Ah, so much to read after being away for a couple of days. Regarding special needs children, I learned during my time as prison-teacher to notice that some kids with huge learning disabilities were actually quite aware and intelligent, as is a friend's autistic child. You come to realize that they are all different, like everybody else, and need to be related to in different ways. Hard to get administrators to understand this though. My friend with the autistic child has shaken up quite a few of them. She tends to know more about the subject, and certainly about her child, than the teachers or administrators.

A lot of my current students affect an illiterate character because it's not fashionable, especially among the rap culture, to have learned anything in school. I can tell in a very short time whether this is real or not, and if not, I call them on it, sometimes with great results.

Rap started in the late sixties and seventies in Jamaica when bored dance club DJs would chant, sometimes nonsense but more often "adult" rhymes over the instrumental records they played. Didn't anybody else listen to Yellowman and King Tubby and Eek-a-Mouse back then? Then years later, in the historic 80's, the same thing happened with bored club DJs in New York. Then the "art" of rap (which the Jamaicans called "Dub") leaked out into the streets, became the voice of the neighborhoods, and eventually evolved into being about violence almost exclusively. When it began to sell, the big record companies, including the two biggest in the world (Sony and Warner) got into the market and soon it was mainstream, for sale in above-ground stores and even Wal-Marts. I guess the good question would be why didn't they do this for Al Capone and the other gangsters from the twenties on. I guess in those days there was not as much money in records in general, and in those marketed to a criminal culture in particular.

I wish I knew the answer to this problem. Certainly there was violence before there was rap. No chicken-and-egg argument here. But it's hard to deny that a cycle was created wherein a violent culture leads to violent media which then lends legitimacy or at least a sense of normality to more and more violence. Until I do know the answer, I'll call on thoughtful people of good faith to keep it away from children whenever possible. For many it may be the only way they can avoid the cycle.

There is no absolute freedom. I'm not saying that somebody is keeping it from us. I'm saying that it cannot exist in anything that can be called civilization.

Still raging after all these years, Chet