The New Humanities

There are no awards, for bravery, amidst the trenches of childhood. For none will so award...thankfully forgetting the realities of life, in its formative stages. Some will attempt to erase the terrors, but most will prefer, of course, to forget the cowardice of the noncommittal, that particular shame of...merely turning away. And last - and, surely, least, my friends - will be those who try forgetting they were those beasts...who walked as children amongst us. And some, sadly, still glory in it:

Bright-eyed predators, all...

For, should we - truly - try, we can all remember same.

They ran in packs...thugs most evident, their sleazy faces alight with others' pain. And these were born, mostly, not not made...those killers who still walk amongst us, whose tastes run against the human grain. Their minders, though, were otherwise...for it was power - not pain - they craved...and, so...snickering amidst the back rows, they never inflicted same...

Of course...I could not write this, were I not - still, at times - alive to such...

But, now - fully middle-aged - now, I can finally begin to see these for what they truly are... The honorable scars of failure...

For these are but the price we paid...for a contract unsigned...

For the greatest failing - without question - of our schools...the thrice-damnable sin of our educators, is their surpassing failure, of choice... And, may they rot in hell for this lapse. For, as adults, we - and they - have some freedoms, here...

Those who we work with - our associates - we can damn-well walk away from...with penalty, to be sure. But, we can walk...away. From the worst filth of the power-hungry, and from the even more depraved of mind...we can walk away. But we offer no such choice to our children...unless, in their weakness and terror, they choose to break the bonds of powerlessness, and sacrifice their felt accord - to become traitors to demography, to the unspoken bond of youth...which, of course, is no choice at all - but, merely, yet another form of failure...yet another - terrified - sacrifice to the powers that be...

But, still...most victims do not. We sacrifice our wellbeing - temporarily, we assume - to the damnably weak understandings of our guardians, sacrifice to the silence we unthinkingly realise is expected...and hope, against hope, that there may, one day, be justice for the wretches that are we have now, sadly, become...

However...there will be no justice. None at all, for those who - honourably - keep their silence...

For there are no medals for bravery in youth. No...we will be scarred without recompense, whilst the arch-tormentors of our childhood - those who played us for a game, yet never risked for their pleasures - will play on...cheating justice in their reward...the fattened killers of souls in an order bereft of truth - the managers of us all...

And can you, in your souls, deny it? That the filth that rules us now is not the same as the filth that you, almost certainly - shamefully - never even tried to tell on? The filth that, had we any kind of justice in our youth, would have been singled-out - named - and destroyed, in their tolerated power?

Instead of cherished?

Well...we live in their world, now - as we always have done. Democracy having failed, in the absence of any justice in education.

And, may we be congratulated, for this?

For, it was not the place of the victims to protest this fate. For, it is not the place of the powerless - for so we have made them - to sacrifice their place in this world, however wretched it may be, for some slight chance at redress, against their tormentors...

But me... I just want - now - to award some medals...for bravery under fire. For, it was not their silence, nor their suffering, that was shameful...

For it was not their order that condemned them to suffering, and it was not their task - amidst their unchosen peers - to betray the instinctive silence of all those without choice. For that order was delivered by those who made - and enforced - such lack of choice...that betrayed, in loco parentis, their guardianship...and have never, ever, taken a stand in favour of children's right to choose their classmates - their fellows, in powerlessness...

For me, I blame the teachers. For it is they, in their unknowing, who have unwittingly conspired with the filth... The filth, that is, that has - as adults - justly reduced them to the trash of the professions, the losers - that is, today - of life...

john henry calvinist