WHENEVER a scene of demonic horror occurs in one of our modern indoctrination centers known as schools, we are reminded again of just how much niceness keeps these sterile, ugly, soulless places afloat. Teddy bears, candlelit vigils, a tidal surge of unanimous praise for the niceness of the victim follow nightmarish, bloody carnage. Philip Chism was only 14 years old and yet he stabbed a teacher to death with a craft knife after hiding in a suburban Massachusetts classroom and waiting to accost her. He then placed her body in a recycling bin and walked out the door. He went to the latest Woody Allen movie after dumping the body in the woods and then wandered the streets, alone with his demonic secret in a perfectly nice community.

How can we explain this? There seems to be no way to process it in the vocabulary of nice. Teddy bears, candles and pledges to remember the deceased are the best answers it can give. Even the murderer in this case is believed to have been nice. Of Philip Chism, one of the few blacks in the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, The Daily Mail reports:

Other students, who played soccer with accused 14-year-old Chism, said that he was a really nice boy but incredibly shy and hard to get to know.

One said: ‘He was nice, but really quiet. No one really knew him that well. Apparently when he was arrested he was unresponsive and barely said anything at all.

Beneath the pervasive niceness, there is breathtaking hard-heartedness. One wonders whether Philip Chism, who may have been overwhelmed with phony niceness during his few months in Danvers because he was black and may have been used to demonstrate the wonderful tolerance of others, saw through this in some childish, intuitive way. There is no real love in these places. Where love is not, hatred blooms. It erupts after a period of silent, invisible fermentation. However nice the teacher Colleen Ritzer may have been, she worked for a brutally indifferent institution. She gave herself obliviously to a system that denies God with matter-of-fact efficiency and refuses to teach a student something so basic to life as prayer. Where God is not, Satan is. And he’s just not very nice.

 

— Comments —

Caroline writes:

It struck me –again– reading about the horrific, barbarous murder of Collen Ritzer that the formula is: elevate the murdered to saint — perfect human being, loved kids, loved her job, the best there ever was — while ignoring the evil of the perp, especially the perp’s race which no doubt had nothing at all to do with the crime, much less the souless human being he is.

And gosh, gee whiz, we just can’t figure out a motive. The boy was an evil automaton. Just didn’t have a motive.

All the lies embroiled in this story defy reality, and could only be perpetrated in a culture that is so debauched, so decadent as to be absolutely delusional about reality itself. And is paying the price thereof with dead bodies. What an outrage. And the students, with their tweets and teddy bears are just as soulless as the murderer, in their own way.

Aservant writes:

How completely apropos this post is for me today.

 My 11-year-old daughter returned from school yesterday to inform me that there was an anti-bullying assembly at her middle school.  The girls all got their pinky nails painted blue as a “pinky promise” to stand up to bullying…….how nice. Doesn’t appear that the boys got anything.  Another notch on the “women-will-solve-all-the-world’s-problems-guys, just-sit-back-and-be-lead” feminist agenda.  The principal is a woman, as are at least 90 percent of the educators. I’m surprised that the boys didn’t get a nail painting as well to satisfy the transgender initiative.

 As my daughter explained to me what she took away from the assembly I began to feel quite angry.  Basically, she was told to “always get along with everyone and never have a confrontation.” How that is supposed to be possible, especially in today’s wicked world, wasn’t explained.  Of course I know that the solution offered is to run to the state to solve all of your problems. And why not?  They are doing such a great job in this area.  We just need to accept the fact that occasionally teachers and students will be murdered as sacrifices to the greater good.

 The clarity of intellect is amazing that an 11-year-child can have if she is raised with solid Christian values and some frank honest discourse from her parents.  All of the following that I explained to her was understood immediately.

 I told her that this was very bothersome to me.  We constantly have conversations about the current state of affairs as compared to how things used to be, especially when I was in school, so this discussion wasn’t in a vacuum, nor was it new subject matter for her by far.  I told her that bullies have always existed and always will, but it wasn’t nearly as bad of a problem when I was in school as it is today.  I explained to her that this is because when I was in school there were two major factors that played into this that are absent today. (I know there are many more, but sheesh, Rome wasn’t built in a day!)  First, parents weren’t nearly as feckless as they are today. If their child was being bullied, something was done about immediately or very soon thereafter.  Sometimes this even included dad going to the parents of the bully, and in the case that it was revealed that the bully’s father was the source of the problem, he may have even got a beat down. This was very rare of course, but in the couple of these scenarios that I knew of growing up, this put an end to the bullying behavior immediately. But usually this wasn’t the case.  What was more common was that some adult was involved, whether one set parents or both, and the bully was put in his place through good, old-fashioned discipline.  Of course there were a lot more parents still using corporal punishment in those days, and in the case of a threatening bully, that is what it usually took to make him understand.  Those who speak the language of the sword must be spoken to as such. This remedy is now of course anathema to almost all educators and parents today.

 The second factor was that the kids were allowed to sort things out on their own much more so than now.  I saw numerous times that a bully or bullies continued to intimate students for a period of time, but it was inevitable that eventually they picked on the wrong kid.  Sometimes it ended up that the kid beat down the bully himself, but if that didn’t happen, one day the victim of the bully showed up at school with his massive, older cousin, brother, or best friend from the next school over and the bully was humiliated in front of the whole student body.  Almost all bullies had seen this happen to someone at some point, so they knew they could only go so far before the masses rose up against them.  In this way the situation rarely got out of hand.  And frankly, I told my daughter, bullies served a certain social good.  They kept mouthy kids that provoked a lot of situations but couldn’t back their mouths up from getting out of line.  Rarely was there a physical confrontation, but just the possibility of it happening was enough to keep arrogant kids in check.  Today I see a huge percentage of youngsters fly off at the mouth constantly to anyone, without any fear of retribution for disrespecting others. This is a major factor in the hateful environments that dominate in the public schools today that you referred to Laura, for as my daughter just informed me, the kids are now being indoctrinated to “eat sh#t” at all costs and at all times.  This can only breed resentment.  Sorry for the profanity, but that is what the pinky promise is all about in real terms.

 And the bullies also served as a sort of testing ground to toughen up some of us.  It wasn’t always pretty, but neither is the real world.

 So I agree completely with your assessment on “niceness.” Everything looks “oh-so-nice” at this public school where my daughter goes.  Many of the modern prisons do as well these days. But the gangs have more and more power and less and less fear of authority. I would imagine that this dynamic played a part, although probably unconscious, for the young murderer featured in your post.

 Why am I sending my daughter to this government run hellhole, some may ask?  Believe me, it only because the law requires it and I don’t have another viable option right now.  God willing, this will be her last year.

Dnr writes:

Well said!  Absolutely breathtaking in your insight into the problems of today’s indoctrination centers, er, “schools”.  God has been forced out, and the vacuum has been filled with evil.  The re-emergence of the “banality of evil” – although once it was identified and rooted out of society.  Now we must simply ignore it, no matter the cost in lives and hearts destroyed.

Last night I was speaking with my in-laws about our future plans regarding homeschool.  We are in our 3rd year of homeschool, and they were wondering when we will return our children to the public school, as if that is the only inevitable option.  I asked them, “What is it that my children are missing by being schooled at home?”  All I heard were nostalgic responses about proms and football.  One would hope that happy memories have been made in other ways in their lives since high school days.  And of course, things were so much different when they were in school, over 50 years ago.  Of course, the next thing mentioned was something about the kids learning to recognize bad behavior and how to deal with it.  So, I must throw my children into the pit and hope they survive?  My children will have plenty of time to deal with the monstrosities of this world when they are fully mature.  In the meantime, they are not isolated from the experiences that help one to develop, without the oppressive atmosphere that forces them to submit to evil.

Regardless of how sweet and innocent things seemed while my in-laws were in school, the government’s takeover of education over the past several generations has led to the freefall of today’s society.  The indoctrination to always trust the government as provider and protector, rather than God Himself, and God-given authorities, such as parents, has led us to the depravity we are now witnessing daily.  I will NEVER turn my children over to the state again.  We experienced a few years of public school indoctrination, and the battles we fought during that time were enough.  Not only were their minds and hearts in jeopardy, their very lives were in danger simply by being in the gun-free, God-free zone.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

Someday when your in-laws are proudly comparing your children to the products of public schools, you might courteously remind them how they once failed to support you and respect your judgment.

James N. writes:

One of the distinguishing features of How We Live Now is the candlelight vigil after an outrage.

Fifty years ago, we would have been looking for a rope. Now, we light candles.

And we wonder why things get worse.

Laura writes:

Not just candles, now we have “sky lanterns.” It’s all part of the pageantry of modern violence.

A reader writes:

Reading your comments about Phillip Chism, I wondered why you think the murder has something to do with the empty “niceness” or nihilism of the schools or the larger society.  I agree with pretty much everything you say about this — that the niceness is meaningless, shallow, that it reflects nihilism, that it ends up being a tacit endorsement of all kinds of evil things.  But don’t people also do inexplicably evil and perverse things in more traditional or religious or morally serious cultures and communities?  Or do you think that this kind of thing was significantly less common in 1950s America or some other society less characterized by false and empty “niceness”?  My impression is that chaotic evil was very common in other times and places.  Or am I misunderstanding your comments about this?

Laura writes:

Evil and violence are permanent features of life, but nihilistic violence of the sort we see in schools today was very rare in Western society before the 20th century. School massacres and murders of teachers, not to mention brutal, spontaneous attacks on ordinary citizens that do not involve any immediate gain for the attackers, are a relatively distinctive phenomenon.

Seraphim Rose wrote in his book Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age:

Crime in most previous ages had been a localized phenomenon and had apparent and comprehensible causes in the human passions of greed, lust, envy, jealousy and the like; never has there been anything more than a faint prefiguration of the crime that has become typical of our own century, crime for which the only name is one the avant-garde today is fond of using in another Nihilist context: “absurd.”

[…]

When questioned, those apprehended for such crimes explain their behavior in the same way; it was an “impulse” or even an “urge” that drove them, or there was sadistic pleasure in committing the crime, or there was some totally irrelevant pretext, such as boredom, confusion, or resentment. In a word, they cannot explain their behavior at all, there is no readily comprehensible motive for it, and in consequence — and this is perhaps the most consistent and striking feature of such crimes — there is no remorse.

Chism may have had a comprehensible motive if he was angry that his advances were rebuffed by Ritzer, but violence of this type by a 14-year-old is rare in history. Much of school violence is just free-wheeling hatred of authority and of life. As I said,  it is not surprising that schools are scenes of horror. The extreme niceness — the elevation of niceness to the highest virtue — is, as you say, another manifestation of spiritual emptiness and rebellion against God. To quote Rose again, “God is dead in the hearts of modern man: this is what the “death of God” means, and it is as true of the atheists and Satanists who rejoice in the fact, as it is of the unsophisticated multitudes in whom the sense of the spiritual reality has simply disappeared.”

Winnie writes:

Your main entry eloquently describes the black hole vacuum that public schools have become.  Sometimes I marvel that I emerged intact (though not unscathed) from my own “incarceration.”  That was nearly two decades ago… and we all know how much worse things have become and how rapidly the evil has accelerated.

Fast forward to a career-pursuit in my own adulthood.  I realized half-way through my graduate studies in education – but especially during my year-long student-teaching experience – that to voluntarily place myself back into this environment (which was so toxic to me as a child and adolescent) would be a form of self-endangerment, even in a so-called “good school district” (like Danvers or Newtown or Columbine).  Ironically, the danger that was most obvious to me was of a subtler nature: the oppressive and deteriorating intrusion of curriculum and the “experts.”  But with each successive incident of violence in schools, I find myself thinking I would have to be crazy to seek employment in a school.  Schools are both broken AND dangerous.  There are two categories of dysfunction to consider, even though we see them as part of the same problem in the macro.

On a separate note – I take issue with Caroline’s comments above.  I give her credit for recognizing the sainthood narrative and its distraction.  Fair enough – we know this will be sensationalized for a day or a week before the news and our collective consciousness move on in oblivion.  But this teacher herself was a girl – yes, probably naive, but from the looks of it, an innocent herself.

First: These students with their soulless response of teddy bears and vigils and tweets… how do we expect them to know any better?  They are merely playing the roles they’ve been taught to play.  Yes, the scenes of aftermath become cliched (and almost pornographic in the case of Newtown).  But the abdication of authority all around them is not their fault.  We can’t blame them for the silly ways they try to make sense of their world.  They text, read twitter, watch Miley and take their cues from parents who do the same.  They are being malformed.

Second: I cringed at her description of the murderer.  Yes – a barbaric act.  But to say “the boy was an evil automaton” – he is 14.  Yes, we have seen enough gruesome crime perpetrated by youths such that this is not really as shocking an incident as it ought to be. BUT, 14 years old – he is tragic too.  Do I wish to excuse him? Psychoanalyze him?  No.  He has brutally murdered an innocent woman, and on the surface, I don’t even object to his being charged as an adult.  But he is an undeveloped human.  I reject her assertion that he is soulless – we cannot make that judgment, but we can look at the environment that formed this boy and we can understand the distorted outcome.  Can evil exist in a child?  Perhaps it can.  Don’t get me wrong, I see the tribal, racial, social and cosmological implications and I do not wish to turn this boy into a victim.  But he – like the mourning vigil throngs – in some way he has done something that this evil culture has cultivated him to do.

Thank you for drawing the connection to nihilism and to the expulsion of God from polite society.  Fr. Seraphim Rose has written brilliantly on nihilism among other things.  Much of the goodness on display in our present-day environments is what is left of the fumes and ashes of Western civilization.  And evil creeps in on little cat paws.

James N. writes:

“A reader” asks, “Or do you think that this kind of thing was significantly less common in 1950s America”

Uh, yes. I was there.

The use of the trope “1950s America” to imply some horrible, benighted place has become commonplace, so much so that persons born after, say, 1955 may take the trope as a real thing, like mistaking a footprint for a shoe. There was a movie (Pleasantville) that used the Wizard of Oz trick of switching from black and white to color midway through, except the “switch” was thrown when the two teenaged protagonists started having sex.

The America of 1950s was a paradise compared to the present day. Of course, we know now what we did not know then – that the seeds of destruction had been planted and were already growing, in fact. Just as a single example, most of the extreme pedophile priests (those with hundreds of victims and those who practiced sacramental abuse) were formed in the 1940s and 1950s, in contrast to the homosexuals who flooded into the seminaries after Vatican II and had one or two teenaged victims apiece. I often wonder how much World War II, with its titanic violence and cruelty, played a role in forming the parents of the late 1940s-early 1950s children, like myself.

Enough. No, “reader”, “that sort of thing” WAS significantly less common in 1950s America.

Laura writes:

An incident in which a student hit a teacher would have been highly shocking in the 1950s. Now it is very common.

Mary writes:

Laura wrote: “Chism may have had a comprehensible motive if he was angry that his advances were rebuffed by Ritzer, but violence of this type by a 14-year-old is rare in history….”

And this motive itself would have been incomprehensible two generations ago, as 14 year old boys back then would never dream of making advances to a teacher, whatever private feelings they might have; authority in general has broken down, leaving both teachers and kids more vulnerable.

My feeling is that virtually all of these types of incidents have one thing in common: a teenage boy alone with a computer. A teenage boy at a very impressionable point in his life building a private interior world of fantasy, fed by unlimited access to violent and pornographic imagery; a boy completely disconnected from reality, with dangerously warped ideas about human sexuality and relationships, ideas which have destroyed in him the understanding of real love and family. A boy like this might be on meds, or from a broken family, have any number of other stressors, including being in an environment of unfathomable happiness and good cheer and, yes, niceness, everyday via fellow students, teachers, Facebook etc. But the commonality between these boys would be unfettered, unsupervised access to the Internet. This type of boy could easily appear calm and nice and quiet. He smiles in this world but lives in the one he created. And his crime shocks everyone.

Jane S. writes:

I would love to hear further discussion on this subject. The niceness of the Left is the hardest thing to deal with.

I once had a friend from school who was the epitome of the dopey bleeding-heart California peacenik. Full of tender sympathies for Muslim terrorists, homosexualist radicals, miscreants of all kinds.

I was once getting ready to tell her a story I had read about a woman who taught crafts workshops for convicted felons at a local penitentiary. I got as far as the word “convicted felons” and my friend went, “Awwww,” the way you would if you saw a baby bird fallen from the nest.

It got so I couldn’t stand to be around this woman. The way she was always clucking and cooing over evil people. It made me want to belt her. And of course that wouldn’t be nice.

James N. writes:

With regard to the “teenage boy alone with a computer:”

Well, maybe.

When I was a fourteen year old boy (and when I was older than that, too), the only question about any female other than my mother and my sisters that crossed my mind  (Including my young, blonde social studies teacher) was “does she want it?” (boys that age really don’t know). We did not have computers, we did not have video games, and we (mostly) didn’t have pornography, unless coach “accidentally” left his copy of Playboy in the locker room.

Now, I grant you that the sexualization of TV, movies, the internet, the damn magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle, etc, etc are gasoline on the fire of the young man’s reptile brain. But the underlying neurophysiology is there, and has always been there.

A further comment on “nice.” Well brought-up children should strive to be nice. But there is a difference between nice BEHAVIOR and believing that you being nice can change the world. Liberals promote “nice” as a substitute religion, when it’s only a useful behavior. They even teach children that Jesus was “nice”, while the moneychangers in the Temple Courts and those who cause little ones to sin might disagree. Displaying nice behavior is one thing. Walking into the volcano because it’s the nice thing to do is something else. This poor teacher, it seems, was very nice. It may turn  out that she was nice to the wrong person, at the wrong time, because she believed that her “niceness” could tame the savage beast. THAT is something children, especially girls, should never, ever do.

I have adopted your “Satan is just not very nice” brilliant comment and I can’t stop repeating it. It’s so RIGHT.

Laura writes:

Thanks.

James N. wrote:

But there is a difference between nice BEHAVIOR and believing that you being nice can change the world. Liberals promote “nice” as a substitute religion, when it’s only a useful behavior.

That’s right, although niceness can be a form of humility that is not purely utilitarian.

It’s because niceness is such a, well, nice virtue that liberalism’s elevation of it is so disarming.

Alex writes:

Let’s not be naive. This is typical violent black-on-white crime. A black covets a white woman. She says no, he kills her. It’s what blacks do.

He is 14? Blacks at 14 are as good as adults; they are as mature and mentally developed as they are going to be. The black brain stops developing or even regresses at this age. He is an undeveloped human? Blacks are undeveloped humans. We need to stop applying to blacks white standards of physical, mental and emotional development and adulthood. The physical develops much earlier in them than in us, and the mental and emotional also reaches its full development in them much earlier than in us and then freezes at that low level, leaving them forever 14 years old, simply because this level of mental and emotional development was sufficient for them in their natural environment.

Look at him in this video. Does he look like a child? How more mature can his face possibly be? It is already more mature than that of an 18-year-old white man. He is as tall or taller than the adult white men who guard him. He has adult sexual urges. He sees the prize value of a white woman for a man of his race. He is an adult by the standards of his race.

Now imagine yourself in his place: a simple creature possessing the bare minimum of mental and emotional power necessary to function well in a wild environment, thrust in a nice civilized place where everything is incomprehensible and alien to your nature. You were not created to function in this place. Your behavior is guided by simple instincts: want something, grab it; don’t like someone, punch him; like a woman, take her. She says no, kill her. The strange, hostile environment drives you crazy because you can’t follow your instincts in it – but your instincts are the only thing you can live by because you don’t have much else to guide your behavior. Worse; the hostile environment forces you to behave in ways difficult and utterly alien for you, ways in which you are not made to behave. As Laura said, the whole place, the entire order of things just looks phony to you with its cold, unfeeling niceness covering the great emptiness underneath. You feel imprisoned, caged. If there aren’t many others like you around, you’ll be painfully lonely; having little in common with the nice people around you, you’ll turn quiet, until one day you blow up in a burst of your natural behavior. And that behavior will be the worst of which you are possibly capable, because it has been suppressed for so long.

There will be no end to this type of crime as long as we keep forcing blacks to live among us, unsegregated.

Laura writes:

Your theory makes sense. Combine the sexual maturity, impulsiveness and aggression of a mulatto 14-year-old (for readers who are unfamiliar with racial differences, it has been widely proven that blacks mature sexually at an earlier age) with an environment saturated for him in particular with denial of the most obvious realities of racial and sex differences and a home life that includes interracial parents who nearly divorced (picture of his mother, Dianna Chism, below) and who have been separated (see this), and you have a young man on the edge of a violent outburst.

What Alex says here will never be mentioned in the thousands of stories about this crime:

Now imagine yourself in his place: a simple creature possessing the bare minimum of mental and emotional power necessary to function well in a wild environment, thrust in a nice civilized place where everything is incomprehensible and alien to your nature. You were not created to function in this place. Your behavior is guided by simple instincts: want something, grab it; don’t like someone, punch him; like a woman, take her. She says no, kill her. The strange, hostile environment drives you crazy because you can’t follow your instincts in it – but your instincts are the only thing you can live by because you don’t have much else to guide your behavior.

I disagree, however, that he doesn’t look like a child. He looks like a tall child. But if you combine the sexual urges and aggression of an adult male with the impulsiveness of a child, you get black violence.

The reader who commented anonymously above writes:

James N. writes, in response to my earlier question about the 50s:  “the use of the trope “1950s America” to imply some horrible, benighted place has become commonplace, so much so that persons born after, say, 1955 may take the trope as a real thing, like mistaking a footprint for a shoe.”  He goes on to say that America back then was a “paradise” in comparison with the present day, and concludes by saying that senseless violence definitely was not more common back then.

Why does he think I meant to disagree?  My question was not rhetorical.  It was a sincere question.  But maybe it’s worth pointing out that if I had meant to suggest that senseless violence was just as common back then as it is today, that would certainly not be equivalent to the extreme and silly position he attributes to me here:  that 1950s America was “horrible” and “benighted”, etc.  That said, it is not entirely clear to me that it was a “paradise” by comparison with the present.

But there’s also a more substantive issue that I meant to raise in my original question, but perhaps didn’t frame clearly enough.  Even if, as James and others claim, there was far less senseless violence in the ’50s than now, is it plausible to suppose that there was less crime or less human evil than there is now?  If there was not, does that count against Laura’s explanation of this particular evil?  (I assume that great evils of the 50s or the Middle Ages are not going to be attributed to the general cultural depravity of those other eras in the same way that this seemingly unintelligible murder is attributed to the depravity of our own.)

 Laura writes:

People in the 1950s were as innately evil as people today. Our laws, customs, the general nihilism and will to destroy that pervade our culture permits the indulgence of evil inclinations to a degree that was impossible in the 1950s. There was lots of crime in the 1950s, mostly in the cities, but the sort of massacres we see today did not occur and the savagery of criminals has escalated. I don’t have the time to pull up statistics at the moment, but serious violent crimes by adolescents in the 12-to-14-year-old age range have, I believed, increased considerably. When I was a child in the 1960s, there was nothing in schools like this crime.

Mary writes:

James N. wrote: “But the underlying neurophysiology is there, and has always been there.”

Of course it has, as it has for all evils/passions. But accessibility has put today’s pornography in another league altogether than the Playboy of past times – today’s porn is a completely different animal which acts upon the brain in heretofore unknown ways. It is the great silent scourge of our day – it would be impossible to overstate the gravity of the problem. Some sources say 80% of teenage boys are exposed to it, many of those addicted. It is a billion dollar industry. It preys upon and devours our teenage boys. Accessibility and level of depravity have put it on par with the most highly addictive drugs. New studies are just beginning to shed some light on why porn addiction it is more difficult to beat than drug addiction and for multiple reasons, one of which is because once drugs leave your system there is some relief, but images never leave the “system” of the mind. The pleasure pathways created by porn become more efficient over time and reinforce further use; the user needs more and more of it, and more intensity, to satisfy him.

Much of it is not just straightforward sexual activity but is totally depraved, mixing extreme violence and unspeakable perversion. Since males are more visually oriented, pornography makes slaves of our men and boys – they are being crippled by it by the millions. It renders their views on normal sexual interaction abnormal. It hinders the life of the addict, turns him inward on himself; it ruins marriages and other relationships. It puts men and women at odds. It has/is changing the face of society, not single-handedly of course, but while we hear at least some push-back on same sex marriage etc, no one is talking about pornography. And that is, as a priest I know once said, the “mystery of evil”, for pornography is diabolical – it is a great victory for Satan.

The topic of pornography is not a non-sequitur on this thread. My firm belief is that Chism – and others like him – had a dangerous internet life that we will probably never hear about. It is one thing for a boy to daydream about a pretty girl and another altogether when that girl is inserted into that boys depraved fantasies, fantasies that he indulges in daily and become a prime focus in his life.

The Public Discourse site has a couple of really thorough pieces on the new science and law regarding porn but I warn anyone thinking of reading them that they are not for the feint of heart; there are some things mentioned that I wish I hadn’t read. Use caution and skim where necessary.

 Laura writes:

I agree with Mary that Internet porn is probably a factor here. Chism may also have seen on the Internet images of someone cutting a person’s throat. Teenagers who play the game “knock out” have probably seen images of others doing the same on the Internet too.

By the way, I think it is an exaggeration to say that porn images never leave the mind, but they obviously are very powerful and tend to be retained for a long time.

Diana writes:

I didn’t know that Philip Chism’s mother was white until I saw it on your site. It explains a lot. He had a simmering rage against white women. One day it all came out.

I remember the 1960s. An incident of violence against a teacher was shocking, and rare. I knew a lot of rough types and they just didn’t do that. What would happen was this. The punk in training would begin by defying teachers and acting out. After a while, he realized that this was not going to get him anywhere. This was baby stuff, so he’d drop out and either straighten up or do something really stupid and go to jail.

Hey, at least you could say it was “honor amongst thieves.” I’m not defending this at all, just saying it bespoke of a certain personality integration and stability.

Philip Chism is an entirely different kettle of fish.

The first incident of real violence against a school admin that I personally became aware of was the father of close friend. He was an assistant principal of a decent school in Westchester County. A black parent came in for a conference about his obstreperous kid, and decked him.

Alissa writes:

I find it interesting, how Caucasoid Arabs who enslaved and murdered millions of black Africans (plus executed the “whitening process” with some black female slaves through impregnating them consecutively over at least 2-3 generations so their offspring wouldn’t be a threat, and would end up quadroons/octoroons) don’t have the reputation of being “racist slave-owners” whereas the ancestors and descendants of white Americans who perhaps, in my viewpoint, have treated them the best, are returned with bad feelings.

The Chinese are currently extracting resources from sub-Saharan black African countries and they have no “white guilt” either. They also have a faint caste system (as opposed to the more extensive Indian one), where light skin and delicate, fine features are regarded as ideal and sought after in both sexes as an indication of higher status.

It seems that both the Caucasoid Arabs and the East Asian Chinese have a better attitude towards them and a healthier sense of self-preservation of their own people and culture. They were also often terribly cruel towards blacks, but that isn’t acknowledged, whereas the kindest white American is seen as horrible.