greenskye

The reason isn’t really silly, I get it, but the punishment was.

In high school I spent a lot of time reading. Basically every lunch, every study hall period, etc. I read a fairly significant chunk of the library.

Problem was that I also tended to read during boring lectures in class, which pissed off a couple of my teachers and resulted in not great grades.

But all of their punishments were designed to punish people who hated to read. So my math teacher finally snaps and sends me to in school suspension… where I sit in a room and the monitor on duty is absolutely delighted that I sat there the entire day to read and even lets me go early for such good behavior.

I was later kicked out of honors courses and put into a remedial study hall situation. Again with a monitor who was supposed to make sure people were actually studying. Only way to get out of this was … a library pass. Where I could freely read whatever I wanted. Never did spend much time in study hall.

And also we aren’t (or sometimes are) allowed to express our own displeasure at these actions. Like reacting to speech somehow isn’t covered by freedom of speech.

For me at least, I’m wanting to focus our efforts beyond the goal of simply educating the unaware. A huge amount of effort over the last 8+ years has been in “awareness”. That if we simply made people aware of the bad stuff, that they’d correctly see it as bad and would want to take action.

It’s an entirely different problem we face when people are aware of the bad stuff and either don’t care or actively support it. The ‘solution’ can’t simply be awareness campaigns and the hope that people will react the way we want them to. We have to do something actually effective.

They can’t do anything if you stand your ground like these people

No, they still can. It’s not legal (for whatever that’s worth these days), but they can absolutely just bust down your door anyway. We need to start treating them like they lawless criminals they are.

The system will not save you, at least not immediately. You might get let go later, after they’ve sufficiently punished your resistance, but that’s it.