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The Price of Being Different
from the the-rights-of-geeks dept.
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
I still didn't hate high school (Score:5)
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....
----
The Dark Side (Score:4)
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.
Stuff That Matters and Anti-Matters (Score:3)
I'm user #783, IIRC. I'm not some interloper here; I'd like to think it's my forum too -- /. is my browsers' start page. I'm as on-topic as anyone else. I love Ask Slashdot, the GPL, RMS, tarballs, OO, DSP, Java, a certain anti-trust case, and any number of "relevant" topics (turnoffs: sunlight, aspartame, bad hair days, and mean people). I have about seven toolkits installed on my box, and I'm wrestling with all of them in search of The Right One. Unfortunately, what we have here this week is a mania far removed from hardware, software, and licenses.
You hit the nail on the head, surely by accident: "Far worse things are happening out there". That's why I'm on-topic. Geeks, being part of society, are often complicit (directly or, more often, indirectly) in those "far worse things"; that shows me that whatever they may have suffered in high school failed to register permanently on their brains -- it shows me that their radius of compassion is woefully small. (Yes, Eric, if you're reading this, you are one of many exceptions :)
If you can't make the leap from feeling sorry for yourself (or a fellow "oppressed" geek) to feeling anger and remorse over a political prisoner or a sweatshop laborer's plight, then Katz's whole exercise is just shallow pimping. If you can't make the leap from jocks abusing geeks to being angry about the plight of the political footballs in the ghettos that your commute and your subdivision so deftly avoid, then Katz's shallow pimping is as obscene as the abuse of geek students.
Do you get it now? If not, then please explain -- in 3000 words or more -- why you think "nerds are more important than the herded masses". Can any of you explain? It is the impression I get, just as I get the impression from Katz's peers in Big Media that the deaths of affluent suburban kids are more important than, say, deaths from malnutrition occurring in the very same country.
Let me close with a quote from my favorite nerd, a bookish lawyer (and one-time journalist, IIRC), who never quite learned how to fight his way out of a paper bag, though he was often provoked.
We will learn far more about real solutions from reading the writings of that nerd (his name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) than we will from reading Katz and the often-hysterical "Geek Power Now!" threads from our peers here.--
Look at their side of it (Score:4)
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
Protect Our Geeks! (Score:3)
So
More than a few high schools now have their own Web pages. Lots of high school teachers and administrators have their own email addresses. (They're probably all on AOL, but that's no matter.) And every high school principal or headmaster, I'm sure, has a telephone.
So perhaps what we need is for geeks, goths, and other HS outsiders to tell their stories of harassment and abuse -- but to tell them with the names and email addresses of the offending administrators. When Mr. Jones says that "it's just part of growing up" to be beaten by classmates, or Ms. Brown suspends a student for wearing black, or Dr. Smith encourages students to mock and harass those who don't attend pep rallies -- Mr. Jones, Ms. Brown, and Dr. Smith should get mailboxes full of polite condemnation from educated, intelligent, and successful geeks.
It's just an idea
Wanna make a difference? Write the schools. (Score:5)
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.
Don't react out of fear. (Score:3)
Wimp. Instead of assuming they were friendly and saying 'Hello.' you reacted out of fear.
If we all continue to react fearfully instead of treating each other in a civil manner, we will continue to isolate each other.
I've been wearing a black trenchcoat for months, and I will continue to do so. I believe it would be tacky for someone to rush out and buy a trenchcoat in response to Littleton, but I also believe that it would be tacky to react by discarding a trenchcoat I already wear.
My point here is that I will continue to wear my trenchcoat because I had already decided it is what I wanted to wear. I am refusing to become more normal simply so that other people can live in a more comfortable world while clinging to labels and reacting instead of thinking.
We all need to learn to judge people as individuals or not at all. If you don't know enough about someone to make an informed, personal judgement about them you should simply treat them in a civil manner and assume that they are a decent person. You will be right more often than not.
Forget the mainstream media (Score:4)
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.
Re:Problems Are Fundamental to Our Society (Score:3)
I was miserable in high school, and I drifted through (eventually dropping out) college, but once I was working for a living I realized the best way to have a good boss and to help other people was to be the boss myself. Nowadays I run a department of techs, and I have worked my butt off to give them a better environment and more dignity than they had before. I also do everything I can IRL for the same purpose.
We shouldn't complain about it - we should take over. There's no reason we can't play the game too, and better than they do. The majority doesn't know we have our own rules and our own culture, and they don't care. We, on the other hand, know their game, understand their rules, and lord knows we're smart enough to dominate them on the field of play... So why don't we?
Re:Culture evolves? (Score:3)
The responsibility of "who shall protect the children" rests where it always has -- with the legal guardians of the child. Every child develops the capacity to make moral judgments at a different pace. Being a parent should mean helping your child become an adult, not become a clone of yourself, and certainly not to remain a child. I see increasing numbers of people every day my age (30ish) and older who can only, as William Gibson put it in Idoru, only express their twin desires of murderous rage and infantile desire by pressing the buttons on a television remote and voting in presidential elections. Just a symptom of all the ways we teach children that Thinking Is Bad.
It does children no service to be anything less than scrupulously honest. While four-year olds may not need to know how to use condoms, feeding them BS that says, for instance, all substances are equally morally and physically Bad, only encourages harmful patterns of abuse, not responsible use or voluntary abstention.
Who decides what is education, and what is brainwashing and indoctrination? Only someone who believes that one size truly fits all, and has the gall to believe that they have the right to force the rest of the world into line, would dare. Try to please everyone, and you end up pleasing noone.
And to tie this back to the beginning: The ancient Greek children who witnessed incredible violence and cruelty on a daily basis did not all grow up to become despots and tyrants. Of course, most Americans seem concerned only with themselves or the current fads-or-politically-approved-oppressed-classes.
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 poor for centuries by making it illegal to own swords and other weapons (thus prompting the development of many of the martial arts)....
Then, folks, there is some serious hypocrisy and denial going on.
The school system sucks:what to do? (Score:3)
I don't want to justify their behavior in creating this kind of situation, but I would like to explain some of the their reasoning in all this.
At least in my schools, there were overcrowded classrooms, aged and retiring teachers who just didn't have the energy or youth to deal with us, and and not enough funds to do anything they would have liked. In order to handle and deal with a class, conformity was stressed over performance, individuality, or creativeness. How could a teacher handle 20 wildly independent, unique, creative, inquisitive students? Whether intentional or not, they managed to convey to us the idea of conforming, of not rocking the boat. They were happy and excited whenever one of us showed initiative or intelligence, but they did not actively try to push us towards that goal.
Kids picked up really quick; they became the enforcers of the norm, and if you were different of race, of behavior, of attitude, of anything, they'd target you for this.
This was a school system which actively recruited for GATE students, but didn't have the resources to actually do anything with/for us once we were identified. They actually used us to gain more funding for stuff such as books, repairs, maintanence, etc. They didn't have the training or resources to manage a handful of gifted students, so we were left to our own devices, and then resented for it by all the other children.
This goes on all the way up to high school, in which I finally figured out how to look cool, how to act cool, how to be cool. I also happened to gain a foot in height and 40 pounds of bulk, so I guess people didn't figure I was such an easy target either.
Something does need to be done to change the system. We live in a society that does reward innovative unique and creative people, but the system we use to train and manage the kids tries to destroy and contain these things because they cause too much trouble.
I was talking to my dad about this, and he mentioned that even private schools have this fascist need to maintain conformity, except that they raise the bar and expectations much higher than in our public school. Are there any real solutions available?
AS
Katz and Slashdot doing the right thing (Score:5)
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.
AMERICA, land of the free???? (Score:3)
Just the other day in Lincoln , NE a guy i know, who is a Goth, walks into my former High School and a teacher says, "It's because of people like that things like this happen." the teacher was of course refering to the Colorado events. What kind of society do we live in that this is tolerated? The kids mother called a lawyer and it looks like something is going to happen in the courts, but it will not be enough. I am going back to my high school to talk with the Administration, but I know it will be futile, they just cater to the jocks and the popular kids. But I feel obligated to try. This is something that we all should do, let the schools know what we think, they don't use the 'net, they know it's nothing but porn and sites that promote viloent behavior. And having never used the 'net themselves they are completely justified in their beliefs.
no.
High school was no picnic for me, but I found out the other night, while getting drunk with some people from high school, that I was aclutally looked up to, people liked me, and they respected my views. That blew my mind. The guy said it was because I was dtudent council president, and people thought that made me good people. When do I find out though? two years after I graduate. WTF? So to all you people still in the schools, life does get better, just hold on, we are with you.
to the rest of us do something about the current issues, visit schools, there will be at least one group who will listen to you, start a community group, but get out and make a difference.
just my thoughts. I am also going to move to Canada, the US is not the place I thought it was.
nice job katz / suggestion for followup (Score:3)
Katz mentioned previously that reporters were trawling this site looking for people and stories. A nice followup article would be to analyze any resulting press to see how well they grasped the issues. Might let us know how well we do at communicating our views 'out there'.
Role of parents and role models? (Score:3)
What I personally fear more than that the torment of "geeks" will continue is schools and society will make it nearly impossibel to interact with others without fear of words being taken as harassment or torment.
Most of us who had to suffer at the hands of bullies, and the "popular" crowd did not go and blow 12, or even 1 person away. We learned to deal with. I think the most succesful of us who dealt with it had good support from our families.
With the ever declining strength of the family unit, and lack of almost anyone in the US taking responsibility for their own actions, kids have no place to turn for support and positive reinforcement.
I think these are the issues that need to be addressed, not the teasing that goes on, has gone and on, and probably will go on for years to come. Freedom of expression has a price, and I'd rather pay that price, and help my children pay that price, than see those freedom's restricted.
At last, a voice of reason. (Score:5)
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