Slashdot Mirror
Voices From The Hellmouth
The big story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages or the TV talk shows. It wasn't whether the Net is a place for hate-mongers and bomb-makers, or whether video games are turning your kids into killers. It was the spotlight the Littleton, Colorado killings has put on the fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high school is a Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and rage.
From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Todd Solondz's "Welcome To The Dollhouse," and a string of comically-bitter teen movies from Hollywood, pop culture has been trying to get this message out for years. For many kids - often the best and brightest -- school is a nightmare.
People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky ones are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated, sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially. Odd values - unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are exalted, while the best values - free thinking, non-conformity, curiousity - are ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the Trenchcoat Mafia left was to ensure that this message got heard, by a society that seems desperate not to hear it.
Minutes after the "Kids That Kill" column was posted on Slashdot Friday, and all through the weekend, I got a steady stream of e-mail from middle and high school kids all over the country -- especially from self-described oddballs. They were in trouble, or saw themselves that way to one degree or another in the hysteria sweeping the country after the shootings in Colorado.
Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt for oddballs -- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange and the alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the normal, to be different wasn't just to feel unhappy, it was to be dangerous.
Schools all over the country openly embraced Geek Profiling. One group calling itself the National School Safety Center issued a checklist of "dangerous signs" to watch for in kids: it included mood swings, a fondness for violent TV or video games, cursing, depression, anti-social behavior and attitudes. (I don't know about you, but I bat a thousand).
The panic was fueled by a ceaseless bombardment of powerful, televised images of mourning and grief in Colorado, images that stir the emotions and demand some sort of response, even when it isn't clear what the problem is.
The reliably blockheaded media response didn't help either. "Sixty Minutes" devoted a whole hour to a broadcast on screen violence and its impact on the young, heavily promoted by this tease: "Are video games turning your kids into killers?" The already embattled loners were besieged.
"This is not a rational world. Can anybody help?" asked Jamie, head of an intense Dungeons and Dragons club in Minnesota, whose private school guidance counselor gave him a choice: give up the game or face counseling, possibly suspension. Suzanne Angelica (her online handle) was told to go home and leave her black, ankle-length raincoat there.
On the Web, kids did flock to talk to each other. On Star Wars and X-Files mailing lists and websites and on AOL chat rooms and ICQ message boards, teenagers traded countless countless stories of being harassed, beaten, ostracized and ridiculed by teachers, students and administrators for dressing and thinking differently from the mainstream. Many said they had some understanding of why the killers in Littleton went over the edge.
"We want to be different," wrote one of the Colorado killers in a diary found by the police. "We want to be strange and we don't want jocks or other people putting us down." The sentiment, if not the response to it, was echoed by kids all over the country. The Littleton killings have made their lives much worse.
"It was horrible, definitely," e-mailed Bandy from New York City. "I'm a Quake freak, I play it day and night. I'm really into it. I play Doom a lot too, though not so much anymore. I'm up till 3 a.m. every night. I really love it. But after Colorado, things got horrible. People were actually talking to me like I could come in and kill them. It wasn't like they were really afraid of me - they just seemed to think it was okay to hate me even more? People asked me if I had guns at home. This is a whole new level of exclusion, another excuse for the preppies of the universe to put down and isolate people like me."
It wasn't just the popular who were suspicious of the odd and the alienated, though.
The e-mailed stories ranged from suspensions and expulsions for "anti-social behavior" to censorship of student publications to school and parental restrictions on computing, Web browsing, and especially gaming. There were unconfirmed reports that the sale of blocking software had skyrocketed. Everywhere, school administrators pandered and panicked, rushing to show they were highly sensitive to parents fears, even if they were oblivious to the needs and problems of many of their students.
In a New Jersey private school, a girl was expelled for showing classmates a pocket-knife. School administrators sent a letter home:
"In light of the recent tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, we all share a heightened sensitivity to potential threats to our children. I urge you to take this time to discuss with your children the importance of turning to adults when they have concerns about the behavior of others."
This solution was straight out of "1984." In fact, this was one of the things it's protagonist Winston was jailed for: refusing to report his friends for behavior that Big Brother deemed abnormal and disturbing.
Few of the weeks? media reports - in fact, none that I saw - pointed out that the FBI Uniform Crime reports, issued bi-annually, along with the Justice Departments reports (statistical abstracts on violence are available on the Department's website and in printed form) academic studies and some news reports have reporters for years now. Violence among the young is dropping across the country, even as computing, gaming, cable TV and other media use rises.
Unhappy, alienated, isolated kids are legion in schools, voiceless in media, education and politics. But theirs are the most important voices of all in understanding what happened and perhaps even how to keep it from happening again.
I referred some of my e-mailers to peacefire.org, a children's rights website, for help in dealing with blocking and filtering software. I sent others to freedomforum.org (the website Free!) for help with censorship and free speech issues, and to geek websites, especially some on ICQ.com where kids can talk freely.
I've chosen some e-mailers to partially reprint here. Although almost all of these correspondents were willing to be publicly identified - some demanded it - I'm only using their online names, since some of their stories would put them in peril from parents, peers or school administrators.
From Jay in the Southeast:
"I stood up in a social studies class -the teacher wanted a discussion -- and said I could never kill anyone or condone anyone who did kill anyone. But that I could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because day after day, slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can learn how to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over sometimes, especially when you come to see that you're hated only because you're smart and different, or sometimes even because you are online a lot, which is still so uncool to many kids?
After the class, I was called to the principal's office and told that I had to agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or be expelled from school, as I had expressed ?sympathy? with the killers in Colorado, and the school had to be able to explain itself if I ?acted out?. In other words, for speaking freely, and to cover their ass, I was not only branded a weird geek, but a potential killer. That will sure help deal with violence in America."
From Jason in Pennsylvania: "The hate just eats you up, like the molten metal moving up Keanu Reeve's arm in the ?The Matrix.? That's what I thought of when I saw it. You lose track of what is real and what isn't. The worst people are the happiest and do the best, the best and smartest people are the most miserable and picked upon. The cruelty is unimaginable. If Dan Rather wants to know why those guys killed those people in Littleton, Colorado, tell him for me that the kids who run the school probably drove them crazy, bit by bit?.That doesn't mean all those kids deserved to die. But a lot of kids in America know why it happened, even if the people running schools don't."
From Andrew in Alaska: "To be honest, I sympathized much more with the shooters than the shootees. I am them. They are me. This is not to say I will end the lives of my classmates in a hail of bullets, but that their former situation bears a striking resemblance to my own. For the most part, the media are clueless. They're never experienced social rejection, or chosen non-conformity'Also, I would like to postulate that the kind of measures taken by school administration have a direct effect on school violence. School is generally an oppressive place; the parallels to fascist society are tantalizing. Following a school shooting, a week or two-week crackdown ensues, where students? constitutional rights are violated with impunity, at a greater rate than previous."
From Anika78 in suburban Chicago:
"I was stopped at the door of my high school because I was wearing a trenchcoat. I don't game, but I'm a geekchick, and I'm on the Web a lot. (I love geek guys, and there aren't many of us.) I was given a choice - go home and ditch the coat, or go to the principal. I refused to go home. I have never been a member of any group or trenchcoat mob or any hate thing, online or any other, so why should they tell me what coat to wear?
Two security guards took me into an office, called the school nurse, who was a female, and they ordered me to take my coat off. The nurse asked me to undress (privately) while the guards outside the door went through every inch of my coat. I wouldn't undress, and she didn't make me (I think she felt creepy about the whole thing).
Then I was called into the principal's office and he asked me if I was a member of any hate group, or any online group, or if I had ever played Doom or Quake. He mentioned some other games, but I don't remember them. I'm not a gamer, though my boyfriends have been. I lost it then. I thought I was going to be brave and defiant, but I just fell apart. I cried and cried. I think I hated that worse than anything."
FromZBird in New Jersey:
"Yeah, I've had some fantasies about taking out some of these jerks who run the school, have parties, get on teams, are adored by teachers, have all these friends. Sure. They hate me. Day by day, it's like they take pieces out of you, like a torture, one at a time. My school has 1,500 kids. I could never make a sports team. I have never been to a party. I sit with my friends at our own corner of the cafeteria. If we tried to join the other kids, they'd throw up or leave. And by now, I'd rather die.
Sometimes, I do feel a lot of real pure rage. And I feel better when I go online. Sometimes I think the games keep me from shooting anybody, not the other way around. Cause I can get even there, and I'm pretty powerful there. But I'd never do it. Something much deeper was wrong with these kids in Colorado. To shoot all those people? Make bombs? You have to be sick, and the question they should be asking isn't what games do they play, but how come all these high-paid administrators, parents, teachers and so-called professional people, how come none of them noticed how wacked they were? I mean, in the news it said they had guns all over their houses! They were planning this for a year. Maybe the reporters ought to ask how come nobody noticed this, instead of writing all these stupid stories about video games?"
From ES in New York:
High school favors people with a certain look and attitude - the adolescent equivalent of Aryans. They are the chosen ones, and they want to get rid of anyone who doesn't look and think the way they do. One of the things which makes this so infuriating is that the system favors shallow people. Anyone who took the time to think about things would realize that things like the prom, school spirit and who won the football game are utterly insignificant in the larger scheme of things.
So anyone with depth of thought is almost automatically excluded from the main high school social structure. It's like some horribly twisted form of Social Darwinism.
I would never, ever do anything at all like what was done in Colorado. I can't understand how anyone could. But I do understand the hatred of high school life which, I guess, prompted it.
From Dan in Boise, Idaho:
"Be careful! I wrote an article for my school paper. The advisor suggested we write about ?our feelings? about Colorado. My feelings -what I wrote -- were that society is blaming the wrong things. You can't blame screwed-up kids or the Net. These people don't know what they were talking about. How bout blaming a system that takes smart or weird kids and drives them crazy? How about understanding why these kids did what they did, cause in some crazy way, I feel something for them. For their victims, too, but for them. I thought it was a different point-of-view, but important. I was making a point. I mean, I'm not going to the prom.
You know what? The article was killed, and I got sent home with a letter to my parents. It wasn't an official suspension, but I can't go back until Tuesday. And it was made pretty clear to me that if I made any noise about it, it would be a suspension or worse. So this is how they are trying to figure out what happened in Colorado, I guess. By blaming a sub-culture and not thinking about their own roles, about how fucked-up school is. Now, I think the whole thing was a set-up, cause a couple of other kids are being questioned too, about what they wrote. They pretend to want to have a 'dialogue' but kids should be warned that what they really want to know is who's dangerous to them."
From a Slashdot reader: "Your column Friday was okay, but you and a lot of the Slashdot readers don't get it. You don't have the guts to stand up and say these games are not only not evil, they are great. They are good. They are challenging and stimulating. They help millions of kids who have nowhere else to go, because the whole world is set up to take care of different kinds of kids, kids who fit in, who do what they're told, who are popular. I've made more friends online on Gamespot.com than I have in three years of high school. I think about my characters and my competitions and battles all day.
Nothing I've been taught in school interests me as much. And believe me, the gamers who (try to) kill me online all day are a lot closer to me than the kids I go to high school with. I'm in my own world, for sure, but it's my choice and it's a world I love. Without it, I wouldn't have one... Last week, my father told me he had cancelled my ISP because he had asked me not to game so much and I still was. And when he saw the Colorado thing online, he said, he told my Mom that he felt one of these kids could be me'I am a resourceful geek, and I was back online before he got to bed that night. But I have to go underground now.
My guidance counselor, who wouldn't know a computer game from Playboy Bunny poster, told me was Dad was being a good parent, and here was a chance for me to re-invent myself, be more popular, to ?mainstream.? This whole Colorado thing, it's given them an excuse to do more of what started this trouble in the first place - to make individuals and different people feel like even bigger freaks."
From Jip in New England:
"Dear Mr. Katz. I am 10. My parents took my computer away today, because of what they saw on television. They told me they just couldn't be around enough to make sure that I'm doing the right things on the Internet. My Mom and Dad told me they didn't want to be standing at my funeral some day because of things I was doing that they didn't know about. I am at my best friend's house, and am pretty bummed, because things are boring now. I hope I'll get it back."
Wow, pretty contradictory, eh?
The system is all around us in our culture. It is all about rules, controls, checks and balances. This system is implemented by the powers that be to keep things running smoothly. Powers fear change, and therefore need the system to ensure that everything runs according to the plan.
As an individualist, you have probably already dismissed the plan. You have probably already recognized it's shortcomings and weaknesses, whis is why you have chosen to branch off from it, rather than try to conform to the expected norm. I feel that this is a good thing, but you must realize that, because the powers fear change, they will resist you. They will try to force you into the system. They will become frustrated, and you will become angry. You wmay be branded as an "outsider" or "troublemaker". This is not a good thing.
You cannot simply go against the system. The system is like a fast moving river, and you are stranded somewhere along it. The current tries to push you in a certain direction. If you try to fight the current, you will lose the battle, and be swept away nonetheless. What you must learn to do is work the system, the current. No one is asking you to go where the stream pushes you, but by watching how the water flows, and observing and learning it's patterns and behviours, you can use the current to take you where you want to go.
As it is in the system. If you fight the system head-on, you will fall. It's not fair, but that's the way it works. What you need to do is look at how the rules of the system work, and learn to use, manipulate, and bend these rules to get you where you want to go. Don't reject the system outright, but rather use it's power to your own advantage. Don't let it change who you are, but rather find a way to make the system work with you.
You will need patience. The system doesn't always let you move where you want to immediately. You must learn that, if you move in the right way, at the right time, you can go where you want to through the system. Attaining a harmony with the system, but not letting it control you, is the path to success. Ever see The Matrix? Kinda like that, only without having to jab a probe through your brain.
So how do you make it through the system without becoming a drone? That's where the other point comes in: fuck it. No, I don't mean literally. You must also see that, despite the power of the system within mainstream society, it is not omnipresent. You must be able to "escape" the system every now and then. By reaching out and finding a peer group of people who are "on your level" and have also learned to see the system, you let yourself exist on an intrapersonal basis in an environment free of the rules of the system. The Internet is a great forum for this, as the deliberate environment of agreed anarchy precludes the intervention of the system. A warning though, don't let it become all-consuming. Don't let the Internet take the place of real intra-personal relationship, or the real-world skills that help you navigate the system will soon begin to decay.
Once I made this realization, life suddenly became so much easier for me. I am still learning the rules, but the more I know about the system, the more I can manipulate it to my own ends as a non-conformist. You'd be suprised how often the powers can look past your individualism so long as they can't detect a threat to the system.
In summary: The system is there. You can't stop it by fighting it. Don't give up your individualism. Learn how to work and use the system, and you will rise above it. Keep a few good friends, with whom you can relax outside of the system. Be yourself.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Adam Schumacher
cybershoe@mindless.com
First, as regards those who are being mistreated in school as a result of this, the admininstrators are not your friends. Accept this. When you find this isn't true in the case of one individual or group of individuals (rare, but happens), treat them accordingly, but remember that they're there to make things run smoothly. If they can lower their workload by walking all over you, most will do it without hesitation. Expect it.
So what to do? You people are supposed to be smart. God or nature may not have given you beauty or strength, but one of the premises here is that you to have brains. Use them. The letters to Katz show several lawsuits waiting to happen. Be aware that you don't have to file them (I never did). Go to the library. Read the relevant areas of the Constitution. Find some court cases that set precedents that favor your position. When Joe Administrator tries to force you into counseling for speaking your mind, lay it on him calmly, coolly, and with confidence. He will turn tail and hide.
And if this doesn't work? Pick up a pen. "The pen is mightier than the sword" is an old cliche, but it's true. If you know how to use it. When my school implemented a draconian dress code (for no real reason that anyone could ascertain; the vice principal just decided to do it) I wrote a long editorial for the school newspaper. I pointed out the flaws in the reasons given for each specific rule. I did not call names. I did not use inflammatory language. I did use humor. I did cite legal angles. When the vice principal tried to kill the article, he was unsuccessful because he couldn't point to anything that was actually wrong with it other than it kind of made him look stupid. The dress code wasn't repealed as a result of this (it ain't a perfect world), but neither was it enforced. And if he had killed the article? First I would have offered to send it to the local paper along with an explanatory letter to the editor. This will usually work. If that hadn't worked, I would have gone ahead and sent them.
The point is, you need to do what the TCM didn't. Take responsibility for your life. If you can get help from your parents or a teacher do so, but if you can't (I usually didn't) don't just roll over. There is always a way to fight back. You'll have to work harder than you should have to to find it, and you'll lose some frustrating battles, but if you're smart (and you are, right?) and careful, you'll win most. It is worth it. And you'll find that you might not have to wait until you're out of high school to laugh at the people who are putting you down.
This system evolved to serve a purpose; by ruthlessly punishing difference, rewarding conformity and reinforcing an immutable status quo, it creates the preconditions of a modern industrial society; a population of predictable, conditioned worker/consumer drones, people who accept their place in the great machine of society and don't make trouble. The relatively small number of murders and suicides is well within the margin of acceptable loss.
Meanwhile, when the jocks and popular kids grow up, they take their places in the leader-caste of society; and while most of them are, by then, relatively decent individuals, they do not see that there is a problem. Hence, when a bunch of black-clad angstpuppies massacre some jocks and popular kids, the solution is obvious: sue the video-game companies, restrict the Internet. and ban aspects of outsider subcultures, such as black clothing.
And so, the invisible hand increases the pressure even further.
As soon as I got to first grade, around 1963, the teacher heard the way I spoke and walked me down to the retarded children's classroom, where I stayed until my parents realized that my description of my classmates was a bit odd. No IQ tests or anything, she just dumped me in there. Once my parents found out, they tested my IQ (it was high) and put me back in the regular class, but the teacher resented it - she took every opportunity to tell me, in front of other students, that I was retarded and that I didn't belong in the class. This made me the school pariah until Junior High or so.
The problem with American schools is the awful pressure on students to conform, when they simply can not do so due to the misfortune of being bright, handicapped, or in some way unusual. The pressure to conform is the same sentiment that causes racism and religious intolerance - there's simply a different group being hated this time. It is enforced by the students but it must come from the instructors and parents - where else would the students be getting it?
Anger in our schools will be a problem until we can embrace our differences rather than try to iron them out.
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
I was blessed. I got to go through public elementary school in a 1-day-a-week gifted student program. Wonderful implementation. Freedom of expression was foremost. Most of those kinds of programs have dried up. I'm wondering if my child is going to have any way of expressing himself when his time to go through high school comes around. I doubt it. Parents are so quick to put on the Jackboots, and squash individuality. Supress individuality and expressiveness long enough, and it will find its own way out--in short, harmful, and explosive bursts.
As a postscript, my wife and I have raised Foster Children before (and shortly after) our son was born. For children that are truly destructive, harmful, and uncontrollable there are lots of warning signs. In practice, they differ from expressiveness and individuality as much as a shovel from a bayonet. Only when expressed in the dry, clinicians language used for describing behaviour do the differences fade. "Flat, sharp, metallic, with a handle". It's this dry description that's going to be used to hunt down the individualists.
(We had a Foster Child committed to a home for a while because of this kind of desctuctive behaviour, with good results. It's possible to tell the difference, and necessary to act on them.)
Get off my lawn.
What the people can't accept is that the massacre was utterly meaningless. You have to consider a few things:
I just think they wanted attention; they wanted to do something superlative. When life is meaningless (and most surburban youth are upset at meaninglessness of bourgeouis life), there isn't anything else left. This doesn't look like the "suffering chilld being driven over the edge" thing to me.
They were obsessed with Hitler. Hitler was definitely superlative. I guess they could have done something great, but slaughtering a crowd of helpless people is a lot easier than self sacrifice.
support gun control: take guns from cops
I may be in a uniquely qualified position to comment on this issue, as I moved from Canada to the U.S. halfway through high school. This was in the mid-80s, and I don't think American high schools were as bad then as they are now, but the difference was obvious.
In elementary school (in Canada), I was picked on by the other kids pretty badly. But when I got to high school, I didn't have any real problems, even though I was high-IQ, low-brawn, into computers, etc. The high school I went to in Canada had less restrictive policies than some American universities. You were expected to go to class, and if you failed to show up for a scheduled class more than once or twice, the school would call your parents and get you in trouble. But at lunch time, or before and after school, or during a period when you hadn't scheduled a class (what American students call a "study hall" - we called it a "spare"), you pretty much did whatever you wanted: Go sit in the cafeteria or the library, walk across the street to the nearby shopping center (which had a video arcade and a food court), what have you.
After a couple years of this, I moved to the U.S. and was thrown into an American high school. I showed up the first day with a walkman, like I'd worn to school every day for the last two years; it was immediately confiscated. We were not allowed to be in the halls during class without a signed note from a teacher; we were absolutely not permitted to leave school grounds during the day (except for seniors who, only if they had their own car, were conditionally permitted to go out to lunch, no more than two days a week). If we didn't schedule a class during a period, we had to go sit at a desk in a classroom, with a teacher sitting up front but not teaching anything--and we weren't allowed to _go to the bathroom_ without asking permission first.
After about a week in this environment, I realized, not without some horror, that these people were children and that I would have to spend the next two years being treated like one of them. The coursework was almost without exception pure memorization and repetition--in my case, it involved a heavy diet of American propaganda indoctrination ("civics") because this was the only graduation requirement that I hadn't already satisfied. Happily, the school I went to had a "gifted & talented" program and I managed to find a couple courses that were actually interesting--AP physics and calculus.
I also met my first geek when I went to the computer club. Now, there are undoubtedly geeks in Canada; I'm not trying to say there aren't. But these people bought into every negative stereotype about themselves. They didn't just like playing with computers; they defined themselves by _hating_ the good-looking kids. I didn't get this at first, and almost wound up ostracized by every group at the school including the geeks. But as it turned out I was a lot better at the computer stuff than all but a couple of them, which earned me some respect.
Then there was the racial tension. In gym class, the black kids and the white kids actually played on opposite sides of the gym. This was so far beyond my comprehension that I didn't even notice, and went and played on the wrong side. They whipped me into line pretty quick--and it wasn't just the students; the gym teacher took me aside and told me what the deal was--as if it had official approval!
In short--I've never been in a more hateful, useless, divisive, nasty place than an American high school, and I can state from experience that there's no inherent reason why it has to be that way. It may sound like I'm painting Canada as some land of milk and honey--but believe me, that's not what I think at all (otherwise why would I still live in the U.S.)--and I have no way of knowing what's happened to Canadian high schools in the last 15 years. But if Canadians rarely kill each other in their schools, maybe there are good reasons why.
I think that the heart of this problem is the notion of discipline in schools. As much as Americans talk about freedom and liberty, they sure aren't comfortable with it in practice. America can be (and is) one of the most oppressive nations in the developed world. Hell, any politician who doesn't have quite as many votes as he would like can run a "get tough on crime" campaign and win an election. And what's the effective difference between "get tough on crime" laws in America, and oppressive social policy in places like China and Saudi Arabia?
The typical American on the street is strongly in favor of, to name a few, state-sponsored execution; state-sponsored political assassination (of foreigners, never of Americans--but no qualms about foreign heads of state, Geneva conventions be damned); immediate death penalties for anyone even suspected of, say, selling drugs to children; economic "starvation warfare" against civilian populations; the sale of heavy arms to essentially crazy people (ie state militias); and God knows what else--I can't even go on.
And they want to blame violence in the schools on Quake and Doom? Please.
The penchant for extreme violence and extreme social oppression is built into the American psyche. You can't get away from it. The use of language, the mass entertainment, the political scene, the reality of many neighborhoods--you can't turn around twice without being confronted by violence. Hell, America was founded on violence; up to maybe four generations ago, a fairly typical way to get land to live on was to go drive off or kill the native people who lived there. There's the old joke about an American and a Canadian talking about guns: "Guns are necessary," says the American, "because without guns we couldn't have won the West from the Indians." Replies the Canadian: "Did you ever think of making friends with them?"
But even with all the violent tendencies in the world, it's very difficult to act on them if you don't have a gun. Guns are the basic problem. Gun advocates will quote the Constitution as if it were holy writ: I say, the Constitution be damned; the provision for well-armed militias was written when the worst thing you could carry was a wheel lock musket. Stop hiding behind the Constitution and tell us exactly how free access to guns helps build communities in our cities. A note to the clue-challenged: You can't. They don't. Wake up.
-Graham
As with every democracy (even the representative democracies) the US has a problem on its recently re-bloodied hands: how do you serve the minority when majority rules? The short answer is: usually, you don't.
In high schools across the country, students are ritually ostracized, ignored and avoided by their peers, supposed mentors and potential friends, because they dress differently, they listen to different music or they have the wrong color skin. This is not news.
The Slashdot community (can I call us that?) is in a bit of an uproar, because "Hey, those guys over there in Colorado, that's us... or could be if we lost it... not saying that we'd blow people up or anything, but jesus, it'd be nice to get some revenge on these jerks who've been mercilessly picking on me since they developed muscles and I learned to code." Not that slashdotters would actually go out and do anything violent. We've got better things to do. Like watch freshmeat update. Or daytrade. But still, we can understand.
So teachers get worried. Because, after all, many of their middle school students are already more intelligent than they are. Not in all cases certainly, but after all, those who can, do, those who can't teach, right? Obviously overgeneralized, but you get the picture. When you have to send your eigth grade student over to the local college to get math tutoring, you have to worry that maybe the kid, without guidance, will be a bit of a danger. Because it's not a far jump from learning math to learning physics to learning chemistry to making bombs. Especially with such easy access to violent images in the media, not to mention the sex and violence they learn in Sunday school from the bible.
So teachers run scared of their students, who can, in many cases, out-think them, certainly outnumber them and with a bit of weaponry, could destroy them. Small wonder that that they trample students civil rights in the name of protecting themselves and other students. Small wonder that they pawn intelligent students off on psychiatrists, guidance counselors and the schools principal (Remember, the principal should be your pal... or treat him like a member of your family... an older brother...) when any student shows promise, or interest in something not specifically in the curriculum.
A fascination with war could be interpreted in two ways: if the kid is a jock, he's a West Point cadet, if he's abnormally intelligent, he's Oppenheimer, pursuing a "sweet technology" at the Trinity site.
How do you balance your fear of those who are more able than you with your duty to them as a teacher? Here's a thought: punish students who pick on other students, instead of ordering the students who get picked on to go to counseling.
You want solutions: don't turn to parents, who have turned absentee-landlord. Maybe it's time to up teachers salaries, so we can get teachers that are more able to cope with gifted and ostracized students. Perhaps looking to a President nicknamed "Bubba" is the wrong thing to do when dealing with the rights of the oppressed? Maybe it's time for corporations to send their techies out to do some one on one, or one on groups with gifted students? Show them that at the end of the tunnel is a paycheck, if not a light. Maybe it's time to stop handwringing and ask the "misfits" what it is exactly we'd like, why we hate four years of life and how we could make it better. Because you certainly won't see teachers reproaching the football team for locking the chess club in lockers and setting fire to the swim teams clothing. But you will be sent home for wearing a trenchcoat.
Because many of us can understand the hatred that wells up in the pit of the stomache when the opposite sex laughs at your advances, the media gives you no voice and your peers and mentors all view you askance because you have been cursed with intelligence, or view the world slightly differently, or have acne, or god forbid, are of a race not the majority. Those of us who have made it through the gauntlet of high school, getting marginalized, ignored and offended, could take some of these marginalized kids, and help them.
The following is my response to the Littleton massacre. A horrible event that could of been prevented. But the public system was too blind to see it coming:
I am 22, and since the age of 4 I've been a Geek. All through grade school I was considered a thug because of the people I hung out with people who
liked to think, rationalize things, and for that I was an outcast along with them. I developed a horrible temper, and was sent to the principal on
a regular basis because I wouldn't take the insults. And this was just 4th and 5th grade.
Then came middle school, I saw the anger I had, which was the same anger my father had, was killing him, and would kill me too if I didn't
try and control it. It took months of work on my self to bring myself to a level where the insults and ridicule wouldn't trigger the rage against people who saw me as a freak because I like chemistry, math, computers, and Star Wars.
But this if ofcourse didn't stop anything. In fact, it only made it worse because now I would "take it". In the 7th grade it got to the point
where I had to switch schools. My father had divorced my mother and moved to the suburbs. I can't describe the nightmare of that year.
In a world where you had to be a jock, or cheerleader in order to not be slammed as a nerd, it was straight out of the movie "Disturbing Behavior". I was supposed to go to the local highschool after that, but I moved back with my mother in the city, where there was at least
more people who thought on my same level. I would of rather died then stayed in the suburb where I was. They threaten to take me back, I threatened
to run away, never to return, and showed them the bus ticket to prove it.
Ah yes. High school. The most patheticly egotistic and superficial institution I know of. My freshman year was just as bad as 8th grade, only at least here I had a group of fellow geeks to lean on. Nerd, Geek, Dork, you name it I was called it. That was until an honest accident in high-school.
I was mixing two chemicals to study air pressure in a contained blast, for a science project, the teacher knew about it. I forgot that the vent fan wasn't on so it was basicly a big contained
box. I blew up the chemical shield that the compound was contained in. In a full class of 40 kids, the room was cleared in 10 seconds. They refused to come back in with me in the room. I was given a suspension, and was told that if anyone wanted a bomb from me, I was to report them immediately.
After this I was never ever bothered again. The people who once thought of me as a freak, thought of me as now a dangerous people who could snap
at anytime. They left me alone, and my friends and I who knew that I wouldn't hurt anyone, laughed, and were also saddened that it took an accident and the fear of me the "Crazy bomb making psycho" to finally make the cruelty stop.
My sophmore year I met my wife, online, and she supported my "crazyness" my irrational "curiosity" and now I'm a programmer and system administrator
at the midwests largest private ISP.
What the Littleton kids did was horrible. But not surprizing. My hearts go out to the families of the people who died. But we need to look at the
social struture of our schools. They can be segregated and twisted environments, which lead to twisted individuals who no longer see the value in life. Individuals who won't control the rage, and have no support system to vent it.
And then you have Littleton.
To those in school who see this situation as their own, you have to take heart. With places like Slashdot, you have a vent. You have a culture that accepts you are on the net. Life gets much better
after high-school. Find people who you share the
same ideas with, and who you can be creative with.
Don't get isolated. Find your kind. They ARE out there. The net makes it much easier for us to find eachother. And when the Jocks the people who find our curiosity dangerous and offensive are 30 years old with beer guts, watching re-runs of "All in the Family" wondering why the NFL hasn't called, you can laugh from your leather chair in your office knowing that for all your suffering, it paid off.
I was both jock and nerd in high school (14 years ago). Worst time of my life. I needed anti-depressants, 18 months of counseling, and strong support of my parents and my few friends to make it through without killing myself. Life has improved by magnitudes since then.
If your parents abuse you, Child Protective or Social Services steps in. If your co-workers harass you at work, The Law protects you. If some stranger harasses you, there are restraining orders, and stalking laws, and such, to use as a remedy.
But if your classmates treat you in a manner that is not acceptable in _any other facet of society_, it is called "part of the growing up process," or "all part of high school." I have never again seen the callous viciousness that permeated high school.
I do not, in any way, condone or sympathize with any violent actions. I do not condone, nor understand racism (especially because I am of mixed race).
But this national search for scapegoats must end. If the Internet and violent games cause behaviour like what has surfaced in Colorado, then how do we explain the actions of Ted Bundy and Ed Gein, whose killing sprees were far, far more sinister?
I have one thing to say, and I can't say it loudly enough:
The talents and values which are rewarded in high school have NOTHING to do with the real world.
HIGH SCHOOL IS NOT THE REAL WORLD!
I get up every morning to go to my over-paying job GLAD that I made it through without killing myself. Eveyone I know who is happy as an adult HATED high school.
HIGH SCHOOL IS NOT THE REAL WORLD!
If you're an outcast in high school, it's probably because you have values more meaningful than sneaking beer and attending pep rallies. I'm sorry it sucks, we "adults" aren't doing a very good job making it better.
People used to tell me it gets better after you get out. They were wrong. It gets fscking GREAT after you get out.
I can't imagine why adults are fascinated with high school. Every day I put between that place and myself is an improvement.
HIGH SCHOOL IS NOT THE REAL WORLD! DON'T TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY!
Hope this helps.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.