Ishmael Companion: Beyond Civilization -- resources for teachers and readers
Liberation · Listening to the children · The Littleton bloodbath · Listening to the monsters · A cultural space of our own
Discuss the connection between communes and the parable about the Russian poet.
Paul Eppinger, the real-life model for Quinn's character Jeffrey, didn't drown himself. He took himself off to a quiet spot in the hills and shot himself. Does this invalidate Quinn's point here?
Describing his own school experience of unpopularity, Quinn says that he and his accomplice "in exclusion" had "tons of hope"; they knew they could do anything they really wanted to do, because everything was just going to go on "exactly this way," getting better and better forever. What are your own feelings about the future? Do you have "tons of hope"?
Do you agree that if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had another way to go, they would have disappeared from Columbine "long before their only dream became a dream of vengeance and suicide"?
Do you think Quinn and the authors he cites (Côté, James E., and Allahar, Anton L. Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1996) are too pessimistic when they say young people "are becoming increasingly ghettoized in retail and service sectors, where they endlessly lift and carry, stock shelves, push brooms, bag groceries, and flip burgers, gaining no skills and seeing no path of advancement ahead of them"?
How do you feel about the prospect of "taking the world back from the pharaohs"?
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