Bid Person's rant reminded me of something I have ANGST about.
Take a look around your school. Notice anyone who shouldn't be there? You may be wondering why a cop is standing over by the administration office. Well, he’s there for a reason, and it’s because the school is afraid that there’s a psychopath within the walls, ready to shoot up the students and staff at any given moment. Now some schools may not have a cop, and if you don’t, you better pray that no one decides to go crazy. The fact of the matter is, we wouldn’t have to have cops if schools weren’t afraid of students going nuts and blowing everyone away. Why do some students choose to shoot other students? Is it it because their home life is horrible? Not likely. It’s probably because there are other students, who most of us call bullies, who push them around and make them feel like garbage. This brings me to another point I have to make, which may or may not make you angry, depending on where you stand on this issue. Why do people bully? To make themselves feel good? Partially, but would they feel it necessary to even attempt this if the school system was strict in enforcing the rules? Maybe, if they were taught at a young age that bullying/fighting is wrong, with more than just the crappy “okay boys, don’t bully each other and I won’t through you into detention.” That kind of crap only encourages bullying, since the perpetrators know they’re getting out of doing something bad for a few lousy minutes in a nice, quite room where they’ll have to miss going out with their girlfriend for half an hour. That just doesn’t cut it. Your parents and grandparents will tell you that back in their day, if they did something wrong, they were met with a 4X6 paddle with holes cut in it for extra speed. If we had that kind of punishment today, kids would know that if you did something wrong, you’d be punished severly, and would not be encouraged to hurt someone else for your own gain for fear of getting paddled. But we don’t have that today, do we? Why? Perhaps it’s because a few whinny parents and individuals thought it was “unfair” to punish children in this manner. You know what’s really unfair? Sending my kid to a school that could be locked down at any given moment because there’s a student inside with a gun, who was bullied all his life. And this is all because the other students weren’t taught at a young age not to bully through harsh punishment. You may say that the old ways don’t work, that our parents had it all wrong and that we should go about doing it the way we are now. I want you to think for a second and tell me how many kids shot up schools back in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70's. You can probably only count about 3. After the 1970’s, the number of student shootings in the US become increasing difficult to count on your two hands alone. You’d probably need someone else’s hands to help out. But do we even pay attention to that nowadays? No, we just continue to go about out lives and dissmiss bullying as child’s play, waiting for the day when some tortured student comes into the facility and starts picking off innocent lives. I say we should go back to the old ways, where we taught our kids at a young age to respect each other through harsh punishment rather than the crummy peaceful and lazy way of just sitting them down in detention. It’s not about being “fair” to our students, it’s about saving the good and innocent students from another Columbine. I felt like I had to share this with you guys because I’m tired of hyper-hippies telling me that kids are just “playing around” and that punishing them “is not fair” when it’s obvious that the system now is not working. And that my friends, is my ANGST.