Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Kevin Drum notes the latest example of school officials overreacting to a student's creative writing exercise. As Kevin notes, this bizarre belief on the part of many in education today that we can somehow eradicate brooding teenagers is causing a lot of problems. I did a fair amount of brooding myself, and I recall that some of my teachers accepted it and tried to "channel" it, while others apparently had no use for the non-popular sports types like myself. In general, I suspect that the brooding types are never really trusted, which is a particular bummer now that we've managed to convince ourselves that every brooding heart may be a beat or two away from sliding over the edge to murderousness. (Wow…"muderousness", what a word…)

I'm also probably lucky that my main creative outlet in school was music. I did write, but that was always "back burner" stuff and it was always Star Wars fanfic. Had my current love of horror developed back then, I probably would have generated some grim material indeed. But then, I've never really been one for using my fiction to vent the problems of my inner life. I don't base characters in my stories on people I know, nor do I put my characters into situations in which I have been before. I may borrow someone's interesting habits or something like that, but that's about it. So even in my "brooding teen" days, I would have been vanishingly unlikely to write a tale in which I arranged the deaths of my hated teachers. (And besides, my brooding was pretty tame, and there were only a handful of teachers I really disliked in school.)

Kevin's parting shot here is this: Everywhere you look, it's either overreaction or underreaction. Is it just the curse of humanity never to get things right? I'm sure that Kevin knows that the answer here is basically "Yes". We're basically a pendulum species that will never, ever quite reach the center where we find Nirvana, Heaven, Righteousness, or whatever you want to call that state of pure morality. Sometimes we swing way too far one way, other times we sway too far the other. All we can really hope for is that over time the wildness of our swings lessens a bit, and that our moral pendulum never again approaches, say, the position where buying and selling other human beings for servitude is OK; and what keeps the pendulum swinging in the first place is that no one knows what its rest-position would be, anyway.