It's not just that, it goes along with having militarized police and running schools like prisons.

Even back when I was in school, during Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, they were starting to bring police dogs into schools with their handlers in full armor to sniff lockers for drugs.

At a little country town school.

They hired a truant officer and gave him a truck to run kids down for skipping school or leaving campus during lunch or study hour -- even to go to the public library, as we had ALWAYS done as it was right across the train tracks. We shared athletic facilities with the middle school, especially the track and the tennis courts, but technically, the track was on their campus and the courts were on the high school canpus.

One time, I missed the bus and was walking home, so we're after school hours. This truant officer fool squeals up beaide me when I'm halfway home and starts screaming at me and it's "you kids this that and the other" bullshit. He's gonna "haul me off to jail to teach me a lesson".

Just imagine some n'er do well high as a kite out on the street corner screaming obscenities at young women in public and you'll have the right idea.

They gave him a truck and a gun, as a means to "scare kids straight", I reckon.

That was 1989.

And yeah, in retrospect, I think he was high.

Took me 5 minutes to get through to him that school was over and had been for nearly an hour.

He got embarassed, yelled some more, jumped in his truck, and nearly hit me squealing off again.

Well. If that sort of thing is happening in little country town schools where it's 'safe', you can imagine the sort of shit that happened in larger schools where drugs and gangs actually were a significant problem.

So we've got schools locked up and guarded by bullying police and truant officers and police hounding and hassling kids on the streets for walking home or over to a friend's, or any public park or facility, or just hanging out.

And people don't think that has a deep psychological effect on young impressionable minds?

When you're young, in this country, depensint upon where you live, it can very much be like living in a police state at times, which is a form of stochastic terror.

The Reagans did that.

My sister was hassled and threatened by pokice as a teenager when she, along with other neighborhood kids ride their bikes to the public pool, during the summer so no school, during early afternoon hours, clearly hauling pool gear. Pool was about a mile away from wgere we lived.

That fool tried to report them as runaways to have an excuse to haul them in and hassle them. She was 15 years old.