Savannah Lee

My daughter was not feelin' it this morning. School was getting to her.

I explained to her the fundamental truth of our society, which is that school exists to train us for life in our culture. It's so we can get up when we have to get up, go where we have to go, do what we have to do, and deal with whoever's there, day after day.

Hearing the blunt reality didn't help, though, and I realized that this was *not* about properly understanding and contexting her experience (which tends to be the be-all and end-all for me). This was more about pent-up emotion.

"She needs," I thought, "a Two-Minutes Hate."

You know, the thing in George Orwell's '1984' where everyone stands in front of the screen and screams and shakes their fists and throws things in an orgy of rage against whatever they're told to. It's a means of social control, but one which does provide stress release for the people it's used on.

Now of course you don't want to *call* it a 'hate.' Nor do you want to use it, as Big Brother did, for scapegoating. Those things are, shall we say, doubleplus-ungood. But just as a pure release of angst...there's a baby in the bathwater.

I turned to my girl and said "We're going to have a Two-Minute FRUSTRATION."

And for two minutes, I whipped up her frustration ("More! More! More! Yeah!") and she screamed and hollered gibberish which was meant to stand for the "really bad words" in her mind. And lo and behold, she was (scratchy-throated but) smiling at the end.

George Orwell: parenting expert.

The extremely disturbing thoughts this engenders about the apparent parallels between childhood and living in a supertotalitarian state shall be left for another time.