Category: Terrorism

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There is a Rising Tide of Hysterical Over-Reaction

Manalapan, New Jersey.

We are going to stop school killings. We are going to put a stop to the violence. We are going to take the bull by the horns and put our heads together and think and think and think and we will come up with strategies and policies that will prevent students from bringing guns to school and killing their classmates and teachers.

So what did you come up with? Metal detectors? A ban on guns? A program to detect stressed-out students and counsel them before they go nuts? A plan to reduce the stress on teenagers? A plan to reduce the stress on society? Improved communications between parents, teachers, students, and police? Come on, tell us!

You are going to bust five-year-olds.

All right. I just know that your school will never have an incident of a five-year-old bringing an assault rifle to class and shooting people now. I just know it.

It was the county prosecutor’s idea, in Manalapan, New Jersey. After the shootings at other schools in California and Colorado, he decided that the only solution was “zero tolerance” for threats of violence. Not for actual acts of violence– for threats of violence.

So when an angry ten-year-old girl who wet her pants because her teacher wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom said, “I could just kill her”, she was suspended for three days. The police now have her name in their files. Watch this girl– she’s a danger to society!

There have been fifty such suspensions so far. But why are they so reticent? Are they only dealing with the most serious incidents of violent threats? Violence is also caused by greed, jealousy, lust. The next time a 12-year-old says, “I want that,” have him fingerprinted– he’ll think twice before stealing. Notice any six-year-olds guzzling Coca-Cola? An incipient coke addict– have him spend a night in the slammer so he knows what his future will be like. Notice any grade sixers holding hands with six-year-olds?  Possible future abuse. Counseling and group therapy, and maybe a prescription drug or two.

Do these thought police patrol the school yard during sports activities? Have they missed any quarterbacks or coaches shouting “hit him, hit him”? Have they checked the library? Lots of pictures to snip. Any children bringing bibles to school? Besides being unconstitutional, there are some rather lurid tales in there about incest, rape, murder. “Unduly fascinated with morbid acts”. Perhaps it is a little early for institutionalization.

If you think this is an isolated incident, think again. Check the link above. There’s more. There was a nine-year-old who was suspended for “threatening” any classmates who took the last French fries at a cafeteria lunch. He was last seen packing a howitzer. A twelve-year-old was shoved during a football match. The shover received no sanction, but the victim, who shouted something he had heard his parents and friends and television heroes say a million times– “I’m gonna kill you”– suspended. A girl suspended because she was planning to blow up a friend’s house. One hopes the police burst into her bedroom with proper warrants and authorizations and thoroughly investigated every orifice on on every Barbie doll for evidence of explosive materials.

And of course, in Kingston, Ontario, a grade 11 student was suspended after a dramatic reading of a piece of his own fiction in class describing how an alienated student bombed his own school. His classmates, who had ostracized the boy, thought it was judgment day. The student was arrested and strip-searched and incarcerated for 34 days (while two students in Quebec, who had actually set off a bomb at school, but who were popular with their classmates, were released on bail after a few hours).

Down the street, of course, for a mere $9, any student at the school could enjoy two hours of far greater mayhem, also fictional, without repercussions. (The boy’s 14-year-old brother, who is developmentally delayed, was harassed by students as a result of the incident. He made some verbal threats and was also arrested.)

I’m sorry if this offends you, but there is no other word for these people. They are idiots.

They say, Klebold and Harris (the Columbine killers) were known to have made violent statements before they came to the school with bombs and guns. Klebold and Harris were also known to have guns before they came to the school with guns and bombs. In the current climate of U.S. culture, that was not considered a warning sign.

Do you have children? Can you count how many times they have said to each other, in anger, “I’m going to kill you”? Have you ever seriously believed they were about to commit the act?

The rationale is that there is a tide of killings taking place at schools all across America. The perception is that this is a rising tide, threatening to overwhelm society with murder and mayhem. The only solution is to nip it in the bud. But of course, that is not really a solution at all. Nobody has said, “this is a solution”. Nobody has demonstrated that it works.

There is strong evidence that the same approach to marijuana has had no effect at all on the use of hard drugs. There is over-whelming evidence that “zero-tolerance” applied to the drug problem has been a colossal failure.

There is further irony in the fact that many of the actual violent acts at schools, including killings, have been committed by students who were… suspended. So the very policy that is supposed to save us all has been demonstrated to fail, just as the zero-tolerance policy towards marijuana has demonstrably failed.

The truth is that there is no “rising” tide of violence in our schools. There are a number of small, isolated incidents. There has never not been a number of small isolated incidents. The statistics– those annoying facts– do not show anything like what people tell you they think is happening. When people go, “What is happening to our society”, they are simply reacting thoughtlessly and without information.

What is really happening to our society is that the profusion of law suits for civil liability has indeed reached epic proportions creating an atmosphere in which the hysterical attitudes of paranoid idiots prevail, because nobody wants to be the one who said he didn’t do everything possible to prevent this week’s catastrophe of the month.

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The Master of Soul-less Self Sufficiency

When Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to death for murdering 276 people in the Oklahoma bombing, dies, it is reported in Salon, he intends to quote the poem “Invictus” by William Henley:

I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

Now now– that’s not traditional. You’re supposed to turn to the families of the victims and say, “I am truly sorry.” But McVeigh isn’t sorry. He believes in what he did. He believes he was right to do it. It was good and necessary.

The Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, believes that it is an act of compassion to grant, to the families of his victims, the privilege of seeing Mr. McVeigh get murdered himself, on that peculiar cross-shaped table upon which they will strap him before this charming little game of “which tube contains the liquid cyanide” that they play when they put him to death.

When they executed people by firing squad, they used to put one blank in one of the rifles, so each of the shooters could go home that night thinking that he might not have been the one responsible for the man’s death. How honorable, for an institution that claims to pride itself on honor, courage, and integrity— how honorable, to cop out at the crucial moment: I might not have done it. I can sleep at night.

What a great idea. What a great way to help people– men (do you know of any female executioners?)– feel better about themselves. It’s cheaper than Prozac or Zoloft.

What amazes me is that they don’t do this in war. Why not?  Every soldier gets a gun but some only fire blanks. Every air plane gets bombs but some are duds. One in five torpedoes carries only the admiral’s laundry. That way, after committing hundreds or thousands of atrocities, we can all go home and say, I didn’t do it. When our children ask us what we did in the war, we can all say, “fired duds, mostly”.

Why didn’t they think of this when they dropped the nuclear bomb? They could have sent ten planes with ten similar fat bombs and they could all have dropped them at the same time and then they could all have gone home and said to their wives, “mine was a dud”.

Of course, the real captain of the Enola Gay, Paul W. Tibbets, is actually proud of the fact that the dropped the real bomb, and I guess his wife didn’t mind, so, in that instance, the idea is wasted.

Anyway… Ashcroft wants to give the relatives of the victims the “sense of closure”– or is it vicarious thrill? — or “satisfaction”– of seeing McVeigh die. The language is nebulous– no one wants to admit they are simply out for revenge, since our society knows well enough that “revenge” is not a noble virtue. Nobody really believes that McVeigh’s execution will stop anybody else from doing the same thing– not, especially, when we have suicide bombers in the world.

Revenge is an attribute of pugnacious, small-minded thugs and felons. But we are not thugs and felons. We are honorable and pure and we want to watch McVeigh die so we can get a sense of …. “closure”.

After the grandmother of one of Floyd Allen Medlock’s victims witnessed his execution, she expressed disappointment. It was too quiet, too peaceful. She wanted to see him die but our society, at cross-purposes with itself, now resorts to the antiseptic ritual of lethal injection. Not enough horror for her, I guess. More to the point: his death didn’t bring back her grand-daughter, and didn’t remove one ounce of the pain she suffered and didn’t prevent a single crime from being committed. It just added to the total sum of misery in the world.

I know this seems strange, but she reminds me of those fanatic Palestinian mothers who raise their sons to become martyrs to the faith. These devout boys strap explosives to their bodies and then get onto buses or wade around busy market places and set themselves off. Their mothers approve, so it appears. They wish death upon their own sons.

The deaths of their sons help them bring “closure” to their anguished feelings about the atrocities the Israelis have committed upon the Palestinians.

Do you buy that? Or do we prefer: they will feel closure about the deaths of their sons when every single last Israeli citizen is driven into the sea?

And the biggest joke of all: McVeigh announcing, as he is helplessly strapped to a table and poisoned to death, that he is the master of his soul, the captain of his fate. He is now the master of nothing. He is utterly helpless and useless and impotent. He is less important than a beggar on the streets who, at least, could beg or not beg, or cross the road, or not cross the road. He could imagine he is the King of Spain and prance down the alleyway singing at the top of his lungs.

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The Rash Hysterical Itch

From the New York Times: In New Jersey, two second graders in Irvington were suspended and charged with making terroristic (sic) threats last week after pointing a paper gun, in what they said was a game of cops and robbers. In Jonesboro, Ark., an 8-year-old was suspended for three days for pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and saying “Pow, pow, pow.”

What kind of insane people are running America’s schools? A second grader is about 7 years old. Seven-year-olds, unlike most adults, so it seems, have an imagination that is not limited by constricted prurient inhibitions. Everything they see or hear is raw material for play. Arrest them!

A few years ago, a kindergarten student was charged with “sexual harassment” for kissing a classmate. What kind of insane world do we live in? What kind of people sit at their desks with serious expressions on their faces and pronounce that this child is a danger to the community and must be stopped? What kind of complete idiot thinks that this kind of “zero tolerance” is going to have any effect whatsoever on the number of school shootings or assaults we have in our society?

Isn’t it obvious? When a seven-year-old is arrested or suspended for making “threats”, aren’t we in fact contributing to the aura of power and importance that disturbed, potentially violent misfits are looking for?

On the other hand, someone with a brain lives in Fort Huron, Michigan. When some students made a threat (of dubious sincerity) to bomb the school two years ago, instead of installing metal detectors and banning back-packs, the school decided to have the principal and teachers sit down and have lunch with students and parents at least once a month. This won’t guarantee that there won’t be any incidents, but I’ll bet it makes for a better school and school community.

There’s something else to keep in mind. Almost every media outlet refers to a “rash” or school shootings, or the “increasing” violence in the classroom, or the “epidemic” number of sexual assaults. Why? Do you, the naïve reader, assume that they have conducted research and produced some rational analysis that actually shows that there is a “rash” of anything, other than the itch to sensationalize and pander to a kind of hysterical paranoia in our society?

We have a little-understood impulse, within ourselves, to want to believe the worst of others. I think it is rooted in the desire to believe in ourselves, that we are good, honorable, lovable people– because they are not. It’s a basic human impulse. It’s why we have to believe that a five-year-old that kisses a fellow student is some kind of pervert. It’s because we are the sick ones who believe that a kiss between children can be perverse.