IP: more on : singling-out of non-conformists from the Financial Times -- I agree with them

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>
> To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
>
>
> this Financial Times article said it best for me:
>
> THE AMERICAS: Denver tribes make their own rules: Columbine High School
> children handle their grief, arrange their wake and try to explain their life
> to an outsi world that had left them to their own devices but will soon bring
> fences and metal detectors to curb their freedom
> Financial Times ; 23-Apr-1999 03:14:56 am ; 791 words
>
> Almost everyone wears a uniform at Columbine High, the latest and probably not
> the last US school to taste bloody mayhem.
>
> The Jocks, the tough-guy games players who predominate among the boys, sport
> numbers on their baggy shirts and caps tight on their cropped heads. Worn
> back-to-front or sideways, the baseball hats alone are enough to badge them as
> members of the dominant male group.
>
> The Preps, studious boys and girls set on university, are differentiated by
> sweaters knotted around their waists. The Goths affect black garb and eyeliner
> in imitation of pop stars. The Drama, aspiring actors, dress for the camera.
>
> Then there is the Trenchcoat Mafia, distinguished by trailing, black,
> cowboy-style "duster" coats and swastikas scribbled on their clothes and school
> folders.
>
> Two of them, hitherto considered merely obnoxious and if anything less abrasive
> than the Jocks, brought at least four guns and 30 pipe bombs unhindered to
> school on Tuesday, killed 13 people, then shot themselves dead.
>
> Next day, children in their uniforms poured in a constant stream to a roadside
> grass bank on the school perimeter. Until the early evening, when the work day
> was over, and the last corpse was removed, there was hardly a parent to be
> counted among the thousands.
>
> Even now, the tear-stained children were fending for themselves. While most
> adults looked on and complained of inadequate supervision and lack of respect,
> the students choreographed and conducted their own impromptu wake and prayers.
> They handled the media with calm aplomb and patiently filled in the gaps in
> adult understanding of their world and its rituals.
>
> A cluster of Jocks recalled with tear-filled eyes how they had first thought
> the disruptions came from seniors carrying out a threatened rough-house prank
> code-named "Annihilation".
>
> Few had understood when, earlier in the day of the killings, according to
> eyewitnesses, a message had scrolled across school-network TV screens warning:
> "Today's the day you wish you weren't here." It was written in German.
>
> But even as the body count revealed that two of the dead were black - there
> were only 16 African Americans (compared with 1,783 whites) among Columbine's
> 1,965 students - the youngsters discounted the media's race-hate theories.
>
> Blacks, whites and Latinos alike paid little heed to the Trenchcoats' reputed
> fascination with "the holocaust, Hitler and a lot of German history". By their
> reckoning, "they didn't like anybody", and picked fights to draw attention to
> themselves because they were so few.
>
> A band of a dozen or less, they were, by common consent, the smallest and
> least-regarded of the tribes which comprise Columbine's microcosm of fractured,
> self-conscious US society. Adults at the scene, police included, had not heard
> of the group until the day of the killings.
>
> Like many of Columbine's children, they were left to their own devices, which
> produced murderous consequences and another deadly warning for the US school
> system.
>
> Fashion and factionalism - freedoms clearly treasured at Columbine - played a
> part, as was tacitly acknowledged yesterday when local school authorities
> banned the wearing of the stigmatised trenchcoats.
>
> By omission, the ruling approved the rest: the heavy chains some wear at their
> waist, and the swaggering manners of the Jocks. They, after all, are seen by
> many parents and teachers as the archetypal clean-cut all-American boys.
>
> Who cares that they wear their hats in class, and freely admit to harassing and
> bullying anyone they deem inferior?
>
> Will their freedoms come under scrutiny when the time comes to rewrite the
> rules of conduct? Without doubt, many privileges will be lost when, as now
> seems inevitable, the menacing paraphernalia of inner-city school life comes to
> this green and pleasant suburb, a 20-minute drive from central Denver.
>
> On the surface, Littleton still represents the clean and orderly ideal of the
> New West, where people come to start over. There are vast green fields where
> patches of buckled asphalt serve as yards in city schools. There are no metal
> detectors at the entrances to its campuses. There are no wire mesh fences
> locking children in and keeping predators out. The walls are not plastered with
> city-style posters warning against carrying guns or knives.
>
> Columbine's only defences against itself and outsiders are one fatherly deputy
> and a handful of security guards.
>
> But all that is about to change. When the metal detectors are installed,
> Littleton and towns like it will be one step further from the New West paradigm
> and one step closer to the US norm, which demands ironwork and muscle to police
> rather than protect its unfathomable young.
>
>
> Copyright © The Financial Times Limited