The ceremony of innocence is drowned

I don’t know how else to describe it, so I have to turn to Yeats.  This is a night­mare.  These are ele­men­tary school chil­dren being described here.

[The younger stu­dent] claimed she suf­fered emo­tional trauma because she was sub­jected to racial and sex­ual slurs at … ele­men­tary school … Despite com­plaints, school admin­is­tra­tive staff and dis­trict offi­cials allowed the abuse to “esca­late to the point where [she] was phys­i­cally threat­ened, assaulted and bat­tered,” the suit alleged.

Racial and sex­ual slurs.

Threat­ened, assaulted and bat­tered.

This goes beyond any­thing in Lord of the Flies.  In an ele­men­tary school while teach­ers were present.  Has the bur­den of behav­ing like respon­si­ble adults and rais­ing chil­dren become so over­whelm­ing that the col­lec­tive WE, with a shrug of the shoul­ders in acknowl­edge­ment that we can do noth­ing about it, slouch to a place out of sight, out of hear­ing, and wish only to be left alone?

The Sec­ond Com­ing by W.B. Yeats

Turn­ing and turn­ing in the widen­ing gyre
The fal­con can­not hear the fal­coner;
Things fall apart; the cen­tre can­not hold;
Mere anar­chy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-​​dimmed tide is loosed, and every­where
The cer­e­mony of inno­cence is drowned;
The best lack all con­vic­tion, while the worst
Are full of pas­sion­ate inten­sity.
Surely some rev­e­la­tion is at hand;
Surely the Sec­ond Com­ing is at hand.
The Sec­ond Com­ing! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spri­tus Mundi
Trou­bles my sight: some­where in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and piti­less as the sun,
Is mov­ing its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shad­ows of the indig­nant desert birds.
The dark­ness drops again; but now I know
That twenty cen­turies of stony sleep
were vexed to night­mare by a rock­ing cra­dle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Beth­le­hem to be born?

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Tags: bureaucracy, children, reality