They’re our children
In order to condemn, one must first go to the trouble of pinpointing the facts, presuming one does not want to play the role of a tele-psychiatrist who makes snap diagnoses while the cameras send direct footage from the digging at Veria (where a missing child was supposed to have been buried by schoolmates who allegedly have confessed to killing him). I do not mean that one should know exactly what happened – that is, whether the alleged «gang of five» actually acted like a gang. But before crucifying children who have not yet been proven to have committed any crime, one should first try to understand that they are not despicable extraterrestrials but our own children, and that the glorification of violence, to which their alleged acts were supposedly attributed, is not purely their choice but something in the nature of a social amniotic fluid in which they began swimming even before birth. Is it possible for our children to grow up normally when the violent world in which they are being raised is abnormal? In our cloned towns, children are reduced to being domesticated bipeds, prisoners of the culture of the image, of isolation. There is no point in asserting that the violence on television programs and in video games that often substitute for friends is bound to result in juvenile crime, although statistics confirm that every teenager in the developed world consumes 10,000 television hours of violence by the time he or she reaches adulthood. How can a young person resist such an onslaught when even adults cannot control themselves, as is evident in the ease with which we come to blows over a stolen parking place? Don’t we as parents have trouble accepting that the gap that separates us from our children is not two or three decades but an entire century? Unfortunately, one cannot bridge that gap with the pocket money we dole out in order to ease our own guilt at being absent from their daily lives.
