Archive for December, 2005

While surfing the ‘Net today, I tripped over this article. Go read it, I can wait here. My problem isn’t with the article itself. Well, not a lot, anyway. The title of the article is SCHOOL TERRORISM. Hmmm.. But the Title Bar of the browser window says “TRUE CRIMES: BULLYING”. So now they’re equating bullying with terrorism? Egads, they’re going the route The Feds did with RICO laws. Throw a broad enough concept at someone and SOMETHING should stick, yes?

When I was in school, bullying was BULLYING. It wasn’t terrorism. Here’s the definition of terrorism:

Wikipedia: Terrorism is the unconventional use of violence for political gain.

Dictionary.com: The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

Britannica.com: The systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

So how is being a BULLY being a TERRORIST. (SIGH) Back in my schools days, bullys were to be avoided, but they weren’t TERRORISTS. They were assholes. Simple. And if one day you kicked the bully in the twins, he usually left you alone (another Yuppie asshole term here) ‘going forward’.

When are these (insert an entire life’s worth of epithets for the present school systems administrators and teachers) going to QUIT teaching our kids the WRONG things and get back to the Big Three (Reading, Writing and Arithmentic)?

While I adamantly agree that incidents such as Colmbine are truly tragic, THEY WERE NOT TERORRISM. We have to stop taking a much greater tragedy and linking it through poor vocabulary to whatever topic de jour we’re hyping today.

Or am I just a nut?