Bless their hearts, the experts keep telling us the internet is just a tool, like a hammer. Well, this week in Poland, somebody’s been swinging the hammer. Three school stabbings in one week, the latest on Saturday when a 21-year-old woman walked into a higher-education school in Warsaw and went after a 17-year-old girl with what police are politely calling a “dangerous object.” Two other women, there just to hand in enrollment papers, got hurt too. One victim went to the hospital. She’s expected to live.
Here’s the part that ought to stop every parent cold: Polish police, according to local media citing an actual police spokesperson, say they have information suggesting this whole string of attacks may be connected to an internet challenge. An internet challenge. Not poverty, not some sociological gobbledygook, but a fad. A trend. Like the ice bucket thing, except with knives and children.
Walk backward through the week and it gets worse. Wednesday, a 19-year-old at a vocational school in Mazovia injured nine people. Thursday, a 15-year-old walked into a primary school in Leszczydó-Nowiny and a 37-year-old caretaker ended up dead. A caretaker. The person who mops the floors and unlocks the doors. Then Saturday’s attack in Warsaw, where police say the suspect was a student at the school and, as far as investigators can tell, didn’t know a single one of her victims. Didn’t know them. Just picked a place and a day.
Now, I have questions for the manager. When did we decide that every child in the Western world should carry the entire internet in their pocket, unsupervised, around the clock? You can’t buy cold medicine without showing ID, but a 15-year-old can scroll through whatever sewer the algorithm serves up next, and we’re told that’s just modern life and you’re a square if you object. Poland’s interior minister had a 17-year-old detained in Sierpc this week for standing on school grounds announcing he planned to harm someone. A teenager announcing it, out loud, like he was ordering lunch. That’s what a decade of treating screens as babysitters and online “communities” as real communities gets you.
Give Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk his due, because I don’t hand out compliments to politicians for free. “When it comes to the safety of Polish children and peace in our schools, there is no room for compromise,” he said, and then his government actually did something: thousands of police fanned out and checked tens of thousands of schools across the country, and 76 people were detained. That’s a government doing the one job it actually has, protecting people who can’t protect themselves. Notice what the response wasn’t. It wasn’t a panel, a study, a sensitivity seminar, or a five-year plan. It was adults showing up.
And that’s the lesson for the rest of us, because don’t think this is a Poland problem. Bad ideas travel faster than good ones ever did, and the internet is the fastest bad-idea delivery system mankind has ever built. Some challenge cooked up in one corner of the web can be in a school hallway on another continent by Thursday. The kids aren’t evil, bless them, they’re bored and marinating in garbage, and half the adults in charge are too busy being impressed with themselves for knowing what a hashtag is to say no to any of it.
The Warsaw police say they can’t confirm whether Saturday’s attack is tied to the earlier two. Fine. But three schools in seven days, one dead caretaker, a dozen injured, and a police force sweeping every school in the country isn’t a coincidence, it’s a pattern, and patterns don’t respect borders. Parents, know what your kids are watching. Schools, lock your doors. Everybody else, stop pretending the feed is harmless. The Poles just showed what taking it seriously looks like.