Thursday, October 15, 2009

Learn the Warning Sign of Mental Illness

Today, I'm a study hall supervisor all day. I sit and make sure that kids do their work. If they don't have work, I'm supposed to make them be quiet. They are not allowed to talk, listen to i-pods, or put their head down. They must be what I want them to be. The walls of my trailer are covered with posters professing what's best for them. I can't help but laugh. You think the kids are gonna listen to this stuff? Check out the scare tactics on the posters:

Drugs and the body... it isn't pretty.
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What you're served... what's one serving?
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Learn the warning sign of mental illness.
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YOU MAY NOT REMEMBER...
Did you see her last weekend?
I can't believe she did that...
I bet she doesn't even remember what happened...
She was so drunk...
BUT WE WILL.
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Call it what you want, it's still a drug.
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Cheating: Talking about the test to the next period class.
Cheating: "Borrowing" homework.
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Live for the future, not for the moment, sex can wait.
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What Mommy does... baby does...

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To get a visual idea, here are some examples:





Faith in the kids? Nah... I can't see it. My desk is a throne, the walls around me the bastion for propaganda. The walls are plastered with our lack of faith...

I look around the classroom, and the way I see it is this...

just like the baboon on the Serengeti...

He runs and fails. He humps his brother. His mother mortally wounds a rabbit so that he can practice making the final kill. He doesn't know how to do it and paws at it's back feebly... He eats a poisonous lilac berry by accident... One day he catches an infant gazelle... It's torn from his hand by another... He learns to climb trees to escape... mates with a sultry female in estrus... ignores his children until they do the same...

experimentation...

Things have been happening this way thousands of years, whether IT goes down in caves with fermented mammoth piss, with grog on an Atlantic crossing, or in the back of the Burger King. By having IT plastered on the walls of schools and on the tip of adult lips, all IT does is bring IT to the forefront of the kids' minds. IT makes them think about IT more. IT makes them curious. IT makes them want IT more.

Is a sexless drugless adolescence really the key to a successful adulthood? Is that the prelude we need? I think that has yet to be proven, and probably never will be.

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