The student, according to the article, did not make any threats towards anybody. He did not mention the school at all. However, “his work caused concern because it referred to guns, death and suicide.”
That’s right. Poetry that involves guns, death, and suicide is now apparantly illegal. Will English teachers be barred from using the poem Richard Corey in class? If they do, will they be arrested?
If every teenager who ever wrote some crappy angsty poem involving death, suicide, and/or guns was arrested, the schools would be damn near empty.
Granted, the article is short and lacking some information. What am I missing here? Is it possible that this is something less than a blatant violation of a student’s First Amendment rights?
(I understand that the student was using a school computer to write some of this poetry. However, I fail to see how that is even slightly relevant. At worst, he would be guilty of violating some school rule, not a law.)
Apparently this comes just a week after another student has made what may have been more concrete threats, which may suggest why authorities were so quick to freak out.
But that doesn’t even come close to justifying this! Not even close! We now have to worry about how we express ourselves in a forum as private as a personal journal!?!?!? I realize that kids don’t have as full a right to privacy as adults do, but, Jesus Christ!, the fucking read the kid’s journal then arrested him for what he had written!
If ever school officials or parents feel that it is necessary to invade a kid’s journal it can only be justified if there is a genuine intent to help a kid who may be troubled! But to have him arrested for his poetry?!?!? What exactly is the message here? No! Don’t express your feelings of loss, confusion, and depression! Those feelings should be pushed deep deep down inside and they must remain trapped there don’t ever let them out- never!
That’s exactly how poetry gets replaced by an uzi.
The problem is too many people value appearance over substance, and mistake repression of an emotion for its absence.
You can’t eliminate anger, fear, etc. from people - EVERYONE has those feelings, they’re part of being human. But the “nanny-state” is currently having a go at it.
I am so glad I graduated from school waaaaaaay back in the early 80’s before a lot of this bullshit got so deep
Actually, now that I reread my previous post, I realize I was putting a lot of focus on whoever turned the kid in- and I still assert those people were wrong! wrong! wrong!
But how about the bigger, much more disturbing issue? The St. Paul Police Dept. considers poetry a valid offence to which to apply a disorderly conduct charge!
Note that this kid was not standing on a park bench loudly reciting this poetry in public. He was not posting it on telephone poles and shop windows. He was not leaving it in people’s mailboxes or other students’ lockers. He just wrote it down in a private journal! (The report says both that he used a school computer and that the writings were found in the journal- which I assume to mean he used the computer, printed out the poems, then stuffed the printouts into his journal.) He was “found out” because he forgot the journal when he left for home. Where is the fucking crime?!?!?
When the authorities can apply a disorderly conduct charge to writing poetry, we are heading for a seriously fuck-up Orwellian society.
Somebody should wallpaper the school in the writings of great American poets who’ve written about death. Emily Dickinson might be a good. Dorothy Parker has a fair bit written about suicide. And American poetry about violence is not hard to come by, especially from the second half of the twentieth century.
Hrm. I wrote a poem about suicide once. I had to see the school shrink for 3 years but no one ever called the authorities. (It did freak out my mom though, for which I’m eternally sorry.) The only reason I wrote it was a friend of mine said “You write so well, but you should write about something dark. Like death!” (She was a wannabe goth before goth was even cool.) I read an Ann Landers column that morning, which happened to be about suicide, and so, there it was. A neat little poem about suicide. On the back of my geography worksheet :smack:
A few years later, I wrote another poem, much darker, much more graphic, much more personal to my own feelings. I guess I don’t even want to know what they’d do to me today if they found that one.
A guilty plea waives all non-jurisdictional defects in the criminal charge pled to.
I agree that the charge is outrageous. But if someone charged me, outrageously, with a crime of which I was not guilty, a guilty plea would be the last thing on my mind.
Unfortunately with this kid being 17, his options are probably limited. If his parents are anything like mine were, he doesn’t have much of an option to defend himself. Next week there will probably be some kid who gets a B+ instead of an A- on an essay and the parents want to fight it to the Supreme Court.
I’ll vote with the “glad I got out before all this started” comments. When in 6th grade, a friend and myself decided we were going to list out all of the guns we could thing of so we made a very long list that included machine guns and other nice items. My teacher found it, gave us a frown and threw it away. What would happen these days if the same thing happened doesn’t even compute.
Whenever a teen suicide happens there are countless people who knew the victim telling themselves,“if only we could take action before this happens”
Whenever a teen kills somebody at school there are countless people who knew the teens telling themselves, “if only we coul take action before this happens”
When you find any written statements about suicide, guns, or violence on school property I think some form of action is necessary. The problem then becomes determining if the teen was capable of acting out the violence or if he was just expressing thoughts about violence. I would think that the liability of underestimating the violent intent of a student is much greater than overestimating. In other words the administrators would rather trample on some innocents rather than run the risk of misjudging a realo threat.
Certainly I agree that some sort of action is appropriate. I don’t agree that the correct course of action is to make a criminal out of someone who was writing down a poem. Arresting someone is not the only response, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the way to reach out to a kid who might be troubled.
Arrest all the kids spanking their monkey on a webcam, convict them of child porn and make them sex offenders for life, and then force them into mandatory psychological counseling because they were abused by evil promoters of kiddy smut.
:rolleyes:
“Zero Tolerance” is the stupidest policy trend in schools across the land. But nearly as stupid is to just submit ot it. Alas, as Bricker said, if you’re a minor and your parents will not back you up, you have no choice. He was probably threatened that if he did not plead guilty to disorderly conduct, he would be prosecuted for making threats and for misuse of government property.
BubbaDog, prosecution is not the answer for these cases. In this case, that youth expressing that he was troubled was made a crime unto itself.
Jesus. God konws if I was in high school today I would be sent to reeducation camp for some of the angsty teen poetry I wrote. This makes me very angry.
