NO-fault forgiveness fall

THE anatomy of vio-
lence in schools runs
as follows:

7 First, a loser, who enjovs

. all the accoutrements of —
middle class life --- including
parental unconditional
approval — and who has no
predilection whatsoever for
self-denial or control,
decides tu expand his sphere
of misery.

The latest prototype was
an infelicitous 15-year-old
boy, referred to occasionally
as Felicity, from Orleans,
Onarario, who wene darting
about Cairine Wilson High,
plunging a knife into fellow
students.

Next, as in the
Columbine and Taber affairs,
his compatriots, the chil-
dren, commence the ritualis-
tic, exculpatory rhetoric,
taught to them by progres-
Sive parents and teaciicrs.

As one automaton said:

.. “He was poked at and made

- fun of ~~ the kids in
Columbine felt neglected
until their deaths.”

_ Ina word, the perpetra-
tor, who suffered from acne,
simply buckled. under the
tremendous psychic pain of
overactive sebaceous glands.

The narrative expands
some, but retains its idiotic
thrust when the mentai
health mavens appear on the
scene. Now iz’s ume for the

mailisex
Tutor
costs
clarified

article “NV ‘schools | toss
tutors.”

The statement “... the cost

to the (school) district of pro-
viding . specialized tutoring
could run to $850 per child
per year ... ” is inaccurate. The
statement should read “the
cost to’ train as an Orton-
Gillingham ‘tutor is approxi-
mately $850.” ;

It is my understanding thar
‘the schoo! district has recently
provided tutor training for a
number of special education
aides: The challenge to the dis-
trict and schooi administrators
will be to develop a daly
wide program that will identi
those surdents in need of spe-
cialized reading, assistance, and
to enstice that the support is
given on a ‘consistent, on-
going basis as needed through-
out their elementary and sec-

comment

roster of pop-psychology
explanations of how an
essentially tender soul was
pushed to attempt murder.

The-culture-of-violence
mantra scems to have been
played for all it’s worth, and
bullying now is the more in-
vogue causal factor.
Certainly cutis-deep qualities
have always determined the
pecking order in schools.

Angry teenagers nowa-
days are simply less inclined
to ruminate about their
angst, and mere likely to act
on it. Social justice, they are
taught, pivots on redistribu-
tion. And redistribution is
achieved by taking forcibly
from some to give to others.

When you are taught to
reject the harsh reality of
inequality, not having some-
thing you covet, be it popu-
larity or pulchritude, gener-
ates the anger of entitlement
and the sense that someone
ought to pay for the pain of
being without.

Furthermore, where once
kids might have been
spurred to see dignity in a
brave face and a stoic coun-
tenance, now, the cultural
cognoscenti have declared
these to be pathologies,
born of repression and
denial.

Is it any wonder that
some kids -— the bad ones,
at least — are egged on by
the culture of share-your-
feelings-with-the-group to
take the rage of entitlement
to its deadly conclusion?

So the perpetrator is now
a cause celebre.

Next, society exonerates
the youth and his parents of
responsibility.

As Hillary Clinton said, It
Takes A Viilage, and we
must all share the blame.
The need to replace individ-
ual with collective responsi-
bility is vital because blaming
everyone is ike blaming no
one.

Let my kid and me off
the hook, and when your kid
stumbles, we will retara the
favour.

By incorporating rather
than expunging the offender
from its moral midst, the
community further blurs the
lines between innocent and
guilty, good and bad; a vita}
fudging which serves to sus-
pend these occurrences in an
ethical limbo and make them
sufficiently ambiguous to the
future offender.

The cry then goes out for
more focus groups to edu-
cate about bullying and to
plump fragile egos.

Like all efforts to drum
up ignorance, this one can
be dangerous. For little do
the major domus know of
the disturbing research that
indicates “aggression is more
frequently associated with
positive seff-appraisals than
with low self-esteem.”

As Professor Marilyn
Bowman of SFU has written
in her 1997 monograph on
post-traumatic stress disor-
der, “every kind of social
problem is analyzed as the
outgrowth of low self-
esteem. Treatment programs
to teach people how to love
themselves are put forward
as the means of raising self-
esteem.”

Not only is “the relation-
ship between emotion and
well-being not robust, causal
or meaningful,” but, on the
contrary, there is a dark side
to self-esteem.

“The prototype aggres-
sor,” writes Bowman, “is a
man whose self-appraisal is
unrealistically positive.”

Finally, in order to sustain
this self-reverential and self-
referential world, and to
ensure that the only enemy
that remains is “the man

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who is Not open to every-
thing,” to quote philosopher
Allan Bloom, the communal
will makes one last paroxys-
mal gesture.

As a youth pastor on the
stabbing scene said, “You've
got to totally accept him,
totally forgive him.”

As in Columbine and
Taber before it, a communi-
ty now prepares to bestow
no-fault forgiveness.

Of course, instant for-
giveness is a perversion of
Christian doctrine. Christian
forgiveness is contingent on
the sinner’s repentance and
can be granted only by the
sinned against.

But the act of uncondi-
tional forgiveness, as Ted
and Virginia Byfield once
wrote, abolishes both the
necessity of repentance, and
sin itself.

Having achieved such a
feat, people begin to speak
of being on the mend. And
so everyone “moves on,”
until the next time, that is.

—gnome@aticanada.net

2a

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