when i was a kid i went to a brutal skool, the enemies were everywhere, punishing the oversensitive, the artists, the thinkers, if you were not a thug then you were no one. the playground at stag lane was covered in blood, a little was mine, teachers sneered as the introverts were assaulted and beaten, humiliated and often tortured. i don't know i was luckier than most of my kind, managed to slip through the shadows with my book and lunch, sit in the corners unnoticed. but that's the trouble with sanctuary, it's fleeting.
our skool was at war with another skool from down the street, and often they would meet in lunch breaks and have massive fights with chains, axes, metal poles and knives. it was pretty nuts, a cross between gangs of new york and lock stock smoking barrels,
but the main characters were violently crazed children and if you looked in their eyes, nobody home.
one summers day i was caught up in a massive war between the two skools, in a big field one side charging at the other with me somewhere in the middle with my lunch, normally an apple, a sandwich and a piece of cake. i was to young to really know what to do, there was no escape, the sides were racing towards me at such a fast pace wielding their weapons, i just stood up and figured if i just eat my lunch it would just happen around me and i'd be okay.
well the carnage lasted about 30 minites, i watched kids being hacked with knives, stabbed and sliced with blades and battered with sticks while i ate my mums cake, one guy i recognised screamed at me, 'whose side are you on?'
i thought about this and said, 'no ones.'
later the police came and broke it all up, they sent everyone home and called the ambulance to clean up the mess. by then i finished my lunch and a teacher was walking towards me. he seemed angry, he grabbed my ear and dragged me towards the skool, 'right mission, you are on permanent detention, you should know better than fighting blah blah blah.'
i got a big lecture, parents were called and i was punished despite my pleas.
i realised when your a child you don't have the means to interpret your world, it's just a powerless state to be in, cos the child only has a limited capacity of experience and it's brain isn't evolved as most adults, yet the child has a much better understanding of reality than the adult, it's not as complex but it's pure. and when you put a pure mind up against a corrupted one, the pure one needs a little help lest it be corrupted as well, it learns how to be deceptive like adults, how to manipulate and abuse power and control.
see power and control are the two hidden forces at work in the human condition and unless individuals understand their own power and control there is no escape from their influence. being human carried a great responsibility, it takes a massive leap of commitment to acknowledge this, and a lot of work. i was lucky, i figured it out early, when i was quite young. yeah i still fucked up and made mistakes but i did take responsibility for them, and that's what being a man is.
they say you learn everything in skool, well i don't think that's true, i think i learnt about power and control there.