Who I Plan to KILL (My HIT LIST)...

Is removing a child from the place where they receive education the answer?

Yes, I think. Because if it has gotten to the point of drafting a hit list (and meaning it, it's important to discriminate between venting and planning, if anybody's prepared to take the time and effort to learn the difference and what the discovery of a list might mean - after all, take a lot of Letterman's Top 10 lists and make just very slight changes and ...), then education has ceased. The damage has been done, there is a clear and present danger that must be addressed before anything else is attempted. Including restoring the person to membership in society - which, as I've written about elsewhere, is a very hard job.

Once again, We the People have, I think, done this to ourselves. It's a lot easier to spot things like this in schools when there are uniform standards of conduct and dress. But the Baby Boomers were very uncomfortable with uniforms - unless they themselves set the pattern. School uniforms OUT, uniform jeans IN. Besides, how were we EVER going to know who had what really mattered (money, fleshly beauty, charisma) if it had to be hidden under a single standard of dress or behavior? No, we unleashed the Competition Demon in our schools. And we have the [deleted deleted deleted] gall to wonder how come the less economically advantaged continue to wallow in poverty? We the People put them there, goddammit! We label them at every possible opportunity, with clothes and "things" standards, so we know who's OK and who isn't. Never mind what they - for I, for Christ's sake!!! - might be good at if it weren't buried under the rags of poverty?

With uniforms, the deviant behaviors stand out. And can be addressed early, before they become Columbines. Yes, the flip side of this can be suppression of creativity. There is no perfect system. But more crowded societies - like Britain and Japan and China, have recognized that more uniform codes of behavior, and of dress especially among the young, are critical to developing the social structures that permit people to be at close quarters without being at constant risk of being on a hit list. The US is becoming more crowded, but has not yet learned the lesson of early behavior modification being more efficient, and less costly, than patching up a Columbine. Or an Iraq.

It is up to We the People to learn how to walk the ridge between rigid social uniformity (uniforms) and anarchy (hit lists) without falling. Our track lately has been abysmal. But then, this is why practically the entire European-influenced world in 1789 thought that the USA (and, in that year, France) could never survive without a King. That We the People could never act wisely enough to govern ourselves. Maybe they were right after all.