At 01:54 16/01/04 -0800, you wrote:
Keith,
I dont recognize any of this at all.
I do, I'm afraid. Even in this essentially middle-class city of Bath with more retired Navy Admirals than you could shake a fist at, Olga's description resonates.
On the basis of the BBC Regional News programme in the early evening I would say that there are four major fires a year in our schools (state schools, that is) within a 25 mile radius -- where 30-40% of the boys are totally alienated from education. One of these fires would probably involve most of a school (that is, a thorough job with several ignition-points). I would say that it's about as frequent round here as farmers burning their barns down in order to claim insurance. From a friend of a friend I know of one farmer who burned his intensive-pig-rearing shed down (several hundred pigs) and one could hear the squeels and smell the roast pork several miles away. That was one whacko payout from the insurers! Why am I saying all this? Simple. People who burn down (state) schools and pig-sheds don't do it for trivial reasons.
Keith
Certainly, nothing Ive seen in the USA is like Olgas description.
But, we so want to believe it is true, dont we?
The simplest way to handle the obesitysituation is to end school busing.
Let the little bs walk to school.
Harry
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 11:26 AM
To: Christoph Reuss
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fwd: Land of the Fear
Christoph,
Thank you for posting this. A valuable commentary on what is going on -- similar things are gathering pace in England, too.
Keith Hudson
At 17:04 10/01/2004 +0100, you wrote:
[maybe they should try a bit of magnesium...]
Fear is driving parents in the United States to strange behaviour
By Olga Lorenzo, The Age http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/05/1073267964070.html
America, these holidays, has been on a high terror alert. This means that every time you turn on the news, a banner informs you that the terror risk is high. It's like a high fire danger or a high pollen day, but the word used is "terror".
People generally acknowledge that there isn't much they can do about the "terror threat" and little prospect that their lives will be touched by terror. They tune out the dire warnings. But one wonders how such emotive words impact on children who, because of their inexperience, are more apt to conclude that the world is a terrifying place.
Visiting the United States after having been educated there and leaving two decades ago, some of the more visible cultural changes struck me as bizarre.
Our neighbourhood, Hialeah, was a middle to lower-class Anglo suburb of Miami; we were some of its first Cubans. It looks no more or less affluent, only now it's almost entirely Hispanic. Like everyone else, we rode our bicycles or walked alongside the drainage canals to school. Visiting a fairly seedy part of Montmartre before arriving in the States, the streets were thronged at eight, as one would expect, with children on their way to school. Not so in Miami. On a morning jog to my former primary school, I met not a soul. Only when I nearly reached it did I see children who lived within a block of the school walked by parents to its gates.
Like other public schools in Florida, the windows of Twin Lakes Elementary are now boarded with aluminium cladding that allows no light, and the school is surrounded by high walls.
Inside, where we had played hopscotch and swung from the monkey bars, now children are led to sit on the asphalt. Even those in the upper grades are led by the hand, and many of these children are obese. We had the school "fatty"; now the healthy-looking child is the exception. Many who aren't overweight are pale and overly thin - the nerdy, nervous children who whittle away their hours in front of TVs, computers and electronic games.
Going by "terror alerts" emitted by the Government and seized by the media, it would seem that terrorists have succeeded in frightening a nation.
Children don't play outside after school as they once did; while we were there, the sounds on our block came from my Australian teenagers. "Why must they be outside?" my mother lamented. "Why not?" I asked. She admitted there was no real reason to keep them in.
Yet children are kept in. My brother told me of a girl who was not even allowed to be alone in her fenced backyard. The fear of kidnapping and sexual molestation had overwhelmed her parents' common sense.
I walked from my school feeling angry, sad and relieved. Relieved that despite my parents' objections and sorrow I had raised my children in Australia. Sad for those robbed of their freedom and, ultimately, their childhood. And angry because it seems unnecessary - the crime rate has not increased significantly, nor have child abductions. Why then are American children being raised as if they were Muslim women under the Taliban - given so little unsupervised freedom, denied the chance to move about unescorted, to discover that life is not overwhelmingly precarious, that it can be navigated and even trusted?
Another day, I jogged to my former junior high school. When I was a student, it was the third most overcrowded middle school in the nation. Our hours were curtailed to allow for two shifts, seven to noon and noon to five. Some classes were in the auditorium, with more than 200 students. It is no longer a two-session school but, from the outside, shuttered and enclosed, it could be a maximum-security prison. Every student has to show identification to the guard at the entrance.
It is similar in other places I've visited in the United States. Fewer children walk to school, where there may be a private contract with the county sheriff's office for security. A friend remarked that it was almost always the sad result of an adverse incident: an intruder in a nearby school, for instance, or the Columbine shootings. Parents demand heightened security and schools, worried about lawsuits, respond.
Long before September 11, 2001, it seems many children were being raised in an atmosphere of distrust. Although racial tension, drugs and guns disproportionately afflict depressed ghetto areas, even in middle-class neighbourhoods life has changed, with emphasis on the potential threats that children face every day.
Another side of the obsession with social standards seems to be the phenomenon of proclaiming your child's achievements. People actually drive around with car stickers that read: "I am the proud parent of an honour student at...". There are placards outside homes, small billboards on the lawn with the student's photograph and achievements. I am told that this trend began about 10 years ago, perhaps arising in the ghettos where any scrap of pride is elusive. It has spread to middle suburbia. I think that an Australian child would axe their parents, thus adding to the crime rate, rather than allow such an embarrassment.
The mainland has survived two world wars and other foreign engagements without anything more than a spent Japanese torpedo drifting onto a California beach. Militarily, this is the best-armed nation on Earth. Given the odds of harm to any one citizen (which are infinitely less than the likelihood of dying from a car accident), Americans should be mostly undaunted by al-Qaeda.
Yet, going by "terror alerts" emitted by the Government and seized by the media, it would seem that terrorists have succeeded in frightening a nation. They may be aided by several decades of over-reaction to the social malaise that is endemic to the poorer and disenfranchised parts of America. It seems that at least one generation has already grown up in the grip of largely irrational fears. A loss of equanimity and that much-vaunted value - freedom - seems to have been the cost.
Olga Lorenzo is an Australian novelist.
Copyright � 2004. The Age Company Ltd
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