Theos-Talk Archives (February 1996 Message tl00048)

On Fri, 9 Feb 1996, liesel f. deutsch wrote:

> I need to add a problem to what Alexis said, because I too believe in the
> freedom of speech, & something occurred here locally, & I don't know how I
> would deal with it. 2 Grammar school boys got instructions from the Internet
> about how to make a primitive bomb. They had already tried it out, & were
> getting ready to bomb their school, when they got caught. I'd like to get
> some opinions of others on this net as to how they would handle this, not
> the boys so much, but the fact that someone can put on the internet
> instructions on how to make a bomb for kids to learn. How do you deal with this?
> Liesel
> Member TI, HR, 5thRR

Liesel ...
	This sounds like a nasty, and obviously terribly dangerous
situation, but I would tend to distinguish between cause and means in
questioning what to do about it ... I guess I think the Internet, in this
case, had but the tiniest part to play:
	The sad fact is that for various reasons the American family is
in really bad shape, and fractured children will come out of fractured
homes. True enough, grammer school kids can get access to a number of
things highly inappropriate for children on the Internet, but in the
larger picture the Net is but a miniscule threat - the much deeper issue
is the violence itself ... for every one kid that can find information
about how to make a bomb from the Net, there are a thousand that already
have guns in their hands; the root question (IMO) is, from where comes
the intent to bomb a school? From where comes the desire to buy guns?
	I remember my own grammer school days, and even if someone had
just handed me or my classmates bomb instructions, it just simply
wouldn't have occured to us to actually blow up the school ... and even
if we found a gun in the playground, without thinking we probably would
have just given it to a teacher.

	I'm glad you mentioned this, however, as I'd love to see this
turn into a discussion. In traditional Theosophical writings there is
immensely complex discussions of esoteric truths ... but if the final
goal is the moral elevation of humanity, the very core of the practical
expression of this must finally reduce to *childraising* ... to the time
of life when the core values and strengths of character are built into
the human energy system. We currently have a social mileau in which by
the time childen begin adult life so many are already so out of tune,
aimed along a trajectory that will just increase this out of tuneness as
time goes by - and being out of tune means the personality is broken off
from the promptings of the spiritual levels of being, and the gap this
causes ... the emptiness this inevitably creates ... causes people to
begin living lives in more and more fractured and manic ways ....
intentions become low, but without an inner standard are not even felt as
being low; significant life choices are made for terrible reasons ...
	What, then, do you (anybody (-:)?) think Theosophy would have to
say about the raising of children - the field is wide open, as in all the
thousands of pages of "source" writings very few words are mentioned on
the topic.
								-JRC