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Helping Create the NEXT GENERATION of the Web: GENERATOR 21 - The World's Magazine

American Dreams

That School Violence Thang

by [Name Withheld at Author's Request]

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i have been talking to rod, the editor here at g21, and a few others about this binge of 'school violence' we seem to be on...biggest news in most of the papers these days, every two or three months another kid shoots somebody at school. rod was saying the official report is that 'there is no profile' of the kids who do these violent things at school. but as we all know they have been

mostly boys, mostly in their early to mid teens, mostly white, and mostly from sub-urban (as opposed to urban) places

. course i guess a few years ago we were hearing about the drive bys in the inner cities, somehow classified as a completely different thang because the kids were in their cars, maybe a bit older and probably black.

it's all violence to me.

oddly, i have recently moved next door to an inner city high school in west oakland, california. i say "oddly" because it might seem a very dangerous place for a white girl like me.

a couple of weeks ago the kids had an anti-violence march around the block long perimeter of the school. they held up traffic. they had candles.

we have all been affected by centuries of violence and there are many people on the planet who want things to change, including inner-city teenagers. you can probably guess this is not a political type article on school violence. it's a spiritual one, and it's about the violence we humans do to each other here on this planet we try to share together.

i say "try to share" because at least as far back as the history books go we have not shared at all, but dominated whomever we could. the very basis of our connections with each other have been the 'fuck or kill it' mentality.

or perhaps -- and more to the point -- if you can't fuck it then kill it. (only crazy people fuck it AND kill it, but we don't really need to go there).

in my mind we are in the process of evolving out of this animal behavior. in order to evolve, the behavior must be magnified a million times so that even the most blind of us will see the problem. at this point it is possible for a human being that has only spent six years on this planet to pick up a gun and kill another in America. (remember the little kid in philidelphia?)

the problem has been magnified.

perhaps we were shocked when this six year old pulled out a gun and killed someone. perhaps we wondered how it was possible, or who his parents were, or what kind of neighborhood he had come from. i know i did.

this questioning caused me to ponder my own life and the violence with which i was raised. my conclusion was that this type of behavior is standard fair for our culture.

i was the only girl in a family of 3 boys and a very domineering father. his dominant/violent character was passed on through his father, a typical canadian-born eastern european immigrant.

we come from the cold country and our blood is as cold as the air. children are raised with a fist or a belt and are indoctrinated with who is boss from a very early age.

i knew where i was in the heirarchy by the time i was one year old. and in all probability this accounted for the nature and tone of my very first word...

"N O!!!"

as loudly as a one year old can scream, at my brothers who were unrelentledly teasing me.

by the time i was 13 years of age this powerlessness and rage had turned into both suicidal and homicidal thoughts.

I would often fantasize (boiled tears rolling down my cheeks) whether i would kill my father with his own gun or sneak into his bedroom at night and stab him in the heart.

these thoughts usually came a day or two after he had beaten the shit out of me.

of course i was just feeling the rage then. it is only now that i can see the rationale in this. when i wasn't thinking about killing him, i was thinking about killing myself.

my english teacher didn't even notice this when i turned in an essay questioning the meaning of why we were alive... how were we any different than the salmon who spent the majority of their lives swimming upstream, only to lay the fish eggs and die? was there any meaning to all this strife?

i spent many years believing my father's violent behavior was normal behavior. i had no idea there was any other way. i lived in a world where when things went right i only became more demanding (that they should be right all the time) and when things went wrong or people pissed me off i wanted to kill them.

i had no idea that i suffered from bad chemistry and a major depressive disorder or that anything was wrong a t all until my father walked across the street one fateful thanksgiving day and killed the neighbor.

and that event changed the course of my life.

oddly, a person i hated so much -- my father -- i am now grateful to because if he hadn't gone out and killed somebody and completely fucked up his life, i probably would have.

it's the one thing that i learned from him, violence really makes for a very unhappy existence.

life is full of frustration and there wasn't a parent in my world who taught me how to deal with it in a constructive way. ("just kill the bastard" i can still hear him say).

my chemistry was out of control both with hormones and insufficient seritonin, yet both my teachers and my parents thought i was just a bad kid and could not be controlled, so the issue was never dealt with.

i concluded one day that i lived in a world where vulnerability was the equivalent of weakness and that whenever i felt it i made my self tougher and tougher. i owned three guns by the time i was 18 and if 'stinky', the berkeley rapist (or anyone else who was uninvited) would have ever made it to my house his face would have been blasted off with a 357 magnum. i waited for that bastard and vented all my fear and rage onto my mental contruct of him.

i fed myself a diet of self hatred and rage till i was almost 40 years old.

it took many years to learn how to chang e the wiring in my brain so that it was possible to experience the world in a new way. and although all journeys are as unique as the people who undertake them, there are a few basic elements that are universal.

• first we are raised in a world where it is normal to blame our own feelings of mistreatment on the people around us. if we get pissed off, we find someone to take it out on. if we are frustrated we find something outside of ourselves to blame. 'if only i hadn't been smacked around by my father, i would have been able to change the world'. it is these 'if onlys' that breed our sense of powerlessness and it is powerlessness that breeds rage. in fact what is truely powerless in this scenario is the inability to both recognize and deal with our own emotions. if i am pissed off my first responsibility is to own and deal with my anger. and until i learn to do that my anger will only render me more powerless. I believe this was the basis of my self-hate. in fact i did learn this lack of responsibility from my parents. children are very often blamed for the failures of adults. and in this way we pass on an insidious powerlessness from generation to generation.
  
  
• secondly we learn very young to react to other people's emotions. as children we have few defenses against this, and most often we are not taught otherwise. in a world where one reacts to other people's feelings a beautiful day can turn into a nightmare in a nanosecond.

say I go out to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes. I walk in and the clerk looks at me as if I have just fucked up his whole day. sensing something might be a little off I greet the clerk hoping maybe to offset that nasty attitude, but the clerk doesn't even have the respect to acknowledge my presense. i leave the store (without my cigarettes) and am faced with two options. Number One: i could react to the clerk's attitude and go back in the store and start a fight. afterall i was taught not to let people walk on me and i am gunna show this person what's right. that of course is what my dad did so many years ago on that fateful thanksgiving day and in those few thoughtless seconds he committed an act which defined the entire rest of his life. he died alone in the prison hospital after having spent the last 17 years of his life confined. Number Two: my other option is to realize that whatever has made this clerk have the nasty attitude doesn't have a thing to do with me, even if i have been in that store everyday for the past year and the clerk just hates the sight of me. i can choose to confront the situation and find out what the underlying problem is ('so just why do you hate the sight of me?') or i can stop going to the store and let the clerk find somebody else to go off on.

either way, whatever is going on with that clerk is not about me< /i>.

knowing that i too am only human, and that i too go off on people in destructive ways sometimes, can breed a sense of compassion that in and of itself can transform the situation.

i don't mean feeling sorry for him or thinking that I am better than he. i mean acknowledging we are both humans prone to ridiculous error and my deciding on putting compassionate energy out there.

it is in this way that i walk away from a nasty situation with a positive feeling. and positive feelings are not only what the good life is about, but what breeds the creativity to manifest an awesome life.

the last part of my journey was about dealing with my alienation.

it started in that same fateful 13th year of my life and i didn't reconnect to humanity until i was 40. that is a long time to feel utterly alone.

for years i read books about religion, spirituality, and alternate states in the vain hope of finding 'my god'. for brief moments of time i adopted other people's gods, but that provided only a moment's relief. then i spent years as the ultimate cynic, (life was worthless, there was no god, and who gave a shit anyways).

that didn't work either. the big realization hit me after i found out that william borroughs had written the majority of his stuff to the aliens in his head.

it didn't matter if his god (or alien) was real, or if somebody else's god was "the one" and his was a joke.

i learned from this that what mattered was that I believed that 'I am not alone' and it is the belief itself, not who or what i believe in that has saved me from alienation.

the opposite of alienation is connection, and based upon my life experience thus far i choose connection. it feels a lot better.

there are many things that are learned along the way to a more creative existence. walking away from a negative situation with something positive is one of the most powerful. in my belief system every time another negative is transformed to a positive the world has become a better place.

these are the things that come to me when i think of those teenagers out there with "the guns and the school violence". and i also feel sad because i know they live with immense frustration and self hate. many of the episodes include a suicide after the rampage and it doesn't surprise me a bit.... because whether you kill yourself or kill someone else, in terms of our spiritual or psychological selves, its all the same thing, violence.

we humans who have contructed space ships and stonehenge and webs of communication all over the world, have never figured out how to negotiate an argument so that it doesn't turn violent or teach our kids how to deal with their frustrations and use them as creative challenges.

we have never figured out how to put our deep dark questions out to the universe and look into the face of a stranger with awe when the answer comes back.

we've never realized that this crazy animal we have living inside each of us is still a frustrated infant who hasn't yet mastered his (sic) creative genius.

in my mind to grow up is to master one's creativity. and it doesn't matter if i am diving in dumpsters and turning junk into art or programming computers to solve the enviornmental problems our very existence brings to fore.

what matters is to transform frustration and powerlessness (which is what breeds both hierarchies and self hate) into the creative potential that is the birthright of each and every one of us. i am stepping down from my soapbox now.

comments welcomed! we're all just people after all.