"You treat children as slaves, and you're surprised when they despise you
and your institutions? You lock them up in cages, and act surprised when
they kill their keepers?"
 - Vin Suprynowicz (who should immediately be elected leader of the NRA, or
   they might as well hang it up. How more clearly can you admit guilt than
   they did by cancelling their meeting?)

"Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage,
isolated from their chance at community...Interrupt kids with bells and horns
all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to
plead for the natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and
toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame
them and they will find a hundred ways to get even."
 - John Taylor Gatto, former New York State Teacher of the Year

I write these things having had a few days and some intense conversations to
reflect on and develop these thoughts, and believe they are an accurate insight
into my history, modulo my own subjective filters.  I have done my best to be
polite -- a skill which I have learned generally by interaction with others
over the Internet and BBS's -- and think I have done a good job. But these are
ugly things we're discussing, and I won't be offended if anyone disagrees with
me or chooses not to read. I say what I say not to gain sympathy, privilege or
any special status as a downtrodden or oppressed person, but because I believe
it to be the truth.

"Laws come and go. What's illegal yesterday may be legal today. But what's
wrong in God's eyes...that's wrong on any day."
 - A priest explains civil disobedience on today's _In the Heat of the Night_
  (and why do I, an atheist of many years, find this show's portrayal of the
  religious and spiritual so profoundly uplifting and moving? Way too many
  reasons to go into.)

One of my sisters writes:

According to the April 23rd online edition of USA Today, the worst school
tragedy in American history -- at least in terms of numbers -- was in Bath,
Michigan. On May 18th, 1927, Andrew Kehoe, a school board member and a local
farmer, killed 44 people, 38 of them children. He had spent the vast majority
of that spring at the school, ostensibly doing electrical work but actually
stringing wires and hiding dynamite in the basement of the school. He left the
building running; two minutes later, the explosions went off. He returned to
the school later that afternoon, motioned Superintendent Emory Hyuck over to
his car, spoke to him briefly and then shot his gun into the back seat of the
car, setting off more dynamite and killing both of them. The next morning, the
body of Kehoe's wife was found where he had apparently killed her the morning
of the blast. His house and six outbuildings on his farm had burned, set afire
by explosions he'd programmed to go off after he left for the school.

On May 20th, 1998, 15-year old Kimberly Jo Dotts of Clearfield, Pennsylvania
was dragged into the woods with a rope around her neck, hung from a tree, and
finally killed by a rock to the skull; her killers were other teenagers, who
were reacting to her threat to inform others of their plans to run away to
Florida. The very next day, 15-year old pencil-necked misfit Kip Kinkel of
Springfield, Oregon, the younger child of well-to-do parents, the only child
still living at home and who had been prescribed Prozac -- a drug whose makers
admit can cause side effects such as "apathy; hallucinations; hostility;
irrational ideas; and paranoid reactions, antisocial behavior; hysteria; and
suicidal thoughts" -- and who had been attending anger control classes -- shot
his parents and two of his classmates, wounding 22 more. I leave it to the
reader to guess which story was on the front page with photos, and which one
was buried on page 12.  

The loss of one life, the crushing of one spirit, is as evil as the subjugation
and destruction of many; even genocide happens one individual at a time.

Before my generation, people who saw a child of 10 or 11 years of age walking
outside with a firearm thought nothing of it, and not just in "rural" areas.
Dynamite, and other potential methods of mass destruction, were available by
mail order with no need for identification. And (prepare for shock) I engaged
in a great deal of destruction of property in my youth as an outlet for my
aggressions; the vast majority of the time, this property was thankfully my own
and not that of others. There are more than a few small craters in the dirt of
my town that I'm responsible for. Inanimate objects don't fight back. Or to put
it another way, "Fire is cool. Hehe, heheh."

I make light of these things because humor is one of the things that sets us
above the animals; but also because if I hadn't learned to laugh, I might have
died from crying. If I'd been allowed sufficient time and attention in some of
the fights I was in as a child, I might very well have killed someone with my
bare hands, a rock or a pointy stick. Killing, or at the very least permanent
injury, or even unconsciousness, was *always* my goal when things escalated to
that point, which was all too often.

"Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We would not let people have guns --
why should we let them have ideas?"
 - Stalin

I had access to computerized Bulletin Board Systems from the time I was 13,
which were a veritable cornucopia of bomb recipes, advice on critical killing
points on the body, and countless exhortations to everything from mindless
vandalism to thoughtful rebellion. Most of the BBS's which contained such
material were populated with individuals who, like me, had a variety of reasons
for their interest in such information and more than the average amount of
motivation for using it. Before that, at any time I could have simply thrown a
can of gasoline over a group of people and easily killed a great many of them,
and this method would have required very little in the way of brainpower and
physical resources.

Even as a teenager, my fear of consequences AND the voice of my conscience were
only BARELY sufficient to keep me from killing, and as I'll show in a moment,
other factors were far more crucial to this fortunate chain of events, choices
and forks in the road of my life. When I found the Internet, I discovered it
was the complete opposite of everything I despised in life; that ideas were
judged according to merit and not appearance or social status; that freedom,
creativity AND cooperation were respected and encouraged; and that violation or
disrespect of the rights of others was quickly punished by the community. This
hasn't changed all that much despite the mass influx of people who have little
to no knowledge of, or respect for, those social mores that the Internet has
developed over the years.

(I don't view adhering to standards of civilized behavior as "conformity", but
rather, the necessary minimum that ethics requires of anyone who wishes to be
treated fairly and justly. The essence of the Golden Rule underlys many faiths
and philosophies, because it's a simple rule that serves people well even in a
complex world.)

You either trust your children unsupervised, in the knowledge that they will
choose wisely, or you don't. The gray areas in rights theory in regards to
children, the mentally disabled, etc., are well-known, and I won't belabor any
of you with them; the point is that it is immoral to treat everyone like the
few nuts who will let nothing but death stop them, and have no fear of the
consequences for whatever reason. My parents trusted me in some areas and not
in others; I betrayed their trust on a number of occasions, and engaged in a
lot of truly evil behavior towards others, not just self-destructive. Them's
the facts.

Culture *and* motivation are the key factors. The truly motivated can, and do,
kill with anything. The fights I got into in school did not result in the death
of my adversaries for two reasons I can think of offhand:

 o My inferior size and strength compared to most of my opponents. This, in
fact, is the primary reason as far as I can determine. It isn't that I didn't
want to kill, but even one on one I seldom had the advantage, and generally
thugs run in packs, both as children and adults. (Why? The more people you get
on your side, the easier you can lose your identity in the mob; it makes it
harder to pin the blame on any one person, and helps people justify their
actions to themselves. Part of the process of becoming evil is a decreasing of
one's sense of empathy with others, as well as deadening the voice of your own
conscience (assuming you have one to begin with; there are a few individuals I
can recall that seemed to have none whatsoever).)

 o The intervention of authorities, which only preserved my physical well-
being; my mental or emotional well-being was not at all helped by their
treatment of me as the causal factor in nearly every altercation. "Blaming the
victim" doesn't just happen to rape victims. For people supposedly acting in
loco parentis, almost every teacher I had did a poor job of it, in both the
private sector AND the public.

The compulsory attendance laws meant that if I was being raised in a way that
others didn't approve of, for whatever reason, my parents could have been
jailed; if they happened to resist, they would have ultimately been killed, and
treated as the wrongdoers. Now having no children of my own may disqualify me
from having an opinion in some matters, or it may not. But for me to look back
and say what my parents "should" have done is grossly unfair of me and ignores
the fact that they DID have my best interests at heart, which is more than can
be said for a great many children.

My father attempted at one point to homeschool me, but this was essentially
repeating the same mind-numbing cirriculum; my heart and mind were sick, and my
emotional and mental attitude were not at all conducive to it. Basically, the
earlier I were offered the choice, the better prepared I would have been to
grow into the responsibilities that freedom entailed; but I know that my
parents did their best with a son who gave them almost nothing but grief from
the time he entered school, and ultimately I am the only one responsible for
the path I walk.

I also thank my parents for never drugging me. Prozac, Ritalin and even
stronger substances continue to grow in popularity with those who find it
necessary to drug children into docility rather than merely breaking their
spirit; these are powerful drugs whose long-term physical and psychiatric
effects are only now being discovered.  Meanwhile, any attempt at altering
one's consciousness with unapproved substances, whether out of an attempt to
dull the pain or just for sheer pleasure, is likewise treated as sick, evil and
deserving of the full punishment of the law; while middle-school girls who
share Midol are suspended and a girl who gave her asthma inhaler to a friend on
the school bus, saving her life in the process, is branded a "drug trafficker"
by school officials.

My resistance is not confined solely to the schools funded by stolen monies; I
resist the entire idea of the Prussian model that most schools are based on and
continue to be based on, because it is fundamentally hostile to the idea and
expression of individuality; it was designed to churn out mindless drones who
wouldn't make trouble, who would make good cannon fodder, with *real* education
in both critical thinking skills (but not too much!), historical fact and the
recognition of humanity reserved for a controlling elite. And it sees all
individuals unequivocally as the property of the State, and at its disposal.

My definition of education is to develop the innate capacities by instruction,
whether formal or informal, with the goal of making the child an independent,
thinking adult who can successfully negotiate the various and sundry perils of
life without going mad, and who have a sense of empathy with others. Is it any
service to children if we teach them the fact of the white man destroying the
Sioux as a sovereign nation, and hide from them the fact that Sioux girls had
to sleep with their knees tied together and rigorously avoid certain areas of
their own camps to avoid rape; that the old, especially woman, were routinely
abandoned (and not as consistently "revered" as popular media tells it); that
young children, especially girls, of fallen warriors often perished because the
man who took their mother would often not take them with her and protect them?
Who decides what should be taught? Who shall determine what is education, and
what is indoctrination and brainwashing? And why must the gun of the law be
used to force every last child and parent to Comply?

The blindered vision of so many statist "educators" appalls me. They portray
themselves as the salvation of the nation, but they have yet to prove that
their method works at all, much less works better than the alternatives. Why do
they so adamantly oppose a parent's having a choice in the matter of educating
their children? If they offered a quality service, wouldn't most people prefer
theirs to whatever else would be available?  But since their service is
mediocre at best and shamefully destructive in so many cases, they rightly fear
that their heretofore captive clientele will abandon them at the first chance.

Having already addressed the weapons, I agree that a great deal of media serves
as little more than inflammation. But I would blame headline news stories, CNN,
etc., before I would blame violent imagery in songs, movies or video games. If
I were a potential criminal looking for pointers, I'd watch news, action dramas
and crime documentaries all day long. The ancient Greek children who witnessed
unbelievably bloody and cruel events as a matter of course every day did not
all grow up to become killers or despots; violence and cruelty have been
historically commonplace and accepted, or even revered and exalted, and human
history at least shows *some* forward progress in this area, however slow.
History has not become more bloody; rather, our tolerance of violence as a
means of social interaction is decreasing.

When Bill Clinton deplores the "culture of violence" while sending troops to
shoot and bomb people in Kosovo who aren't even in his legal or political
jurisdiction; when those who supposedly protect and serve us gas and burn men,
women and children without a properly served warrant or any evidence of wrong
doing, shoot an unarmed woman holding an infant and then taunt and mock her
family through megaphones for days while their bodies rot in the sun; when a
Japanese newspaper deplores "the warped strains of 'an advanced society'" when
their leaders have only recently started acknowledging the Rape of Nanking and
the so-called "noble" class systematically disarmed the peasants for centuries
by making it illegal for them to own swords (prompting the development of many
of the martial arts)...  Then, folks, we have some serious hypocrisy and denial
going on.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."
 - Walt Kelly, _Pogo_

Agreed.

Amen.

I know all too many children with supposedly open-minded and loving parents
who, despite their generally hippy-peace-love leanings, have a great deal of
difficulty in treating their children like potential adults instead of the
mindless lumps they accuse the world of treating them as when they were that
age. Physician, heal thyself! It breaks my heart to see these kids emotionally
bullied, lied to and essentially expected to grow into little clones of their
parents. You'd think these people -- who I spent adolescence with, who are all
slightly older than me and many of whom had just as unhappy childhoods than I,
if not worse -- would never even consider such behavior, let alone engage in it
on a regular basis while apparently remaining blind to its destructive effects.

I have as much of a relationship with these children as I can, under the
circumstances, but I learned long ago that even the most subtle and polite
approach by myself to the parents quickly led to denial and outright hostility
on their part. My point being, I suppose, that stupidity is universal.

"There comes a time when the running of the Machine makes you so sick inside,
so sick at heart that you cannot participate, that you cannot even passively
participate. Then you must throw your bodies across the gears, across the
levers, across the wheels of the mechanism and MAKE IT STOP."  
 - Greenberg, I believe.

Evil triumphs when the good do nothing, and every little bit helps. One soul
(and starfish) at a time.

A group of black girls I passed on the street corner yesterday jeered, yelled
obscenities at me and called me white trash. Just down the street, I stopped
into a restaurant and while waiting for my order, two black girls sitting at
the counter looked at me.

One smiled and asked, "How long it take you to grow your hair that long?"

"Too long," I smiled clumsily.

"I like it," she smiled, returning to her conversation and her cigarette. I
fought back tears.

I paid for my meal. Before I left I thanked her for her kind words and asked
them to be good to each other.

Y'all do the same. It's a big world out there, and anyone who says they don't
need anyone else is either God or a fool.

--
frogf...@yakko.cs.wmich.edu |  "From now on, you'll stand out in life as an
            Damaged Justice |  individual." "Will I?" "Well, of course you
        Will yodel for food |  will...all the other slaves will be black."
     Freedom...yeah, right. |                   - Black Adder