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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (22438)	5/29/1998 12:15:00 AM
From: Stockbull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

What do you have against Beer Drinkers?

To: Grainne who wrote (22438)	5/29/1998 12:14:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Christine, I can understand how you would be dismayed at the apparently novel savagery of our youngsters. All the news coverage of Arkansas and Oregon certainly serves to nourish such dismay. I wonder, though (entertain my musings here) if part of this situation has do do with perception. What if violence like this was as common or more so in the 50s and 60s, but didn't merit a news orgy because it went across race lines? What if the recent cluster of school violence is merely the tip to an iceberg of ongoing juvenile murder that's been with us since frontier times, and the real shift is in the way the media cover it? A sort of journalistic glasnost, a change of emphasis. I'll bet more column inches are being spent on school shootings even now - at the expense of the nuclear brinksmanship being played out on the Subcontinent! Of course, this leaves us stuck with the question: "What do we do about it?" My humble submission is that what we did different in the 50s was have a credible police presence, backed up by a court system up to the task. Situations that the parents and teachers couldn't handle ran headfirst into a capable and determined police force. We have choked police and courts and prisons into helplessness, and at the same time fostered a psychic environment where following civic standards is somehow cowardly, "square". The really cool people are nihilists today! I think Thomas alluded to this problem some posts back by drawing attention to our cult of "self-esteem". Self-esteem is a good thing, but where did we let the reins slip to the point that self-esteem became more important than "good behavior"? This is where I would apply the lever. Make being a good kid or a nice person "cool" again.