Hold those things that tell your history and protect them… The ability to have somebody to tell your story is so important. It says: ‘I was here’.
— Maya Angelou
One of those splattering days — called to teach special education at one of the high schools in Lincoln City. Wonderful students, wonderful para-educators, wonderful teachers.
But not according to the powers that be in the world! How many students are thrown to the floor/ground and handcuffed by armed cops? How many schools are like prisons, with armed school personnel and local cops there to intimidate?
We are priming youth with these strip searches and forced drug tests and grillings about their allegiances outside the capitalist frame to be compliant adults, scared of their own shadows, frightened to death to take too many breathes of air.
No one can dispute a federal appellate court’s characterization of a strip-search as “demeaning, dehumanizing, undignified, humiliating, terrifying, unpleasant, embarrassing, [and] repulsive, signifying degradation and submission.” Even the Supreme Court has said that a search that intrusive “demand[s] its own specific suspicions.” The shock and humiliation suffered by persons subjected to such arrests and searches is aggravated by the fact that they are almost always ordinary citizens who have never been in jail before. In one case a Chicago woman doctor who had been strip searched afterward suffered paranoia, suicidal feelings and depression and would not undress anywhere but in a closet.
The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The Framers would be appalled.
Source: “How the Supreme Court Came to embrace Strip Searches for Trivial Offenses.”
So, how many students are put through this fascist ringer, forced into this series of illegal, unethical, inhumane, insane demands that speak to deeply dehumanizing actions by the so-called powers?
Teaching students in public schools is like pulling the blinders and the blindfolds off of captives who have been shuttered away in some dark and cold cave in Pakistan. They think they sort of have these freedoms outlined in the Constitution, or Bill of Rights, but in reality, they know the jig is up. They know you can’t cross the street while being black without a police confrontation. They know that if they skip rope the wrong way or if they wrestle with their buddies in the cafeteria, then they are subject to the resources officer (thug, wannabe cop) coming in and escalating the situation.
You can’t wear caps, and you can’t hug in public. If you raise your voice in school as a Latino or some teen who is Asian and expressively dressed, well, we have the entire thug force of America come at you full-force.
The Fourth Amendment is dead, and the new government bureaucrats and Gestapo chieftains have taken away unlawful and overreaching search and seizure laws and have normalized their complete “right” to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
In any given day, thousands of Americans undergo forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases.
I have worked for the Starvation Army, through the auspices of the VA, and that corrupt religious outfit — brown shirts one and all — not only forces veterans to pee in a cup for an illegal UA test, but twice daily everyone in a transition housing center has to blow in a straw and prove sobriety with an alcohol monitor.
It’s not for the benefit of the individual, mind you. Getting caught with a hot pee or positive for booze blow, for the homeless vet, the powers that be come down like orchestrated hammers to remind you that you are broken, that you need fixing, that your three hots and a cot are jeopardized and that you might be on the streets, with your four bags of belongings, your emotional support dog, your wife and three kids in tow.
The same treatment is in store for our first through 12th graders.
Typical of the public schools is a North Carolina case of administrators strip-searching a 10-year-old boy in hopes of finding a $20 bill lost by another student, even though the accused boy protested twice that he did not have the missing money. Get this — these little and big brown-shirts, like this ass. principal, ordered the fifth grader to disrobe down to his underwear and subjected him “to an aggressive strip-search that included rimming the edge of his underwear.”
The so-deemed ripped-off $20 bill was later found in the school cafeteria. Did the parents come in with bats and get retribution? Was anything done?
The children of the world want real answers, real stories, real heroes and real tools to navigate a world of fascists, climate change, huge class divides, no economic futures for at least 40 percent of the students as they matriculate out and meander in the wasteland of the 21st century’s second decade in. We have talking sessions and the youth want to ask why people my age and younger have allowed the corporations and government to seize the most intimate details of who we are. Why this is a police state, and a policed school system.
They get it and don’t think all of this talk is some movie script for a Minority Report Two. They already know all their testing scores and performance reports are held captive somewhere. They also know that their vaccination and health records are easily accessed by school officials.
I try and tamp down the urge to tell it like it is early in a class: in the United States we are now guilty until proven innocent.
Students want to know why there are so many fellow classmates with Epipens, why so many are on Individualized Employment Plans, why so many have para-educators assigned to them, what so many are pulled out of classes for special ed or special diets.
We can’t share snacks at breaks because so many are allergic to gluten or sugar or corn or coconut or peanuts of eggs or soy. They are these nervous assist objects and gizmos for many youth on the spectrum to handle, and some are allowed to bring in their own beanbags or to stand up away from the class or pace the room.
We talk about the consequences of unintended fallout from all the junk and plastic products and chemicals laced in the foods and emanating from every corner of a community.
Background checks, parents’ credit checks, health records, records on what they eat and purchase and what their parents plop down on credit cards. What we think, believe, hope for, covet, adhere to spiritually, all of it is recorded, put out in the cloud, held by the IRS, Medical-Pharma-Finance-Debt Complex.
On one hand, we talk about climate change, plastics in their feces, why they get sick with cheese or white bread or with peanut butter. These are smart kids, probing, wanting to know more and more.
They want people in their lives that take them over to the edge of the cliff, and strap them into the hang-glider and take off. They want teachers and mentors taking them to the edge of the boat and plopping backwards to the great blue sea in their snorkel and scuba gear.
They want to go into the forest, not the edge of it. They want to spend time with beavers and watch the process of dam building and the amazing species of aquatic animals thriving.
These children are tired of the Tupperware brand of education and the countless coloring projects and poster projects. They want teachers to help them build catfish ponds, to build gardens, to learn in tepees, to learn how to make children’s puzzles out of wood to sell to the public. They want zip lines around their school, and they want more and more hands-on work. They want to know how to make clay pots, and they want to learn how to arrange flowers, and grow them. They want to learn how to grow food and prep it and cook it. They want to build solar powered pedicabs, and they want to go to all the nursing homes and care facilities with their homemade drums and pianos and accordions and voices and sing and dance and perform for their elders.
It all can be done, and they ask why not, and we talk about every dollar put into a system like decent and real life education getting many dollars matched in return for each dollar invested in children and youth.
Then, we talk about what it means to give up everything for the job, that getting a low paid service job means not having health insurance and being forced to not take vacations, ever, if the job is below a certain amount of hours. They know they won’t be high paid $2000-an-hour lawyers, and they know that very few of the graduates from all the schools in this county will get to be brain surgeons.
We talk about the power in numbers, like bee hives, or ants, and then relate it to people — how many people would it take to get some land, build gardens, do some home-cottage industry work, and sustain a healthy lifestyle. I name this as intentional communities and cooperative living.
Unfortunately, these children are going to be the products of parents who are downtrodden, negative about their own futures, and denigrating against any or all new ideas to get out of this hamster wheel America.
Most of the ideals the youth I teach possess come from Hollywood or thereabouts. They have not met real farmers who are also experts in cheese making and cooking and preserving. They are not meeting the people who are the survivors and the ones who can help us get through this climate and economic chaos.
We talk about the very concept of making sure not to degrade or toxify one self of any of the vital keys to self and community preservation — you are what you eat, you are what you read, you are what you dream, you are what you hope, you are what you think, you are what you say, you are what you believe, you are what you imagine, you are what you do.
There is a lot of pressure on youth, but mainly because the education system as such and the economic horizon we have gifted them are imperiled and off the rails. They want to know what Genetic Engineering is, why all the food items in grocery stores that are not in the green grocery section are contaminated with Roundup, or glyphosate.
They want to know what a Franken-fish is. We talk about that, the mighty salmon, since they reside in Salmon Nation.
Twenty million people share our home in this place we call Salmon Nation.
It spans 100 million acres between San Francisco and Anchorage and generates over $500 billion in economic activity each year, yet is only a sliver of the range that Pacific salmon once ran.
The historic salmon runs remind us of our heritage—what is, was, and, maybe, could be again. Salmon Nation offers a framework for our thinking—a nature state, not a nation state—based on interconnection and the broad distribution of wealth between marine and terrestrial, freshwater and saltwater, urban and rural. Our work is to figure out how to organize our communities and economies to sustain, or even restore, that wealth into the future. Salmon Nation is about the connection between people and place—loving where you live and leaving it better than you found it.
I talk about the power of young people occupying buildings, occupying parks, occupying grocery stores, and occupying the world. They want to know how to protest, how to sing, how to develop the tools that will one day be used by them collectively to do more in the world than to work for the man and bleed their souls for the debts incurred in this capitalist nation.
We parse the following press release just pushed out by environmental groups:
FDA Lifts Import Ban on Genetically Engineered Salmon
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Center for Food Safety, Friends of the Earth and Quinault Indian Nation, and Feed Seven Generations today decried the FDA’s decision to lift the 2016 import alert that banned genetically engineered salmon from entering the U.S.
“USDA’s new guidelines don’t require adequate mandatory labeling, don’t require calling the fish “genetically engineered” and don’t help consumers know what kind of fish they are buying,” said George Kimbrell, Legal Director at the Center for Food Safety. “These guidelines don’t require mandatory labeling of GE salmon, and instead allow producers to use QR codes or 1-800 numbers for more information. That clearly is not what the Murkowski amendment requires.”
Dana Perls, Senior food policy campaigner with Friends of the Earth, warned, “The FDA’s decision to allow GMO salmon onto the U. S. market runs counter to sound science and market demand. More than 80 retailers have said they won’t sell this risky, unlabeled GMO fish and polls show consumers don’t want it.”
“The FDA’s unilateral decision, without tribal consultation, is an alarming signal that our sacred and prized wild salmon is now even more vulnerable to external markets and ecological threats,” said Fawn Sharp, President of the Quinault Indian Nation. “It’s unconscionable and arrogant to think man can improve upon our Creator’s perfection in wild salmon as a justification and excuse to satisfy corporate ambition and greed.”
“By lifting the ban on genetically engineered salmon, the FDA has put American consumers at serious risk and has directly attacked the life ways of Pacific Northwest Tribal communities,” said Valerie Segrest, Muckleshoot Tribal Member and Executive Director of Feed Seven Generations. “They have done this without a single tribal consultation, which violates their legal responsibility, mandating that they consult with tribes. Clearly this is an appropriation of our culture and this action will lead to inevitable contamination and irreversible damage to our food system.”
In every year since 2015, Senator Murkowski (R-AK) has inserted a requirement into FDA appropriations language that requires the FDA to issue mandatory labeling guidelines for GE salmon, using clear, on-package labeling stating that these fish are genetically engineered. FDA claims that the USDA new “bioengineered food” labeling guidelines are adequate, but the USDA “bioengineered” guidelines do not require explicitly labeling GE salmon as “genetically engineered.” Moreover, companies could choose to hide the label using a QR code, rather than on-package labeling.
George Kimbrell, Legal Director at the Center for Food Safety, announced that CFS is examining possible legal actions to force the FDA to comply with the Murkowski amendment. Moreover, the Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice are leading the legal challenge to whether the FDA even has the legal authority to approve this genetically engineered fish as a “new animal drug”.
More information on health and environmental risks of genetically engineered salmon and a full list of stores that have made commitments to not sell genetically engineered seafood and salmon, letters sent to companies by Friends of the Earth U.S., Center for Food Safety and allies, and a list of coalition partners are available at www.gefreeseafood.org.
We talk about how youth, how students, even how their own parents have no say in this insanity of releasing Frankenstein fish into their diets. They are already concerned about other grand experiments by the sociopaths — nanoparticles in all processed foods; more and more chemicals on their bodies, inside their bodies, inside their lungs, unregulated created by these sociopaths in the sciences and technologies hired as hired-guns to make profits for the elite at the expense of global health, and each child’s health. We talk about the native American way, that we need sanity back, sane ideas, sustainability that is real.
Tribal fishermen scramble to contain a spill of farmed Atlantic salmon in north Puget Sound before they tarnish local waters, shedding light on a global struggle between farmed and wild fish. Annie Crawley worked with the Lummi Tribe, Wild Fish Conservancy, Lummi Island Wild, Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife and many others to tell the story of the farmed Atlantic salmon spill into the Salish Sea in August 2017. The event sparked a movement of people to speak out against Atlantic salmon net pens in the Puget Sound. Although our state government has taken action to remove the net pens, they are still in other parts of our world ocean. We hope this film will ignite others to choose wild salmon over farmed salmon and create awareness around the impact farmed salmon can have to wild populations.
— Annie Crawley
The young people of today are our only hope. It’s not the aging politicians that will work to solve the global problems. It’s not the rich and the famous and the celebrity who give a shit about us, the 80 percenters. It’s not the athletes or the CEOs or the bankers who will put the blood sweat and tears into the problems to solve them.
Young people are the lost generations, the lost people, the lost souls, as we adults have abandoned their futures by eating up their futures with this continual continent-sized pile of lies and magical thinking.
They are ready for action and for actors to help them lead themselves. Young people are open to radicals and revolutionaries. Young people need leaders and shaman people to help them crawl out of the dungeons their parents have constructed in not only their own lives, but the future lives of their children.
The students.
Each day I learn more and more about the value of listening and being with and being one with the people of the world, the new people, the arising ones, the people who have not felt gravity enough to weigh down their hope and outlook and creativity. Unfortunately, the systems set up in Capitalism are all about colonizing people at younger and younger ages so they too can be ready for the hamster wheel of Capitalism.