Lockdown fever

Updated 12:00 PM ET February 20, 2001

By Jake Tenpas
OSU Daily Barometer
Oregon State U.

(U-WIRE) CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Imagine, if you will, the high school of the future...

You wake up at 6:30 a.m. sharp. Sleeping late is for deviants.

After stashing your contraband copies of "Catcher in The Rye" and "Wiccan for Dummies" under your mattress, and pulling on your one-piece, cadet blue school uniform, you head off to the bus stop.

On the ride to school, you stare out the wire-reinforced windows at the long chains of closed and abandoned multiplexes that litter the urban landscape like discarded Milky Way wrappers, and think back to the way things used to be.

When your parents were in school, things were different.

Students were allowed to read whatever piqued their intellectual hunger, instead of being limited to those books on the "Approved Reading List." They were also permitted to express themselves in writing, speech and dress -- a freedom long since replaced with "Unhealthy Thought Restriction Codes," and mandatory school uniforms.

But reverie is a luxury you can't afford. Your bus driver might mistake your deep thought for the concentration required to cast a hex upon his exposed backside, and report your thought crime to the appropriate administrator.

You're now passing through the outer safety perimeter, and as you wave to Joe, the kindly security officer currently occupying the gun tower, you begin to work your identification out of your one, highly visible, all-purpose pocket with your other hand.

After passing through the x-ray chamber and metal detector, you say your daily prayer/pledge of allegiance/loyalty oath and then make your way to your isolated learning cubicle.

Things used to be different, but something called "Columbine" changed all of that. Another hellish day of high school, but thank God you're safe.

***

Sound far-fetched? Then you haven't been paying attention. Schools are becoming genuinely frightening places, and contrary to popular belief -- or doxa, as Socrates would called it -- it's because the administrators, not the students, are way out of control.

For your perusal:

In Oklahoma City, a 15-year-old girl by the name of Brandi Blackbear was recently suspended for casting a magic spell that allegedly made one of her teachers sick. The only evidence to support her suspension was the fact that she was seen reading Wiccan literature (which she acquired from the library) and, under aggressive interrogation, she admitted to assistant principal, Charlie Bushyhead, that she might be a Wiccan.

And no, the names have not been made more silly to protect the innocent. Charlie Bushyhead is a real person, and not just the imaginary friend who visits me when I drink too much Knob Creek Bourbon.

In November, an entirely unrelated Kansas girl, Nicole Sumpter, was forced by school administrators to remove her pentacle necklace, because the symbol was seen as a violation of the school's dress code. Said code states that when students dress in a manner "considered indecent or disruptive to school in the judgement of counselors, teachers or principals, the student may be required to change to appropriate clothing or alter the disruptive appearance."

Whoa.

Since when is an upside-down star disruptive to the educational process in and of itself? I guess it might be if it's a seminary school and the eyes of the priests-in-training begin to melt out of their sockets when they stare directly into the unholy relic, but short of that, it's ridiculous.

Wearing a pentacle to school is no more or less disruptive than wearing a crucifix, a star of David or any other faith-related paraphernalia. The pentacle is a Wicca-related symbol that deserves the same respect as the Catholic Church's sanctified presentation of The Virgin Mary.

And besides, according to the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Tinker vs. The Des Moines School Board, it is absolutely unconstitutional to prohibit the expression of opinion, without any evidence that the rule is necessary to avoid substantial interference with school discipline or the rights of others.

In the case of Brandi Blackbear, the American Civil Liberties Union has already filed suit in U.S. District Court in Tulsa. A friend of Nicole Sumpter's family has contacted the ACLU as well.

But despite such attempts to fight back against the groundless oppression of student's rights to expression, the idiocy continues.

In Jonesboro, Arkansas, an 8-year-old boy was suspended from school for three days after pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and saying, "Pow, pow, pow."

I know that chicken strips can be scary. Who knows what strange parts of the chicken are processed down to make those school lunch delicacies?

However, I feel pretty confident when I say that no bullet will ever come from the end of a chicken strip, no matter how hard you squeeze it.

Maybe the teacher was myopic and standing some distance away, and hence couldn't discern between the chicken finger in question and a .357 Magnum.

And maybe John Wayne Gacy really was set up because the chief of police had a homosexual crush on him.

Ever since Columbine, Thurston, and the rest of the wave of school shootings began to rock our nation's conception of the educational system a couple years back, school administrators have been tightening their grip on students and their various means of expression like Stalin crushing the testicles of a dissenter in the Gulag.

Yet they still don't seem to realize that the harder they squeeze, the more the students will continue to explode like the acne on their hormone-ravaged faces.

During my time on the level of the Inferno known as middle school, I was called into the office one day, and asked to remove a Nike shirt which read, "Kick Some Butt." I was informed by my principal that the shirt violated her Quaker upbringing.

Now clearly, no middle schooler has ever used such harsh language, and so the intellectual threat to the student body that my shirt represented was apparent to all.

But because of that day, my young mind latched onto such concepts as censorship, authority, religious persecution, and most importantly, protest.

I refused to remove my shirt, and was told that if I wore it to school again, it would be removed for me. Ever since, I have distrusted authority figures, advocates of expression suppression, and organized religion in general. Of course, many other incidents have reinforced my skepticism, but it was that one confrontation that first raised my awareness.

That principal should thank her lucky stars that I'm not a violent person. Otherwise, the rash of school-related violence might have started a decade earlier.

Violence is a far older force than education, and as long as their are unhappy people living in this country, young or old, the threat of violence will persist. To take away one of the few freedoms that teens have, self expression, is to give a tall cup of Everclear to a man who is already clearly intoxicated.

The more rules there are, the greater lengths students will go to to break those rules. The two possible conclusions to this struggle are both very ugly.

Either violence in schools will increase in frequency until our schools resemble the streets of Afghanistan on a bad day, or students will eventually capitulate. This scenario has been detailed in such books as "1984" and "Brave New World."

I'll take a pentacle pendant over a generation of well-behaved zombies any day of the week.

(C) 2001 OSU Daily Barometer via U-WIRE