Two blogland threads in 2 days, wow cappy you must have an exciting life
Today at school, I had a free with a buddy, and we decided we were going to make some posters and hang them around the school. There are Bernie posters galore and some Hillary ones, so we decided we were going to give the Don some representation in the building. There is a stairwell that every student has to go through to get to classes, and we hung a picture of Donald in the stairwell fairly high up the wall, where nobody could take it down without a ladder. Now, mind you, the hallway leading up to the stairwell has Bernie posters, five or six of them, that have been there for months.
So we hang our poster up, it's literally a picture of Don's face with "Can't Stump Won't Stump" and "Make (my school) Great Again" written on it. It is not offensive nor is it in poor taste. I can PM a pic if you ask.
Lunch block comes and some students point it out and think it's pretty funny and wonder how we got it on that wall in the first place that high up. Nobody is offended. Everyone sees it, laughs, and moves on with their day.
At the end of lunch block, it was gone. The teachers had somehow found a way to reach it and take it down. The Bernie posters, however, remained where they have been for MONTHS. I posed the question to our dean of why the poster had been taken down, and he told me it was "disruptive" and some students found it "offensive."
I later learned which teacher took it down, and he is a huge Bernie supporter and hates Annoying Orange and has told me before that Annoying Orange sounds like Adolf Riddler and is a white supremacist.
It's a crock of stuff that myself and my friends are being censored because our political views do not align with much of the staff, but they leave other posters hanging. In 1969, a ruling was made in the case of Tinker v. The Des Moines Independent Community School District that students that were suspended for wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam Conflict (again, a political statement that was not distracting nor disruptive) were within their first amendment rights, and the judge ruled that the first amendment rights of both students and teachers are protected at school provided they are not promoting "illegal drug use" or causing a "material and substantial disruption" of the school day.
More info can be found here.Another court case, in my home state of Connecticut,
Healy v. James, reaffirmed the decision of Tinker v. Des Moines.
My gripe with this situation is that I acted within school rules and within my rights as a citizen, and that the school is selectively censoring myself and other students with unpopular viewpoints purely because they do not share the same opinions, and not because we have caused grievous offense or harm. It's bullstuff and I know that things like this happen in most every district, but I'm going to question at the next Board of Ed meeting how this censorship is at all justifiable in the district.
