“All we were trying to do was promote peace and recognize that people are dying every day,” said sophomore Adam Szwarek. “They said it was insubordination.”
Man was I out of the net on this one.
Chicago Sun-Times initial story
About 10 Morton West High School students suspended over an anti-war protest at the school last week returned to the Berwyn school today to demand they be allowed back in classes.
The kids were accompanied by about 20 parents and anti-war activists at a press conference in front of Morton West. About 25 students were suspended and face expulsions after staging a protest against the Iraq war in the school cafeteria last Thursday.
The kids were accompanied by about 20 parents and anti-war activists at a press conference in front of Morton West. About 25 students were suspended and face expulsions after staging a protest against the Iraq war in the school cafeteria last Thursday.
District 201 Supt. Ben Nowakowski has insisted the students seriously disrupted the school day. All classes were locked down after the protesters locked arms and refused to move, he said previously. The students insist they were peaceful.
And they were peaceful. The school called the police, had a complete lockdown and then, as you read above threated mass suspensions and expulsion.
There was no property damage
There was no violence.
This could have been Morton West’s finest hour as a school had they turned the entire protest into a teach-in. Instead they called the police.
It was, of course, the student’s finest hour. Although this story was largely locked up by the mainstream media outside the Chicago area, Arthur Silber has written a fine series of blog posts:
A lot of people have signed the petition since yesterday. Signatures are nearing the 2,000 mark. Let’s get well over 2,000 today. Go on, live dangerously: tell more people to sign it. A lot more.
Breaking the rules to “promote peace and recognize that people are dying every day” is a damned good program. These students are a hell of a lot smarter than most adults — and far more decent and civilized. To say nothing of much braver.
You may as well break the damned rules because, in these glorious, liberty-loving United States in the Year of Our Final Descent 2007, if you stray even an inch beyond the bounds of “approved” discourse and those views that the authoritarian Establishment considers “acceptable,” you may well be destroyed whether you in fact break the rules or not. More power to them.]
Faced with this impenetrable wall of resistance to truths that ought to be the primary, if not the sole, topic of discussion in our national life, Adam Szwarek and the other students felt an urgent need to speak the truth that we most desperately need to hear at this terrible moment in history: “All we were trying to do was promote peace and recognize that people are dying every day…”
I submit that this is one of the noblest statements uttered in the United States in the last several years, not only because of the supreme importance of its content, but because of the particular values and the kind of soul that inform it. Szwarek’s concerns are ones that should be those of every national leader of minimal decency — but they are not. Szwarek knows “that people are dying every day” — which is the terrifying fact that our politicians and media try to prevent from ever reaching our consciousness. Szwarek was determined to make people aware of the horrors that take place every hour of every day, in the hope that those who have the power to do so would finally stop them.
People like Szwarek are rare in any age; today, there are very few people in our national life who demonstrate this degree of commitment to peace and the sanctity of human life. Szwarek’s awareness of these issues and his willingness to do something about them should be honored and celebrated. Instead, the authorities seek to punish him severely, thus perhaps destroying his educational future, and therefore his hopes for a career, and thus his life.
Silber goes on to outline what the school actually did to the students which was atrocious in its own right but also followed a thoroughly modern script and one that jives with the role of public education today: to get this generation ready for life in a fascist state.
This story has a rare happy ending where the students and parents actually won a victory of sorts. Silber writes about it here - November 17.
In the November 8 entry, Silber lists the five lessons the students were taught and elaborates on each of them. Please read what he was to write under each of them, but here they are:
1. The idea of impartial and “blind” justice is a lie.
2. Adults in positions of authority constantly talk about their concern for children and their futures, just as politicians always assure us that they only act “for our own good” — which is also what the U.S. tells the Iraqis, as it destroys their country and murders more than one million of them. All of this is also a lie.
3. Betraying your friends and allies to save yourself is sometimes the smartest way out of trouble. Even if it may not be “good,” it is sometimes necessary.
4. In their efforts to coerce your conformity to acceptable modes of behavior and to shut you up, authorities will lie to you about anything and everything.
5. The extent of your awareness of the world around you, and the extent of your sensitivity to and concern for the sanctity of human life, will be the extent to which you are punished.
It is with number 5 that I want to stop and comment further since that plays into the essay I wrote prior to this one on Joe Bageant and the Burden of Knowing. Silber quotes Alice Miller:
Children who become too aware of things are punished for it and internalize the coercion to such an extent that as adults they give up the search for awareness. But because some people cannot renounce this search in spite of coercion, there is justifiable hope that regardless of the ever-increasing application of technology to the field of psychological knowledge, Kafka’s vision of the penal colony with its efficient scientifically-minded persecutors and their passive victims is valid only for certain areas of our life and perhaps not forever. For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath. — Alice Miller, at the conclusion of the “Afterword” to For Your Own Good
If you want a more contemporary translation, consider David Bowie:
“And these children that you spit on as they try to change their world,
are immune to your consultations, they’re quite aware of what they’re going through”
In considering why the punishment of these peaceful students was so outsize the nature of the deed, it seems clear that one of the greatest fears any generation founded on the principles of control and obedience has is of their own children. These young minds must be crushed and then remade (as the Marines look at boot camp, so too, we look at public education).
To encourage freethinking is seen as a great mortal threat. The reasons are many: an entire cadre of socialists might grow up and seek to change society economically; children may indeed, if they learn from playing together at early ages, not carry the baggage of racism and sexism into their adulthood therefore further upending the social order, and so on.
The worst thing that can happen for any child with intelligence and heightened sensitivity is to realize, at a young age, that life is essentially fake as advertised. What you are taught in school about justice, equality and fairness is not to be taken literally at all. That we essentially live a thousand little lies that we are expected to repeat soundlessly in our heads every day to get through it all.
For many children, and I saw this with my own sensitive eyes, youthful idealism didn’t survive the first encounter with social authority. Whether it was teachers, parents or police, young minds asking the insoluble question of humanity: ‘why?’ are often given, what to them, is a nonsensical answer that only increases the confusion and disillusionment: ‘because I said so.’
Of this is our society built.
At the point when the answer becomes intractable and not subject to modification, children face a choice. They can either start repeating the mantra of a thousand little lies in their own consciousness and get with the program, they can continue a knowing and active rebellion, or they can choose to simply shut down psychologically.
The fact that Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly used to be a high school history teacher is never lost on me when I see him perform. If one studies O’Reilly’s reactions to guests that are progressives and freethinkers, you will get a superb shorthand version of the way society looks at the awake and aware in this country.
At some point, generally when he knows he is losing an argument, O’Reilly trots out the ultimate fallback position of those who control the minds of our society. No, its not to accuse someone of being a communist, although that would be related. Instead O’Reilly will either say whatever idea he is arguing against will either give us ‘anarchy’ or he will angrily accuse his adversary of being an anarchist and sputter something about ‘you just don’t want to have any rules.’
If we encourage progressive freethinking in our schools, so the theory goes, we will lay the groundwork for future anarchy. In order for society to function, there must be constraints against the freedom of individuals, which will allow certain groups within society to gain justifiable power and wealth. To distribute the bounty of our society equally, so the theory goes, will stifle competition. This is the ‘people are inherently’ bad school of thought which I wrote of earlier. Organized religion also plays a part in the set up of this hierarchy by reminding men they are ‘fallen’ in a ‘fallen world’ and therefore no utopia is possible and therefore, the herd must be ridden, lest anarchy reign.
Of course, what is never allowed to be discussed is why certain people are allowed to be the so-called ‘ruling class’ and why others, through accident of birth, are excluded. Our American class system is such a taboo subject that to even bring it up will undoubtedly cause someone to hurl an accusation of being ‘un-American’ your way.
In our system, so we teach our children, you get exactly the wealth and privilidge you earn and deserve based on your talent and drive. Everyone knows that.
And even if you successfully make the argument that for most Americans, it simply isn’t true, the counterargument goes, well that may be, but its still better in America than it is anywhere else. At that point the argument ends since the questioner is then put in the position of either having to agree or be un-American.
So one is taught many myths and fables as children that are never to be questioned. What Silber is highlighting in his discussion of the Morton West incident and the writing of Alice Miller is first the damage done to impressionable minds early on and then the violence done to those children who has somehow escaped the early conditioning and make it to high school with a social conscience and the will to exercise it still intact. It is those children who are most publicly made an example of so that others will learn that what might be tolerated (or drugged) as an elementary school eccentricity will be brutally punished for someone actually coming of age.
They are taught that for daring to publicly express an opinion out of the mainstream and against the consensus building efforts of modern public education, their ability to get their ticket punched to a elite college (to have their ticket punched there to ‘The Good Life’ and ‘The American Dream’) will be placed in peril by a threatened expulsion.
This is usually enough to cull the rest of the herd down to mooing obedience. But not always. Some quit and conform, others drop out but some make amends but go underground in the system, only to pop up time and again to be beat down again.
For what (almost) happened to these high school students is what will happen to them should they try any of these freethinking shenanigans in corporate America. The unemployment and welfare lines are not necessarily made of only only the unfortunate but people who were fired for standing up for their most cherished beliefs in simply what is right and what it wrong.
If it sounds like I speak from hard personal experience, I am.
But I would say I’m one of the lucky ones. Luck, a few timely connections and a supportive family have kept me going when talent alone was not sufficient. In the main, I have as good a work ethic as anyone and with two very brief exceptions, have been steadily gainfully employed since May 19, 1979 when I was 16.
But being one of these unfortunates who doesn’t quite know when to keep their mouths shut, I did not get to be one of the editors of a major American newspaper, nor did I get a nationwide talk show. Instead, I run a small independent bookstore in my old home town, which to me, is akin to lighting a single candle in a growing darkness.
It isn’t what I had planned to do but that’s life and it sure as hell beats being a cubicle jockey for the corporate state.
But the most troubling aspect as a lifelong shit disturber (a wonderfully Canadian term we USians should embrace), is the extent that the system is going to in crushing the humanistic spirit of our children. This is truly (and I think Silber would agree) the leading indicator of the coming repression. If you neuter successive generations of any ability to stand up and say: this is wrong, you ensure the ruling power structure that the streets will be free of protests and general strikes when Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuiliani are presented as America’s only two choices for national leadership.
Brilliant, really.
After all, doesn’t it make more sense to really go after the people who have not built up assets that can be taken away for noncompliance, such as careers, homes, 401k’s, health insurance, you’re own kid’s education, etc? No surprise that thehe biggest and really only serious threat the school could use against these students was to ruin their chances at college.
When you really step back and assess this situation the only word that comes to mind, at least for me, is evil. This is an evil, dehumanizing system that richly deserves its own destruction. And perhaps, as many people write, this generation of Americans may be facing the the only solution: to destroy it and and build a truly just and equitable society on its ruins.
And maybe Adam Szwarek will lead them.
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