If this was protocol while you were in school, how many of you would have been arrested? I would have been arrested about every other day. This is an amazing story.
if this were protocol in my high school, it’s not even in doubt. i was suspended multiple times for fighting, food fights, and other high school nonsense. but it was dealt with in the typical ways. sort of an unspoken deal. we students accepted that our teachers were often abusive, alcoholic, philandering fakers and in turn, they dealt with our reactionary outbursts to a system that didn’t really give a shit about our humanity. jail didn’t need to come into it. cops didn’t have any business there.
about 10 or 15 years later, i worked as a tutor in a (brooklyn) grade school…and they did, indeed, have police in the school. i remembering feeling like i had narrowly escaped an even more hellish adolescence.
growing incarceration rates, school shootings increasing, cops in schools, taser deaths becoming commonplace, pepperspraying people who are exercising constitutional rights…these are admissions that we have failed, as a culture. we have failed as a culture. so far, the american culture is a failure. a failure at celebrating and revering anything important in the scheme of humankind. good at producing obedient workers and imbibers of fantasy, capitalism addicts, and angry, violent, frustrated humans…but a failure at much else. when there are lights among us, they are exceptions to the agenda of the system, not products of it.
i believe there is still hope. just not much.
“cops didn’t have any business there.” yep yep yep.
I already felt extremely uncomfortable with state police occasionally walking through the campus and dorms when I attended college in Oregon for a term back in ‘06. And I’m a white middle-class dude old enough for everything.
Police patrolling high-school? Pupils being penalized for paper planes?
That’s just wrong.
CLARITY AND CHAOS 