I have a problem when I get angry. The problem is that I’ve long ago learned – particularly in dealing with traditional publishers – to get depressed instead of letting myself go berserk. Mostly because when you’re dealing with publishers they’re not near enough to vent your berserker on, so you just end up hurting yourself. (Whoever said stress is the feeling you get when you can’t strangle someone who righteously deserves it was right on the money.)

Lately, I’ve been getting deeply, profoundly depressed, which is why I’ve been so silent. (Yes, post three on how to write short stories is on the way.)

So many things are winding up, it’s not even worth listing them all. The most proximal one, though, is the accusation against Kavanaugh, which, even if true, would not be in any way actionable or, barring this behavior persisting into adulthood, mean anything about his character as a grown-up. High school has always been a weird and psychologically unstable part of anyone’s growing up years, partly because we’re all learning the ropes of what “adult” means, and partly because we’re isolated with other kids, also all learning the ropes. (It’s not the best system, no.)

But this nonsense with the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — which, by the way, not only doesn’t rise to “credible,” but is barely past the level of “inane ramblings of crazy woman on the corner” — is being given credibility and the Senate is bending over backward to give that crazy woman the chance to ramble at them. Any way she wants to.

Which is a symptom of deeper corruption.

This morning I woke up to an article in my inbox about a student at a middle school in Colorado Springs who was arrested and suspended for “sexual harassment” with allegations about as credible as the ones brought against Kavanaugh. And I want to throw up and hit people.

Let me tell you about my experience with Colorado Springs area public schools while raising two boys:

In Manitou Springs, in first grade, my older son started writing poems to girls. Yes, I realize this is a weird thing, but he comes by it naturally. Both his paternal grandfather and his paternal uncle have written entire books of poems to various girls and women, starting at about that age, and his mother wrote three hundred and some sonnets (between the ages of 14 and 18) to a guy who never knew she existed.

What none of us ever got was the reaction my older son got. I got a phone call saying he was sexually harassing a girl. Since at 6 he didn’t know how to spell “harassment” and would be uncertain on the meaning of “sexual” (both boys were far less curious than I was at their ages) I begged leave to differ, marched down to the school like the wrath of mom and demanded proof. At which point I was given a very bad, rather innocent poem. I mean the boy didn’t even say he wanted to kiss her. Just that she was pretty and her eyes were like stars. I pointed this out. I was sarcastic. It was resolved that it would be forgotten if he just kept his poems to himself (which, honestly, every poet should be encouraged to do, since the collapse of society starts with open mic poetry nights).

This should have been seen as a sign of things to come, but I wasn’t aware of the insanity stalking this land. Not yet. So I assumed it was Manitou Springs, and someone had overindulged in hash brownies.

Next came elementary school in Colorado Springs. Younger son (slower developing than his brother, and at that time completely unaware of the difference in “vive la difference.”) was in third grade. Things were going well. We’d finally got him to admit he could read (you don’t want to know) and he’d stopped turning in drawn homework (comics… truly) and also had a part in the class’s Shakespeare play.

I was at the dentist. We lived in the Old North End, the first trolley car suburb. Meaning it was about a mile and a half to downtown, four blocks north to the elementary school and four blocks south to my dentist.

I’m sitting in the waiting room. The dentist is a strict Christian, and his magazines are the cleanest sort, his clientele mostly elderly. I get a phone call. And hear words coming out of my mouth. And all the elderly women staring at me in horror, because they were a rather special kind of words.

So I told the elderly ladies, “The school is telling me they’re calling the police because my 8-year-old touched a girl.”

At which point they nodded understandingly because little old ladies aren’t fools.

I had walked to the dentist, partly because my parking skills suck and trying to park in the general downtown area isn’t worth it, and partly because it was a lovely fall day.

So I ran. Eight blocks. Up the street. At top speed.

I got there in the state you’d expect and was having trouble speaking because I was out of breath. At which point the school called a security guard because they were afraid I was going to do them violence. Yeah. Which tells you what their consciences were telling them.

I finally got the gist of the complaint and was told that my son had “confessed.”

I told them to shut up and let my son tell it. Apparently, my son had a little friend who happened to be a girl. He was trying to get her attention so they could play the “space game” (yes, I know what that was, my kids played it all day long. It was basically an RPG where they pretended to be space explorers). There were other kids in the way, and she couldn’t hear him shout. So he reached – through the other kids – and touched her three times.

At which point, all hell broke loose.

Apparently a playground guard thought this girl was “very pretty” and “all the little boys were interested in her” (yes, third grade. Is anyone else getting a creepy vibe?), so when younger son touched her “on the butt” (playground guard’s version) the playground guard KNEW what she had to do.

She descended upon the kids, whisked the little girl to counseling and the little boy to the principal’s office to be threatened with suspension and the police.

I asked my son, right there, in front of all of them, what he’d confessed to.

He said they’d told him touching someone on the butt was sexual harassment so he’d confessed to that. I asked him WHY it was sexual harassment. Bewildered stare. I asked him what sexual meant. He understood it pertained to genitals, but being very young and frankly not sexually aware at all, he had no clue what this had to do with the rear end.

I glared at them and told them how ridiculous this was. They backed down and said they’d just give him a suspension. I said they’d give him NOTHING or I would make them the laughing stock of every blog and magazine in the nation.

Eventually, they backed down.

Roll forward three years.

Our younger son, a happy, gregarious child, who had some issues (he has sensory processing disorder. No, it’s not made up. Yes, it was causing him serious trouble in class as he moved to middle school, which was bigger and noisier) and a slight speech impediment, but never had trouble having friends or enjoying school. The incident in the playground three years before was well and truly forgotten (though I’ll note it was the same school).

Suddenly, he was being given detentions practically daily. We were told he was aggressive. We were told a lot of vague stuff that made no sense. Because the child is introverted and also one of those people who’ll fight his own battles, we couldn’t get sense out of him either.

It all came to a head when they called us – yes, saying they were about to call the police – because he had kissed a little girl against her will on the lunch line.

The problem was that while in the lunch line, he’d been talking to his Spanish teacher. Also, there were cameras in the lunchroom, filming every interaction.

We pointed this out. They said yes, but girls don’t lie about these things, so it must have happened another time. The words “we’ll sue you to your back teeth. I’ll make it my life’s mission to ruin everyone involved in this” were uttered. It was dropped.

But the incidents continued and escalated, and we became aware of what was happening though we only pieced the background of it together almost a year later.

The background was this: 18 girls, most of them children of the staff, had decided my son was – and I’ll use their term – “retarded” and therefore “dangerous.” (I’ll point out that the speech impediment was the ONLY reason they could even think so.) And they’d decided to make us remove him from the school/get the school to expel him by accusing him of “harassing them.”

It included such charming incidents as claiming he blocked the door to them so they couldn’t leave the school, on a day when he was home sick. That he’d called them lesbians when that was a word he a) didn’t know the meaning of and b) couldn’t pronounce because of speech impediment. That he’d FOLLOWED THEM HOME, throwing rocks and threatening them, on a day I’d picked him up in the car. (In fact, I started making a practice of this. Which is why one day, parked under a tree, I watched my son leave the school pursued by one of these delicate flowers who was throwing rocks at him and calling him filthy names.)

Our son became clinically depressed. He gained fifty pounds. He slept all the time. The administration and the school entrusted with his education told us only that girls don’t make things up, so he must be doing something.

We took him to a psychologist, who diagnosed the sensory issues (so he got treatment and finally overcame the speech issues). She also told us the school was “toxic” and we should remove him. Trust the kid, who is my mental and emotional clone, to set both feet and say he wouldn’t be run off. So he finished sixth grade there, and then was homeschooled for a year, during which he did two years, so that when he went back to school he was not in the same grade as his pursuers (and eventually changed to another school for reasons of the program offered). Note he never had any problems at any other school.

However, four interesting incidents followed:

The summer after sixth grade, we were all working in our front yard when friends came by to kidnap my husband and me for ice cream. We left the two boys – the older was then over six feet – to work in the yard, and went off. We came back half an hour later to find all the tools, including the expensive electric rototiller, abandoned in the yard and the two boys locked in the house. Older son – who, trust me, besides being built like the proverbial brick sh*thouse, doesn’t scare easily — then explained that a group of these girls (he thought there were eighteen, but he didn’t count) came by, started taunting and harassing them, and came into our yard through the gate. Two of them picked up gardening tools (like a shovel and a rake) and started threatening the boys. Which is when older son dragged younger inside and locked the door behind them. And they sat. And waited for us. The following summer, one full year after I’d pulled the kid out of school, someone egged our house, around his bedroom window. A FULL YEAR. And keep in mind, this kid at the time had no other contact with neighborhood kids. He was being homeschooled and was at home pretty much all the time. When younger son went into high school that fall, his French teacher called us, concerned. You see, he liked to go two blocks away, to a little café, where he studied. For some days, he’d been avoiding it though. The teacher told us she’d seen some girls surround him and punch/kick him. Yep, same girls. Two years later, older son needed driving lessons. So we got brochures and called one of the men. We didn’t know he was the father of one of these girls. Older son went for his lesson to find himself yelled at and told that the school “shouldn’t put retarded kids with normal kids” and how “dangerous” his little brother was. All while behind the wheel for the first time.

Older son – possessor of an immense dignity even at 16 – politely informed the man that his brother was in no way mentally deficient, having an IQ estimated above the 99.9th percentile. At which point the man then yelled at older son that younger son then was a “psychopath” and “dangerous.”

Note, this was ALL before the #metoo madness and also that the girls were using accusations of harassment as a tool to get what they wanted, i.e. a kid they considered abnormal or “icky” removed from school.

Note also that teachers and parents implicitly believed that everything the little idiots said was the sacred truth. Or didn’t dare question it. Why? I don’t know. The kid hasn’t been born who doesn’t lie, and the stew of hormones in middle school makes girls, who develop faster than boys, into drama queens and bitch goddesses supreme.

Now fast-forward to this incident reported today in a Colorado Springs middle school (heavens, I hope it’s the same. This bad a crazy infecting more than one school would be scary.): Boy, 13, Arrested, Cuffed And Dragged From School Over #MeToo Allegations.

Now consider the puerile origins of the incident:

Keith decided to change his Snapchat avatar into a black Bitmoji character. One of his friends, a girl, immediately noticed and within minutes told him he needed to change it back. She said it was insensitive and racist for a white person to use a black character as an avatar. Keith, stubborn as any eighth grader, laughed it off and said he wasn’t going to change it. The next day at school the girl, according to Keith, then started telling everyone he was a racist. The harassment and accusations persisted for days. Other students began threatening to beat up Keith, saying they were going to jump him after school for being “racist.” Then the girl and three other female classmates took it to the next level, appearing to take a page from the Feinstein handbook on how to destroy your political enemies, they appeared before the vice principal to accuse Keith of sexual harassment and assault stemming back to the summer… One of the girls, according to Keith, identities as a “feminist.” “He’s pretty scared. I was scared. He was crying when they arrested him. We’ve never been close to anything like this. We don’t know anybody criminal. It’s not something we ever thought we’d have to do deal with,” Dennis, 32, who works as a plumber, says. “I think the whole political climate is what is motivating this. Anytime you disagree with somebody, now you accuse them of sexual assault and automatically they’re a victim and you’re a monster. It’s so highly publicized now, that’s just the answer.”… He was charged with unlawful sexual conduct and harassment, which comes with a maximum sentence of two years in a juvenile detention center, and the family must wait until a court date on Oct. 27 to learn what, exactly, the girls claim Keith did to them. But a clue emerged the night before when one of the girls’ parents phoned the Baileys. “Her mother gave us a call and said she just found out that Keith had been inappropriately touching her daughter and she just wanted to let us know. She said, ‘I know Keith is a good kid, maybe he just went down the wrong path.’ She obviously believed her daughter. But she said it happened at the football game last week. The problem with that is, my wife was at the football game the whole time. My son was there with his girlfriend and my wife didn’t want him unattended, so she had eyes on him the whole time. My wife tells this girl’s mother, ‘that’s funny, I was there watching the whole time, he didn’t leave my sight and he was no where near your daughter,’” Dennis recalls. “He was hanging out with his girlfriend, he wasn’t running around molesting other girls.” The mother then changed the story, saying it must have been a different football game.

Note, the puerile, ridiculous origin of why the girls were mad at him. I mean, if anything, taking a black character as an avatar is the opposite of racism.

But these girls don’t know that. A stew and hodgepodge of “racism” and “dog whistles” and “cultural appropriation” has been poured into their heads.

All they know is that he’s doing socially unapproved things and that this is doubleplus ungood. In the way of middle school girls, they want to enforce conformity. And everyone knows if you accuse someone of sexually harassing you, that gets them removed, and people treat you as a victim and are nice to you.

I can’t begin to express my horror and disgust at this. I have no words, just a profound depression.

This is not just wrong. This is evil. Straight up evil. The little boy might change schools and, like my son, be all right. The girls? As with my son’s harassers, there might be no remedy for them. Not unless they hit bottom, realize what they are and decide to change. And very few people do that. Once you realize you can control others and force them to dance to your tune, few people ever step back. Few people can. And chances are, never having been taught to examine their actions or be self-reflective, these girls, now women, will never even be able to realize they’re not perfect.

Now multiply this by all the kids in school.

Yes, every time I publish one of these, I get people telling me their schools are fine; their kids are fine. Are they? Or have you just never interrogated them on their assumptions and what they’re being taught? Do you just not want to know?

If you can, homeschool your kids. If you can’t, please realize they learn all the time. Not just what is said to them, no. They learn what’s enacted around them. ALL THE TIME.

And what girls are learning in our society, partly through warped women like that playground guard who decided kids’ interacting was sexual harassment when younger son was in third grade, is that all men are dangerous, evil, and guilty of something. And that the women accusing them of made-up stuff is not only all right, and not only brings power, but is somehow “heroic” and gets the girl or woman praise and adulation.

We’re handing females weapons with which to destroy innocent males. I don’t care what the imbalance of power was in the past: no male alive is responsible for how people lived 100 years ago. And there were reasons (biological, mostly) for that imbalance of power, which had nothing to do with men being “oppressors.”

We’re turning females into monsters.

We’re making it impossible for the next generation to marry and raise healthy children.

This is the way civilization ends, not with a bang but with a “he touched me, decades ago, at a party occurring in a place and time I can’t recall.” And all of society plays along, treats this as credible.

The school establishment has been doing it for well over a decade (younger son is 24).

If you can, homeschool. Take your kids out of the cesspit. If you can’t, homeschool after school. Make sure you know what they’re being taught. Correct it. Remember that private schools hire the same teachers/follow the same rules as public schools. Do not give your daughter’s fantastical accusations any more credence than you’d give your son’s. She might not be a bad kid, but society is teaching her bad things, and if you don’t stop it, she’ll become a monster.

This is what Marxist group guilt and group victimhood has caused. Stop it now.

Teach your children well. Or we shall all burn.