My law professor said something today that resonated with me.He said:
You only possess the rights that you assert.
In other words, liberty is no longer (if it ever truly was) the default in our society.
In a nation that ever increasingly exhibits aspects characteristic of a police state, in the era of the PATRIOT Act, it is more important than ever that citizens of all ages actively engage themselves in the protection of their fundamental rights.
Young people are especially vulnerable to constitutional rights violations, as many of us believe that we lack the clout or resources necessary to fight back.This mentality stymies the youth rights movement, and is as incorrect as it is dangerous.True, young people lack some of the traditional indicators of social power, such as substantial financial means, and, in the case of those under eighteen, the right to vote.But lack of cash-on-hand and even the lack of the right to cast a ballot do not render youth powerless.Youth have significant power indeed, if channeled correctly.
Every person, young or old, rich or poor, has a voice—the ability to speak out.The question is: do we use it?
Merely complaining about an issue, as many who claim to be a part of the youth rights movement do, is at the very best unproductive, and at the worst destructive to the cause.We must do more than complain.
Simply writing a letter about an issue, or timidly discussing a rights violation, while certainly more constructive than complaining, still doesn’t fit the bill.We must do more than hide behind paper and social convention.
We must speak.
But is one person’s voice enough?The answer is almost always no.We must speak as a group—a unified force.In order to do this, we must find like-minded individuals to rally around us.For, certainly, the voice of one hundred is greater than the voice of one.
And so I call upon young people everywhere to unite for the cause of equality.Turn complaints into campaigns, and mobilize whatever resources that may be at your disposal.Form a group you can rely upon, a group sizable enough to attract attention, and make yourselves heard as a unit.This is the single most powerful way to effect change, whether the forum be a school, a city, a state, a nation, or the world.Unite as many, yet speak as one—this is my charge to you, readers.
If you don’t like a school policy, advocate against it with the full force of the student body.If the police in your city are harassing young people, remind the mayor that his job depends on the satisfaction of his constituents, or future constituents as the case may be.If a law discriminates against youth, fight it as a collective voice, all the way to the courts if necessary.
Do these things, and you will find yourself a formidable change agent in a world that worships the status quo.As my law professor so wisely stated:
You only possess the rights that you assert.
So go assert them, together with as many allies as you can attain.
I used to direct an after-school program, which was housed in a public school classroom, and I tried to implement a democratic meeting with my middle school students (a diverse group in terms of race and family income). As well-intentioned as I was, the students didn’t respect me as a leader because I was offering them decision-making power. They seemed so used to an authoritarian school day that they didn’t know what to do with an unexpected dose of freedom. It was also just a drop in the bucket compared to the way they spent the majority of their time. How would you have handled this situation?
- Redwood City, CA
Jonah Canner responded to the above scenario with an excellent post about how we are all democratic by nature, even little kids respond to each other democratically while playing, and it is school that imposes an authoritarian structure upon us. The following years stuck in school become a long, tired battle between authority and resistance to it. With all the harm that school does it is hard to reverse it over night, it is hard also to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of that ongoing battle of authority and resistance. Especially when you don’t seem to fit easily into expected roles. I definitely encourage you to click the link and read the post. It was an insightful response. (more…)
Let’s say you have two middle school girls, whom we’ll call JC and CC. They don’t like each other. JC then makes a video of herself and a few other girls calling CC names, and then this video appears on YouTube. Obviously, CC is very upset by this. Perhaps she could create a counter video saying nasty slanderous things about JC. Depending on the former video’s actual content, she may have a case for harassment. In any case, JC is the nasty one here, given what is known anyway. That said… how in the hell is this case any of their school’s business?
The facts in this case arose when J.C., an eighth grade girl, videotaped a group of her friends “talkin’ smack” about their classmate C.C. The video featured this group of kids saying that C.C. was spoiled, and a slut. J.C. then when home and uploaded the video to YouTube, and informed several classmates, including C.C., of the video’s existence.
The next day, C.C. and her mother informed the school of the video’s existence. C.C. also met with a school counselor for no more than half a class period to discuss how she felt humiliated by the video.
School administrators, upon viewing the video, called J.C. out of class, and made her write a statement about the video. The administrators also demanded that J.C. delete the video from YouTube. Upon consultation with the school district’s lawyer, the principal suspended J.C. for two days.
J.C. sued the school district, arguing that the school had violated her First Amendment rights and did not have the authority to discipline her over a video made and viewed off campus.
Having been a victim of middle school bullying myself, I do feel very much for CC’s plight, but then again, I do have to side with JC here in that the school is majorly overstepping its bounds on this issue. YouTube is not under the jurisdiction of Beverly Vista School or any other school district, nor are the private lives and doings of students any of the school’s business. (more…)
Our country is shaken up today and trying to find answers, one day after the horrifying shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC by a racist, anti-semitic extremist, killing an innocent security guard named Stephen Johns, and it happened not two weeks after another crazy extremist gunned down Kansas abortion provider George Tiller.
Naturally, we have everyone talking about the problems in our society with bigotry and hate crimes, with the fear of more domestic terrorism from crazy extremists. With it comes another question. How do these people get so hateful?
While I of course do not have a definite answer on that, there is a rather large portion of the population that can very easily be made to learn only hate and denied any access to information contrary to the hate. Those people are children and teens.
Because “everyone knows” that it is a parent’s job to instill values into their children, that parents have a “right” to raise their children however they see fit, it is believed that parents have the “right” to decide what information and media their children receive. It’s a common fall-back our free speech allies use against video game restrictions and library censorship, that it should be the parents and not the government or any other non-parent entity who decides what children read, play, etc. In that particular no-win this-or-that, whether parents or the government should be deciding what kids should be reading or playing, obviously the parents is the option to go with, but it’s really annoying that to so many these are the only two options, completely ignoring the rather important third option of “neither”, that the kids themselves should be the only ones to make that decision. (more…)
A number of news stories have come out lately about concerned groups seeking to ban books they find objectionable or inappropriate for kids, for a variety of reasons. One group in Wisconsin successfully got several teen books banned for depicting homosexuality. In Tennessee, some parents are trying to get books removed from library shelves for discussing sexual abuse, racism, self-cutting, and a number of other issues. They are also trying to remove a book about anorexia believing it would encourage teens to become anorexic. The list goes on.
The National Youth Rights Association opposes these efforts to “shield” teens from supposedly objectionable literature. Teenagers’ minds belong only to themselves and are not there for adults to mold as they wish. The only person who should be making decisions about what books a young person reads is that young person herself. Not her teachers. Not her principal. Not some “concerned” group of citizens. Not even her parents. She, and only she, is the one to make that decision. (more…)
I’m more inclined to agree with the first post here, but StudentActivism.net makes a good point that this case was about an injunction, not about the merits of the speech itself. Still, I can’t see how anyone could side with the high school on any issue related to this case.
According to Sam Stein in the Huffington Post, Sonia Sotomayor is “the odds-on favorite” to be chosen by Barack Obama to fill retiring Justice David Souter’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. She now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit in New York City. She is regularly described as liberal and a judicial activist - fine in my book - and it would good to have a first Hispanic and another woman on the Supreme Court.
But she has one major, very bad decision on free speech and press to her discredit, which should give everyone who values these freedoms in our society serious cause for concern about Sotomayor’s possible nomination to the High Court.
The decision came from Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court last May, regarding Lewis Mills High School student Avery Doninger. While running for Senior Class Secretary, Ms. Doninger found reason to object to the school’s cancellation of a “jamfest” event, and characterized those who scotched the event as “douchebags” on her off-campus LiveJournal blog (she also characterized a school official in that same blog posting as getting “pissed off”). The school officials, in turn, took umbrage, prohibited Avery from running for Class Secretary, and disregarded the plurality of votes she received, anyway, as a write-in candidate. Avery sued the school officials, and the Federal District Court supported the school. Avery appealed to Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court.
After acknowledging the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision, which held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” Sotomayor’s Court proceeded to affirm the District Court’s ruling - that is, Sonia Sotomayor and her colleague justices upheld the high school’s right to punish Doninger for her off-campus speech. Their reasoning was that schools have an obligation to impart to their students “shared values,” which include not only the importance of free expression but a “proper respect for authority”.
“Proper respect for authority” … is this what our democratic society and freedom is based upon? Last time I checked, I thought our democracy and freedom were predicated on the principle that all people have a right to express their opinions, which must certainly include disrespect for authority, if actions by the authority - such as canceling a school event such as “jamfest” - are at issue.
Or as Constitutional scholar and law-professor Jonathan Turley put it about this decision last year, “The continual expansion of the authority of school officials over student speech teaches a foul lesson to these future citizens. I would prefer some obnoxious speech than teaching students that they must please government officials if they want special benefits or opportunities.”
I’m going to ask a question that is often asked in regards to issues with youth: where are the parents? Of course, this question is always asked with very different meanings.
Just today, two sources have inspired me to ask this question. The first was this blog post by a feminist blogger I’ve been following on Twitter. It contains accounts of how she as well as some of her commenters have suffered sexual abuse in the past (unwanted activity ranging from touching of breasts, grinding, all the way up to full on rape), that which for varying reasons they did not even recognize as abuse right away. They still felt very violated, of course, but were pressured into keeping their mouths shut, that it wasn’t a big deal and they shouldn’t be making a big thing of it. Which served only to shame them more, causing them to remain quiet and more ashamed when abuses got more severe, even in cases of rape. And in most of these cases, they were around 14 years old, give or take a couple years.
Very saddened by these horrible stories, I asked myself why they didn’t realize what was happening was truly wrong, that they had every right and reason to feel violated and expect the perpetrator to be punished for treating them inappropriately. Of course, this question was answered right there in that entry, as well as several others this blogger has written on the subject. The victims felt immobilized because of shame, as mentioned already, as well as fear that if they made it known they felt abused they would be subject to worse abuse. So we’re left with them having to suffer in silence.
MADD just sent out the following e-mail to their supporters. They want to give Grand Theft Auto (GTA) an adults only rating because it features the crime of drunk driving (apparently all the murder, car jacking and other crimes in it are just fine with MADD). “Drunk driving is not a game and not a joke” they say. Apparently only responsible adults should drink and drive. It isn’t appropriate for “youth”.
Oh wait, wasn’t MADD supposed to be opposed to drunk driving for *everyone*? So why then would the game’s rating matter? Why does MADD think it is somehow more acceptable for adults to drink and drive than youth?
Why also do they think limiting free speech is somehow an acceptable tactic in their anti-youth and anti-alcohol crusade?
MADD is encouraging their members to write the retailers below to pull GTA4 from shelves. You’d be surprized what a few pissed off complainers can accomplish. Don’t let MADD have the only say on this subject!
Write those same retailers and tell them that GTA is just a game and they shouldn’t stop selling it because a few mad mothers are upset over it. Write them and tell them to stand up for free speech.
MADD’s e-mail:
Each year nearly 13,500 people die in drunk driving crashes and
another half a million are injured in alcohol-related traffic crashes.
This is why MADD is extremely disappointed by the decision of the
manufacturers of the game Grand Theft Auto IV to include a game module
where players have to drive drunk.
Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke. Drunk driving is a
choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable. MADD
is calling on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to reclassify
Grand Theft Auto IV as an Adults Only game, a step up from the current
rating of Mature and for the manufacturer to consider a stop in
distribution if not out of responsibility to society then out of
respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.
If you are concerned about the content of Grand Theft Auto IV, please
contact the retailers below and voice your opinion.
Amazon.com
206-266-1000
Online contact form
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html
Best Buy
612-291-1000
Online contact form
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=cat12104&type=page
Circuit City
804-527-4000
Online contact form
http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/genericContent.do?oid=209855&c=1
EB Games and GameStop
817-424-2000
help@gamestop.com
Wal-Mart
479-273-4000
Online contact form
http://www.walmart.com/cservice/cu_commentsonline.gsp?cu_heading=8
Politicians and public interest groups are always looking to protect youth. They have a long list of so-called bad guys that they believe are a danger to young people. Even if in all this, they ignore the very many actual dangers youth face every day. Maybe there are things they find much more important than the well-being of young citizens. But then, who’s going to help young people? Who really cares about them? I’ll tell you who.
That’s us! We’re the National Youth Rights Association, or NYRA for short. I’m Katrina Moncure, secretary of NYRA and board member. There I am holding my cat, Midnight.
Anyway, NYRA has many goals. We want to lower the voting age to 16. We want to lower the drinking age to 18. We want all youth curfew laws abolished. Those are our major goals, but we have lots of others, too. (more…)
This blog entry is partially a response to the e-mail below, and partially a general comment, so not everything is gonna be directly related to or in response to this quoted bit:
Well that is definitely an issue but not the only one. There are many steps it making this country bearable again and that isnt my only concern. Granted it is an issue but i think we can live without alcohol for a little while. What about our right to privacy? You know the patriot act allows the government to tap into your phone lines and listen to your conversation with just a flick of a switch. No questioning. The war is out of hand and just about everyone is either against it or fed up with it. I am personally more concerned about that rather then when I get to drink a beer and when I don’t. I would hope that would not be your ONLY reason for selecting a candidate…
The Patriot Act is extremely mild compared to the many infringements on privacy that young people are subjected to. If you care about the right to privacy, consider the following.
The Patriot Act doesn’t require that individuals submit to random, suspicionless drug testing as many schools and indeed some parents are now requiring. Unlike drug testing at work, youth usually don’t have any choice whether to be at school or live with their parents.
The Patriot Act doesn’t allow authorities to search through an individual’s property without probable cause like schools do with lockers and parents do with everything.
The Patriot Act allows for increased use of wiretaps and monitoring of e-mail but nothing close to the kind of tracking software parents regularly place on their kid’s computers that tracks and records every keystroke and action taken with the computer. Every website, every word typed, every program used is recorded and sent to parents.
The Patriot Act may allow the government, in some cases, to look at what books you are checking out, but it doesn’t outright ban you from looking at or listening to certain books, movies, websites, magazines and music like age restrictions do.
While not part of the Patriot Act, no doubt you are alarmed by the increasing use of security cameras in public places watching our every move. That pales in comparison to the ways teens are tracked. Parents have taken to putting GPS tracking devices into backpacks and cars. Plus many cell phones now have GPS enabled on them and parents use those to track their kid’s movements. Furthermore there are computers parents install in cars that record every turn you make, how fast you go, how complete a stop you make, etc.
More directly, parents are even installing cameras in their kid’s bedrooms to monitor them at all times. Or removing their bedroom doors so they have no privacy whatsoever. This is all perfectly legal and happens all across the country.
As you of course know, the government (via schools) controls what clothes you wear, how you style your hair, whether you can have a cell phone or other electronic device, and what you can say or write in school. The Patriot Act doesn’t come close to that.
The war is indeed an important issue. But who is it that we are sending overseas to fight and die in that war? Young people. Young people who probably weren’t old enough to vote for the politicians that sent them to that war. Young people who risk their lives in the desert and are not treated as equals in this country or given the respect they deserve for making such a sacrifice. They return home and unlike most Americans can’t open a can of beer while watching a football game, or go out to a bar with a few buddies, or even attend many concerts. Over 645 young Americans have died in the desert while never being respected as equals in the nation that sent them there.
The infringements on the privacy of youth are more extreme than the Patriot Act ever was or will be, and affect far more people on a daily basis. After being raised as youth with no expectation of privacy is it any wonder people don’t value privacy as much when they get older and get into power? And while I’m not going to say that the drinking age is more important than the war, it directly relates to the war and is another injustice heaped upon young people that absolutely needs to be addressed.
Youth rights isn’t just some side project or a somehow a selfish, small issue that distracts from ‘bigger’ issues out in the world. I know you didn’t say that, and I’m not saying people should vote only on the basis of youth rights, but youth rights is a HUGE issue that deserves a lot more attention and respect than it currently gets - even from NYRA members. Cause if we don’t put youth rights first, who will?
Finally, if you (and this isn’t just directed to you) oppose the Patriot Act and the War and invasions on privacy and everything else, did you vote for candidates who opposed those policies? Were you able to or were you prevented from voting by the voting age? Who knows how different the country would be today if you and your peers were able to vote.
Youth rights is directly intertwined with all other issues you care about in society. It should never be put on the backburner, even in an election year.
Why don't you 
