A student, A soldier, and a Terrorist

It’s easy to feel that Islamic terrorists are somehow different than home-grown terrorists. If one took the time to look at the human similarities they’d be shocked to see how similar the naked ideals of a terrorist are to that of a soldier. A conscientious observer would note that they both seek to inspire change through killing. Soldiers are not terrorists but our nation has long treated them as second-class citizens while a select-few are used as puppets paraded by politicians to create the illusion of honoring veterans.

A significant portion of American school-children must share at least some of the views of Boko Haram or we would not have school shootings almost every week like clockwork. These school-children have not been indoctrinated or brainwashed by any foreign religious extremist group; it’s as if mass-shootings in our centers of education has become a part of our culture, perhaps to better prepare our citizens for their role as world police? I find this sentiment absurd but if school-shootings cannot inspire a governmental revolution in our schools (a massive reformation of the system from its very foundation) then nothing will.

The problem will not be fixed by gun regulation; it will not be fixed by censorship or psychological intervention, to stop school shootings we must negotiate with the mass-murderers. We must give school-children what they are murdering each-other in massive numbers every year for, freedom of education. There is no other way to heal the psychological trauma we are inflicting on these people that we pretend are intellectual peers based on the number of times they have shared a trip around the sun.

School-children need friends their own age of maturity and they need classmates at their own level of intellectual progress. These two facets of social existence cannot be met by a manufactured social system. Only freedom to choose one’s educational career from the moment they’re able to understand the implications of such a decision (their parents have some say but should be inconsequential in the long run). Such a decision should not lock one in place for life. There is basic education, there is cultural education, and there is vocational education all of which we should begin training early on.

As we continue to send our school-children into an archaic system we will continue to have savage results. The problem isn’t the schools but an outdated school-system. Imagine the scandal that just came out with the V.A., now apply that to our educational system; the outdated computer system which has created thousand day backlogs is analogous to our basic structures of education that have gone unchanged even though they were invented in a time before computers even existed. Instead of sick or injured soldiers needing medical care and being told to wait, we are telling our newest members of society to get in line, and wait for an education, wait to grow-up, wait to be an adult, wait to be a citizen, wait to be a person, wait until you’re not a child, wait because there’s nothing you can do except go to school, school is your job but you have to wait to make a living until you’re considered alive by our economic structures.

I got into a little rant there but it is fitting to imagine the kind of mentality which is committing these acts in our schools. My point remains the same, the issue with school shootings must be addressed by addressing a SYSTEM that has gone largely UNCHANGED IN CENTURIES. I am not saying that education has not changed; it has ALOT yet the basic structures of how long kids go to school, the basic classroom structure, and the lack of internet utilization for connecting more public education to the home, these kinds of things have not been attended to. We must modernize our schools if we want to modernize the minds of our youth so that they stop shooting each-other. Where there are 150 kids a year that commit a mass-shooting in a school there are 150,000 more that have dreamed about it in that same year and 1,500,000 more who have had nightmares about it.