Bong Hits 4 Iraq

The cancellation of a high school play teaches students to hate the Man.

Admittedly, students performing a play going over letters from Iraq soldiers is going to be inflammatory, if by inflammatory you mean presenting the truths of our time, and the meaning of serving in the military in a conflicted war, a subject of some passing interest to high school students.

It probably would cause strife and conflict: a rather paler version of the actual war these students may consider fighting. So we have established that the principle is a turd, not because he has concerns or even because he vetoed the play, but because he argued the following.

“He told us the student body is unprepared to hear about the war from students, and we aren’t prepared to answer questions from the audience and it wasn’t our place to tell them what soldiers were thinking,” said Sarah Anderson, a 17-year-old senior who planned to play the role of a military policewoman.

I'm usually nearly alone in arguing strong rights for students, but I'm looking at the long run: high school is our most profound civic training. Americans must be raised to expect freedom for themselves and tolerate it in others, and not in theory, in practice. The more we squeeze them with random drug testing, random searches, ubiquitous data collection, daily clamps on expression, the more we teach that trust is one way from them to us, the more we go for the moment of the illusion of security over the practice of liberty, the less our national culture will value the practice, the ordinary expectation of liberty. And, as is already happening, the more alienated, fragile and timid our young citizens grow - here I speak anecdotally, but in young college students I'm noticing both a decent general education, but more and more expectation of being told what to do. A good principle in this situation would have figured out how to manage to let the play go on, provided an open forum and access to a comparable event with pro-war themes, and made clear what the lines of appropriate behavior were so that voices from all sides could be heard. Hard? Impractical? Welcome to democracy. It's ultimately a practice of political and social organization, not the simple fact of voting.

Freedom of expression for students 16, 17 and 18 during a war gets more important, not less. Even in a volunteer army, boys and girls, they'll be recruited, they'll fight, they'll watch their friends die. A lot of progressives/ liberals are starting to argue for a draft. I understand the reasoning, and even share it to an extent, but it's an easy argument for us to make. If the rationale for an American war is so delicate it cannot survive the critique of a gaggle of high school thespians, let me suggest that the war is probably misguided.

(As a side note, I'm one of those civil libertarians who would be entirely okay, even encouraging, to a religious-themed play, as long as attendance wasn't mandatory, and it was clear other religious views had access to the facilities, which in most real-life circumstances, is not the case. )

It's been a while since the country has bothered arguing about the idea of high school students' free speech. I'm just happy for that.

Meantime, the big hit in the country is The 300.

I reflect that it was the Thespians that stood by the Spartans at Thermopylae.