SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Schools in the Bogus Age of Terror
May 13, 2008
Massacre. Suicide-bombing. Mass murder. Conspiracy. WMDs. They love those inflammatory words, don't they? Not just adolescents, who use the words as adolescents would, without gauging their impact, but also law enforcement types, who should know better. The climate that makes chatter of school shootings so endemic can be attributed to the few deranged souls who think up mayhem fantasies in their miserable little journals and cyber-caves. But they're not the only ones responsible.
"Massacre" and "conspiracy to commit murder" were the words (and official charges) of choice when three DeLand Middle School seventh-graders were arrested in March after their "plot" to gun down other students and themselves was uncovered. "The investigators determined the students did not appear to have weapons or means to carry out the threats," a Volusia County Sheriff's spokesman said soon after their arrest. Nevertheless, word of a massacre averted and severe punishment deserved spread through the community. The three children's grind through the system is only beginning.
What, so far as we know, had these children done? One of them posted threatening messages and satanic idiocies on his MySpace page, along with the obligatory references to the Columbine school massacre. No matter how baseless, those references have become iconic for anyone angling for his 15 minutes of fearsome fame. Innumerable journal entries by seething adolescents, in print and online, are no doubt filled with Columbine fantasies. They're ignored, as adolescent scrawls generally (or absent more incriminating evidence) should be regardless of medium. Once in a while they're "uncovered." What should be the occasion for a parent-child reality check, a dressing down or at most a trip to the local counselor, is turned over to law enforcement instead. The cycle of public fear and sensationalism kicks in. For the children in question, humiliation and cruelty (what any form of juvenile-criminal proceedings and detention consist of these days) follow.
There's been a spate of alleged plots in schools lately, locally and elsewhere. Spring is the season of threats. It's stupid students' way of commemorating the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, which took place April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, claiming 47 lives between them (the three gunmen included). Earlier this month two schools in New Smyrna Beach swirled with rumors of an attack. Since April, Malcolm X College and St. Xavier University in Chicago, Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Mich., and three parochial schools in Michigan all closed when threats scribbled their way around each campus. Tales of suspicious backpacks, rumors endowed with the power of errant bullets and bad jokes elevated to threat levels worthy of the Department of Homeland Security's paranoia locked down or shut down schools in Oveido, Pittsburgh and South Bend.
And police in Chesterfield County, S.C., in what's becoming a habit of pre-emptive arrests based on private thoughts rather than action, arrested a high school senior who'd been writing threatening messages in his journal for up to a year. He'd referred to an alleged suicide-bombing plot against his own high school as "Columbine III." The boy's parents tipped off police in that one. The boy was charged, if you can believe this, with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
What almost all these allegations have in common is disproportion -- the disproportionate fantasies of the alleged perpetrators, whose frames of reference are cribbed from a culture that blurs the lines between video games, entertainment, celebrity and violence; and the disproportionate response from schools and law enforcement, whose overzealous narratives incite fear by feeding into overheated anxieties. But there's glamour in the language of violence and humiliation. Witness the Daytona Beach police chief's fetish for the word "scumbag," now emblazoned (as "scumbag eradication team") with an obscene image on shirts for the teenagers in the department's Police Explorer program. There's power in the language of violence supposedly averted, even if the upshot of it all is more irrational fear, not more security, and more children slammed into a juvenile-justice system designed to scare and punish, not heal and reintegrate.
We live, it's true, in one of the most violent states in the most violent society of the developed world, the most crime-ridden, the most prison-happy (2.3 million people behind bars and rising). Schools might reflect their world. But sensational incidents aside, schools remain among the safest quasi-public spaces anywhere -- not because they've been turned into fortresses of discipline and order, which they have, but because schools are simply not useful to criminals. Rather, they're being made too useful to the policing mentality of zero-tolerance discipline, perpetual surveillance and unquestioned authority that mirrors a larger transformation of society. Security is the excuse. But obedience to authority has little to do with security, and everything to do with control. Schools in this bogus age of terror are the cheapest, most impressionable, most unquestioning incubators of mass submission.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com.
(c) 2008 News-Journal Corporation
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
© 2023 Pierre Tristam
Pierre Tristam
Pierre Tristam is a journalist, writer, editor and lecturer. He is currently the editor and publisher of FlaglerLive.com, a non-profit news site in Florida. A native of Beirut, Lebanon, who became an American citizen in 1986, Pierre is one of the United States' only Arab Americans with a regular current affairs column in a mainstream, metropolitan newspaper.
Massacre. Suicide-bombing. Mass murder. Conspiracy. WMDs. They love those inflammatory words, don't they? Not just adolescents, who use the words as adolescents would, without gauging their impact, but also law enforcement types, who should know better. The climate that makes chatter of school shootings so endemic can be attributed to the few deranged souls who think up mayhem fantasies in their miserable little journals and cyber-caves. But they're not the only ones responsible.
"Massacre" and "conspiracy to commit murder" were the words (and official charges) of choice when three DeLand Middle School seventh-graders were arrested in March after their "plot" to gun down other students and themselves was uncovered. "The investigators determined the students did not appear to have weapons or means to carry out the threats," a Volusia County Sheriff's spokesman said soon after their arrest. Nevertheless, word of a massacre averted and severe punishment deserved spread through the community. The three children's grind through the system is only beginning.
What, so far as we know, had these children done? One of them posted threatening messages and satanic idiocies on his MySpace page, along with the obligatory references to the Columbine school massacre. No matter how baseless, those references have become iconic for anyone angling for his 15 minutes of fearsome fame. Innumerable journal entries by seething adolescents, in print and online, are no doubt filled with Columbine fantasies. They're ignored, as adolescent scrawls generally (or absent more incriminating evidence) should be regardless of medium. Once in a while they're "uncovered." What should be the occasion for a parent-child reality check, a dressing down or at most a trip to the local counselor, is turned over to law enforcement instead. The cycle of public fear and sensationalism kicks in. For the children in question, humiliation and cruelty (what any form of juvenile-criminal proceedings and detention consist of these days) follow.
There's been a spate of alleged plots in schools lately, locally and elsewhere. Spring is the season of threats. It's stupid students' way of commemorating the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, which took place April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, claiming 47 lives between them (the three gunmen included). Earlier this month two schools in New Smyrna Beach swirled with rumors of an attack. Since April, Malcolm X College and St. Xavier University in Chicago, Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Mich., and three parochial schools in Michigan all closed when threats scribbled their way around each campus. Tales of suspicious backpacks, rumors endowed with the power of errant bullets and bad jokes elevated to threat levels worthy of the Department of Homeland Security's paranoia locked down or shut down schools in Oveido, Pittsburgh and South Bend.
And police in Chesterfield County, S.C., in what's becoming a habit of pre-emptive arrests based on private thoughts rather than action, arrested a high school senior who'd been writing threatening messages in his journal for up to a year. He'd referred to an alleged suicide-bombing plot against his own high school as "Columbine III." The boy's parents tipped off police in that one. The boy was charged, if you can believe this, with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
What almost all these allegations have in common is disproportion -- the disproportionate fantasies of the alleged perpetrators, whose frames of reference are cribbed from a culture that blurs the lines between video games, entertainment, celebrity and violence; and the disproportionate response from schools and law enforcement, whose overzealous narratives incite fear by feeding into overheated anxieties. But there's glamour in the language of violence and humiliation. Witness the Daytona Beach police chief's fetish for the word "scumbag," now emblazoned (as "scumbag eradication team") with an obscene image on shirts for the teenagers in the department's Police Explorer program. There's power in the language of violence supposedly averted, even if the upshot of it all is more irrational fear, not more security, and more children slammed into a juvenile-justice system designed to scare and punish, not heal and reintegrate.
We live, it's true, in one of the most violent states in the most violent society of the developed world, the most crime-ridden, the most prison-happy (2.3 million people behind bars and rising). Schools might reflect their world. But sensational incidents aside, schools remain among the safest quasi-public spaces anywhere -- not because they've been turned into fortresses of discipline and order, which they have, but because schools are simply not useful to criminals. Rather, they're being made too useful to the policing mentality of zero-tolerance discipline, perpetual surveillance and unquestioned authority that mirrors a larger transformation of society. Security is the excuse. But obedience to authority has little to do with security, and everything to do with control. Schools in this bogus age of terror are the cheapest, most impressionable, most unquestioning incubators of mass submission.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com.
(c) 2008 News-Journal Corporation
Pierre Tristam
Pierre Tristam is a journalist, writer, editor and lecturer. He is currently the editor and publisher of FlaglerLive.com, a non-profit news site in Florida. A native of Beirut, Lebanon, who became an American citizen in 1986, Pierre is one of the United States' only Arab Americans with a regular current affairs column in a mainstream, metropolitan newspaper.
Massacre. Suicide-bombing. Mass murder. Conspiracy. WMDs. They love those inflammatory words, don't they? Not just adolescents, who use the words as adolescents would, without gauging their impact, but also law enforcement types, who should know better. The climate that makes chatter of school shootings so endemic can be attributed to the few deranged souls who think up mayhem fantasies in their miserable little journals and cyber-caves. But they're not the only ones responsible.
"Massacre" and "conspiracy to commit murder" were the words (and official charges) of choice when three DeLand Middle School seventh-graders were arrested in March after their "plot" to gun down other students and themselves was uncovered. "The investigators determined the students did not appear to have weapons or means to carry out the threats," a Volusia County Sheriff's spokesman said soon after their arrest. Nevertheless, word of a massacre averted and severe punishment deserved spread through the community. The three children's grind through the system is only beginning.
What, so far as we know, had these children done? One of them posted threatening messages and satanic idiocies on his MySpace page, along with the obligatory references to the Columbine school massacre. No matter how baseless, those references have become iconic for anyone angling for his 15 minutes of fearsome fame. Innumerable journal entries by seething adolescents, in print and online, are no doubt filled with Columbine fantasies. They're ignored, as adolescent scrawls generally (or absent more incriminating evidence) should be regardless of medium. Once in a while they're "uncovered." What should be the occasion for a parent-child reality check, a dressing down or at most a trip to the local counselor, is turned over to law enforcement instead. The cycle of public fear and sensationalism kicks in. For the children in question, humiliation and cruelty (what any form of juvenile-criminal proceedings and detention consist of these days) follow.
There's been a spate of alleged plots in schools lately, locally and elsewhere. Spring is the season of threats. It's stupid students' way of commemorating the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, which took place April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, claiming 47 lives between them (the three gunmen included). Earlier this month two schools in New Smyrna Beach swirled with rumors of an attack. Since April, Malcolm X College and St. Xavier University in Chicago, Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Mich., and three parochial schools in Michigan all closed when threats scribbled their way around each campus. Tales of suspicious backpacks, rumors endowed with the power of errant bullets and bad jokes elevated to threat levels worthy of the Department of Homeland Security's paranoia locked down or shut down schools in Oveido, Pittsburgh and South Bend.
And police in Chesterfield County, S.C., in what's becoming a habit of pre-emptive arrests based on private thoughts rather than action, arrested a high school senior who'd been writing threatening messages in his journal for up to a year. He'd referred to an alleged suicide-bombing plot against his own high school as "Columbine III." The boy's parents tipped off police in that one. The boy was charged, if you can believe this, with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
What almost all these allegations have in common is disproportion -- the disproportionate fantasies of the alleged perpetrators, whose frames of reference are cribbed from a culture that blurs the lines between video games, entertainment, celebrity and violence; and the disproportionate response from schools and law enforcement, whose overzealous narratives incite fear by feeding into overheated anxieties. But there's glamour in the language of violence and humiliation. Witness the Daytona Beach police chief's fetish for the word "scumbag," now emblazoned (as "scumbag eradication team") with an obscene image on shirts for the teenagers in the department's Police Explorer program. There's power in the language of violence supposedly averted, even if the upshot of it all is more irrational fear, not more security, and more children slammed into a juvenile-justice system designed to scare and punish, not heal and reintegrate.
We live, it's true, in one of the most violent states in the most violent society of the developed world, the most crime-ridden, the most prison-happy (2.3 million people behind bars and rising). Schools might reflect their world. But sensational incidents aside, schools remain among the safest quasi-public spaces anywhere -- not because they've been turned into fortresses of discipline and order, which they have, but because schools are simply not useful to criminals. Rather, they're being made too useful to the policing mentality of zero-tolerance discipline, perpetual surveillance and unquestioned authority that mirrors a larger transformation of society. Security is the excuse. But obedience to authority has little to do with security, and everything to do with control. Schools in this bogus age of terror are the cheapest, most impressionable, most unquestioning incubators of mass submission.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com.
(c) 2008 News-Journal Corporation
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.