psychoceramics: Re: psychoceramics-digest V1 #466

[s--@s--.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont)]

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> Subject:   psychoceramics-digest V1 #466
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> 
> psychoceramics-digest      Sunday, 15 February 1998      Volume 01 : Number 466
> 
> In this issue of psychoceramics-digest:
> 
> psychoceramics: where'd you go to school? (fwd) (fwd)
> psychoceramics: London Psychogeographical Association (fwd)
> Re: psychoceramics: where'd you go to school? (fwd) (fwd)
> Re: psychoceramics: where'd you go to school? (fwd) (fwd)
> 
> ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> From: "Andrew C. Bul+hac?k" <a--@z--.net>
> Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 05:24:46 +1100
> Subject: psychoceramics: where'd you go to school? (fwd) (fwd)
> }    I went to New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. It was a WEIRD
> }  place. CNN once featured it in a story on "the Harvard of high schools."
> }  It's a public school, ...
> 
> These stories aren't quite paranoid ramblings, but they may well be
> urban-legend type exaggerations.  A recent article in the Chicago
> Tribune covered a meeting at New Trier, where parents, students, and
> teachers got together to reflect on the problems that New Trier's
> success was causing. ...

Sadly, in present day America, incidents of the type described in the
original posting aren't all that unusual.  For that matter, they
weren't exactly uncommon years ago (back in the middle 1960s, when I
went to high school).  They were more often just better hushed up.
We had our share of drunken kids killed in car wrecks -- we just
didn't festoon the school walls with ribbons in the fashionable color
of the day -- and there were violent incidents of other kinds as well
-- the kind of incidents that you'd hear about only as rumors, rather
than see on the 6 PM news or read about in the papers -- suicides,
beatings, etc.

There has always been a certain amount of violence and cracked
behavior in high schools -- it was just not reported as gleefully by
the teevee Where It's At NewsTeam and by national media with a profit
driven appetite for body bags and blood splattered walls.  Add to that
the kind of parental and peer pressure that probably exists at New
Trier, the easier availability of extremely lethal firepower, big
media stories from which to copy, and you've got a cluster of stories
such as the ones in the posting.

Doesn't surprise me in the slightest.  I think the only "shocking"
thing in the story is that the stories are about "good kids" at a
"good school."

							spl