The Hitch and Heather

The Hitch has a good one up today about the reaction to the Virginia Tech shootings. What he doesn't mention, and perhaps not due to his continued support of the Iraq war, is the number of American soldiers that died in Iraq this month. This is a parallel that has come up in certain media circles, and the argument is that 33 deaths in Iraq is a good day, yet there is no national mourning, no half-raised flags, no tearing at the breast.

Another good point -- if the shooting had happened a week earlier, would Don Imus still have his job?

Heather Havirlesky also has a good article about name-calling and kids and that if the worse thing you do is call your kid a name, then that's not too bad. It does seem there was a big shift a few years ago and now children have to be protected from the big bad world and made to feel special. There were some undertones of that when I was a kid, but I still had teachers from the old school of thought who would think nothing of calling you a name. In my Grade 1 class if a student got upset about something the teacher would make him/her feel better by singling out other students and pointing out their mistakes and shortcomings. Those who know and love me know I have horrendous, horrendous hand-writing and I was often singled out when someone was having trouble with capital letters as the negative example, as in 'you might be having trouble with your capital Q's, but at least they are not as bad as Greg's'. Did it make me cry? No. Did it make me try harder and master handwriting? Well, no, not really. But then the PC became standard and now no one uses handwriting anymore, so it all worked out.

The point is you can't be made to feel that you are successful all the time, that you are special, because you are not special. Everyone should fail at least one course in high school (or come close to failing and then pull yourself back from the brink by studying hard and cheating off the smarter kid in class) so at least you know what it's like and you are not 25-years-old when someone points out for the first time that instead of being a wonderful, special human being you are actually a border-line loser destined to spend his time stuck in a meaningless middle-management job and screw up every relationship so badly that it gets to the point that you have to join a cult, or much worse join a religion and spend your Sundays at Wal-mart railing against the tide of uppity foreigners who are sending you coded messages through the mercury-lined fillings in your teeth.

I have the sudden urge to see Fight Club.