Slashdot Mirror
The Price of Being Different
Joan McDonald has been a teacher in a New York State suburban public high school for nearly three decades. "While deeply saddened by the tragedy in Littleton," she wrote Tuesday, "I am appalled at the resulting backlash our students are forced to suffer" in the wake of the Littleton massacre.
The last thing we need in the 20th Century, she wrote, is another witchhunt.
But that's what we're getting. McDonald described what hundreds of other teachers, administrators and students have been reporting all week - an assault on speech, dress, behavior or values that the media, politicians and some educators deem uncomfortably different a/k/a geek, nerd, Goth, the usual labels.
In a Gallup poll this week, 82 per cent of Americans surveyed said the Internet was at least partly to blame for the Colorado killings. And schools across the country were banning trench coats, backpacks, black clothing, white make-up, Goth music, computer gaming shirts and symbols. They installed hotlines and "concern" boxes for anonymous "tips" about the behavior of non-mainstream students. Kids who talked openly about anger and alienation, or who confessed thoughts of revenge or fantasies of violence against people who'd been tormenting and excluding them, were hauled off to counselors.
Thus the students already at risk, already suffering, have become suspects, linked in various thoughtless ways to mass murder and - consequently - more alienated than before.
The number of incidents involving disaffected kids and schools is growing. In Canada, a 14-year-old boy shot two students at a high school in Alberta, killing one. In Brooklyn, five boys were charged with conspiracy after allegedly compiling a list of people to be killed in an attacked planned for their schools commencement on June 26. In Oak Lawn, Illinois, a 15-year-old boy was charged with assault and disorderly conduct after an ax, knives, a rifle, shotguns, and 150 rounds of ammunition were found in his home. In California, one student was arrested for threatening to burn down a middle school and another for threatening to blow up the high school. In the city of Chicago, a 15-year-old was caught with a .22 caliber gun taped to his ankle. Pennsylvania officials reported at least 52 bomb scares and other threats at schools in 22 counties. In Washington, more than 12,000 high school students were evacuated after a caller said hed placed a bomb in one of the citys 13 public schools. In Longwood, Florida, a 13-year-old student was arrested after allegedly threatening to place a bomb at the school and kill eighth graders who had tormented him. A note on a map hes supposedly drawn included the phrase "revenge will be sweet."
"I just came right now from the counselor's office," e-mailed DrgnD. "I scored a thousand. I had on a long coat, was wearing black and loudly told the jerk sitting next to me that I'd do my best to kill him if he ever called me a " trenchcoat freak" again. I am now officially on probation. He is not."
Among the many other consequences of the Columbine High School tragedy: the cost of being different just went up.
Take the Goths, one of the distinct sub-cultures singled out by the press and linked to the Littleton bloodbath. Gothwalker says he (Drew) wrote his principal after his school made plans to ban black clothing, trenchcoats and Marylyn Manson music.
Goths have been e-mailing me for months now.
One of the most individualistic, interesting, and yes, gloomy subcultures, Goth is a style - of music, dress, state of mind. In general, Goths wear black, hang out on the Net, experiment with androgynous styles, are sometimes drawn to piercings, tattoos and white makeup; and love Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy and the Cure. Among their cherished authors are Sartre, Burroughs, Shelley and Poe. Fascinated with death (a taboo in the media and certainly in schools, along with sex and the open discussion of religion), Goths see it as a part of life.
In general, though, Goths do not hurt people. They brood; they emote; but the idea that they are murderous is a cultural libel.
One of the educational system's pervasive responses to Littleton was to lecture oddballs and geeks about the importance of not slaughtering others. One thing geeks and nerds hardly need is patronizing, offensive lesssons about the importance of not committing massacres. They're probably one of the least likely cultures in American life to commit homicide; their weapons of choice are electronic flames, not machine guns.
Of the thousands of e-mail messages I got this week (4,000 between Friday and Wednesday is my best guess), not one advocated violence or supported assault, murder or revenge.
Although many expressed sympathy for the killers as well as the victims in Littleton (unlike, say Time Magazine, which accompanied cover photos of the killers with the headline "The Monsters Next Door"), no one threatened violence, supported it, or approved of it.
But the stories of physical, verbal, emotional and administrative abusive that came pouring in were stunning, a scandal for an educational system that makes much noise about wholesomeness and safety, but has turned a blind eye for years to the persecution of individualistic and vulnerable students.
The Voices from the Hellmouth series on Slashdot this week demonstrated the power of interactivity and connectivity. Kids passed it around to one another, to parents, friends, teachers and guidance counselors.
"My seventeen year-old son handed me a print -out of your Littleton article," wrote Bagatti. "No one seems to think that peer abuse is real or damaging. I would like to see any adult report for work and be taunted, humiliated, harassed, and degraded every single day without going stark, raving mad. Human beings are not wired for abuse."
One of the clear messages from all of the e-mail was that it's time for geeks and nerds and the assorted "others" of the world to assert themselves, to begin defining and asserting their long overdue rights, perhaps with the help of the communicative possibilities of the Net. And to begin the work of re-structuring American schools - barely changed in generations despite the ongoing Information Revolution - and their frequently warped procedures, infrastructure and value systems.
At the very top of the agenda: Freedom from abuse, humiliation and cruelty. Geeks, nerds, and oddballs have the right to attend school in safety. Teachers and administrators have an obligation to make dignity for everybody - not just the popular and the conventional -- an urgent educational concern, in the same way they've taken on racism and other forms of bigotry.
Geeks who are harassed and humiliated should report the assaults, and perhaps using the possibilities of the Internet, take their complaints farther if they are ignored or further victimized. Online, they can receive support, advice, even counseling if necessary. Judging from many of my e-mail messages, it is.
Each generation has the right to determine its own culture. Culture isn't just symphony orchestras, movies about dead British royalty and hard-bound books. For some, culture is now also gaming, websites, chat and messaging systems, TV shows, music and movies.
No generation has the right to dictate to another what its culture ought to be, or to degrade its choices as stupid and offensive. Yet geek and nerd culture is continuously denounced as isolating, addictive and, now, even murderous.
Games like Tribe, Unreal, Quake, even The Legend of Zelda, and yes, Doom, can be astoundingly creative, challenging and imaginative. They are often demanding, played in communal and interactive ways. Some people may be uncomfortable with some of their imagery.
But youth culture has frequently been offensive to adults - that's often the point - and culture has always evolved. Adults seem to have no memories of their own early lives. Early rock and roll was likened to medieval plagues by the clueless journalists and nervous educators of the time. Now, next to some extreme forms of hip-hop, Chuck Berry seems as dangerous as Beethoven.
Adolescence is a surreal world: kids who don helmets and practice banging into one another for hours each week are deemed healthy and wholesome, even heroic. Geeks are branded strange and anti-social for building and participating in one of the world's truly revolutionary new cultures - the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Or for being isolated or lacking school spirit. Or for listening to industrial music or wearing odd clothes. But perhaps geek kids are isolated partly because schools don't provide them with any means of connecting.
Educators need to radically expand their notions of what culture is, and to re-consider the messages of disdain they continuously send some of their potentially most creative and students.
Inhabitants of a new world, with a new culture, geeks often find that the old symbols don't work for them - pep rallies, proms, assemblies, etc. In fact, scholars like Janet Murray of MIT ("Hamlet On The Holodeck") are beginning to explore the ways in which interactivity and representational writing and thinking are changing the very neural systems of the young.
Instead of banning Doom and Quake, schools should be forming Doom and Quake clubs, presided over by teachers who actually know something about the online world ( my e-mail indicates that there's one frustrated geek on the faculty in most schools). Any school with a football team ought to have a computer gaming, web design or programming team as well. Geeks ought to see their interests represented in educational settings, to not simply feel pushed to the margins of everyone else's. When these new interests and values are recognized and institutionalized, geek kids may have more status, and feel less like aliens in their own schools.
Schools need to provide choices. Educators love to talk empowerment, but few seem to grasp what it means. Geek kids are not, in general, docile and obedient; their subculture is argumentative and outspoken. Online, each person makes his or her own rules, goes where he or she wants to go. Increasingly, it's a difficult transition between free-wheeling cyberspace and the oppressive, rule-bound Old Fartism that dominates American education.
"School sucks," e-mailed Jane from Florida. "It's run like a police state, and it's boring and clueless."
Kids raised in interactive environments - with zappers, Nintendos, computers, sophisticated games - complain that they sometimes struggle in environments where adults stand for hours droning at them about passive things. This doesn't mean they are dumb, just different. Their digital world is much more vital, colorful and engaging that their educational one.
Geeks are used to choice, a landmark cultural and political issue for them. It's the responsibility of schools to create more challenging and interactive environments for its students - a benefit for all younger people who need to learn how to analyze, how to question, how to reach decisions, not just how to take notes and then check the right boxes on the midterm.
And: freedom. Why does the First Amendment end at the school door, when many kids, especially geeks, have spent much of their lives in the freest part of American culture - the Internet? Online, people can speak about anything: dump on God, talk about sex, flame pundits, express themselves politically and rebelliously. In school, no one can.
Geeks, perhaps more accustomed to free expression than their non-wired peers, increasingly and disturbingly refer to schools as "fascistic" environments in which they are censored and oppressed. All kids can't have absolute freedom all the time but many kids, especially older ones raised in the Digital Age, need more than they're getting. Without it, they will become increasingly alienated.
A gaming website like PlanetQuake gets more than 70,000 visitors a day; Planet Halflife gets about 30,000. GameSpy, which helps gamers connect to local games, draws between 60,000 and 80,000. Estimates of online gamers in the United States alone run as high as 15 to 20 million people. The half-baked notion that this activity sparks kids to grab lethal weapons and murder their peers sends a particular kind of message to the millions of kids gaming on and off-line -- that the people responsible for educating and protecting them (politicians, therapists, journalists, educators - have no idea what they are talking about, and are posturing in the most ignorant and self-serving ways. It's hard to imagine a more alienating lesson for the young than that.
Finally: access to popular culture and to the Internet isn't a privilege. It's a right. For many kids, the Net isn't alienation, but its alternative; it's their intellectual, social, cultural and political wellspring. They need it to learn, to feel safe and connected, and to function economically, socially and politically in the next century. Obviously, no rights come without responsibilities - and those should be spelled out both in schools and in families. But access to the Net and to other facets of one's culture ought not be a toy that parents and teachers are willing to dispense to "good" and "normal" boys and girls. For many kids, it's their lifeblood, and it shouldn't be restricted, withdrawn or used manipulatively except under the most serious circumstances.
It already seems clear from the stories coming out of Colorado that the two young killers killers were severely disturbed, victims of mental illness about which we know, to date, very little. The media roadshow - increasingly our leading transmitter of national hysterias -- that quickly engulfs stories like these demands answers, and has an endless supply of experts happy to go on TV and supply them.
But Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, along with the completely innocent people that they slaughtered, are also victims deserving of compassion. Their illnesses may or may not have been exacerbated by social cruelty and alienation, they may or may not have been affected by access to violent imagery and/or lethal weaponry. We may never be able to answer the why's their act provoked. Human minds, for all we're learning about them, sometimes remain mysterious, human acts inexplicable.
Reading all these messages from the Hellmouth this week, I've been overwhelmed by the outpouring of suffering generated by the experience of going to school, and by the brutal price people have paid and are paying for being different. Few people commit violence in schools, but way too many have fantasized about it.
These messages were, in different ways, all saying the same thing. A humane society truly concerned about its children would worry less about oddballs, computer games and clothing, and more about creating the kind of schools kids would never dream of blowing up.
Postscript-just came in:
My life has been turned upside down over the last few days, all because
I wear a trenchcoat to school. The vice principal called the local
sheriff because of rumors that he herd. On Friday I had my home
searched by 3 deputies when they didn't find any thing I thought that it
was the end of my humiliation but it was only the start. When I got to
school Friday I had to spend a entire hour talking to the vice principal
and a guidance councilor. Today when I got to school I was called back
to his office and this time had a nice chat with a detective from the
local police. This time the person from the police was asking me about
rumors that when the sheriff searched my home that they found weapons
and bombs. I now have a police investigation going on about rumors of
the sheriff's investigation. In the mean time I have been speeding more
time out of class then in it. When will this witch hunt end? When can I
get back to my life? And when will the nation learn that it is
pointless to composite for long periods of inaction with extreme over
reaction.
Mootar in central IL
high school.
Sure, I remember a lot of bad times; times when
administrators and teachers picked on me and my
friends for not falling into line, times when the
jocks and rich kids got special treatment, times
when I got made fun of...
Overall, though, high school was fun. I remember
laying out in the sun with my friends, water-gun
fights (probably banned now, eh?), bowling,
Denny's at all hours, parties, and just plain
hanging out.
I see all of this angst dripping around here, and
I almost feel like I have to defend my experience
because it didn't suck. And yeah, I was in the
dweeb clique -- RPGs, first person shooter games,
trench coats et. al....
Someone back me up here....
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Posted by Alf Alpha:
I'm not sure if I have the quote correct, but in one of the SW trailers Yoda says something like this: "Fear leads to suffering, suffering leads to hate and hates leads to the Dark Side."
One of the greatest tradgedies that has become apparent in these recent posts is how many people have given into the Dark Side. The decision whether to let hate dominate our own lives is our own choice, whether we are the oppresors or the ones being oppressed.
And so with this latest backlash the cycles continues. However, the choice of response if ours, we can choose to forgive or to hate in return.
May the Force be with you, always.
Yes, harassing people for wearing trenchcoats seems prima facie idiotic. At least it did yesterday.
Last night I was walking along the street around midnight and I saw two young boys coming towards me. One was wearing a long black coat. I have to admit this thought crossed my mind: what if he's planning a copycat killing?
And hey, I'm a freaky geek who was picked on in high school. Shouldn't I be sympathetic?
The fact is, these cops and principals, who are so out of touch that they probably never noticed trenchcoats before, are suddenly struck dumb with fear at the sight of that particular piece of apparel. It's not a conspiracy to suppress individuality, it's just the honest terror of the clueless whitebread types.
Will there be copycat killings, though? It seems there was one yesterday in Canada, with a trenchcoat-wearing gunman wounding one student and killing another.
Try to understand that people are very afraid right now. Try to leave your trenchcoat, your Marilyn Manson t-shirts and your skull earrings at home for a few weeks. When the urge comes upon you to utter threats in a rage or say that you understand how the gunmen felt, bite your tongue and post about it later. If parents or teachers question your right to use the Internet, quietly and calmly argue that you use it for research, that you like to read the headline news, and that you need it to download antivirus updates (point to Melissa and CIH).
This too shall pass.
Groucho
Reading these missives makes me hurt so badly I have trouble reading through them. It really amazes me that people can do that to children, and then keep doing it even when the consequences of abuse are so, so clear.
I understand the problem. They don't know. They have no idea there is a problem; their behaviour is exactly what causes kids to snap and even kill.
Ironically, the very thing which they think might be responsible could actually help them. It's a simple solution -- it's worked for Amnesty International for decades. E-mail the schools. Don't let them act without letting them know you know what they're doing, and you don't approve. Tell them about the Hellmouth. Tell them why what they're doing is wrong.
I would love to see the Geek community united to the point where it is a force for social change as well as just the technical. This seems like an excellent place to start.
Will.
The mainstream media is likely to distort any story to be as controversial and poigiant as possible while squeezing it into 22 minutes of dramatic 911 calls, crying kids and choice quotes from dime-store sociologists.
How about snail-mailing every principal, vice principal and guidance councellor in North America?
Perhaps a standardized letter?
Some of them did some good things, like promoting geeky clubs in schools and not forcing people to eat in their cafeterias. Others it seems like to degrade students as much as possible.
Or perhaps at the very least, we could create a website where the outpouring of email could have identifying markings stripped off, and focus on what seems to be the problem... parents, teachers, police officers and principals who are critical or neglegant --- along with another area where success stories could be posted. Things which saved people from bitter isolation and torment.
There has to be a better way to handle this than to have bullies and jerks all over the country laugh at heart-felt testamonies from tortured schoolkids on NBC, while sociologists tell these kids to talk to their parents, teachers or guidance councellors.
I'm 31 years old. I was a misfit in school; so much so that I never joined a distinct subculture. I just wore clothes that weren't trendy, listened to music that wasn't trendy, thought what I wanted and said what I thought. I was isolated, alienated, and generally unimpressed with my peers. My overwhelming feeling was one of pain. Pain at the casual, random cruelty that people inflicted on one another. I'm not religious at all, but I have a favorite verse of the Bible. It is the shortest. "Jesus wept." Do you know what it is like for an overweight male computer geek who cries at the pain of others?
Now I am 31. I'm very mainstream. I've reached equilibrium between my continuing concern for my fellow living things and my relative powerlessness. I'm actually happy. All of this personal revelation is just to lay thr groundwork for what I have to say.
Even now I am forgetting (as I think most adults have forgotten) how powerful adolescent emotions are. I wept, I raged, I suffered. In retrospect, it was a lot of wasted energy, but at the same time I miss the passion I had then.
When I heard the news of Littleton, I heard the demonization of the children who perpetrated this crime. Adults do this so we don't have to own up to our own painful responsibility for this event and others like it. Adolescents need the involvement of caring adults in their lives, not the intrusion of fearful or mistrustful adults. These were not monsters, they were CHILDREN. What they did was monsterous, but there were not adult enough to be monsters. They were not "gunmen" as I hear in the press all the time. If anything, they were "gunboys." Until you have lived through some adult pain (like the death of a parent, etc.) until you know the emptiness of unconsolable loss you don't REALLY know what death means. To these "gunboys" death became a game. Not because they played Doom, but because they hadn't learned through loss the value that life has. They held life cheaply.
I do actually think violent games and movies are a problem, but I do not think they are to blame. I think each of us, parent and child, game maker and movie producer, employer and worker (the economically induced absence of parents plays a part I do not hear enough about), jock and nerd, each of us needs to take a look at how we treat ourselves and one another. We need to ask ourselves if our lives should be this way. The world is not immutably a place of cruelty. We have the power to make this world what we want it to be. We just have to decide within us what has value. Money and power, or compassion and love. It is our choice. It is my choice. It is your choice. Choose.
I'm one of the people who fit the nerd/geek/wierdo category. This article is very thoughtful, and extremely well worded. I can say as a person who spent every year of school until my junior year of highschool being tormented, that it is worse than a lot of people can imagine. What saved me?
One day, I stopped myself from snapping back at somone, and thought about it for a second. What exactly did 'nerd' mean to me? It meant someone who did well in school, who liked learning, who loved science, computers, and being their own person. At that moment, it stopped bothering me, and within a month of that, they stopped bothering me. They started to respect me, because I respected myself, and realized that I could be proud of myself.
So, to all you nerds out there, I have a few words of encouragement. Stand up for yourselves. Stand tall, be proud. We are the people who really make society run.
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
The mandatory hell referred to as high school will always be one of the most detrimental experiences an individual can go through until some fundamental changes take place.
What we need to understand is that the jocks, preps, and wacko administration kiss-asses do not go away once high school is over. They become the new generation of teachers, cops, judges, businessmen, etc. They do well in life because they already have the advantage of being well-to-do, accepted by the rest of the mundane society, and "on the right track." In case anyone hasn't figured it out, high school is a training ground for the workforce. All the necessary skills of obedience, blind acceptance, kissing butt, the willingness to sacrifice 66% of your day to mind-numbing and pointless work or sleep --- these are the "job skills" that need to be learned by the innately free-willed human being to fit into our mechanical capitalist hell.
Of course, nothing of this has to do with the fact that our society has been running on an authoritarian structure that places a small group of people as an elite over other groups and, ultimately, all of the "masses."
Black, poor, gay, freak, geek --- your individualism is useless to the machinery of global profit-making.
But there is more to it than that. Your individualism is more importantly dangerous to the button-pushers and their servile middle-men (the managers -- cops, teachers, landlords, corporate scum). They will always do whatever they can to appease you. And they will try to appease you over Colorado. They will become more "open" -- at least on the record. But in the end, when push comes to shove, they are "they" for a reason: they have the power and they will do anything to keep it.
Our generation has the cynicism from watching the extended hippie revolution joke, the anger from being further polarized and born into a violent, oppressive culture, and the numbers to make a difference.
So what are we doing whining about it on this message board? Let's overthrow the music industry with MP3's, overthrow the tech industry with free software, and overthrow the corporation-state's power monopoly through plain old internet anarchy!
-----------
open source everything
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open source everything
. . . is a great source of the problem. Ignoring things will not change it. Forgetting about it will not change it. These very issues need to be addressed!
I would hate to be in school as a teenager now. I lived thru years of torment/alienation from ignorant people like you. Take the time to understand the people that are picked on. Those 'jocks' & 'preps' that took the time to get to know me, the 'freak', knew I was someone worth liking. Kids needs to understand that. Befriend those in your class because it is they that have to deal with you. Once they know you, understand you, they may even stand up for you. I had a 'jock' friend that was willing to fight my fights with the 'jock' bully who was picking on me, calling me a fag, threatening me. Take the time . . . it works . . .
This tragedy(s), & the ones gauranteed to follow from more copycats like Taber Canada, touch me deeply because I lived it. I feel that the persecution from the 'jocks'/'preps' is only being justified by the school administration when the schools themselves persecute. What kind of message does it send to a developing mind when the school administration isolates/persecutes/alienates/traumatizes people that so happen to dress the same as Eric or Dylan? There has to be a place for the kids being 'attacked' by the school systems to log their complaints! It has been labeled before, but this WITCH HUNT needs to stop before they pust another kid over the edge!
I have created a place for everyone to discuss these issues. Where to get help, where to take your complaints, what to do, why, when, & who . . . stop by!
LITTLETON TRAGEDY DISCUSSION
£ Ä ¥ G Ö
~=~=~=~=~
I get knocked down, but I get up again;
You're never gonna keep me down
~=~=~=~=~
£ Ä ¥ G Ö
~=~=~=~=~
I get knocked down, but I get up again;
You're never gonna
We've seen an outpouring of experiences, feelings, and commiseration over the past few days, and that's a good thing. This is surfacing in many places, and that's a good thing, too. It's good to talk. It's more effective to take the talk and actually develop it to the point where we can actually do something to make a difference for today's and tomorrow's kids...
...Or, you might not...
I've made a start. Have you?
I wrote a letter that I entitled, "An Open Letter to My Child's School District". It was a three page piece calling attention to the things being posted here, and how it relates to ALL schools EVERYWHERE. I voiced my concerns calmly and with as much logic as I could muster. I appealed to the readers to remove the gloss from their own memories of their school years. I urged that the letter be made available to every member of staff in the District.
I attached Jon's articles, as well as several of the responses they generated. Made a pretty long attachment, I must say!
I hand delivered a copy to each principal in the school district, as well as one to the District Superintendent.
Then, just so the whole thing would be less likely to be met with a "Thank you" and shelved, I delivered a copy to the editor of the local newspaper (the only media outlet here), who expressed an interest in helping keep their feet to the fire.
I'm moving on to our Congresspersons, the Secretarial levels of state and federal government, the Governor, and the President.
In order for this sort of thing to be effective, though, many more have to play the game. It's far more enduring than a flash in the media pan is going to be, even though it takes a bit more effort. However, since there is a lot of hand-wringing going on, with a lot of people saying, "Somebody's got to DO SOMETHING about this!", I would that we be the ones to start doing the doing.
The letters need to be signed and accompanied by the information necessary to contact you. You might wish to offer to sit on a committee that works on policy recommendations.
Since students who say these things are targeted for even greater levels of scrutiny (and even abuse), it would seem advisable that the letters come from concerned parents and other adults. There are also some things that you might like to consider in the process...
While we might be offering a wake-up call, we should also be offering solutions and suggestions. Emphasis needs to be placed on identifying problem areas, defining needs, and devising age-appropriate solutions. This is a pervasive problem that begins in early childhood education and continues on, with ever-increasing cruelty, through entire school careers. Geeks, etc. are not the only ones who are being tormented. Anyone who is classified as "different" by ANY school caste group is going to be abused in some fashion by the members of at least one of the many other caste groups, unless education and intervention are inculcated from the earliest ages possible.
Since education begins at home, community awareness needs to be significantly heightened. There are instinctual elements at work here that are going to take a lot of work to counteract. If there is a pecking order amongst chickens, one of the least intelligent critters available, you can bet your boots that every higher animal is going to have individuals singled out for torment. That's not to say, however, that the most intelligent of the animals can't overcome this.
It's just going to take some work, is all...
This is NOT just an "American thing". It happens EVERYWHERE in the world. You can change the names of the authority levels to meet your own situation. Remember, civilisation began to happen because an individual found a better, easier way to do something important!
There are several things that need to be brought to the attention of officialdom, and I think we can all appreciate that the wheels of authority don't turn in the direction we want them to unless enough of us begin hollering loudly enough in a reasoned way to merit serious consideration. Things to bring to the table in your letters would include:
Littleton didn't happen beacause:
-- of the Internet
-- of violent computer games
-- of violent movies
-- of easy availability of weapons
-- of adopting an "outsider" culture
-- of drugs
-- of a lack of anger control
-- of lack of parental supervision
-- of the general decline of society
While some or all of these may have played contributing roles to a varrying degree, we need to get the nation...and the world..to understand that Littleton, along with similar incidents, happened, and WILL HAPPEN AGAIN, largely because of the severe emotional stress placed on people too young to handle it by the incredibly rigid and cruel caste systems imposed by young people in the sxhool and neighbourhood social systems of the young.
In common with the caste system we see operating even today on the Indian sub-continent, once assigned to a group, you are hard pressed to ever rise above it. In common with what happens in chicken society, those at the bottom of the pecking order become incredibly abused and left out of all opportunity to remain healthy.
Most of those so abused in our education systems make it out alive. However, far too many kill themselves out of despair. Some use alcohol or drugs to ease the pain. A precious few snap in another direction and seek active revenge. A small minority of these actually succeed in killing those who they perceive to be tormenting them. In cases where the targets appear random, chances are that is because the killers perceive that EVERYBODY hates them.
I would like to make certain that the President comes to rise above political gun control rhetoric to understand that his proposals will not help reduce the chances of this happening again, because they won't. That won't happen unless enough people step forward with calm, reasoned words that counter the present knee-jerk reations we are seein all around us.
I want every Congressperson and Senator to understand that there are problems that need to be addressed, and that it's going to take some resources to bring about change for our children.
I would like people to make enough well-reasoned fuss that we see Congressional Hearings on the issue of caste system abuse in American schools (along with schools in all nations). I would like to see students of all ages and from all school and neighbourhood castes to be among those testifying. I would like to see adult survivors of this abuse testifying, and I would like to see our educators and developmental and emotional health experts testifying, too.
It won't happen without a lot of serious noise from the crowd.
The world needs to hear from those who snapped, telling why they snapped, as well as from those who endured, and why they didn't snap. We need to learn a WHOLE LOT more from those who are going through this now, from sides of both the oppressed and their oppressors.
We can't get there, though, unless enough of us speak up ON PAPER. We can talk amongst ourselves until we are blue in the face, and we can talk to talk to all of the reporters we want to, but it won't do any good for our kids until we can get the people in charge of their educations to address the problem in an effective manner.
At the same time, we are ALL going to have to address our responsibilities as adults in the process of raising the next generation of leaders and followers. It doesn't matter whether we have children of our own or not, we all have a part to play in the process. We can either be silent and let things go on as they have before, or we can get up and make a difference. Each of us has the choice.
For those of us who are parents, we have to pick up on our responsibilities to our own children. Some of us have children who are being tormented in school. Some of us have children who are tormentors. Some of us have children who have feet in both camps. We have the responsibility to know where they stand in this, and we have the responsibilty to work with them to help them prevent being part of the problem where that is indicated, and we have the responsibility to advocate for them where that is appropriate.
Nobody is going to be neutral in this one. You are either going to be an advocate for change or an enabler for the status quo. That's a choice that each person is going to make, whether he or she reads this or not.
Norman MacLeod