Anything they touch.

Editor,

I worked as a substitute teacher in Marin and Sonoma counties for a few years and also had some harrowing encounters with a few kids who were basically insane.

My take on what is going on in youth culture generally and in schools in particular is that corporations, which are in the business of making money -- not fostering mental or social health -- are creating pathological role models for children.

Children do not come equipped with life-experience frames of reference in terms of which to evaluate critically or comparatively the idiocy with which corporate marketing departments are filling their heads; so you have kids who are essentially being taught -- with the most compelling imagery humanity has ever seen -- to be antisocial, violent, and crazy showing up in schools, which operate on an entirely different set of principles, of which these kids are completely ignorant.

Teen violence and school violence are just one more example of corporations killing or destroying anything they touch in order to make money.

re: "Cops vs. Kids" (3/6/2010)