I’M POPULAR AND NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD OF YOU
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I agree that there should be significant consequences for their actions, but it’s possible that expelling a gang of nazi wannabe’s and turning them into a gang of home schooled kids being schooled by parents who didn’t plan on home schooling them could have unintended consequences. Yes, some parents might send them to an appropriate private school or home school them well, but not all parents have the resources or aptitude to do those things. If that was the end result, I could see online nazis suggesting kids get themselves kicked out of school as a recruitment tactic.
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Yes but Norway approach: educate, assimilate. Nazism is prime fodder for testosterone-driven youths, but very few of them would not be sickened by the outcomes that lie down that path.
Educate them, strip them of water polo team rights, but don’t fuel the fire. Radicalising them will make them group behind the scenes out of site, and we’ve had too much of that for now.
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I saw a someone online suggesting that this is precisely an alt-right tactic. Get dumb kids to say and do dumb stuff. then when they face harsh consequences from the authorities or even just social media backlash, they suddenly see themselves as victim of an overreaching leftwing. This kids should be made to understand what they did was wrong. I don’t know what the appropriate punishment should be. I’m not sure if participating in a stupid chant deserves the same sort of harsh punishment as actual physical or sexual violence. In those cases another person has been directly harmed. In this case, maybe theres a possibility for redemption if these kids understand how stupid they were. (I’m not saying go easy on them.)
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I’m not sure that you could say that students at Pacifica High School are “upper class.” Median income in Garden Grove is about $60,000. As far as I remember, it’s somewhat common to have high school water polo teams. Something about the year-round warm weather and outdoor pools, I guess.
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It’s also a crowd of kids. There could be one or two real charismatic kids who know what they’re doing who convince their peer group. And some could be redeemable, some could be Stephen Millers. I would want punisment/education that helps them be more human, but also don’t want to drive them further into being nazis. Hard to figure out how.
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Then schools need to stop cutting out the humanities and arts. That’s how you include empathy and critical thinking in education.
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Yeah. Though Kavanaugh and Trump went to schools that included such things and they were apparently absent the day they handed out empathy.
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White, male, elite privilege is a hell of a drug.
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Seize up those gears.
Not working class then. “Only” 60k is a pretty privileged statement to make.
It would be funny if they sang “Springtime for Hitler” or “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” given they are only ironic Nazi songs.
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Your comment touches on what I think is a fascinating question about the antidotes to fascism. I think we convince ourselves to some degree that racism/fascism/nationalism come from a place of stupidity and/or ignorance, and if we could just improve the education and/or make people not be idiots, then it would eliminate much if not all of the problem.
But then we look at Weimar Germany, where they had probably the best educated population in world, and it still produced what it produced. The same people who were so incapable of empathy or morality were often also capable of discussing classical music or painting or architectural styles in intelligent ways.
In conclusion, people are confusing and I don’t understand them.
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I do agree that education isn’t the only antidote to these things, especially when the education system is still shot through with these things. Humanities, as it started to be practiced in the postwar period, sought to make some corrections to these things, though. There was a big push to have greater inclusion of a variety of voices and ways of understanding the world. In literature, people began to push back against the almost exclusively white, male canon, for example. History started to become a field that did more than just look at the great men, and as the field itself became more diverse in make up, new fields opened up that started to seriously question to teleological narrative of the field (one of Eurocentric progress to one of questioning that narrative).
So, there is no singular answer here. It depends on the education, as much as it depends on the role of the family and other institutions in a child’s life. We should also note that much of the postwar progress made in decolonizing our humanistic fields of knowledge production have been under attack since they began to be a serious force in the production of knowledge and started to have influence outside of the ivory tower of academia.
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I think that attack you reference is exactly what we’re seeing in broad strokes across our culture. Have you read Coates’ We Were Eight Years In Power? I thought is did a marvelous job of explaining how American history is full of examples of progress being made and seeming inevitably permanent, only to have the backlash more than undo any gains.
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Nothing says camaraderie like a bunch of undersexed dude bros in speedos clambering over each other for a ball in a swimming pool. It’s like a premise for a racist High School Musical featuring Proud Boys.
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I have not gotten around to that yet… I’ve read his other books, though.
Yes, we do ourselves a disservice when we assume progress (meaning creating a more equitable society for all) is inevitable, because it’s not. The Weimar example is great, as it had high levels of education and cities like Berlin were incredibly cosmopolitan. The nazis fed off the depression and off the perceived “evil” decadence of Berlin’s culture. It gave nazi supporters an easy to grasp narrative that fed into their sense of (both) entitlement and fear of change. They pointed to certain groups, starting with the Jews (and really blaming Jews for all the other “ills” some perceived to be the cause of the depression), and said “that’s who to blame.” And that’s easy to grasp. And it has nothing to do with level of intellect, either, as the problems of the modern world are so complicated, so hard to pin down, because there is not singular cause. It’s a million moving parts and you can’t find a single thing to pin it all on. So, if you’re some peasant farmer in rural Bavaria, and you are reading newspapers about all the crazy art and culture in Berlin, and meanwhile, your farm is failing, and your only son ran away to join a cabaret as a drag queen, your daughter has no interest in marrying the neighbor’s son, no one goes to church anymore or respects your way of life or authority, and the reason for all of these things are not readily articulated in a neat, understandable way… someone coming along and blaming a long blamed group of people that you have no direct experience with, and then promises to fix these problems in the economy, to put you back to work, to make your son come back and fall in love with a nice girl, make your daughter compliant, etc… and meanwhile the current government can’t stop violence on the city streets, but you see one group doing something about it… That narrative starts to sound pretty good… It’s much more understandable in that context, how some people would turn to Trumpism, especially when it seems like all the promises made by both parties tend to fall apart during the process of governing. And as much as our society celebrates the outsider, it’s little wonder that some young men would embrace what they have been told online is the ultimate outsider… nazis.
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We all know the swastika and the nazi salute, but going through the trouble to learn and perform a nazi song? That is a whole 'nother level of dedication, especially for high school students. I’m baffled.
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You’re somewhat correct about this. The school is in the upper middle class area of GG (privileged–can’t think of a wealthier neighborhood off the top of my head), and many of the students come from that neighborhood. However, there are students who live in other parts of GG and enroll in this school for various reasons. (There are seven moderately-sized HSs in the greater GG area and one continuation HS.)
However, as @Quinn_Skylark mentioned, water polo is common in urban and suburban high schools of California. It does have many white kids on teams, but it has become more ethnically diverse over the years.
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Fun fact: savvy parents of children who are inherently ‘disadvantaged’ by their caste often encourage their kids to take up non-traditional sports which tend to have mostly White participants (like lacrosse and water-polo) so that they can increase their chances of getting into better colleges.
For every rigged system, there’s a way to circumvent that system.
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