By Elizabeth Harper

I identify with that anger.

I don’t think anyone knew how really deeply angry and miserable I was throughout my entire childhood and adolescence.

And it was so hard to get free of that environment.

That back and forth between the two prisons of home and school.

I imagine to be a smart teenager these days would be to have the experience of being constantly gaslighted with no vocabulary to even describe what’s wrong.

I at least had Marx and Emma Goldman, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, etc.

Kids today have endless entertainment options instead of hours spent in libraries and on their beds reading. Or if they do read, who else do they have to talk to about it?

Are there actually students who don’t want to bomb the school and/ or shoot a lot of people? In my day, all the smart kids did. It wasn’t even surprising or cause for alarm. We read The Anarchist Cookbook. Hell, it was a prerequisite for being one of my boyfriends that you had to know how to make a bomb.

These millennials and upcoming generations who think the government or adults or rules or laws or safe spaces or trigger warnings are going to protect them and make them safe, what Kool-Aid are they drinking?

Everyone’s busy selling them a bill of goods. Some story about how if you work hard, you will achieve and be successful and happy and you can buy stuff.  

Here’s some crushing debt. Here’s some soul-crushing alienating job.

Tell me who to kill to fix the world and I’ll kill them, paint the walls with their blood.

But that won’t fix it, but I have no idea what will.

And the individual acts of violence actually distract from the real violence, the systemic, worldwide violence.