Cry me a river

Whilst perusing various oddities on the Internet, I found myself reading an article describing a “model” for school violence, as developed by a professor at Stanford University. Building on the idea that violence in the public schooling system is the same as any level of conflict, the professor was able to generalize the reasons why kids shoot each other into five separate levels.

Level one consists of things we all want: money, love, friends, nuclear arms, but to say the least, exactly what our current state of affairs tells us what is wanted.

Level two pits us against each other for all of the above mentioned items. An appropriate example would be that “Sally” has a new doll. “Mandy” wants the doll, so she proceeds to her grandfather’s gun cabinet and unlocks a small but powerful hand-cannon, loads it, and the proceeds to splatter “Sally’s” brains all over the playground.

Or not.

Depending on her course of action, what we are typically going to do is get something of more value; in this case, a doll that comes with a functioning vagina, or a string that you pull that comes up with new words to call your genitals.

Level three finds us in the middle of the constant bullshit that is hurled around any conventional place in the world – slander, insults, trash talk – and what usually follows these insults: the need to retaliate with something to signify that your brains are even smaller than those of the person from whom these things are spewing out of.

Something along the lines of, “Eat shit off your Lord’s diapers, you fucktard, and stop raping your sister long enough to realize that anything you say to me is going to be met with equal yet opposite brain power: ie, I’m smart, and you’re an idiot. So go fuck yourself! Eat shit and die!”

Or something along those lines.

Level four is where we seperate the sheep from the herd. Basically, taking the dog from it’s home, putting it into a burlap sack, and then dumping it in the woods fifteen miles from nowhere. Better known as “alienation”. One party over steps their pissing grounds, and then hurls even more insults at the other party. Then, they gather into a murder, making the force they are fighting against into a proper scapegoat.

The fifth and final level finds us punishing the scapegoat, thus completing the model. I can’t help but be left in a stupor as to how this even comes close to being a proper model for school violence. To model a behavior is to assume that you understand it. And how does one understand behavior that is unpredictable?

In the case of Columbine’s 1999 school shooting, was there a conflict of interest between the so-called “Trenchcoat Mafia” and the 20+ people that they blew away with heavy artillery? Were there the different levels to this “conflict”? Did they follow the model?

We think we understand how the monster feeds, and we think we can get inside of the heads of the wounded who are compelled to wound, and explain to the world exactly what makes them them?

We are absolutely wrong if we are to think this. Of course, everybody has to have this non-existent Psychology degree that they can just pull out of their ass whenever they feel it necessary, and pretend to understand things that they will never fully grasp.

If we’re going to think we’ve got a grasp on this subject, we should at least take a brief walk back through high-school. I can sum this up in one sentence: “I’m like everybody else who thinks that they’re not like everybody else.” You can sum it up into one final thought: we are all the same.

You think you’re an outcast? Everybody else does, too. So you form groups, and then suddenly, you aren’t an outcast anymore. Those who don’t fit into certain groups start flocking together, and before you know it, they’ve formed their own group as well.

Each group has it’s own different views, disagreements about said differences, and own personal opinions about said differences. And being the teenagers that they are, they haven’t quite grasped the emotional dildo that walk around life with. It’s called, “I’m a fucking teenager and I don’t know how to deal with my problems.”

Most people know that killing is socially and morally unacceptable. But then, most people, if given the chance to kill someone with zero recourse, would most likely do it.

Using Columbine as an example, the “Trench-coat Mafia” were called fags, and then the “jocks” threw hard mean stones at them. Escelation turns into retaliation.

However, kids get beat everyday. As I understand it, it’s a part of growing up. If you weren’t beat as a child or teenager, you should have been. It gives you many things to look back on years after the fact and say to yourself, “Boy, I wish I had a loaded hand gun when I was that age!” It’s called life.

And the mere fact that bullets hurt more than rocks. I don’t think I have to emphasize the fact that it takes a coward to unload a weapon on an unarmed person.

I’d also like to point out another simple fact. As I’m sure you are aware of your own life’s event, please take these next two seconds to simply say to yourself:

“I survived high-school.”

Public schools don’t promote school violence, and any parent that disagrees with this needs a quick punch to the face. And the removal of prayer from public schools? Necessary. Violent video games? Did you know that if your child plays less video games and watches less television, he will be more likely to be violent? Technology and media are in our houses; they are everywhere we go. If a child is less exposed to these items, they have less in common with their peers, which makes it more likely that they will be more violent towards their peers, because of this very simple lack of commonplace interest. You heard me: music, video games, telelvision. These are the things that are likely to keep your children in line, not the opposite.

So what causes a kid to pick up a weapon and then blow away his fellow classmates, teachers, principal, or everybody in his path? One website suggests that some kids feel that they have problems that they cannot talk to their teachers or parents about. These problems lead to anger. This anger leads to guns. And these guns lead to bodies.

Another reason listed is the ever popular “blame the media”, ie violent tv shows and video games, which, according to the theory, “causes them to believe that violence is the only way to solve their problems.”

Kids don’t talk to their parents or teachers on a regular basis. They talk to their friends. We’ve even seen that kids that don’t fit into the regular groups form their own groups. There is not one kid in any school that has absolutely zero friends.

Another theory, coming from the University of California, suggests that heavy metals and pesticides in the blood of teenagers is leading to their aggressive outlets, and that trace pesticide combinations lead to irritability and aggression. That, and the fact that at that age, hormones race faster than Bush Jr. on a cocaine bender.

It is my personal belief that the most traumatic experiences a person can through are: birth, death, and growing up.

For every school shooting, there was a different string of events that led up to it. And of course you better bet your ass that Tipper Gore of all people had something to say about the deaths of Columbine, to which I can only say, fuck you Tipper Gore, fuck you very much.

We’re going to take the Columbine hilarity, er, tragedy, for an instance of reflection. I’ve heard many things about Columbine, for the sake of not listing too much or pissing too many people off, I’ll only list a few of those things, in conjunction with my own thought process for the sake of digging even deeper into the school violence craze that may or may not have died out faster than the fact that the Backstreet Boys drug problem.

Apparently, there was some kind of conspiracy involved. There was also evidence that one of the gun men had tried to join the army a week before the shooting occurred. And when the bomb squad went in to get the situation under control after the two kids off’d themselves, they found plenty of pipe bombs that somehow failed to go off. What we don’t know, like 9/11, there were plenty of things not released by the press because of lack of information.

What lead up to this event? Could we go one month before it? Two? A whole year? Evidence points out that the shooting had been planned for more than a year, so what could we, as people, track down to over a year ago that would set a thought process in motion to the point where pipe bombs, dead bodies, and shotguns were involved?

The simple fact of the matter of this whole thing that everyone seemed to have missed were that maybe there were just chemically imbalanced. Let’s all stop this bandwagon to the destruction of music, video games, television, and anything else that sends “bad vibes” and chalk this up to human stupidity and a fucking brain imbalance.

Anyone ever try to blame the parents? Or maybe, instead of blaming the media, blame the fucking kid. Blame the lack of communication between the kid and the parent. Blame the fucking victims. Maybe they deserved it! Anyone ever think of that?

Because behind every straight A kid is a mindset that they can get away with anything. Don’t ever underestimate the smart ones. They are always the one to set off something they can neither contain nor destroy. The Trench-coat Mafia could have been nothing more than an offspring of ridicule from some rich-straight A-better than everybody fucks who didn’t know how to treat somebody different with a little bit of decency.

Sometimes the criminal isn’t always the one to blame. We can just as easily point a finger at society as a whole, and then proceed to ass fuck society as a whole, and then say “It’s your own fucking fault.”

Perhaps their motives go further back than even they themselves care to understand, or know. I won’t be the first to say that the absence of God in the public schooling system is the reason for the bloodshed, although anybody with a Christian agenda would be quick to go against my words. But I will say that the absence of parent-child friendship is a major cause of it.

My father once told me that he wasn’t there to be my friend. He was there to be my father.

Maybe at some point in time, this was the opposite. Society changes over time, we all know this. We all know that it is inevitable for a society as a whole to realize that certain things need not be censored, while other things need time to understand. But the relation between a child and their parent going from mutual friendship to perennial dominance is a change we might not have need. We all wonder why kids have such a difficulty talking to their parents? That’s no fucking surprise when one parent raises their child as their friend, and the next raises their child as nothing more than their child. Then one kid has a friend who’s parents are cooler than his own because they actually try to understand and punish without simply punishing when something has been done that warrants punishment.

We as a society are to blame, not just for school violence, but for everything we have brought upon ourselves. We failed to look to the future while we lived in the present, and because of this, we are dealing with the problems of the present, looking to the past, and failing to see how this all came into play.

Take time to understand your children, and spend time with them before they start going to their friends for help instead of you. Doesn’t it seem more obvious that they should come to somebody who has lived longer than then to seek advice instead of seeking advice from somebody that is going through the same fucking problems?

But looking at it from another perspective, we need this. We need school violence so we can have something cry over. 9/11 didn’t happen by some fluke; it was allowed to happen. For more reasons than I care to list here, 9/11 was spectacle orchestrated by two governments and a handful of terrorists, one of which we still haven’t caught. All the worlds a stage, and our tragedies are our finest hours. We shine through tragedy. Doesn’t it give you a feeling of unity when your child dies and then the rest of the nation grieves for them? For one instance, your child is more famous and loved than they could have ever hoped to achieve on their own while they were alive?

Tragedy brings a country together, spurs creativity, and promotes economical growth. Death is essential for life, and murder is essential for ratings. As a harsh reality, we all live from moment to moment. Some of them are happy moments, others are tragic.

So why don’t stop searching for an answer, add the date 4/20 to the rest of the list of infamous dates that have dual meanings, and move on with our lives. They’re gone, not forgotten. But like everything else, life moves on.

Or maybe you should just realize that school violence can’t be classified, categorized or understood. To understand school violence is to understand humanity itself, and from my last check, we were all about one million miles from nowhere on understanding that beast.