kids these days
stolen from Ace, this bit of prose just won an award from a group of alleged educators in Australia called the "Multicultural Educational Services" :

I waken to the sounds of bombs. Women and children crying. Rubble. That is all there is to see.

Baghdad: once filled with beds of flowers and happy smiling faces. Now destroyed homes: destroyed families -- no peace, no hope ...

I miss my ma and papa so much. Images of their mangled bodies lying in pools of blood will never leave my mind ...

The back door opens. Two American soldiers. The enemy. The destroyers, who say they are here to save us. I hate the Americans ...

"Get them to the camp," the gruff one orders ...

A prisoner of war with nothing to live for except maybe to uphold the memories of my beloved Allah, my parents and my country.

To truly show the world what it means to be Muslim, I reach under my salwaar kameez and release the catch of dynamite strapped to my chest. Two minutes. Silence. THEN!!!!!

This kid needs treatment, not an award. Nevermind the bizarro fantasy of Baghdad before and after; fantasy is what kids do. But I thought we were suppossed to be keeping track of kids with violent tendancies and giving them the help they need, not rewarding murderous role-play.

People keep bitching about Grand Theft Auto, or whatever the violent video game du jour is, but acting out your violent fantasies on your own is considerably more likely to lead to actual violence.

If a kid wrote a passage of skinhead literature, he'd be sent to the shrink, possibly kicked out of school, and his parents would be getting a call from social services. Same goes for any social outcast that gave the slightest indication of violent fantasies, much less actually turning in a paper full of them. A kid who wrote a paper role-playing as a soldier in the desert blowing away every muslim in his path certainly wouldn't be given an award. The passage "I hate the Iraqi People" wouldn't be allowed to stand.

And rightly so: violence and murder fantasies are not tolerable subjects for school papers. That goes for all situations; "I hate muslims" and "I hate American Soldiers" are equally unnacceptable; either one should be punished or, at the very least, questioned closely. Certainly neither should be rewarded, and any educator who smiles on that kind of writing shouldn't be allowed anywhere near any children.  ¶ 2:25 AM