Liberal cruelty has consquences

This semester is winding down. As I am desperate to avoid grading student papers, I’ve spent the morning reading longish-form online articles. I just came across one that I feel very conflicted about. The online reaction to it as been troubling. So I don’t know if I have anything particularly coherent to say, but I’d like to talk about it.



The anonymously written piece is titled “What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt Right.” It documents a young man’s journey from a garden variety, liberal-leaning goon to a frothing neo nazi mutant.

The piece is understandably sympathetic, seeing as it was written by the boy’s parent. The writer’s whiny and heavy handed tone caused me, and most of my e-pals, to dismiss it. If anything, the essay showcases an immense failure of parenting. If my child were to ask me to take him or her to a “Traditional American Culture” rally, I would slap the everloving shit of them. Lord knows how many times the kid’s parents had dropped the ball before it ever got to that point.

But then I re-read the start of the article, in which the parent identifies the trigger point for their son’s downward slide:

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.” No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested. If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written. At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care.

Eck… who edited this? It would have worked so much better without a fucking Kafka reference.

So, maybe it was the tone. I dunno. But most readers seem to regard this section as exaggerated, possibly fabricated. The takeaway was “boo hoo, the nazi kid got punished for sexually harassing a girl.” Heck: If a reader is truly dedicated to the #BelieveAllWomen mantra, then this description doesn’t warrant sympathy even if it’s entirely true. The kid said something that upset the girl. It wasn’t directed to her and it wasn’t about her. But still, he upset her, and she’s a girl, so he is bad and deserved whatever punishment was doled out to him.

And this got me thinking about my experiences in high school, as a student in the late 90s and a teacher in the mid-aughts. Administrators seemed to always be adopting some or other policy of harsh punishment for bad behavior: zero tolerance toward weapons, drugs, hats, disrespectful posture, electronic devices, swearing, Simpsons t-shirts, and mentally unhygenic reading materials. During dances and social gatherings, my middle school allowed students to bring in CDs from home. That was a decent policy, but anyone who attempted to play a “hip hop” track would receive an immediate suspension for “endorsing violence,” regardless of the track’s lyrical content. My high school adopted a firm anti-bullying policy, but once a boy came to school wearing a gothic dress as some kind of vague transgressive statement, and two separate male teachers called him a fag–out in the open, in front of everybody, as part of the official business of teaching.

Once, in 8th grade, two kids were caught taking over-the-counter caffeine pills. They didn’t get sick or anything; a girl saw them and she narced. They were arrested by the school resource officer, taken in a cop car to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped, and then summarily expelled, their young lives effectively ruined over 50 milligrams of a safe and legal stimulant. At an emergency assembly held the next day, the frog-faced principal croaked out a dire warning that the use of such drugs was strictly forbidden and we would all be subjected to the same fate, should we attempt to sneak in any No Doz. As he issued his stern warning, he slurped gluttonously from a 22-ounce mug of gas station coffee.



The point is, zero tolerance never really means zero tolerance. Rules are always–always, literally always, without exception in the whole of human history–enforced arbitrarily. Harsh policies rarely make anyone safer. They are employed instead to further humiliate and brutalize those who have already been rejected by the system. In my last two paragraphs, I cited the dumbest and most conspicuous examples of arbitrary cruelty that happened to pop into my head. This doesn’t cover the everyday, petty cruelties that teachers and administrators would exact upon kids they simply didn’t like. Without exception, these were the kids who were already marginalized: effeminate boys, masculine but unathletic girls, kids who dressed poorly, kids who spoke with accents, black kids, kids with learning disabilities or behavioral problems. These kids would be given detentions or even suspensions for minor infractions–looking away from the chalkboard, slouching, sneaking in candy, laughing at importune times, etc. It wasn’t the teacher’s fault, of course: zero tolerance and all that. But, strangely, the zero tolerance policies never seemed to apply to the popular, athletic, and/or well-connected kids. If Suzie Creamcheese was caught sneaking some Starburst during Algebra–well, she’s probably hungry, seeing as she works so hard. If Raul, Roofus, or Sheena were caught doing the same? God help them.

Some teachers were nicer than others, of course. Some were downright supportive. Others were simply evil. There was one, when I was in 7th grade, who was particularly repulsive and cruel–no kidding, his admiration of Rush Limbaugh was formative in my early-adopted hatred of American conservatives. He had matted red hair and teeth like a cracked picket fence and would wear a leather jacket out to lunch. Anyhow, he would prattle on about his hatred of kids who “Just. Refuse. To. Learn.” These kids were almost always black. Pure coincidence, I’m sure. He’d make a show of tossing them out of class–sometimes physically–for infractions as minor as getting an answer wrong when called upon. One time, a twitchy white kid who wore the same t-shirt every day called him out: It’s unfair, he said, that I’m getting thrown out of class for getting an answer wrong, when right before me another kid got several chances to respond.

The teacher turned beet red. He got on his knees and put his face two inches in front of the twitchy kid’s eyes.

“I’m not throwing you out because you got the answer wrong,” he explained. “I’m throwing you out because you are you.”

Again, these are the conspicuous examples. The everyday stuff is harder to describe twenty-five years after it happened. Most people were not brutalized and they didn’t have a single moment that ruined their life, but they were still exposed to a deeply unfair and cruel system, and such exposure naturally engenders feelings of betrayal, hopelessness, and anger.

Here’s my story–it’s particularly stupid. 9th grade. One day, I walked into Spanish class, and the large woman who teaches in that classroom before my section grabbed me by the collar, physically lifted me out of my chair, and shoved her moist biscuit of a hand into my face. “What is this,” she demanded.

This was all very sudden. I could see nothing but her hand, which had a distinct fecal aroma.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She removed her hand. I looked down toward desk. She stood silently. I had no fucking idea what she was talking about.

“You’re gonna tell me what you did, right now, or I’m gonna double the detentions.”

I was still silent. Seriously, no idea what was going on. This enraged her. She began to count upward, starting at 3 detentions and stopping at 10, by which point tears were welling up and my face was flushed. I said I seriously did not know. She pointed to a small pentagram someone had engraved into the desktop. The desks, by the way, were movable. Anyone could have done it. She blamed me because she didn’t like me. I served 10 detentions and had to pay over a hundred dollars (a shitload of money for a 13-year-old) to get the desk refinished.

This isn’t the end of the world, obviously. But it really, oddly broke me. Before, I had thought that so long as I did was I supposed to and didn’t break any rules, I’d be okay. Now I realized that was bullshit, that any vindictive cunt with a few ounces of power could punish me for any reason, at any time, and I wouldn’t be allowed to mount a defense. That’s the sort of thing that fucks with a kid’s head. I mean, christ–it’s 23 years later and I’m still kinda pissed about it. I hope that woman is dead.

I regained a sense of control by stealing books from the woman’s classroom. A few times a week, I would grab a textbook when I came in, use it during class, and walk out with it. At the end of the school year, some friends and I burned them in a glorious bonfire along the banks of the Mississippi.

My response was petty and destructive, but I don’t feel any pengs of guilt or shame in remembering it. I had to do something to reassert agency, to feel like I had some control, and I managed to find a way to go about doing it that didn’t hurt anybody or get me into trouble. Regardless of the morality of my particular response, we can agree that kids are now much more surveilled than they were 20-odd years ago, and that minor mischief is now much more harshly criminalized. If a kid finds themself on the outs within their school, there’s really no way they can push back. Their only available avenue of asserting control over their lives is to wander into welcoming communities elsewhere…

One more anecdote then I’m done….

My sister was in high school during 9/11. The attacks were on a Tuesday, and the whole rest of the week was assemblies and talking circles and other such activities meant to assuage fear and gin up the hatred of the dirty brown bastards that done this. Two of my sister’s friends, older boys, were the sort of kids who read Howard Zinn and listened to Jello Biafra’s spoken word records. During one meeting, they expressed exasperation at a girl who was sobbing because she just, like, didn’t know why anyone would do that. The boys certainly didn’t approve of the attacks, but they tried to explain the whole concept of the US being an unhinged and murderous imperial power that had done much worse stuff all over the globe. The audience gasped. The boys were hauled into the principal’s office. They were charged with verbally assaulting the crying girl. One was suspended. The other expelled.

So, I dunno… go ahead. If you think due process is evil, that all victimhood claims are valid and should be taken at face value, and that kids of lesser social status should be demonized and made into criminals for upsetting members of the fair sex, then you do you. That’s fine if that’s what you believe. But please don’t be so naive as to think that the bulk of these newly criminalized behaviors are going to actually be malignant, or that the genuinely malignant behaviors of secure kids will be curbed in any way. Please respect yourself enough to realize that school admins aren’t magic sages with mature moral compasses–a plurality of them were business majors in college, for fuck’s sake. And most importantly, don’t be surprised if the kids you dismiss wind up doing some crazy or awful shit in response.