Newtown

Whenever I go to New York, I stay for a few days with my nephew, who is like my son, and with my grandson, a little math genius who will be transferred to a special school because, among other reasons, the conventional school bores him stiff and he provokes cranky attacks from his teacher, who, trained in old teaching methods, doesn’t know how to deal with him. What intelligence cannot stand is boredom, and boredom, in childhood, is best fought with activities and early responsibility, turning those who “know best” into teacher’s helpers.

In that house, there is a quiet and affectionate dog who goes crazy when the child begins to play with his video games, all of which involve hunting an enemy, be it animal or person. The dog runs from one place to another in the room, biting the furniture. It climbs on the bed, though it does not attack us because we are his masters.

Can you see what these video games provoke in the dog? It’s the exact same thing in the brain of your child, who already has a problem with an intelligence that overwhelms him. That child should listen to soothing music when he gets home and watch age-appropriate movies with simple and humanitarian plots (remember Lassie?), movies we all saw when we were seven years old. In addition, the child should go to bed at a set time and have his television monitored, because what he watches now (especially detective series) are classes on how to kill.

When I read that a young man had killed his mother and then killed 20 children aged five, six and seven, I immediately called my nephew, you see, and we both cried. I cannot put myself in the shoes of parents who dress their child, prepare his backpack and send him to school without ever imagining that this will be the last time they will see him alive.

Nobody seems to understand anything. They investigate the life of the mother, a teacher apparently normal and peaceful, but who boasted of her collection of weapons and shooting classes (to defend herself against whom?) and who trained her son, though he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Nobody seems to understand anything, in a rich white community in one of the richest states in the United States: Connecticut, a paradise where people are oblivious to the fact that they are part of a universal family, in which most die of cold, hunger and armed conflict, and that the one who dared to denounce it, in a song actually called “Merry Christmas,” was murdered on the sidewalk.

I’ll write about John Lennon in the next article.