My brother said I looked like L yesterday...

Sometime earlier this week a student was suspended for making a death note (source: Anime News Network). First off, I would like to say that the kid was behaving poorly. Disregarding the fact that the student was copying death note poorly, students who read "hit lists" aloud have always been suspended or expelled in the past.

I grew up in Richmond, Franklin Military Academy is a military highschool in the eastside. I don't have anything particularly against military schools, some people need that structure and discipline in their lives, it's when people began to glamorize it is when I get mad. The eastside was the type of place parents on the westend warned their kids about. Personally, I find it more of a sad place than a scary place. It's hard to be scared when you know how hard people have it there.

What I find rather upsetting is that the principle tells parents to look at a death note fansite, "to get to know the reference better". The website almost says nothing about the show itself, and is really only an online version of the fictional book. Reading through it a bit, it's like a cross between 4chan and post secret. (excuse me for not linking 4chan, I think you can google it yourself.) A mix of vulgar jokes and venting of immature aggression. Not really an accurate representation of the show, or the show's message. I find it upsetting that the principle would need to focus on this aspect of the student, and not other parts.

We live in a pretty inhospitable world. When the human mind can not stand it, we naturally lash out, unfortunately in violent ways. Right now institutions have little recourse in how to understand the problem. Mostly it comes out in the form of isolated what is perceived as dangerous from the community. Then a ritual of victimization is done to galvanize the community to establish how different they are from the perpetrator. However, I would say that this constant isolation does nothing but segregate out people who are in pain, from those more protected from pain. The idea that these people who do violent acts are merely anomalies in a community becomes the most important thing. There is rarely any attempt to say that these are the unfortunate products of the way we live and treat each other. As long as we keep isolating out those who we deem too dangerous to be a part of society, we'll never be able to look at what it is that influences these dangerous things.