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Age = Dumbness
So here I am, three days into the new school year.
Among the new students are four little Muslim girls, all sisters, ranging in age from six to ten. They all need to leave class a couple of times each day and go out into the hall to pray. The other kids, far from thinking this was weird or different, were all interested in knowing why they did this, which led to an impromptu schoolwide assembly discussing all the major world religions and the differences between them. Since (despite whatever preconceptions one might have about who constitutes “the homeless”) our kids come from every conceivable racial, religious, and ethnic group, everybody learned something and had something to contribute.
Am I being overly optimistic in finding something hopeful in all this? Lord knows, you’d be hard pressed to cross paths with anyone more cynical than I, but I found it extremely heartening that the Post 9/11 fear and paranoia of “The Other” doesn’t seem to have affected these kids. There are, of course, students here who don’t like other students, but from what I can tell, the emnities are based entirely on the respective personalities of the individuals involved. Their cultural differences don’t seem to matter much at all. It’s only adults who are stupid enough to give any credence to this idiotic “My Invisible Sky Fairy Is Better Than Your Invisible Sky Fairy” nonsense.
Or maybe I am being too optimistic; maybe they all get along because they are so young, and the poisons that infest our society and species simply haven’t started to work on them yet. We all evolved from monkeys, and we’ve spent the vast majority of our many millenia on this planet acting exactly like monkeys: forming into packs, flexing our muscles, howling, and throwing shit at one another. Am I stupid and naive to hope that these kids will somehow be able to transcend that which we’ve so manifestly failed to?
If I am grasping at straws, then so be it. The world as currently constituted cannot continue much longer: we are at war with madmen who think “God” is on their side, and we are led by madmen who think “God” is on their side. Both groups are perfectly content with destroying the entire human race in furtherance of that belief. One group already has the capability to do so; the other will have it eventually.
Maybe kids like ours can change all that. Maybe not.
“Maybe” is a thin reed to hang your whole life on, but it’s all we’ve got. -Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger
