Subject: Re: canadian kids in the brig
From: Graham Preston (gpreston@mail.com)
Date: Sun Feb 11 2001 - 20:34:08 GMT
> As far as the kid in Canada is concerned, I still don't think that vebal
> threats constitute a crime, nor does sticking up for yourself. His crime
> remains, in my eyes, nothing more than the ultimate social crime of being
> different.
>
> andy
>
The real scary thing about this whole calamity up here is that prominent
canuck writers such as Margaret Atwood (ack) are joining together, and using
this as a rally against censorship. The charge was for uttering threats and
not (officially) for writing "Twisted", and that is the central issue in all
this. Making this situation into a great, big fight against solemn issues
like censorship will only compound the issue. Being in high school during
the Columbine incident (and any time for that matter) there are certain
respected bounds that are not crossed, and when crossed there must be
responsibilities that you will need to deal with. The student's neglect for
all these predetermined boundries, coupled with threats to other students
probably necessitated action, and so action was taken by the RCMP.
I'm not saying that boundries must not be crossed (In fact they were meant
to be crossed), but there are certain social situations (high school is
probably the most intense example) where these boundries have to be
respected so the entire school can coexist. I couldn't even imagine the
chaos that would happen at my high school of 2300 people if 10% of people
did as their thoughts told them to. And so school's exist on a ledge of a
building teetering in the wind, and so does our society. Our beloved Holden
himself is very conscious of this and spends most of CITR trying to find his
balance.
Graham
______________________________________________
FREE Personalized Email at Mail.com
Sign up at http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Mar 01 2001 - 16:49:06 GMT