Bad Parent Blames YouTube

Apparently there is stuff on the Internet that slow children shouldn't see:

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So does this mean the Internet will be closed tomorrow? But really, while little Russell Gortzig is propped up in front of the television for the next few months -- Internet privileges taken away I presume -- his ever watchful mother and sister better keep him away from Jackass, Beavis and Butthead, and The Roadrunner. "Monkey see, monkey do," as my mother would say.

The funniest part of this story isn't even mentioned. Through an interview with Marco (the buddy who poured the gasoline) "deputies learned that Gortzig had set his pants on fire on three previous occasions without any accelerant."

Hey, I have a good idea. In addition to watching your children carefully, how about keeping gasoline, cigarette lighters and accelerant out of their reach? I'm hoping that's what Ann Curry really wanted to say to these clueless dimwits.

Group Hug!

When are hugs okay, and when are they just plain awkward? According to the NY Times, today's teenagers never give that question a single thought:

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

Of course, principals are responding by clamping down and banning hugs or at least limiting them to a 3 second rule. These drastic measures are either a plot to undermine kids' confidence, practical advice from rabid school lawyers, or the "gateway theory" run amok.

Whatever the reasoning, I'm glad I went to high school back when sex, drugs and song lyrics were the only causes for moral panic. I think the peer pressure to hug might have killed me. I'm just not a hugger.

I wouldn't really say my parents were frigid, screwed-up or repressed, but am I the only one who thought the Keaton family hugged way too much? I'll hug friends and family if they're going away for a long time, or if they're coming back from a long trip. I'll hug the youngest family members because they're cute. Of course I'll hug anybody I'm in a loving relationship with, but that's a different kind of hug.

I loathe hugs from strangers. It's fake intimacy from fake people. But why do I suddenly feel like I'm the one who's maladjusted?

From now on, I'm ending all blog posts with "hugs and kisses." Blame it on the peer pressure.

Columbine Lessons

I'm sure you've heard that today marks the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. The predictable sensationalism proved to be too much for Oprah Winfrey who pulled an already-taped episode about the tragedy saying it "focused too much on the killers."

I suppose that move is respectable considering the number of mass shootings this country has seen lately. However, there are lessons to be learned and relearned from Columbine. Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, dispels a prevailing myth about school shooters:

The first lesson is really one that we have unlearned, which is that there actually isn't a distinct psychological profile of the school killer. Pre-Columbine, teachers, parents, journalists, and the general public were pretty clear on where we thought the danger lay: loners and outcasts, troubled misfits who could not figure out how to fit in. Harris and Klebold were mistakenly tagged with all those characteristics in the first hours after their attack. Every characterization of them was wrong, both in their case and for shooters generally. The FBI conducted a ground-breaking study to help teachers assess threats in their classrooms. Oddballs were not the problem, the FBI concluded. Oddballs did not fit the profile, because there was no profile. In a surprisingly empathetic report, the bureau urged school administrators to quit focusing on the misfits. These were not our killers, and weren't they having enough trouble already?

That's how we slide into a classic moral panic -- believing that public morality or safety is threatened by the activities of a stereotyped group.

The only people I feel comfortable stereotyping are psychopaths. Eric Harris was most likely one. His own journal entries document his contempt for everybody. But the most revealing passages describe his goals: "I have a goal to destroy as much as possible, so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."

In order to kill his classmates, he first had to consciously kill his own humanity.