POST YOUR HIGH SCHOOL WALKOUT AS AN EVENT!
HS Student Walkout: May 1st
While the teacher talks in front of the class, I leaf through an old Time Magazine issue from October last year: Occupy was just hitting the streets, folks were rushing to call it the start of a "much needed, Second American Revolution".
The scramble to comment on the "phenomena" makes me laugh becuase they have no idea where it came from...
Whether it was UC Santa Cruz students in '09 occupying Admin buildings in California, predicting the student loan bubble; or East Madison High School students walking out of schools by the hundreds in Wisconsin, it still made the papers as a bunch of kids out in the streets in front of Wall Street.
Who were we mobilizing for? The Old Left before us keeps calling for a "return to the 50's" progressive nostalgia: some utopia of fair taxes and ample work for all Americans that I guess existed. Trayvon's murder helps us recollect what barbarism underlined the "good 'ol days", and still stalks his peers through gated communities...
The New Left, the "Carnival Left", Adbusters and the rest, gave us some nice slogans and posters and lets us totter off to Wall Street. A number of brutal beatings and a sickening number of #hashtags later, they tell us "Prepare for the American Spring!" And we're still left asking...who are we moving for? Who are we?
Paul Robeson High School needs to become our watchword. These kids aren't just asking for a "Middle Class Scholarship" to fix the UC crisis; they aren't asking for anything. Their school is being foreclosed right from under them, along with 23 other school in New York, with the "Bloomberg Education Revolution" fully underway.
They don't face a cloudy future, but an immediate escalation of the systemic exclusion and disregard they've faced for years. Their view of budget cuts is global, not local:
"- The privatization of our school system
- The budget cuts
- Lack of appropriate leadership
- Malicious closings/phasing out of schools against the communities' wishes.
- Cell phone policies
- Overcrowded classes & abuse of SAFE rooms
- Over policing of our schools and the criminalization of our youth.
We feel that these issues are setting our students up for failure, and we DEMAND a change! We believe that trying to control our schools is just another symptom of the blatant racism in our country similar to the government's response to the senseless killing of Trayvon Martin." -- Paul Robeson Students call for May 1st HS Student WALKOUT, Youtube
We have to answer the question of who we are. Are we liberals, clinging to the hope of a quiet reform from the bottom up? Are we "class clowns" with face paint and stunts up-and-down Wall Street? Or are we Paul Robeson High? They are everything we should hope to be: brave, clear, uncompromising, and disillusioned. They represent a portion of our peers who have been truly oppressed for years, without a voice. They represent our connection to the world outside the US that has also been exploited and demoralized.
When we decide who we are mobilizing for, we decide who we are as a generation. When a call is given out by inner-city kids who are the first to face the assault, we have a choice. Is this the call we respond to? Is this the call that will resonate?
An injury to Paul Robeson High is an injury to all. They know this, that's why their Facebook event doesn't mention their school: they simply call is a HS Student Walkout.
