It’s a good thing I had the foresight to burn all of the poetry I wrote during my adolescent-angst phase, otherwise I might be in the same sort of situation.
I can see how such a poem would arouse concern, but not to the point that criminal charges are necessary. The problem, though, is that, post-Columbine, a precedent has been set in schools that says that anything which seems like it may result in violence should be treated as concrete evidence that violence is forth-coming. Point a finger at a teacher and it could be construed as representing a gun and, much more sinisterly, your intention to kill that teacher. Figurative language and behavior has been lost in the place where we learn what "figurative" means, all due to a climate of fear.
The knee-jerk "pitch him in jail" attitude, I believe, benefits no one. How about a little counseling, or an interview by a psychiatrist to determine whether his poem really constituted a threat. A lot of teens harbor violent fantasies but are nevertheless non-violent. I think what was done will only heighten the boy's alienation without doing anything to ameliorate it.
Nobody wants to be the guy who saw the "warning signs" and didn't do anything. That said, most people are morons.
:m: Peace.
What the hell are they thinking? It's poetry (however bad), and it's one of the privileges of being a teenager. Writing lousy “I Hate The World And The World Hates Me” type stuff is par for the course isn't it?The boy was shy, 15 and new to his high school in San Jose. He wrote poems in his notebooks and carried them everywhere. One day in honors English, he approached a classmate who had been kind to him and asked her to read one of them.
"Is there a poetry club here?" the gangly teenager wanted to know.
The girl read the poem, but it did not spark a friendship. Instead, fearing for her life, she fled the campus. Police went to the boy's home two days later and arrested him.
The poem, called "Faces," ended with these lines:
"For I can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school. So parents watch your children cuz I'm back!!"
The boy, identified in court records only as George Julius T., had no history of violence and wrote "Faces" at a time when his family was broke and living with an uncle. But a Juvenile Court judge decided that the poem amounted to a criminal threat, a felony, and the boy served four months in juvenile hall.
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cach.../nationworld/nation/la-me-threat18jun18.story[/url]
I can see how such a poem would arouse concern, but not to the point that criminal charges are necessary. The problem, though, is that, post-Columbine, a precedent has been set in schools that says that anything which seems like it may result in violence should be treated as concrete evidence that violence is forth-coming. Point a finger at a teacher and it could be construed as representing a gun and, much more sinisterly, your intention to kill that teacher. Figurative language and behavior has been lost in the place where we learn what "figurative" means, all due to a climate of fear.
The knee-jerk "pitch him in jail" attitude, I believe, benefits no one. How about a little counseling, or an interview by a psychiatrist to determine whether his poem really constituted a threat. A lot of teens harbor violent fantasies but are nevertheless non-violent. I think what was done will only heighten the boy's alienation without doing anything to ameliorate it.
Nobody wants to be the guy who saw the "warning signs" and didn't do anything. That said, most people are morons.
:m: Peace.