From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 13:35:22 MST
[Violet Beck] FIRSTLY, greetings. i'm new to virus, as you have noticed. i
stumbled upon the site one day and found myself nodding in agreement to all
of your principles. and thus, here i am.
[Hermit] Welcome to Virus.
[Violet Beck] I have spent my entire life in a medium sized, upper-middle
class suburban community. I am blonde, blue-eyed Caucasian female who
attends an expensive prepratory school along with eight hundred other
children that look and speak almost exactly the way I do.
[Hermit] Grrr. Those are not schools. They are institutionalized
baby-seating organizations which could not be better designed to invoke pack
behavior.
[Violet Beck] And I, as a human being, am considered grossly abnormal. I
live simply and dress conservatively. I do not watch much television and i
spend most of my time writing. I am openly bisexual. It's not that I am a
repulsing or unfriendly person--in fact, i try very hard to be kind--it is
simply in my few small differences in lifestyle that make people dislike me
to the point of hatred.
[Hermit] Anything that makes people (particularly children) "smell
different", is grounds for the "pack" to round upon the [i]different
ones[/i]. And such is the nature of schools as breeders of UTism, that even
when no discernable differences exist, children will discover them. The
purpose of the consequent "attacks" (mental or physical) is to test to see
if the differences are significant, and the response to these "attacks" will
determine how the pack will treat the subject of their suspicion (from
rejection to acceptance). This behaviour occurs in almost all ape packs, and
must serve some beneficial purpose in that environment.
[Violet Beck] you see it everywhere: the white kid in the black school; the
short kid on the football team; the quieter man in the office. people always
have someone to pick on. They harass those that don't fit into their mold
for society for no reason other than that, deep down, this discrepancy
amongst their fellows perturbs them.
[Hermit] These are "big" differences. Small differences are quite sufficient
to trigger such dislike and harassment or worse. I suspect that this is pack
behavior remnants, but it doesn't happen much in office environments. Adults
recognize that the costs of such behavior are too high.
[Violet Beck] And it comes down to a large question: how to stop it? It is
obvious that many disasters could be averted; school shootings come first to
my mind. A few ideas come to mind, such as MTV's PSA campain to raise
awareness about minority groups in our community, but aside from that they
only change i've met so far since columbine was a metal detector to walk
through every morning. And that, my friends, is NOT a solution: it is trying
to plug the dam with sealing wax. we need to pull the weed out by the roots.
[Hermit] I agree that this behavior is harmful in the modern setting. Metal
detectors and barbed wire aggravate the problem, but the trouble is that our
society is not rational and is clearly frightened by children, but the
school system is constructed in such a way as to maximize benefits to the
system, not the inmates of it, and society appears reluctant to pay the cost
of fixing this.
[Hermit] My opinion is that huge schools and religious indoctrination foster
these troubles - and may explain why illiteracy rates are directly
proportional to the size of the school. I have some ideas on these issues
which are part of the "Viral Politics" proposal coming up real soon now. The
short answer is to create much smaller schools. But to do so
cost-effectively will take a massive restructuring.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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