Political Games In Middle School
In the news today is a story about some high school kid who was sent home for wearing an asinine Lady Gaga shirt that was deemed disruptive. This story reminded me of a fond 6th grade memory.
Freshly settled into the middle school environment, my friend Josh and I had been reflecting on the monotony of institutional education. So we hatched a plan to entertain ourselves. We would set up a sting operation by edging to the line of passive disruption, then record the following encounter and debate with the authority figures.
It was easy to figure out our roles because Josh was willing to go as far as get suspended in the name of fun and to prove a point and I, on the other hand, was nowhere near that hardcore.
So he wore a White Zombie (a band I knew I wasn’t even allowed to listen to) shirt reading “I went to hell and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” It was a funny shirt and really not too offensive, but we knew that on display in the lunchroom in front of administrators it would prove to be perfect bait.
The lunch period came and the biggest fish in the lake bit the hook faster than we could have ever expected. In fast, Josh was still near the back of the a la carte line, probably waiting to order a freshly baked roll or a thirst-quenching fruity slushed ice drink.
My eyes scanned across the cafeteria and I double-taked at the sight of Josh being harassed by the purple-faced principal. I grabbed the microcassette recorder from my backpack, speed walked over to the confrontation and hit record. The veiny principal was too crazed with venomous delight at his find to even notice the slick handoff and Josh subsequently slipping our makeshift espionage device into his front pocket. A second later Josh was dragged off to the adjoining administration office.
The tape — which I still possess — filled up fast. It exhibits a verbal chess match between the hero on the right side of the law and the evil opposing forces. Josh suggests calling an ACLU lawyer to sort the whole thing out and the dean hands him a phone, challenging him to dial. The recording gets epicly more dramatic each time the dean or others who enter the room order Josh to remove the shirt and turn it inside out, only to be met with unshakable adolescent legal rhetoric.
The tape clicks to an end on a note that sounds like a physical struggle. That’s not how it really ended, of course. The final compromise was that he could wear a school gym shirt in lieu of turning his own inside out.
Once outside the office, we met up in the hallway by the lockers and decided we could make the experience even funnier and more memorable with a final punchline. So Josh busted out his biggest permanent black marker, one of sword-in-the-stone proportions. He turned the blue school gym shirt inside out and leaned over, and on the back we neatly wrote:
“I WAS STRIPPED OF MY CIVIL LIBERTIES AT MURRAY MIDDLE SCHOOL AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT”
//
In retrospect, we were young kids (12 years old) without the advantage of having the whole internet at our backs. Still we felt more powerful alone than the entire school district. More importantly, we understood the reality of the world and our limitations, which allowed us to live stoically and reflectively.
If you’re in high school today with a platform as great as millions of people on the internet and you somehow still feel helpless as a human, and all you can muster as a sound byte is, “self-expression runs so deep to me I could cry talking about it,” you deserve expulsion. From school AND from life.
I had an ironic intellectual crisis toward the end of middle school (1996) when I saw the internet trending toward a viable communication tool. Maybe Josh remembers this conversation— What if, I worried, all the capacities he and I held were one day typical of elementary school kids. I felt preemptively left behind and jealous. Young vs younger.
No longer do I feel envious of youth. Somehow kids found a way to get dumber. And they deserve what they get as a reward.
