The War On Kids

Why do the shootings happen in schools? because they are made by the same people who make the prisons and have the same chairs and tables. Because they have no windows and no wood. The children are amputated by the blank, textureless walls and subsequently their own eyes like nothing they see and their imaginations, schooled by darkness, can only articulate themselves through violence. They fire bullets into the dead walls to hear the only thing that has resonance: grim fame and death.

In a place where nothing grows, where no one listens, where the teachers are police, the loudest sound you can make is a well publicized murder. If these environments were more alive, if there were knotted wood and old brown books and trees imploring against the windows the kids could not understand murder because they would understand that the world around them is indeed a world and is alive. It's a problem of alienation and big guns are a symptom of that. These children are so powerful they never have to leave the throne of their armchairs and are fed genocidal images on command. Increasingly the schools are incorporated and so the minutes and the mentorships and the epiphanies are portioned out according to policy. Spontaneity and beauty is actively discouraged. At a time when people are already heinously self-conscious, that self-consciousness has been stoked and embellished to a point where by the time one makes it to the end of puberty (if), they have forgotten entirely who they were born to be and so can only relate to each other in terms of consumptions. What you buy is who you are. They can be whoever they want, as long as it will not ostracize them from the group and said identity can be sold to them.

Their inner world has been erased too. Words, which used to give them a way to share their hearts, have been withheld from them. Language is the way we detect an decipher what's encrypted inside of us. The whole language could fall in the space of one generation, one technological leap. When confronted with the forgotten, threatening traces of real language, the real texture of living things, they will learn to reply with guns, with seeming power and dominion over nature. We can't seem to locate our old hearts, the hearts perished by indoctrination, and so we drive the hearts of the innocent against the overhead projector screens and dry erase boards smeared with the afternoon's answers in an attempt to get them to speak to us, to know that there was blood in those veins after all. Our hearts will be written in a confusion of blood across the inoffensive walls.

The schools have been made into war zones, but not by the kids.