shooting?
The earth is already way too overpopulated as it is.
Besides 25 000 people die from polluted water every day, a lot more die because they don't have much to eat and no one says anything or tries to resolve that pollution problem.
It's also in the way administrators deal with it - but I can't talk about that now because I have a class to get to. Just something for you to think about...
I can't be karma whoring - I've already hit 50!
SIG: HUP
I don't agree that long summer breaks are useful for anything. Especially given the trends towards double-earner homes where children are increasingly less supervised or simply shuttled to care centers which deprive them of any of the real benefits of a summer vacation. I certainly don't think much of ultraregimented schooling to begin with, I thought my bias was pretty obvious (any and all lecture classes should be eligible for some sort of testing out). And I think a proper school environment would be nothing like being "locked in" anywhere.
One of my major complaints with most schools is age segregation. It's not useful. It stigmatizes brilliant students (or at least bores them) and it stresses the less apt. Given that most kids are average this isn't a huge problem, but it remains. Even worse is the notion that your friends have to be your own age. The segregation that occurs due to the notion that children should only socialize with other kids their age is a major handicap. Society has people of all ages in it and children seem to be increasingly losing interaction with that (maybe it's not the case, this is just my perception).
I do not have a signature
No. I am not proposing that school be a child's home, year-round. While I agree that there is a need to work on parents, I don't really think convincing more women to be stay-at-home moms while their children are young is a winning battle right now (and actually it's easy if the children are infants, but as soon as the kid can take care of itself the idea that parents should be there as much tends to slip). And if you think there is a strong movement for stay-at-home dads, then I'd also like to know what color you'd like your bridge. The simple fact is that most jobs require parents to be away from home-- something I think is fairly recent in human history.
I am proposing that school be much less separate from the rest of the world, less run by bells and regimentation, and less likely to consume a child's entire day. Parents have never before in history been such the singular focus of raising children-- except perhaps in farming communities, even there you see large extended families all sharing daily life. If you look at history, most children have spent their days interacting with plenty of adults besides their nuclear mom and dad. There is no precedent for this "raise your children in a nuclear family vacuum" notion and it is dangerous. If society wants these children to grow up to be members of society then society must take an active interest in children. We shouldn't be walling children off in schools all day and we shouldn't expect parents to take major economic hits at the same time in life when they need the money the most.
I do not have a signature
I thought that was the way to outrun gators?!?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I find it quite hard to swallow that the "lack of traditional Christian morals" is one of the root causes of school problems. Consider the following:
On the 7th of March, soon after the Santee school shooting, there was another school shoting, this time at a Roman Catholic High school. Clearly Christian morals didn't stop this person from committing an incredibly stupid action.
Even if we do buy into the myth that a Christian upbringing would eliminate the problems with todays youths, you're neglecting some basic facts. Namely, that America is an incredibly religious nation. According to a recent Gallup Poll 88% of Americans feel that religion is fairly to very important in their lives. Americans attend religious services at a far greater rate than many other western countries, such as Italy, Sweden or Great Britian; yet those countries have lower rates of violent crimes and societal problems.
Something I find quite interesting (but I can't recall where I read it), is that the majority of the school shootings (which are essentially public suicide attempts) take place in suburban settings. They aren't occuring in the inner city schools, places traditionally held to be full of crime.
Gun violence has been a problem throughout history. Violence among young people, and school violence in particular, is not really on the rise. The severity of school violence may be (as in, some of the shootings in the past several years have been real masscres, something that was more rare in the past) but the frequency of the incidents is not. It's just been picked up by the media and become a flash point for heated discussion.
The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (where I work) has data collected by the U.S. government and by private researchers. It's free and available to the public, and you can look at it and see (if you do the statistical analysis yourself) that this is the case. This includes the CDC data that the statistics in the article above come from. I'm not denying that this is a major problem, and one that should be addressed immediately and with a great deal of energy. I am getting tired, however, of reading about this is a new phenomenon. Every time that people say that this is a new phenomenon, they link it to other new phenomena like the Net and video games and too much cheese in one's diet.
Don't just swallow the sound bytes whole-- look into the sources and decide for yourself.
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One thing to remember is that these are children. They are acting out in natural ways. The reason the Internet and the media are blamed for problems in school is we want to blame someone, to say that bad behavior was learned from somewhere else. The fact seems to be that bullying, singling out different children, and forming cliques is natural behavior. It also seems natural to react with depression, becoming withdrawn, or making a decision to conform.
Why is it this way? Maybe there is a pressure to eliminate those with some sort of flaw. These "flawed" organisms compete for food and resources with the "unflawed" folks, so there may be a group pressure to isolate the strange elements and deny them social privileges. Perhaps even suicide is a natural reaction to this treatment by the group.
Even though we are influenced by biology, we are not determined by it. I think we need to recognize a real biological influence behind this cycle, and come up with rational and societal methods for combating it.
One of the problems is that this anti-biological tactic used to be in the realm of religion. In Christianity, the call was to "love one another, as God has loved you". The fact that many Christians did not practice this decree is a human flaw, not a flaw in the religion. Regardless, now that religion has taken a back seat in public life, we need some sort of shared civil code to replace it.
I don't want to go back to the days of religious intolerance, but we do need something that looks like religion, to help us care for each other a little better, something that we can share as Americans or Humans, regardless of race, creed, or religion
As for those who are currently going through this hell, they need to remember that this time in their life is temporary. There are those that appreciate them for who they are, and when they get out of school, they can move to a place where they are accepted. Suicide is permanent, and you can't take back murder, but, if you survive school, you'll be a better person for it.
Wow... you had an amazingly wonderful father.
My parents gave me the "these are the best days of your life" crap, and the "if you'd just act more normal, no one would pick on you" crap. My life started to get easier as soon as I stopped caring about my image, about dating, about what others thought in general.
The worst thing my parents ever told my is that in high school, I was to young to know real stress. I now am in college full time, working a full time job, and juggling a social life in between... it's nowhere near as stressful as high school was! There's no violence, geek bigotry, popularity contests, etc. to worry about.
If any geeky, rebellious, and/or non-conformist high-school students are out there and considering suicide -- take my advice, life gets way better after school. Don't listen to your parents bitching. Life only gets easier. Especially if you are intelligent, and go into a field like computer science, engineering, etc.
--Paladin
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
The digression about guns pointed out a beautifully predictable aspect of a lot of American citizens - this secret desire to be able to take the law into their own hands (or so I observe).
You're right - guns wouldn't be needed in a nicer society - personally, I feel we have it here in Canada. Guns are an easy target because they show up in the press so much more so than "somebody bludgeoned somebody else with a baseball bat." It also tends to illustrate that people get violent even over the issue of guns. This violent behaviour is at the root of American society.
Religion to me is a very personal subject. And I have come from small towns where my religious beliefs would have gotten me persecuted in a second by the majority of the townsfolk. I really got sick and tired of having this forced in my face everyday - especially with respect to government and public institutions. My government should have absolutely nothing to do with how I or others practice religion. I have nothing to do with how others practice their religion - I just think it should be removed in that sense.
I can really empathize with that Wiccan who committed suicide (although I'm not Wiccan) because of persecution - do the people of the USA remember why they came to the New World? Religious persecution.
I agree that the better culture needs to accomodate people who think differently - often cultures that are able to grow and adapt succeed. I have nothing wrong with diversity - just don't stick it in my face and tell me that I am wrong because I *shrugs* worship in the nude or on Saturdays, or don't at all.
This might get me modded down, but that's okay too - it happens.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
But what is it that you and other anachronistic people tend to believe that they have to defend themselves from?
I've never understood that "defense" (pardon the pun) for owning guns. I don't own a gun, and I feel perfectly safe walking through my neighbourhood, or other neighbourhoods.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Politicians like to blame video games and culture, because these things can be regulated and legislated. Bullies don't respond in quite the same way.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
The old saying goes something like, "If the mind can conceive and the heart can believe, the person can achieve." You've got to know what to do and believe that you can do it before you can make it happen.
Of course, if you'd told me about the leaps computer networks were making between the time I left Ohio in 1991 and moved to 'net-unaware Mississippi, when I didn't get access to the Internet until 1995 at my alma mater, I would have pestered my parents for the ability to stay connected in that four-year interregnum. Then I might have started writing about sports online a little bit earlier.
An interesting phenomenon...mod the parent of this comment up.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
Wisdom pre-Matrix. wow...
I still prefer this one...
"My kid got your Honor Roll student pregnant!"
1,0
ml
--Unix *is* user friendly.
It's just picky about who its friends are.
In typical fashion the administration looks for a solution in which military-style intervention will work.
It won't.
Until we can offer young people high quality mental-health treatment for their concerns we'll find more and more sinking into depression and despair.
I believe that our culture is a violent one and that the images in Doom and Marathon where violence is consequence-free matches that of our film world where its easy to see the whole-sale slaughter of thousands with no consequences at all for the person who caused it.
It's a pervasive message in our society.
Given this background, is it any wonder that young angry adolescents strike out in ways that are so destructive? They have been de-sensitized to violence! And it's not going to change soon.
So what we have to offer are ways for these deeply confused and possibly damaged young people to express what they are feeling and work through the terribly hurtful places so they can stand the social pressures (which are profound) without losing contact with the social fabric of society.
Guess what?
This is expensive. So is treating the drug problem at the demand side instead of the supply side.
We can't see that what we have are sick people who need to be cured...because you can't BLAME them if they are sick and you can't send in the police. Instead you have to treat them as individuals and cure them, one person at a time, person to person.
It's the only way we know, right now, that is proven to work.
Gun violence in our nation's schools is a serious problem. So, I recommend we stick to discussing the impractical solutions. That way when people ignore us and the problem doesn't go away, we can claim to have known better all along.
Can I get an "amen?"
Personally, I doubt it. I really do. Teasing, bullying and ostracism are not in any way new trends among children, or adults for that matter. Anthropological studies of societies which are effectively stone-aged have indicated that these, like sex drive and hunger, are human universals. Children are cruel. They make fun of each other. They will physically bully each other, and emotionally torment each other. And they grow up.
I know alot of kids who got bullied. Badly. I've worked with some on a therapy basis. They dealt. They grew up. They never killed anyone, including themselves, and most of them are now highly motivated geeks who work very hard to obtain a high standard of living. I know children, 16 and 17 now, who have been subjected to years of being a child, just like the children who Mr. Katz is discussing, and who similarly are growing up,a nd are dealing. These are also children who've played Doom. Children who've seen Terminator. They're grown up with the same society, and yet, they've actually grown up.
I am querying the assumption that the only thing society could teach is violence to others. Is it possible that the (truly disturbing) rise in suicide rates among under-16's might be due not to children being bullied more, which I seriously doubt is the case, but in fact to society accepting and presenting suicide in a way it has never done before? Suicide as an option for 'dealing', being perceived as a way to deal, enjoys a status it has never enjoyed before.
I do not take suicide lightly. Suicide is not a new thing, and I'm not trying to claim that it is. It's a very serious, deeply distressing thing. But modern society treats it differently than society in the past. In the past, suicide was one of two things; it was either honourable, in the sense of saving others from shame on your behalf (rare) or it was deeply dishonourable as it constituted the ultimate admission that you were not strong enough for life as an adult.
That was the past. This is the present. Nowadays, suicide is viewed and presented as something that happens. It is 'understood'; it is a 'cry for help'; it's 'attention-seeking'.
Attention-seeking! We're talking about someone trying to take their own life, for goodness sake. Any society in which suicide has become so much a part of everyday life that children will consider attempting to take their own life as a gesture has made suicide far too easy an option on the individual. It has lowered the shame barrier, which ultimately is the only thing which keeps the human animal within bounds of socially acceptable behaviour, so far that the act is considered near-trivial.
Hypothetically, then, if (as I would argue) the premise that children have become fundamentally more unpleasant is untenable, what might be transmitting society's inured attitude to suicide into an advanced death rate for minors?
Why do people kill themselves? Be it loneliness or pressure or depression or spite, ultimately, it all comes back to one thing. Despair. It comes back to the point where one's image of oneself and of one's own worth is in deficit compared to the effort and strength required to continue being. So maybe the problem, then, is in that image? That sense of one's own worth?
What's changed, perhaps, is that children are no longer being taught about strength of will, about persistance, about self-confidence. Children are not being supported, given strong self-image. They are not being given the tools required to survive life. Life is hard. Life is nasty. People are nasty, and that is the way it's always been. If, however, you're not taught how to cope, not given something to cling to (be it religion, science, self-image, money, whateverthehell) then coping with Life can be made exponentially more difficult. And it is a famous refrain of the social reformers in these days the The Family Group is Dying, and Parents Aren't Helping Enough, and Teachers Need More Respect, and so on. All these things are true, and not true. Many parents are teaching their children what those children need in terms of self-worth and positive reinforcement, and discipline (at least as important). Many teachers are dedicated to their vocation of helping children grow into erudite adults. But, many aren't. And society has created a culture for children in which adolescence can start at 7 and go on till 25... It's bad enough when it used to last three years, 18 is ridiculous!
Attempting to imply that children now are more nasty than children fifty years ago is just not a sensible suggestion. Suggesting that parents now are not, on average, doing as good a job of giving their children the tools to survive life, due to societal change, working habits, etc, strikes me as much more plausible.
So, Mr. Katz, in answer to your postulate, I do not believe that kids are turning other kids into killers. I believe that society is turning kids into victims.
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
i don't find it to be a badge of honor. it's simply a fact. and of course i'd be different now if i didn't grow up with it. i can't say i'd be BETTER, though. my depression turned out to be traumatic rather than clinical, but the doctors didn't know that at the time and diagnosed me as clinical.
therefore, if i had been given drugs, there are any number of incredibly bad side effects or other problems that could have occurred. and since children's brain chemistry changes more drastically than adults when they are between the ages of 5 - 16, there are scads of other ethical issues that arise from using adult-tested drugs on children.
you might very well be right, but a two parent loving family can't always exist. i had a single parent loving family. my parent was VERY dedicated to me...but resources were limited.
i was a senior when the movie "Heathers" came out. it acted out a fantasy i had had all along - blow up my whole damn school. why the whole school? because there's no torture like being ignored by all your peers - literally an *entire school* - for months. why? because there were rumors that i was gay.
my parent couldn't help me with that kind of torment. school was a requirement, and a single parent cannot home school their child. i had little choice. if i were inclined to be more physical with my anger, i *might* have killed. i consider myself lucky that i wasn't. i did flirt with thoughts of suicide instead...once again, i consider myself lucky that i didn't do it.
but i certainly thought about both options. i would have been a saint not to.
i was one. it still doesn't change my mind.
The difference is that no one reveres life in this age. We make abortion easy and now that RU-486 is available, even easier. Physician assisted suicide, formerly unheard of, is now available in Oregon (I'm not sure where else...) Our heroes are Arnold Schwatzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The coolest games are Quake and Unreal (among many others). Television cops draw their guns at least once per episode (ask a real police officer when the last time he/she actually drew his/her weapon was - yes, there are shootings, but on a per/officer basis, it is rare)
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize why when the same bullies act the same way they always have, the new solution is to kill. You reap what you sow.
"Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly"
A little personal anecdote: Like a bunch of other users I've read on here, I went through the same crap. Junior high and high school are thankfully now a long, awful, blur. A few random instances spring to mind, particularly with bullies. Few friends, all the assorted things that go along with it. I always had violence on the mind and it made me a very angry, very unhappy person. I had a bad bout with depression my sophomore year of high school, and thankfully my parents recognized it and forced me into some therapy. It made all the difference in the world. He said to me that he firmly believed that 99% of the population ought to be in therapy. Should any parents read this, I would absolutely urge you to consider it. You do not have to be crazy to go into therapy. Really. I grew out of it. The problem was, I was a new person stuck in the old environment with the old relationships. Then I got to go off to college. Firstly, I'm a big believer in gut feelings. When choosing a school, the environment has to be right. You'll know it when you see it. There's nothing like a change of environment. Upstate New York is also a hell of an attitude change. I'm now the happiest person I can ever remember being. I like my classes, I love my school, I love meeting people, dance, art, and other things I never would have considered. Not a total change, I still love punk music and computers. I'm still a geek, to be sure. The point is that yes, it does get better. If I can do it, I do feel that most people can. Put yourself somewhere that you want to be, surround yourself with people that you want to be with, to whatever extent possible. I'm not suggesting to change yourself, because two years ago I wouldn't have listened. I'm suggesting that you let yourself be open to change. It takes time to be secure in your own personality. It takes some soul-searching, too. I've made a distinct effort to not hate anything anymore. Removing it from one's vocabulary does wonders. Oh, and I read some users that suggested fighting back as the solution. I could never do it. I tried several different types of martial arts but could never stick with it. It took me a long time to figure out why. I can't stand violence. It wasn't the thought of what people would do to me, it's what I would do to someone else, the things that they were teaching me. The thought of violence makes me sick physically. Now, I'm not saying that it isn't a solution. I'm saying that fighting is not the solution for everyone. Weigh out the pros and cons and decide for yourself. And note that I *do* play Counter-Strike :).
No matter how bad it gets, never forget that you are loved. I lost sight of it for a while. You are a special person, you have your own story, and you can contribute things that nobody else can. And, in case this massive outpouring from the Slashdot community hasn't convinced you of it, you are not alone.
-Justin
OK, let's run down the numbers:
1. kid vs kid violence - at an all time low. Caveat: US culture encourages the use of military style firearms and glorifies same. Hence, individual actions have higher bodycounts. But fewer die than in prior years, it's just reported nationwide now.
2. main cause of Columbine-style killings: jocks and cheerleaders teasing geeks and outcasts. Nothing is ever done about this - teachers always support the dominant social order, even those the jocks and cheerleaders will grow up to be destructive members of society, wasting resources and creating nothing of lasting value.
3. main result of zero tolerance - geeks and outcasts are further pressured - result is more incidents.
4. main result of media national reportage of such incidents - more shootings as other kids realize they too can emulate the Way of the Gun.
5. main result of media coverage - more NRA actions encourage more kids to use more guns.
6. main result of games - zip. zero. zilch. it's been a red herring for centuries, get over it.
7. main result of reading a "story" by Jon - brain rot and belief that untruths are real and geeks are the ubermensch of the new millenium, even though we're just people who need to party but now can't even buy E without doing 20 years in the pen.
This is your brain. This is your brain after reading Jon. Any questions?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
It's true, adolescents can be some of the cruelest people in the world. An article on the 'Columbine effect' in TIME said that one of the California shooters had his shoes stolen by bullies!
Think about that for a minute.
Can you imagine if your colleagues in your workplace held you down and stole your footwear? Would people be so surprised if you returned with a gun?
But, that's only part of the problem. Bullies were just as mean 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. Guns were arguably just as available. So, maybe kids hadn't seen so many Terminator movies, or played as much Doom. Maybe their parents were at home more. Most likely, the idea never occurred to them, or they didn't think they could actually pull it off. Columbine changed that forever. To solve the problem now, we need to address every single one of the causes, and make some serious changes, or it's not going to stop.
No, most of the shootings aren't in the upper middle class schools -- those are just the ones that get all the media coverage. I guess the media don't think one poor black kid shooting another is worth reporting. Or maybe it's that if someone tried to pull a Columbine in a Detroit public school, half the teachers and students would be shooting back!
I think a lot more accurate target is the "self esteem" movement, that is, education schools teaching the teachers to try to make the kids feel good about themselves by praising them for crappy work. Of course, the kids see right through that.
The second part of this is an often repeated untruth -- that low self esteem causes violence. Someone finally did some research on this. Actually, violent criminals think very highly of themselves, without any real accomplishments to support their self-esteem. So when they think their inflated self-opinion is challenged, they explode into violence.
Both people with low self-esteem and people with solidly-founded high self esteem are unlikely to resort to violence. (Makes sense: the first group suspects they'd lose the fight, and the second know better ways to handle problems.)
A teacher could try to handle low self-esteem by teaching the kid to do work he or she could really be proud of. (I know my father did, many times. But that was in college, not at a public school.) But most of the so-called teachers can barely teach, so instead they praise crappy work. And some kids put enough belief in the praise that they are walking around thinking they are really great, but aware other people may not agree -- so they'll shoot if you look at them wrong...
Nah, I can't stand the food. ;) Besides, they might shoot me. Seriously, what you really need here is statistics -- the reported murder rate, official executions, and other sudden deaths. I would love to see trustworthy statistics from China -- but I don't expect their government to compile them without bias, and I don't see how anyone else could... What I do know is the record of the Nazis part of the record of the Soviets, and an order of magnitude estimate of the deaths under Mao in China. And in each of those countries, at least ten million died by the actions of their own gov't in a few years. Far fewer Americans died violently in the whole 20th century.
I'm a highschool junior, and I've been teased for who knows how long. I'm not a strong girl, I break down a lot. I have been taught to hate, and I do hate the people who choose to tease me. I could very well yell at them, scream at them, and maybe even hit them, but to what extent will it take to push me over the edge? I can't imagine wanting to kill anyone, even if they have tortured me for years. It does make me wonder what these children have gone through that makes them so unhappy. All the school shooters have made it clear that they have been made fun of and teased.
But can it be entirely blamed on the students? The peers? No, it can't. Where are the parents? How can they live with someone and not realize how unhappy their children are? And if they realize that they're unhappy, how can they sit there and do nothing about? When I'm a mother, I will not let my children go through such pain and torment. That's just added stress on a child's life, the fact that the parents don't care enough to help... It would kill me.
I'm thought of killing myself before. And it was not just my peers that made me want to die, it was very much my parents. So, it's not entirely the kids in school. It's the parents.
These days it's very dangerous for parents to not talk to their children. We, as the children, are the future, and you, as the parents, are helping to raise us, to make the world a certain way as we grow up and take over. Parents need to make an effort or the world will be chaos and violence. Parents are the outcome of the way you grow up. If they're there for you, care for you, you grow up a respectful, independent person. If your parents are negligent, you grow up a cold, uncaring person. If the parents take the time and the effort to be there for their children, we will grow up good, and the shootings will be lessened. That's the truth. Parents need to be more involved.
It's frightening to go to school these days, with all these shootings happening. It's sad that these are supposed to be the best days of our lives.
It's easier to blame something intangible and large than it is to blame the parents who raise them that way.
I agree with you that probably the best solution to this problem would be if people were better parents, but I don't think that it has anything to do with whether it is a two parent family or not. Lots of families are split up not because of issues like divorce, but by tragedy. What do you suggest should happen in a case where a car accident or an illness kills one parent early on? Should the surviving parent go out and find a 'replacement' for the sole purpose of giving the kids a good home environment? I think that would end up causing more problems. I think the issue is not the family structure. It doesn't matter whether there are one, two, or three primary care givers, what race they are, what religion, etc. What matters is that they love their kids, take good cre of them, and wish the best for them. For instance, I am sure many kids are raised primarily by loving older siblings, uncles, grandparents, etc, and live in a very healthy home environment; while many others are raised by their biological parents and deal with issues like abuse. People shouldn't raise kids for the 'fun' of it. They should only raise them if they are willing to commit the rest of their lives to their children, and be less selfish about spending their time and resources on the child's happiness (within reason) and well-being.
I just started reading \. right when the "hellmouth" series ended here.
I've seen only a few other posts from high school teachers, so I'll respond to a few points here.
I love teaching high school computer science. It simply rocks. The AP Program stays current and relevant. (dumping C++ in favor of Java) It's unfortunate that there are too many high school students who don't get to experience any kind of real computer training until they graduate. I wish that it was a requirement to take more computer classes in high school in the US.
There is too much bullying going on in the classroom.
Why? I get stuffed with forty students in a classroom when I directly asked my administrators NOT to put anymore students in. My lab only holds 25 students comfortably. It is too damn difficult to keep track of those students.
This leads to the 'warehousing' feeling that most students get. I agree. As a public high school teacher, I always feel like I don't get enough time to talk to each student everyday, to check up on them.
So in many cases it's difficult to find out who started what, who threw the first punch, etc.... Adminstrators and teachers go on very little information.
The school violence will continue to occur.
IMHO, and my six years teaching in the public school system in Arizona, school violence occurs because:
1. Overcrowded classrooms. There have been many studies that indicate that the optimal classroom size is no more than roughly 22 students (I can dig out research if you'd like)
2. Low teacher salaries -- which result in adminstrators hiring whoever has a pulse. These people don't have real training to counsel students, nevermind actually know the curriculum or how to teach it.
3. Underpaid, overworked school counselors, who wind up just having enough time to do schedule changes. I asked our counselors what they really thought their job involved when they were hired: Advising students on careers, getting to know what students need in schools, taking care of emotional problems, listening etc....
I HATE bullying, and one of the reasons I wanted to be a teacher was to make the classroom a safe learning enviroment, but damn is it difficult.
What can you do about it:
1. stop bitching about it. 2. don't blame violent video games, movies, britney spears, etc... 3. Promise that you'll be involved with your kids life until they are 18. (if you want the extra BMW, don't have kids etc) 4. VOTE for your local legislator that supports REAL reform. I want to hear administrators say (Damn we have 10000 people applying for 100 jobs, we have to take the cream of the crop.) 5. Do whatever you can in your local government to make sure that QUALITY teachers get into the classroom, and that class size stays down.
Well enough rant for now....
Columbine and countless other school shootings if these kids parents would take a bit of responsibility and actually be parents to their children.
Today's parents are content to ship their children off to so called "daycare centers" which are nothing more than holding pens to get rid of kids while the parents are off selfishly furthering their careers. We're treating our children like cattle while we go about climbing the corporate ladder so we can afford that shiny new Beamer. Is that really more important than the wellbeing of our nation's future.
Another thing that bothers me is the lack of traditional Christian morals that are being instilled in today's youth. You never hear about a Reverand's son or a child of a devoutly religious family shooting up a school. It seems like today's family's would rather watch WWF Smackdown than enrich themselves with the wholesome teachings of Jesus Christ.
Neither peer pressure, video games, or violent movies will have any negative affect on children if they are taught how to properly deal with such situations. Children need to be taught the difference between fantasy and reality.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
He thought a moment, then: "Well, consider who is saying that; former football players, former cheerleaders. For the most part, after high school, they have nothing. All their time is spent trying to recover their former glory, and of course it becomes more glorious in memory with each year. They did nothing in high school that will allow them to grow and enrich their lives now, and they probably can't even understand that this is not the case for other people. So the football player remembers his victories as he works a dead-end job and gets fat and shapeless, and the cheerleader who married him remembers how pretty she was, as she spends more and more on cosmetics, surgery, and babysitters, trying to remain 18 forever. And life for them sucks. For them, high school was the best years of their lives, and it's imperative that they, and everyone they know, maintain that belief."
He was also the football coach, albeit a good one. He made sure the quarterback got into college on a math scholarship, NOT a sports scholarship. And yes, the team had a winning record.
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
The fact of the matter is that, whatever course of action is decided upon to try and resolve these issues, it is ridiculous to expect children to "think of themselves as a cohesive group" and "[resist] against the curtailment of everyone's rights." They're children after all.
They're in school for more than rote learning, they're there also to learn how to be a social human being. It is a difficult fact to accept, but children are cruel, and everyone has to deal with that at least once in their early life. This has always been the case in every school in the world, throughout history. Taking that as a steady-state condition, then, the reason, I think, that we have seen a proliferation of juvenile violence in the last several years, is the degradation of the home life. If parents would simply instill better values in their children, which is their job as parents, then this would not be happening. It used to be that children had enough morals and values that anything like this would not have happened, if for no other reason than that they would not want to disappoint their parents. That's no longer the case, and we are seeing the results of that every time we turn on the news to hear about another school shooting.
Trying to blame things like games and the internet is short-sighted, realistically stupid, the wrong idea, but it is politically smart. We all need to remember that politicians are rarely interested in long term solutions, but the quick solutions that will give results during their terms in office. That's part of their job description. At any rate, that's my nickel's worth.
--FatTony
200 years ago it took a full minute to reload one round. Very tedious (I know, I used to do alot of muzzl-loading target shooting comptetition).
200 years ago a pistol was so inaccurate that it was next to useless. In comparison, it would be hard to sneak a 5 foot long flintlock rifle into your schoolroom unnoticed.
I don't know the exact stats, but I'd bet that cheap automatic weapons have only been available to kids on a large scale recently. If all a kid had was an old revolver, it seems that he'd be less tempted to try to mow down his classmates with it.
Thanks for posting this essay. This is what I have been saying all along. All the people who are in positions to make changes or simply encourage changes do nothing and turn away from the REAL issues. To often they go for the more 'glitzy' issues then the ones that are the true issues.
Why is it that if a bully attacks someone in school, he might get scolded, detention or even *gasp* some sort of in-school suspension, When if this happened in the Real World(tm), he would be in jail? Schools have too much of a tendancy to look the other way in situations like that.
Students who are caught with some pot get expelled, but those who harass someone to the point where they kill themselves have never gotten more than a slap on the wrist.
It all comes down to basic animal psychology.
/. readers as well) have
You kick a dog often enough, it will either
crumble mentally, or turn on you.
I (and I am sure other
gone through the same thing to varied degrees.
You entertain thoughts at a certain stage of
retalating, then, if the stress is bad enough...
you act. I got to the point of being 3 seconds
away from knifing a 6'4 18-year-old bully in
my high school days...but thank god the principle
was one of those that cared and put an end to that
kind of BS real quick.
We need school admins with a clue. Plain and simple.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
"A child's character education should take priority over his academic education. All educational efforts are basically meaningless unless build on the solid foundation of good character" --Menachem Mendel Schneerson The Lubavitcher Rebbe
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I applaud the kid with the ingenuity to kill others after he has killed himself.
pooptruck
Of course Ashcroft doesn't want to acknowledge this fact. This would bring down his entire religious belief system. Anybody who can kill others after they have killed themselves would be stepping on God's toes ... unless they were aligned with Satan, in such case the ethic of violence would make sense.
It's a common mistake, most likely a typ-o, should have been than instead of then. But it sure does conjure up a funny image of ghosts wandering through the halls with shotguns.
Now that I have kids, I want to make a "Proud Parent of Another Brick in the Wall" bumper sticker, with two walking red hammers to one side. ROTFLMAO!!! Let me know if you make them, I want one!
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Many people drive drunk and survive, yet when someone gets in an accident while drunk we attribute that to the alcohol. This doesn't mean that everyone who drinks will crash, just that drunks are more likely to.
Similarly, not every bullied teen turns killer, but when a teen turns killer we can attribute that partly to the bullying. It's not the only cause, but it's silly to deny that it is a cause.
Density?
Right...high density....like Littleton?
As was mentioned elsewhere, high density areas have been around for a much longer time than the school shootings.
Maybe I'm stupid and Canadian, but in an urban population with a decent sized police force, there should be no good reason for people to have to carry around weapons.
Damn I wish I were you. To have that much faith in your govt. Wow.
The reason American's, when setting up their own government, decided to let every law-abiding citizen carry a gun was simple. And it had nothing to do with bears or hunting.
The question is often raised: " Who polices the police? " The answer is every citizen.
The founders of the United States realized that in a normal, everyday world, police will behave in a manner that to them seems just. Laws will be enough to keep everyone, including the police, in line. The problem comes in times of chaos. These times can be long, like the LA riots after the Rodney King beating, or short, like the beating itself.
It is times like this, when police are either the problem themselves, or cannot help each citizen, that the citizens must be able to help themselves.
Yes, I live in a country where a co-worker could go nuts, go home and get his gun(s), and come back and kill everyone. The chance is remote, but it could happen. This is a trade off, however, that I am willing to make. I understand the risk, and would rather live in a country where if the shit hits the fan, I can defend myself, instead of being dependent on the gov't for protection.
Well, let's see...
:). I think perhaps today people who would have otherwise slit their wrists or just thrown a punch have picked up the school shooting fad. If I'm right, I think things will probably die down in a couple of years if we don't overreact and clamp down even further on the kids.
You say that guns are far more "difficult" to get today, but I have to wonder if that's entirely true. Yes, there are more laws regulating possesion of guns, but guns are also cheaper and in wider availability than, say, 50 years ago. In fact, in a small town it would be extremely difficult to acquire a gun without half the town knowing before long, as the person selling the gun is likely to know everybody within a few square miles.
I think anonymity is more of a problem in this matter than anything else. It's easy to acquire a weapon without anyone noticing today, whether via legal means or the black market. As far as I understand, matters such as those Katz refers to would have been dealt with during a fistfight after school, or whatever they did back then
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-Omar
Drat: I finally found the link after I posted. Here's the link to CBC National's special on bullying
The founders of the United States realized that in a normal, everyday world, police will behave in a manner that to them seems just. Laws will be enough to keep everyone, including the police, in line. The problem comes in times of chaos. These times can be long, like the LA riots after the Rodney King beating, or short, like the beating itself.
It is times like this, when police are either the problem themselves, or cannot help each citizen, that the citizens must be able to help themselves.
So Rodney King would have been better off if he had a gun? Be able to "defend himself from the man?". No, Rodney would be DEAD. The only way Rodney could have held power over his own government was with a portable nuclear device...
As much as this "arming the citizenry to defend against the government" gets quoted, it's not like it's been tested much as a theory. The thing is, is it really needed? Democracy ALONE seems to work well at correcting itself once it's stable, and you don't need to arm your citizenry to the teeth to defend it.
An aside here... There are more unstable fledgling democracies, Africa and Eastern Europe come to mind. Eastern Europe, though going through a hard time, seems to be coming along fine. Some states in Africa had had real problems starting democracy, but that appears to be because their citizenry is armed. It's more of an external force. Feel free to pick me apart on this item...
If government sucks VOTE THEM OUT. I know for you it's 4 years, and that's too long. Maybe think about changing your system so that if something is VERY wrong you can kick out your government. Most parlimentary democracies (sorry, my only frame of reference) can allow you to ditch a government in a single non-confidence vote. Sure, you can have more frequent elections, but in a near 50-50 split like your last election, the government would be so unstable it would either have to co-operate (or more likely) collapse after several months.
I'm disturbed how Americans defend their right to self government with guns, and then so few of them actually vote when the time comes. And when they do vote, they don't take enough care of their voting system to be able to handle exceptional situations (like vote count accuracy within, say, 50,000 votes!!!). Democracy is something to be cherished an nurtured.
Sorry, I don't mean to flame the whole country. The US has done some amazing things, and is damn high on the list of places to live in the world. And Canada has its fair share of problems too, they just generally don't involve things blowing up or killing people. It's just every once in a while we see things up from up here that scare us. Perhaps America needs to be able to take a little constructive criticism instead of telling everyone else to bugger off.
Just as a point, not all coaches are bad, I was in track and cross country, and I had the best, fairest, most inspirational coaches you could imagine. Now realize I was the worst on the team...
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
JonKatz wrote:
The problem is after the kids kill themselves, it is their unstopable lust for life that makes them go on killing sprees.
If I carry a pistol, hey, better get an UZI in case someone comes up to me with a desert eagle or some such thing.
That's crazy, and not even us gun-nuts argue it that way. Even in states where you can legally carry a concealed weapon with ease, no one's carrying around rifles and other forms of extreme firepower.
If someone takes after you with a BIG gun, even a SMALL gun is enough to defend yourself. Carrying a big gun doesn't make you tougher.
If you are really getting at "why do we need to have the right to own black, scary-looking rifles?" then that is another topic for another post.
Are we all sure that this phenomenon of children going berserk is recent?
Everyone seems to assume so, but I'm not to sure...
How many small town news stories like that would have spread far enough for you to hear about them back in 1900 or even in 1950? Not many...Most people only knew about things that happened in their small towns, particularly before the widespread use of telephones.
Now information is spread instanteously; I can fidn out about the latest school shooting within an hour of it happening. In 1950, you *might* hear about it the next day, you might not ever hear about it.
To say that we know what the cause of these things are, is to reduce an extremely complex problem down to an absurd solution. It could be guns, it could be bullying, but I don't think those are the answers. John's essay indicates that many of these people (I would guess this holds for similar past crimes) are mentally disturbed/ill.
The problem seems to me to lie in the parents, teachers, and friends who might realize that their son/daughter/student/friend is having problems and doesn't step in to help. It is a failure of that person's support network. There is one obvious solution to this problem:
Pay attention to the people around you and talk to them if you think they are having problems; counsel them; help them. If you don't help them, who will?
.
BTW, the lameness filter sucks, repetition of a few characters can cause a filter, but the trolls seem to get by just fine.
How come when a kid kills people he usually gets sentenced for life in an adult prison? On the other hand if an adult kills a kid, well he usually gets nothing more than a few years in prison.
Talk about double standards.
I agree. The children I see in my neighborhood who cause the most trouble are the same ones whose parents are least interested in actual parenting. Parenting includes more than taking your kids to activities or buying them toys. It is about communicating real values.
I also think our school system is a massive failure. Someone else on this thread suggested that we not extend the school year into the summer, but ban school entirely. I disagree. I think that school should be year-round. These days, kids who have the summer off are completely on their own after about age 10. Those kids who aren't own their own are doomed to a day in a daycare, which is a stultifyingly structured unproductive environment.
But on that same note, past sixth grade, no kids should be in school for more than four hours a day. They should be working at internships and part time jobs... and not fscking fast food, but assisting in adding value to the world and learning to do something (or a variety of somethings) useful at the same time. This should be part of their educational experience and not additive as it is now. It should be coordinated and fairly compulsory. They should be treated with respect and given real responsibilities. Sure, there is still room for activities like sports and debate teams, and all that. But get a kid with a math bent a job in an actuarial firm or a bank or a science lab, and she'll never be stuck in a room with 29 other kids whose primary question is "what good is this junk?" Also, this gives kids an honest chance to see what jobs and work are like.
Further bonus: one of the frequent arguments against homeschooling is the supposed lack of social skill practice. Well, what kind of social skill practice is it to sit in a room of 30 kids listening to some adult drone? How to learn to actually interact in a civilized manner when you're surrounded by other children? School is missing some major lessons that life has to offer and serves to do little more than keep most kids age 12-21 in a kind of social holding tank.
I do not have a signature
It has to be a complete culture change - from that of a typically violent, religious-based, keeping-up-with-the-Jones' culture to one where individuality is respected. And that is not likely going to happen in the near future.
The solution to foot-in-mouth disease is to not have any foot-in-mouth disease. Read: get rid of the guns. I know that won't help the poor individuals who will take their own lives or come up with more inventive means of striking out, but it might slow things down. Seriously, what the f*ck does a person need a gun for anyway?
Drop the religious aspect of your society back to the individual's beliefs. Don't ever allow it to creep back into politics or society as a whole. I've been to engineering meetings in the USA where problems encountered in designs were met with a "prayer" session. Sheesh - why don't we just sacrifice a goat or virgin or two to Baal to help our sales team.
Keeping-up-with-the-Jones' is going to be a real tricky thing - this is the result of feedback from a capitalist society - more money tends to breed more money, and a drive to get what is perceived to be better and better things. Some people will be able to afford the "bestest" things (generally the goal of all), most people will be able to afford the "next-to-bestest/acceptable" things, and unfortunately, there are a lot of people who never will - they get left out. I don't know how to counter this one.
Perhaps as the boomers die out, we can influence our children to respect each other's individuality a bit more. Cycles like this occur to counter the previous generation - we just have to wait for the prevaiing group to die for the other extremists to take over.
Oh well, that's all I got's to say - let's see what fallout comes from this...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
You know, I've come to the decision after working with high school kids that it's a fad. What do I mean by that?
Kids do things to get attention: from their peers, from their parents, from those in authority. That's why kids act out, and that's why kids have interesting modes of dress. That's why kids push for "innovative" music--because it pushes the envelope.
This nature--probing the envelope--is key to understanding this phenomenon. Kids are going to push the envelope: consider bedtime. "Mom, can I stay up 'til 10?" If that works, you push for later and later. If it doesn't, 9:30 is your next offer. Kids push, push, push, until they find the limit.
A loving parent sets those limits. It can really hurt to do that. Hell, it hurts me as a twenty-something working with kids to set those limits on kids for things that adults would do with no recourse [such as alcohol consumption, etc.]. It bothers the snot out of me to tell kids not to drink at their age when I am just 4-10 years older [depending on what age group I'm working with at the time] and can drink most folks I know under the table.
Unfortunately, some parents, rather than set limits, become uninvolved in their kids' lives. Becoming uninvolved is a process--because kids want their parents to be involved, for the most part. Yeah, even at the teen ages, they still want some parental involvement, though they only want it on their terms. The kids keep reaching out for things that aren't there--loving parents who want to know what's going on. And considering that brain development is still going on at that age, they can contemplate things from a whole new perspective without good parental supervision: hence, the idea to go out and take a lot of people out with you.
I contemplated and nearly did commit suicide just five years ago. But while I was at a residential high school where taking out a few of my peers would have gotten me a shitload of publicity, and I did have access to guns, including one of my own, when I was suicidal and wanted attention, I never thought of doing something like killing my peers. But now that a couple deranged people have done it, it now becomes plausible and has mindshare. The "early adopters" have created a market for killing.
I'm sure there are a ton of posts about how kids picking on kids are nothing new. Sure wasn't when my parents were growing up, sure wasn't as I was growing up. That's true. What's different is that there are new methods of acting out in the social conscious. Wonder why teen smoking and drug use is somewhat down? They've found something new to try.
And, like a bad kidney stone, this too, shall pass.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Ah yes. To quote, "Tod: You know, Mrs. Buchman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car -- hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they'll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father."
Schools are just as equally to blame - for their silence and inaction if nothing else. How many of us have gone to our counselors or teachers or principles for help. "They will not leave me alone. Do nothing to them, but they keep hounding me!" How often has the response been something like, "oh, just ignore them/be nice to them. Everyone gets picked on." Pfft. Things are different.
The dynamics of how who gets picked on and why are different and nobody seems to realize this. Now a days, it's the majority - the people who follow the norm, play sports, wear Abercrombe & Fitch, etc. that are doing the bullying. They often move in packs or groups upon individuals or very small groups of smart/independent thinking people. That's a hell of a lot for a person to cope with. In my grade school days, I've been surrounded by groups of 10 or more other students, all bent on name calling, pushing, etc. There was never any escape and the school never did anything. Often times, I was the one who was punished for making a "big deal out of it" or pushing them back.
The story is the same and goes on much longer. But in my pre-highschool days - a far back as early elementary, this kind of treatment has induced violent behavior. I often fantasized about severely injuring my class mates. I dreamed of bringing a gun to school so I could make people not mess with me. I harbored images of the school's smoldering remains. And yes, you guessed it... this was LONG before I had ever even SEEN a video game. And no, I wasn't listening to goth music either.
Again, this story is nothing new. But one thing is certain, it's worse today for the "social outcasts" than it ever was before. Ashcroft's position is a slap in the face. The schools' continued inaction is a cause for yet more dispare. However, with the sudden increased frequency of school violence, they're going to get to the point where they have to act, out of fear if anything else. One of my friends and I were discussing this issue, and he was of the position that this is the only good thing that will come out of these shooting. Schools may do something about the problem (other than installing metal detectors - those only make the 'jocks' feel save). And maybe, just maybe those who do the bullying will think twice.
Who knows. I was one of the fortunate people who didn't suffer any kind of break down from the treatment. But there are a lot of people who simply cannot take it and will lash out against oppression. Ironic how schools do nothing. That's simply historical fact.
Why bother.
You'll never know how much I owe you for writting that article. I was sitting here in my basement thinking that dying might not be such a bad alternative to going to school tomorrow. Blindly perusing slashdot I came across this and it made me feel infinitely better knowing that life only gets easier. It reminded me of all the things I want for myself and for the people I love. Thanks for saying what I've been hoping.
Density?
:-)
Actually it's always been a problem, but only became a MEDIA problem when it started being upper-crust white kids getting killed.
Guns don't kill people, gun culture kills people.
Knives don't kill people either. America probably has more KNIFE killings per capita than Canada - which hints at the real problem: American culture is just plain violent. It's like we're expected to go for the most violent solution first (and I consider lawsuits a form of violence, if that helps) any time we meet resistance. Actually two problems - we want EVERYTHING (American corporate culture is driven by the belief that you can't just make money, you have to make ALL the money, and you go to Hell if you leave one cent unmade in your chosen market - doesn't this explain the RIAA's behavior?) and we don't see anything wrong with using violent means (guns, fists, lies, lawyers) to get it all. Canada doesn't seem afflicted with either disease, except perhaps within the bounds of hockey.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Seriously, what the f*ck does a person need a gun for anyway?
:-)
:-)
Same reason a person needs a lawyer - to defend oneself against other people with lawyers. We really don't need guns or lawyers, but as soon as one person pulls either a gun or a lawyer on you, you'll need both.
Drop the religious aspect of your society back to the individual's beliefs. Don't ever allow it to creep back into politics or society as a whole. I've been to engineering meetings in the USA where problems encountered in designs were met with a "prayer" session. Sheesh - why don't we just sacrifice a goat or virgin or two to Baal to help our sales team.
Funny, I think, that the unholy marriage of religion and politics were something Jesus seemed to resent.
The only way a state religion can work is if EVERYONE - every last person - supports it, or at least if there's a convenient way for dissenters to move to a neighboring "free" nation that the religious nation isn't planning on conquering. (In many ways a theocracy is a bit like a Communist state - if even one person doesn't buy into it, it starts to collapse.)
Actually, that's not entirely true. A theocracy COULD possibly work if it's not the kind of fundamentalist regime we see in most Christian and Muslim countries - the real problem isn't the religion, or the link to politics, it's that for FAR too many people in the countries I've mentioned, religion amounts to little more than a desire to see everyone else become exactly like you, and for some, it's a means of gaining power. THAT's the real reason we have a separation of church and state - religion is all about interpretation and divine inspiration of unverifiable origin, so all it takes is one Cardinal Ximinez or one Jerry Falwell to start to impose his will onto a religion and then impose that religion onto the state. The only defense is to prevent religion from being imposed onto the state - and so far America has done a shitty job of this, mostly because the lawmakers tend to WANT religion imposed on the state.
Keeping-up-with-the-Jones' is going to be a real tricky thing - this is the result of feedback from a capitalist society - more money tends to breed more money, and a drive to get what is perceived to be better and better things. Some people will be able to afford the "bestest" things (generally the goal of all), most people will be able to afford the "next-to-bestest/acceptable" things, and unfortunately, there are a lot of people who never will - they get left out. I don't know how to counter this one.
Look at the root of the problem: people don't know how to be happy anymore. Unable to find emotional satisfaction, unable to comprehend subtlety, or unwilling to become philosophers who see more beauty in a rundown building than in a mansion, people have tended to latch onto dicksize as a means of happiness. They think if they LOOK happy, they can BE happy - and the only way to look happy is to look like you have more toys than the happy people next door. They shouldn't call 'em yuppies, they should call 'em Happies.
Anyway, it's an amusing situation - a whole sector of people who want big houses they can't live in because every room is a museum, big vehicles that get 8mpg and have 4 wheel drive they'll never use because going off road would get it dirty (I have no problem with people who buy SUVs because they actually intend to use the four wheel drive, but as status symbols they SUCK), and kids they don't even raise. (And yes, I think this tends to pass these same kinds of values on to the next generation.) All because these are the things they see other people having and it certainly makes THEM happy.
Me, I'm thankful I have such weird tastes in stuff. I've gotten cynical in my old age (26) and despite the limited world experience I have, I've nonetheless come to the conclusion that there is NOTHING in this world I can obtain - no stereo system, no car, no woman - that will grant me lasting happiness. There is joy to be had in owning things, which is why I hang out at thrift stores, and I do happen to like having a girlfriend - these things, for me at least, tend to subtly increase the level of joy in my life, but I already know there's no guarantee that ANY of them - or even ALL of them, if I should somehow one day be granted the complete checklist of "stuff I want" (a delightfully implausible list that includes Jennifer Connelly, 109 missing episodes of Doctor Who, various unbuilt Amiga prototypes from over the years, and a winning $250m lottery ticket) - will make me live happily ever after. Nor would I want them to - the struggle to become happy is the point of life. (Even for you religious types, "being happy" means pleasing God, and therefore is the point of life.)
Granted part of the reason I came to this conclusion was that I noticed I never really much liked "cool" things. It's a blessing not to have to judge oneself by other people's standards - and it's paid off, because I can get great deals on the stuff other people throw out.
I don't know how to cure the Happies of their problem. The sad thing is, the ones who were once hippies used to have the answers (insofar as they had simpler tastes) and seem to have forgotten them. But there's another aspect to the problem - the Happies have been conditioned by the media. Come on with a commercial during Seinfeld to tell them this year's SUV brings happiness and they believe you - and once they own one, and can park it in the driveway where their neighbors can drool over it, pretty soon the whole block will have one. How do you decondition people from the media? Hell, most of them don't even realize they AREN'T as happy as they make the neighbors think (and when they do, it's called a midlife crisis) - which means as far as they're concerned, this kind of one-up lifestyle has WORKED. It's a religion, really - and people only ditch a religion when a) they realize how silly it sounds, b) they realize it isn't working for them, or c) they weren't really that deeply into it to begin with.
The problem is that waiting for the boomers to die won't help - the boomers have offspring who have been similarly conditioned.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Please explain how it is possible to first kill yourself, then kill others.
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
See the Rough Draft column from Monday for more from the Press.
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OK, getting back to the original subject.
:)
There's been a lot of talk in this thread how guns are used for useful purposes: self defense, to defend against the governmet, etc.
Can you imagine if these same arguments were used by students in real schools???
"Everyone knows that it's dangerous to go to school these days, who knows what sort of whacko's are out there. I'm going to arm myself in self defense."
So why not train and arm all the students in a school just in case one person comes along and decides to start shooting people. If gun control doesn't work, why have gun control in the schools?
The analogy is the same, except for the "children are not the same as adults" argument. There is a point here. Adults generally have more social maturity to handle situations like this better. So it's a matter of scale... 99.9% of adults are responsible with guns, lets say high school children would be about 80-90% responsible in the same environment.
But in this argument, even with the change of scale, wouldn't the arguments be the same? I get the feeling that people here advocating gun posession would still possess their guns even if the odds of violent crimes occuring were a thousand times less. I ask these people:
By the same logic, why not advocate arming school children as well?
Reductio ad adsurdum. Perhaps not quite QED..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Humans are social animals, if not pack animals, and will tend to derive self worth from their peer group. And between other kids who mock them, teachers who tell them that 'it's nothing to worry about,' the 'it' in this case being, of course, the child's feelings of unworthyness, and parents who often don't notice such things it can get rather lonely. Throw in the fact that the average 10-15 year old is probably somewhere in puberty process, depending on race, sex, and a few other factors, and you get some nasty hormonal imbalances influencing the kids towards behaviour that, a year or two later, they'd never dream of. Oh, and as an aside, zero-tolerance policies are a bad thing; they tend to influence kids into not 'ratting' on friends who are 'talking smack' because they'll get thrown out of school; how do the kids feel when it turns out he wasn't just 'talking smack?' Of course, how do they feel if they do get him kicked out, and it turns out to be nothing?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I preface this by saying that I'm an RF circuits engineer and she's a teacher in a private school that goes pre-K to twelfth grade.
We both are of the opinion that what we're seeing is partly a reflection of the narcissism of the modern classroom. On numerous occasions I've seen reports that rank American high schoolers close to last in the industrialized world for math skills, but they rank themselves as first when polled. For ten years or more we've had this idea of Outcome-Based Education, which is an odd name for a system where the outcome doesn't matter. With OBE, it's how the student feels, not how much they know. We as a society have raised a whole generation of empty egos, and they don't know how to handle anything that might endanger their severely distorted self-concept. I think that the great majority of school violence, from these shootings to inter-class fist fights, stem from this (inherent in kids) over-inflated self concept. Anything that threatens the self-image is more than they can handle, and they lash out.
Also, with more and more kinds coming from two-career families or broken homes we have parents that bend to their kids' every whim out of the parents feelings of guilt. I see some of my wife's colleagues -- teachers no less -- doing this. The incessant cry of, "Gimme!" is never met with a, "no." Children are taught that they deserve and are entitled to whatever they want, without exception. Their little egos are continually puffed up both at home by unwitting parents and at school by institutionallized emotional poisoning.
Is it right? No. What should be done about it? I say, increase the torment! Call it Tough Love. People need to be deflated from time to time so that they don't get these dangerous egos. They need to see how they're not that smart, they're not that tough, they're not that athletic, they're not that pretty, they're not that anything. In a word, they need humility. They need to know that it's ok not to get everything you want; in fact, nobody has ever received everything they wanted. They need to learn not to take themselves so seriously or to be so brittle when things don't go their way.
One thing that's missing from just about every aspect of modern life is humility. To be humble in America is to be weak. To be unimportant. To be laughed at. These are the things that must change.
If you think the problem is the availability of guns, think about this. The US has had easily available guns for 200 years. In fact, guns are far more difficult to get than they've ever been. Yet, this problem of children going berserk killing people is only a relatively recent phenomenom.
If guns are the problem, why hasn't this always been a problem throughout history?
Guns are not the problem, people are. The problem is cultural. Not all modern cultural trends are bad (I don't think video games are), but quite a few are.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
>>>>
first - sorry, i shouldn't have bothered with my previous post. it was kinda pointless. i WAS shocked that i got FP tho, first time ever. not even intentional.
anyways, my 2 cents- i think the whole thing about bullying is pretty simple. some kids are jerks, some are not, and the rest float in between somewhere. The jerks make life hell for the "easy targets", the defenseless who won't garner any sympathy. witness the phrase "man, look at those pants. he had it coming. snarf snarf snarf". coaches push to fight against the weak- so the jocks naturally gravitate towards the oppression of the weak.
the worst thing about all of this is that when there IS a backlash (columbine etc) the only thing that happens is blame is thrown around and the easy targets become easier. according to a friend in high school, the school shootings that have been happening actually caused an INCREASE in the violence and general crappiness in his school. the jerks in the school used his long blue hair as a target- one even tried to plant a "hit list" on him. he's been frisked numerous times by a not-at-all-attractive vice principal, more than anyone else and on very shaky grounds.
my point is... crud. i forgot. i think it had to do with the fact that being a teenager sucks. it always has, and always will. someone told me "these are the best days of your life, jeremy"... i wanted to kill myself then.
--endcycle--
I was a geek all through school, ostracized and bullied (Even more so since my little brother 12" shorter than me and extremely athletic could kick my @ss in a fight, good thing we are really tight).
I didn't kill anyone or go postal. WHY? Because I had good parents who recognized when something was bothering me and dragged it out of me. I say a culture where parents don't give two shits about whats going on in their lives and let their kids have free rein of their lives is what causes killer kids. This is not an issue of what the schools/teachers/media can do, but what good parenting can solve. Call me out of line or whatever, but I really think a two parent loving family, that is attentive will prevent 99.9% of these incidents from occuring! THATS ALL THERE IS TOO IT!
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
It's funny, but when I was in junior high, I remember talking to my Dad for a while about girls. Not the "this is how the plumbing works" talk, but more prosaic "why don't you ask girls out" kinda stuff.
The thing I remember most about that conversation was that he told me, "Don't believe anything anyone else says to you. These are, bar none, the hardest years of your life. It all gets easier from here." And, he was right. By the time I was a high school junior, I was more or less comfortable with my geekiness, and resolved to just have a good time being me. My senior year, the group of geeks I hung out with mysteriously turned into the most popular group of kids in the school. It was nuts. Large numbers of us still hang out together, ten years later, and we even have actual lives.
I was lucky that things got better for me, I know. But I suspect that the improvement in my circumstances stemmed from an understanding that life wasn't all wine and roses, and I didn't have to act like it was all the time.
OK, this is when I enjoy Katz - heartfelt, human, and without bizarre comparisons or conspiracy theories.
In our country people like to blame "outside" elements - the that-not-like-me. It is games (which I don't play), music (which I don't like), and the Internet (which I'm too ignorant to use).
However, what is missed is that a problem this widespread (violence, suicide, bullying) is not going to come from outside - it is going to come from within the culture. That is hard for many people to accept.
Americans are people with a great deal of pride, but not all of that pride is earned. We visualize ourselves often as the Light of the World.
We're not good at introspection (having only 200+ years of history limits our shared experiences).
So, we don't want to deal with the fact that if something is going wrong in our country at large there is a problem in the culture at large. It would be having to admit we're not perfect. It would be having to admit we can make mistakes. It would mean hard work to fix things. It would mean confronting ourselves.
We are a violent culture. Wether we justify it by God, Darwin, or History, we figure nothing is wrong with taking what we want, hurting those different, and stomping around as if we'll never take a fall. Repercussions will never happen because, of course, we are so wonderful - and if they do "someone else" must be to blame.
Someday, America, will have to collectively examine itself.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
As much as this a very accurate and useful point to make I think most people who read Slashdot are going to go 'duh'. I mean it's very obvious to those of us who grew up in such a life and contemplated escaping it all ourselves.
If this editorial piece were in a major newspaper or on the six o'clock news - it would be substantially more useful. This is really a case where Mr. Katz is preaching to the converted (again).
To make this piece useful I encourage everyone to print it out and mail it into your local newspapers and news stations. And perhaps the people who really need to be reading this kind of essay will get the opportunity.
If guns are the problem, why hasn't this always been a problem throughout history?
Density?
Let's face it, if the number of bears in the forest surrounding your log cabin outnumber the number of children in your family, then having a good supply of ammunition and weapons in your house is a good thing.
Oh crap, I feel a flamebait rant coming on... Oh well, I've got karma to burn...
Maybe I'm stupid and Canadian, but in an urban population with a decent sized police force, there should be no good reason for people to have to carry around weapons. I mean, Jesus, I remember driving in LA on vacation and seeing a cop in her squad car with the shotgun holster mounted right in the front seat. I mean, holy shit, that thing's loaded. I try not to think about how many loaded weapons there must be if I enter into a family restaraunt in the states with my kids.
Can't you see how this makes you all look like freaks to the rest of the world?!?
Go ahead, mod me down. I don't care. But this is one of the reasons the rest of the first worls looks upon America with bafflement and disbelief.
Guns don't kill people, gun culture kills people.
I've been amazed in Canada how bullying has taken the forefront of the local, provincial, and national news in the last year, and specifically in the last few months. After several teen suicides, a few key surveys of school age kids, and a rather well done documentary on bullying on CBC's evening news show "The National" that provoked an enormous outpouring of phone calls and emails to the station that the next night they had to do a follow up the following night, to the commercials on TV and the radio "bullying is dead serious", Canada seems to have taken the hint. Bullying => teen violence, and bullying is the root source of the problem. BC's government seems to have gone off on this weird tanget for rating video games, but that story is eclipsed here by what's now perceived to be a epedemic problem across the province and the country.
Last night on the news I saw a segment on an elementary school talking about anger management and bullying to 5 year olds. Things are starting to *happen* here. I've got more confidence that my own kids (the oldest now three) will be able to go to a school where the consequences of bullying are recognized as severe.
All I can suggest: Write your local media. Find a good set of journalists who can do a *good* job of getting down to the school level and investigate what kids are actually saying. We had one of our (two) major networks do a huge story on bullying and the whole thing started to snowball once the general public had a chance to react.
Pointing out that whole "Its the mental condition that get kids teased in the first place" - that's bull. Kids get teased because they're there. They get teased for anything at all that makes them different; this, at least in my case, may have had depression as a contributing factor, but I never heard anyone coming up to me, saying "I'm teasing you because you're depressed."
What's more likely is that either a) the teasing leads to depression, mental or clinical (I wonder, can someone be depressed during puberty, and then the body thinks that the *standard*, thereby causing clinical depression?) or b) the depression leads to unusual habits/attitudes, leading to getting teased.
Finally, what I think few people tend to forget is that kids can't get out of these situations. They're stuck with the people at school for years, live in the same neighborhood, have a tight community that they can't get out of; and seeing ways to make the future brighter isn't exactly something people teach. Taking away their video games isn't going to fix the problem. Just may make them stop specifically *shooting* one another. The problem's still there.
Whatever you do... don't read this.
Can you name ONE "fundamentalist Christian theocracy" on the planet at this time? No, because there are no significant Christian theocracies in this era.
There are, however, many Islamic countries which we would classify as having a theocratic system. The laws of government are derived from the Koran and Islamic religious tradition- it has nothing to do with, as you state, "a desire to see everyone else become exactly like you, and for some, it's a means of gaining power". Do you really believe this, or are you just saying it because it seems like it must be true because the alternative is to imagine a large body of people sharing an absolute religious worldview- a concept that, in our post-Christian agnostic consumerist society is too alien to fathom?
Visit one. I was in Jordan last year. The Islamic citizens there aren't pod-people with a hive mentality looking to homogenize themselves- they're human beings with beliefs that they value above their own lives. Also contrary to your statement, they have less power as citizens than you could possibly imagine, and belief in Islam will ensure that they remain without power or freedom as we know it. Yet they still believe..
As a Christian, I disagree stongly with their religious worldview. But try to have a little more respect for people with differing beliefs, and allow for the possibility that the fact of someone else's differing opinion may not be indication of their inferiority as individuals or thinkers.
Now don't go flaming me just yet, these are broad generalizations, lets look at these in a bit more depth.
Quality Time
In our society there is a huge increase in 2 working parent families. Most day care services are staffed by some of the poorest trained lowest paid workers in the United States today. A child raised in this environment is usually introduced to other children via the law of the jungle. i.e. those that can exert their force and power will and you will bend, or go home bloody from "falling" off the jungle-jim.
A parent's time is hard to come by. Companies DEMAND more and more out of their staff (especially those of us in tech or management and on salary!) This in turn gives us less and less time for ourselves, and also less time for our families. Then comes the fabrication of quality time. The idea that spending the "right kind of time" will be ok and you won't have to spend as much time with your children. Try to find a good scientific study about quality time (good luck). The find a study about just plain old "parental involvement". Quality time is a crock designed to make over worked/stressed parents feel better about themselves.
Cost to fix? High, companies would have to stop demanding 12/15 hour days, perhaps even give mothers more time off for maternity. Help provide proper day care. this adds up to $$$$$
School Systems
School Systems Schools are designed with cost in mind, and it is cheaper to build a BIG school for thousands of students then to build several little schools for say 250-500 students. This leads to a system where students can easily get lost, be over looked and hide. There are simply too many students, and our current Jr and Sr years are nothing more than a fashion show in many schools. The fix would be to build smaller schools, and hire more teachers. This of course costs $$$, and trust me the BABY BOOMERS (i.e. the me generation) wants absolutely nothing to do with raising taxes or paying for a good education system. Of course raise taxes for Socialist security to keep it solvent, but the hell with our children! (Sorry, I live in an area with a lot of Senior Citizens, and that attitude is so pervasive it makes me sick)
Improper treatment of children and adolescents
Our society, our advertisers and to a lesser extent each of use are treating adolescents as adults. This can be seen in malicious humor directed at them, in advertisements and in their ability to commit "adult" crimes. It's so funny that our society must be PC (nee see the "re-education" of John Rocker) but we will happily laugh along with the sitcom that makes fun of the "geek", that chastises the girl that is "over wieght" (i.e. she doesn't look like she spent 8 months in Ausweitz) etc. Wow, strange world we live in.
To some extent adolescents WANT to be treated like they are older, and I did too when I was 15-16 etc. BUT this is the age when one learns coping skills, when one learns how to deal with adversity and so forth. A minor incident for an adult can feel like a life threatening tragedy to some children/adolescents. People need to keep that in mind, adolescents aren't adults yet.
Agree with me or not, the cost to solve these problems are high, they will take time, and lets face it video games and rap songs are a symptom not a cause. The politicos will point to the John Rockers of the world (and who cares what he thinks anyway???) and have him get "sensitivity" training while happily ignoring millions of school aged children. PC will simply be a way to silence different points of view, while allowing daily doses of hurtful propaganda that makes some companies rich right on through.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
No matter what Hillary says, that phrase is important because it points closer to what it is that allows for the evil suggestion of a student's Final Solution to enter his brain and seem like the Only Solution.
:)
Stay with me here, I think I have part of the answer, and a damn sight bigger part than a politician would dare try to tackle.
The "village" in this instance is the environment of the kid; this includes parents, school authorities, his peers and friends, TV, video games and computer games. From this village he forms his opinion of the world and obtains a sense of 'connectedness'. 'Connectedness' in this sense represents his relationship with his village: i.e., he gets what he needs from his environment and in return he is responsible for contributing his part to the environment ('he' is generic here, okay ladies?); he feels connected to it, a part of it.
But our village is burnt out.
The parents have skewed values and pursue money at the expense of time with their children. The child is latch-key and unsupervised and unloved in a real sense.
The school environment is composed of overworked and burnt-out teachers: sure they Could care, but who Cares if they Care? So none of them connect with the troubled teen in a realistic manner. And the teen feels inadequate to approach them for help; it certainly isn't encouraged in this day and age. Teachers are Not Parents, but they play them in the classroom.
And now for the Active elements in the Boy's young life! TV actively plays teens against their parents, portraying them as the enemy and corrupt and evil. Kids buy into this because they want power and ally themselves with a 'villager' who appears to be their ally. But it isn't their ally; it is their 'wormtongue', placing messages of destruction into the child's mind. No one would argue that TV is a poor parent for a child. TV actively increases the level of anxiety in the teen's mind... I could go on and on about this, but I think we all agree its fairly evident.
Finally, and in league with the media, is the interactive world, the electronic world of messages that play into the natural tendencies of a child's aggression. He doesn't roughhouse with Dad, he doesn't play capture the flag with his friends, he isn't wrestling in the gym. No, he is sitting in front of a screen blowing the bejeezus out of a bunch of frightening images, getting a subtle (not so subtle?) rush of adrenaline (adrenaline, the drug of choice for Americans, bar none) in doing so. And, as Ashcroft correctly if misguidedly asserts, learning how to kill.
Finally, add the complete humiliation day in and day out of his peers, the final element of his village, taunting and ridiculing him freely and
without supervision. Nothing will stop this daily terror.
Oh no, add one more thing.
Give him a gun.
Therein lies the recipe for these disasters. And when you add the sensationalism and copycat solicitation provided by the media, you really shouldn't be surprised in the monsters you have created.
It takes a village, alright. A village of village idiots.
Last thing. All you single-cause zealots who use these tragedies to foster your cause are doing nothing to help. You add heat but little light to the discussion. Banning guns would help but it ain't gonna happen. The Ten Commandments in school halls would remind us all who is really in charge here (White Christians, not God), but would lessen the alienation of our troubled youth not one whit. Punishing Hollywood, punishing parents, laying blame on Any Single Thing is perpetuating a vicious spiral that gets us nowhere. So please, if you care to respond to any of this, keep that in mine when you do. It is a complicated problem and it might even be one that cannot be solved today or even ever. But we can't make headway if we fall back into old and tired arguments. Not that the NRA isn't an idiot, but that it is too thickheaded and stubborn. Not that Christians aren't the new Nazis, but that calling them names doesn't allow them to trust America enough to open a dialog. We need a brand new paradigm, just like the old paradigm that we once held sacred, albeit only for the landed gentry. Perhaps if we can extend it to All Men and Women and Children, the village can have meaning again for a nation of alienated and Disconnected youth.
(Reprinted from a Plastic article I wrote. I only got one karma point, but a bunch of replies.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
i don't know.... my brother just made a bumper sticker as a spoof of the "my kid beat up your honor student"....
:)
"my kid shot your bully in the head"
with a doom background.
--endcycle--
One thing Katz missed in an otherwise very good article is the termonology battle. Kid in school are victims of "bullying"? I think not.
They're victims of: Assault, Simple Battery, Agrevated Assault, Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Misdemeanor and Felony Harrasment, all degrees of Sexual Assault (with 3rd degree happening to your average attractive girl around 40 times per day), Extortion, Robbery, Theft, Racketeering (a group organized for the purpose of an illegal activity) and countless other very real crimes.
So long as we continue to convince students either a: that the criminal behavior in which they are engaged is acceptable (or, at worst, subject to minimal action taken outside of the criminal justice system it would be in in any other context) or b: that their complaints regarding criminal actions being taken against them aren't to be taken seriously we will continue to have large numbers of students taking their own lives or, in much smaller numbers, those of others.
I think that policymakers focus on guns, games, etc. because they can be eliminated using traditional authoritarian police measures from schools, homes and the other places where children live. Every parent, no matter whether they abuse their child or are a moidel parent, can feel better when they remove evil games or install software to spy on kids or set up a snitch line. That is why law enforcement finds these approaches politically useful.
Cultural change against bullying must come from the kids themselves. Perhaps they need to think of themselves as a cohesive group with a common interest and goal.. in which case, resistance against the curtailment of everyone's rights would be a good option.
Goat sex free since 2001
It feels to me that parents want to point fingers at anything other than themselves for their children's problems. For instance, Columbine - lets blame music and the colour black. The more interest parents take in their childrens' lives, the quicker to help and slower to punish, the more trust children should be able to feel in their parents; these are all issues that should be addressed. Not "what should we ban for the sake of our children". That's why they hate South Park, it is a cleverly executed, very accurate parody of modern society.
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
When I was younger, I was very pale, very small, and had a very sharp tongue. I also grew up without a father and instead being raised by my drill sergeant mother and spineless door-knob step father. The Pink Floyd album "The Wall" has special meaning for me.
From the 5th grade to the 9th grade, I was the target of constant ridicule and physical violence from other students. Invariably, these students had social problems that they were unable to handle. So they looked for a target on which to vent. My poor people skills, high intellegence, sarcastic tone, and effeminant manerisms made me an ideal target. My mother had always indoctrinated me with non-violence. So when I was the target of abuse from other students, I always backed down. And even if I hadn't I figured I was smaller than everyone else, so I would have lost anyway. Dating was also hell for me since I was exactly the opposite of what every highschool girl wants.
Ashcroft said video games contribute to an "ethic of violence."
Video games, violent and otherwise, were an escape for me. had those been taken away, I'm sure I would have vented in more destructive ways.
The question really is whether vicious kids and hostile school environments are turning kids into killers. It's a question neither politicians nor the media seem to want to ask.
I suspect that's because politics and the media tend to attract extroverted people. These types of people, in my opinion, would tend to be the popular people at school. So drawing on their own school experiences would be useless in understanding the plight of these targeted children.
What makes big news -- and what doesn't -- is always telling. We hear a lot about kids who get gunned down in schools by their peers. We usually hear even more about the evil influences on their lives, from gaming to violent TV and movies to the Net. Yet a vastly greater number kill themselves because of their peers. That doesn't draw many headlines or stories on the evening news, or denunciations from the President.
The media is in business to make money. And sensation sells. That's why they cover it. And if they can promote their liberal agneda in the process, all the better. No one wants to hear about how johnny got beaten up on the way home from school for the fourth time this week.
As usual, the government has tended to blame video games and violent movies and TV shows. Aschroft said "the entertainment industry, with it's video games and the like, which sometimes literally teach shooting and all, we've got to ask ourselves, how do we as a culture ... be more responsible."
LOL. I know our public schools are bad, but even the worst educated students can figure out how to fire a gun. They don't need a video game to learn that. I hate it when old conservative politicians try to find some "morally reprehensible" activity, one they don't engage in themsemves, on which to blame society's problems. Morality is part of the answer, not the answer.
Psychologists and researchers report that bullying, taunting or constant ridicule by peers is often a major factor in these suicides, as well as a constant thread running through the horrific series of school shootings.
This is bullshit. A student fearing a shooting at their school is like a passenger on a plane fearing a plane crash. I guess the APA has to get their gun control agenda in there somewhere.
Kids who are non-conformist, rebellious, individualistic or different in other ways are routinely subjected to harassment all kinds, as well as life in schools that cling to outdated curriculums, punish non-conformity and isolate individuals.
It's not just the goths. All I worked hard at being normal.
Yet 81 percent of Americans told the Gallup they blame the Internet for Columbine.
This is because that's what the media told them to believe
A handful of schools have instituted anti-bullying and harrassment programs, but the popular media and most politicians seem much more interested in kids who go over the edge and shoot others than in the many more who are driven over the edge and kill themselves. Maybe it's time to shift focus.
I'll believe it when I see it. And that is why my four kids are in a private school. There's no more powerful weapon to get schools to fix a problem than money.
I have a very clear opinion as to the cause of schools shootings. You can agree or not. I don't care. But it goes something like this:
1. In the lower grades, the "killer" student is ridiculed. Singled out by the other class mates as someone who is different. Maybe they look different, like a very pale person in sunny california. Or an over weight person at a very athletics-oriented high school. Or maybe their parents are poor, so their clothes are an issue. Who knows.
2. Then the killer student either goes to someone they can trust and gets nowhere or the have no one to go to. For me, the people I trusted did nothing.
3. The student feels trapped. Nothing is resolved. The physical and emotional abuse goes on and on, unchecked. Somewhere around now, the student may exhibit emotional or behavioral problems and is more than likely placed on some kind of drug.
4. Then the killer student reaches puberty. The student is now feeling a volatile mixture of self-destructive feelings, poor self-esteem, and unbridled rage.
5. What happens next depends on the student and how they were brought up. If they were brought up in a religious, but not too religious home, with caring, if out of touch parents, they simply kill themselves while leaving a note designed to exact the maximum pain on the ones responsible. If the student was brought up in a home where the parents had no involvement at all, or were really out of touch, and the student has a weak moral background, they may decide to take out as many students as possible on their way out.
In any event, suicides, and shootings are designed to send a strong message to people who aren't listening, while putting an end to the student's pain.
I was close to suicide on many occaisions. I was constantly considering ways to end my life. I eventually decided that the only ways available to me were slashing wrists, jumping from my high-rise apartment building, or jumping in front of a subway train. None were certain or instant enough for me. Salvation for me was puberty which finally hit in the 9th grade. I grew nearly a foot in one year. And over a summer vacation, nearly all of the bullying stopped. Now I'm 6'5" and 270lbs. People tend to leave me alone now. My manerisms are also very different now.
What these kids need today is a good moral background. And good parenting from both parents. If every child got this, the targets would survive the bullying and the bullies wouldn't need to. But parents/adults/politicians don't want to hear this. They want a scapegoat, an easy solution that doesn't involve a behavor change for the parents. Today it's the internet and first person shooters. When I was growing up, it was heavy metal and D&D. Tomorrow it will be something else. Is it really so hard to see?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.