Volume 3, Issue 3: May - June, 2002

Contents Cover Story     Child Labor Laws Articles     Just In My Opinion     Perspective     Sue’s Review Features     Buzz     Letters     News Links     Redirect

Perspective by Daniel McGuire, Vice-President, ASFAR Why Schools As Targets? Why Authority Figures As Targets? On the school shooting in Erfurt, Germany Schools as we know them can be soul-crushing for certain individuals, students and teachers.  Authority figures are the enforcers of the law-imposed system of oppression.  When people’s circumstances drive them close to the edge, it is usually the boss, the school, the teachers, the police, the principals, the mega-gigantic-corporations, sometimes the parents—the *authorities*—that they think about lashing out against.  If they are oppressed enough, or are more prone to losing it,  these thoughts are made actions.  Until widespread meaningful change happens in society,  such attacks will likely continue to happen, and with increased regularity. THE SYSTEM, including compulsory school, doesn’t allow freedom.  The person does not choose to be there, but is forced by law or circumstance.  Force is a bad basis for any organization and will result in tension with those who resist conformity (and conformity for those who don’t resist or whose spirits are broken).  There is a wide spectrum of resistance from a well-thought-out written complaint, to protest, to organization- forming, to verbal argument or questioning, to theft, vandalism,  sabotage, and in this case, violence. One can draw parallels between school shootings and workplace violence such as those employees who “go postal”.  When people are treated as numbers instead of individuals whether purposefully or because they “slipped through the cracks” or because of the huge population the system must deal with on a daily basis, they learn to dislike the system that is dehumanizing them.  A person’s value is measured by the system in terms of numbers.  What is your GPA?  What were your SAT, ACT, GRE scores?  What’s your IQ?  Did you make quota?  How big is your trust fund?  Many of these numbers are major factors in determining the opportunities people have in life, instead of their individual accomplishments, potentials, characteristics and merits.  These numbers affect what other peoples’ opinions of them are.  These numbers determine what quality education they are eligible for.  Why are so many people opposed to national ID’s, even if they would make us “safer”? Each person starts out as and remains, for the most part, an individual.  Each person has unique thoughts, experiences, feelings, emotions, a life that is different from every other person’s life on this planet.  Any system that must deal with masses of people “efficiently” tends to assign numbers to individuals.  Systems tend to take on a life of their own, doing what’s best for the system, which is quite often to the detriment of the people caught up in the system.  What’s the human price of efficiency? I don’t know the shooter or anything about his life or his motivations.  I don’t live in Germany or know much about German culture or what the German school system is like.  What I’m writing is meant to stir debate and conversation and to introduce these thoughts into the debate.  And they’re my gut feelings.  It’s where my thoughts are at the moment. My heart goes out to the people who knew these dead.  The pain must be excruciating.