By the Editors of Poly Spotlight
14 November 2012
The Poly High administration and the student body have always pretended to get along, like a married couple begrudgingly staying together for the sake of the children. It’s a relationship of mutual dislike generally maintained with minimal rifts—that is, until that fire of teenage rebellion can no longer be quelled with Sex Pistols LPs.
As everyone probably knows by now, Poly students recently hosted a series of ill-conceived and ill-executed fights that transformed the campus into some sort of primitivist utopia. And because we live in a country prosperous enough to afford gratuitous food fights, we had one—complete with apples, oranges and a false sense of accomplishment.
What was the reasoning behind the hard foods? Maybe people thought that actually hurting each other in a food fight would add to the excitement, the way open-heart surgery gets more exciting when the patient dies. Kids around school could be heard praising the bravery of those who participated and laughing at those who got hurt, which begs the question: do students really need the emotional detachment of a sociopath just to weather the angst and boredom that come with high school?
Kids are already treating these incidents as something they can look back on with a wispy sigh of nostalgia, tiny cartoon hearts dancing around their fluttering eyelashes. “Ah, to be young and tried as a minor…” But both the police and the administration have better things to do than make sure we don’t accidentally weaponize our own stupidity. The announcements, the shortened lunch and passing periods, the no cell phones rule—all this was just the administration reacting to our actions. Can you really blame them?
We built around the fights an obscene amount of hysteria usually reserved for national tragedies and Harry Potter premieres. And for what? To stand up against the administration? How is it that American teenagers look upon institutions of public education, the cornerstone of democracy, and see a system of redbrick gulags in the throes of fascism?
Or maybe these fights weren’t about sending a message at all; maybe they were just for laughs. But that’s the thing—it’s only funny in the most remedial sense, and even then only to those who weren’t on the receiving end. These kinds of antics only play in a high school setting, because the school has to put up with it. You take these incredibly simple, unoriginal acts of juvenile delinquency elsewhere and you’ll promptly be fired/arrested/kicked out of the bar. The humor of criminality dies as soon as you step off campus.
High school is this quarantine bubble where all priorities are upside-down and people don’t realize that, to society at large, they exist as little more than series of annoying sounds. At our age, the world is locked firmly in orbit around us and we’ll indulge our instant-profit, zero-investment impulses just to hear our friends yell “Dude!” and applaud our empty valor.
And the end result of all our heroic displays of insurrection and youthful abandon?
Seagulls.