The Middle School Poultry Pack

Here is a huge personal pet peeve of mine: the way people love to ignore obvious truths, if these truths minimize our belief of superiority on earth.  In other words-- humans hate answers to their 'oh-so-special dilemmas', if they in any way, shape, or form point back to them being nothing more than overgrown apes...

I could give myself tendonitis writing about the misguided beliefs of recent human history. How we have fooled ourselves silly, believing all sorts of hogwash--"oh we are too good to need constant sunshine, breastmilk, dirt microbes, or lots of exercise...."
We like to believe we have gone beyond the most simplistic animal cravings for fatty foods, sex or territorial war...
Dancing around and singing the myth: we are the superior, superior species! Making up rationalized justifications as we trot along engaging in all sorts of animalistic behaviors.
And don't forget, we also have "super bodies!"--No processed sugar in nature--no problem!!  Surely our "amazing people body" will learn to process vast quantities of it--right? Maybe we'll just learn to breathe polluted air too! (I hear they are trying in China...)
We're apes. Silly hairless apes. Wired to live in tribes (or groups, large families, what have you). But not genetically ready to live in large cities, overwhelmed by freaky viruses and vast quantities of people.

But of course, the human misguided apes, think we are really ready for tons of people. And thus we like to "socialize our children". Because just a century ago, kids went to high schools and middle schools with hundreds or thousands of peers--right!? (wrong!) Isn't it all soo natural??  Of course it isn't. Large scale schools only started after the industrial revolution--at the same time we were "learning" (cough, cough) to breathe that pesky polluted air...
The thing about human children is, they enter something we like to call "puberty" --that phase riddled with reproductive hormones. The role of our hormones is to set off the inclination to seek a mate. We are wired to perform an age old mating dance. And of course there is also a darker side to this game (and I don't mean porn). It's called--keeping the 'weak or different' from spreading their genes.

Now we can readily accept that chickens have a pecking order, or that moose go into "rut" or any other animal species displays aggression at mating time-- nature shows happily explain that it is 'all for the best'--ensuring that the strongest of the species are the only ones reproducing.
Now think of a typical middle school or high school as a bizarre 'nature show'--But instead of humans, let's replace the kiddos with 700 adolescent monkeys!!!
What do you think would happen???

And yet, humans sit around on our (usually) hairless asses, designing "bullying task forces", or think tanks, brainstorming-- Oh, oh-- how can it be that the weaker/smarter/nicer/disabled/different kids are being picked on??"

I have a message for you people: you are not going to stop huge amounts of hormonal kids from picking on each other, any more than you are going to turn off their sex drive or cravings for cheeseburgers. Yes, we can be humane--(a learned behavior to be nicer to one another). And some kids will learn to be tougher and grow a thicker skin. But how is this even possible, in an environment where kids are bombarded with nothing but 24/7 hormonal peer influences?? (these days, social media makes sure the craziness follows them home from school).

And the naysayers will be like, "but they are learning valuable social skills".
No they are not, unless you think that the adult world involves spending every day milling about with 1000 hormone crazed adults, exactly the same emotional age as you. (But of course you might be training your kids to join a militia).

Some kids do just fine in our weird industrialized middle and high schools, but I am saying- some will not. The only real thing we can do about it, is recognize this issue for what it really is--and make sure kids have other options for schooling. There is no need to endure bullying, teen suicides or school shootings. If some kids just don't want to play the "middle school ape game", we should at least make sure the cage door remains open.