OhWell [he/him]
Signed up just to reply to this, I can so relate. I went to a school in the rural south too and this same thing happened to us often around the same years. It was also after Columbine and our schools flipping out over gun stuff.
My last year in elementary school, a kid drew a photo of a gun and shoved it into one of the desks where another kid pulled it out in class and our super evangelical Christian teacher saw it and sent him to the principal’s office. That led to the police coming to our school and wanting to interview 7 kids from class, only 2 actually sat in that desk; the other 5 kids consisted of the only 3 black kids in our class and and then 2 white kids who “looked like they did it” according to the teacher. I was one of them who fit the bill of looking like a misfit according to this teacher even though I was only 12 years old at the time but I looked goth and therefore was suspect. I was grilled by the cops and had my backpack searched, parents called from school and the usual scared straight stuff about going to juvenille. This was the first time. It would happen even more in middle school.
Middle school was even crazier and worse. We had bomb threats which led to cops coming down to interview suspect kids and we had the occasional shooting threats. They always picked on the black kids and whatever white kids had a certain look to them, which just so happened to be wearing black/goth or being suspected of smoking pot. Our middle school was so bad that they created their own gender-divided classes for kids who they deemed as looking like criminals, or had a history of getting into trouble and then lumped us in with the kids who got low grade scores (the teachers even flat out told us we were all stupid and/or headed for a life of crime and they were “preparing us for it”, as one loved to remind me I’d be working as a garbage man one day if I’m not rotting in prison). I spent 2 years in these gender classes and you only had 2 teachers who both covered 2 subjects and then PE. They even moved us in portable class rooms away from the main building, so you were divided from the rest of the school and subjected to this awful treatment. Our teachers had the cops search us multiple times over bomb threats, gun threats and the one fucked up time they searched us for drugs cause one of them thought she came across crack cocaine in her class room (it was smarties candies mashed up and didn’t even look like coke). Since the entire class was deemed the “bad kids”, we were all subjected to the horrible treatment.
You cannot convince me that this shit didn’t funnel the school to prison pipeline, cause I lived through and witnessed it first hand. It’s weird talking about it and this post triggered me to make an account. I still have PTSD and the scars from my suicide attempts from back then. The DHS and police state of schools that began back then, absolutely pushed the school to prison pipeline. The few kids I knew from my hometown all got involved in crime once they were old enough to drop out.
The Columbine shooting was the big game changer, alongside 9/11.
I was 9 years old when 9/11 happened, so I still had some years to get through elementary and middle school. Middle school was some of the toughest times of my life. I mention Columbine cause the rock band Marilyn Manson was blamed for it, and that blame echoed loudly in the rural south where Manson was still seen as the antichrist down here despite the fact he was beginning to fade from the spotlight by the mid 2000s and was past his prime as an artist by that point.
Anyone at our school who teachers knew were into Manson’s music or other kind of heavier rock music (in other words, if you “looked like a goth”), we were suspected of bomb and shooting threats. I’m guilty as charged and it would lead to other kids often drawing Manson’s logos on their folders and stuff cause it was seen as edgy and cool. I still have a soft spot for Manson’s early music as an adult. Mechanical Animals helped me through some hard times and I treasure that album for where my mind was at when I was 14-15 years old. But beyond Manson, they would lose their shit over kids drawing pentagrams, upside down crosses and even the fucking QUAKE video game logo, something about the Quake logo was “evil” and “demonic”.
We often had police officers and preachers come to our school and lecture us about how we might spend our entire lives in prison or burn in hell for eternity if we didn’t behave. When I was placed in the gender divided “bad kids” classes, this was something we went through once a month. We’d have some cop show up and talk all tough, or it would be some bat shit fucking insane preacher with a bible lecture us. Other times, we got the educational “scared straight” videos from police departments that we would have to watch in class telling us about how bad prison is and you don’t want to end up there.
I remember back then, there was also a hysteria against violent video games. I remember the craze around Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and later on when San Andreas came out. A kid got caught in my middle school bringing a PS2 copy of Vice City that he was going to trade, and he ended up in the principal’s office with cops called who interviewed his parents for letting him having a game so violent. If it wasn’t GTA, there was always good old classic Doom (and this was around the time Doom 3 was coming out). I remember another incident where some kid managed to install Doom on a school computer and it led to the entire computer lab being locked down and a full investigation of who was responsible for it.
The end result of all of this is really just funneling the school to prison pipeline. The gender divided classes I mentioned, created a sense of fear and animosity we all had towards authority and police. We were dehumanized by our teachers on a daily basis in class and then the police who would search us and give us the stern lectures about going to prison. ALL the friends I had from middle school were dipping their toes into crime by the time we reached high school, including the girls. It started with either small petty vandalism (I was guilty of this too. We got satisfaction out of breaking shit at the school in retaliation to how we were treated) or dealing small time drugs like weed and pills. Then they gradually worked their way up to other stuff.
To this day, I really cannot relate to anyone who has nostalgia for their teen years and going through middle and high school or TV shows/movies about how wonderful school is. It was a fucking nightmare for me. I still have nightmares every now and then about those days, and I’m almost in my 30s. Our schools were like prisons and I’m just one person; there’s many others out there with similar stories of pain and torment from the system.
I was a huge Marilyn Manson fan as a young goth kid. Something about his music spoke to me for what I was going through at the time and living through rebellion.
Mechanical Animals has a special place in my heart due to where I was at when I had the album in my teen years.
Holy Wood is a terrifying album in retrospect. It came out in 2000 and was the last album he really put an effort into before making some mediocre rock albums. Most of the songs and the artwork seem to mirror the growing fascism in American culture. When I seen Kid Rock a few years ago selling shirts that said “Guns, God and Trump” it reminded me of the “Guns, God and Government” line from The Love Song and the cross made of guns that Manson used on that tour. There’s also this song called The Fall of Adam which sounds like a fascist rally with a big speech, not unlike something you’d hear from a Trump rally. So many songs from that album relate to American culture and especially the era we live in now and it’s so hard to believe Manson was writing all that before 9/11. You can see a lot of Trump stuff and Blue Lives Matter bootlicking from the lyrics and artwork to this album.
Unfortunately Manson became a huge joke later on and even revealed to be a true piece of shit.
Thanks for the kind words. I’ve met so many people over the years who tell me how different their schools were, and I just cannot relate.
I have to admit, even though I am now 28 years old, I still fear having kids for a number of reasons and one of them is having to send a child through the same public school system I survived. I don’t know what it’s like now, but after what I went through, there is no way I could live with myself putting a child through the same torment and hell. I was born poor and still am, and the way the school system is constructed in America, it’s pretty much rigged that the poor kids aren’t going to see a proper education compared to the middle and upper class. As Joe Biden said “poor kids are as smart as the white kids”, he made sure to put emphasis on them being poor, as well as the other fucked up comment that senile old prick made about prisoners being uneducated. Gee, I wonder why, when you have a fucking school to prison pipeline through our public school system.
I can relate to Provo and Elan. Reading about Elan actually reminds me of my middle school but in a much more extreme matter. We didn’t have major corporal punishment, but we had incidents of teachers attacking students and violent altercations instigated by them. I can totally relate to the brainwashing and mind games they played too. I have known people who have serious PTSD from going to schools like that and it always made me look back and consider myself lucky that I wasn’t stuck in literal prison camp schools, though my public school was close to that. I tried to commit suicide at 14 years old and then a second time at 15, cause I hated school so much and having to go there made me feel like I was in prison and I was so scared one more incident, I was going to end up being sent away to juvenile jail. The principal at my school was dead set on getting me sent there after attempting to have me arrested on suspicion of drugs and an incident for vandalism. I can’t even describe how degrading it is being forced into a drug test at 15 years old all cause I “looked like a pot head”. Despite a negative drug test and no video evidence of me doing anything wrong, they were dead set to make an example of me after I cussed them out. I actually am lucky that my mother realized something was wrong and decided to home school me my last year for middle school otherwise, I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle one more year of being in a gender divided class with a teacher who tells the entire class how stupid we are and how we’re going to grow up to be scum.
High school was somewhat better, but that largely had to do with me having a handful of teachers who were truly amazing and knew how to teach, including an old black woman I had for a history teacher who marched in Selma AL with the civil rights movement. She was the first person I ever met with leftist politics and had a huge influence on me with how anti-capitalist she was. I used to stay after class and talk with here, cause there was something in her stories that resonated with me and now all these years later, I am glad I had that experience with her. These teachers were great cause they didn’t tell you repeatedly how stupid you were or “you’re going to end up rotting in prison or best, a garbage man cause all you’ll be is trash to society” as one of my middle school teachers would tell me on a near daily basis to the point that line is still engraved in my memory. I still ended up dropping out of high school though. It still sucked, and that was kinda different cause by then (2007-2008), we had armed security cops on campus in case anything happened with shooting threats. High school sucked for me mainly due to all the social cliques. There was the jocks who were bullies, rich white kids (who all had money to go to big southern universities), the poor kids (where I was), the outcast outsiders, and then my old middle school friends who by that point had moved from petty crimes to getting into heavy shit (There was a weird drug scene at HS that made it possible to get stuff like meth and ecstasy). I had something of an understanding of class war at 17 years old due to these experiences that made understanding Marxism so much easier by the time I got into it as an adult.
Suicides were common in my middle school and even in high school, but they were never addressed or followed up on. Another problem we had at our schools was the teenage pregnancies and I only mention this, cause the schools reaction to these problems were to send MORE cops to lecture us and MORE preachers to talk about sin. They never addressed the teenage pregnancy issue besides lectures about how sex was sinful. There were no memorials for students that committed suicide, they were just ignored completely and not talked about.
True, I agree. It’s my favorite album of his cause it shows him thinking outside of the box and leaves you to wonder what he could’ve become as an artist by trying different things and not going back to the full Antichrist Superstar type look and sound for Holy Wood and what followed after.
Mechanical Animals was also well produced. People talk about Trent Reznor’s production on Antichrist, but MA had a unique sound to it. It almost sounds like it’s half human and half machine. The way the acoustic guitars are mixed in with all the electronics, it has it’s own uniqueness to it that can’t be found on any of his other albums. Manson became a lazy artist in the 2000s settling for a sorta generic guitar driven rock sound that don’t mesh well with his older albums.
Same here. We joked about “they’re watching, they’re listening” and it was due to how our middle school (and later high school) heavily monitored everything. By the time I reached high school, the computer lab was divided with assigned computers all with passwords for students and had a security system that monitored each and every computer. They knew everything we did on those computers and an assistant principal would watch all of that just like the same asshole sat and monitored all the security cameras. If you brought a game from home and tried to install it on the computer, they had the exact time logged and would match it with where ever you were supposed to be and would connect the dots that it was you. If you used a proxy to go check your Myspace page or whatever, not only did they had have the time, they would have screenshots of it.
When Snowden and the NSA stories came out, I was not surprised. Our public school system was already a surveillance state by that time. No one can convince me this shit doesn’t make the school to prison pipeline grow. It’s so dehumanizing and creates a culture of fear and animosity you grow up with towards authority (and the police if you are unfortunate enough to deal with them at school like I did).
I haven’t seen this one locally, but there is a new flag I have noticed popping up with the Blue Lives Matter/Trump/Confederate flags all lined up together. It’s a white flag with a rectangle where the blue part of the US flag would be and it’s just blue and has a red cross on it while the rest of the flag is white. Anyone know what this is? Only asking cause I started noticing it popping up where I live in the rural south.
This is why I hate the damage created by the New Atheist/Skeptic crap online.
It’s personal with me and religion. I grew up in the deep south and was subjugated to hardcore Christian fundamentalism from my childhood and through school. But there is a generational gap between all of this. I noticed it when I was a teenager and a lot of my friends and people I knew who generally anti-religion and that followed into adulthood. Evangelicals have been rapidly losing the culture war and becoming a smaller cultural force for at least the past ten years, but probably more so than that. The younger generations have been rejecting religion for a long time now, but evangelicals remain a power mainly thanks to older boomers all having money and being the ones to keep voting in their bat shit crazy Republican politicians and latching onto them in hopes that they hurt the people they hate.
The New Atheist/Skeptic community focuses entirely on calling out Christians for being stupid as in believing in god and it’s usually in the “gotcha!” type of outsmarting them like how libs do to conservatives, expecting them to play by the rules. These “skeptics” simply cannot connect the dots that capitalism is a bigger problem than religion and the two often have been combined together. With quotes like “Religious has created more wars and killed more people than anything in history”, these people were being set up with some bad philosophy. Many of the New Atheists really were only searching for an excuse to revel in their Islamophobia.
It’s really no wonder that since the early 2010s when evangelicalism began to fade out, the big names of the New Atheist movement all revealed themselves to be bigots and it began with Christopher Hitchens before that. Hitchens was a piece of shit and was proud of his bigotry. Richard Dawkins started embarrassing himself around that time and would slide into extreme xenophobia and of course, there is my favorite of these quacks; Sam Harris who was the biggest fraud of them all even back when they were household names. Harris spent years selling Islamophobia and imperialist apologia and gradually shifted into extreme racism and outright nazism. Most of these “skeptics” became the chuds online whining about feminism and “owning the libs” through Gamergate.
Liberalism is all about preserving the system and the status quo. They truly believe that the system we have here is a real democracy and that all they need to do is tweak some things here and there and add more rules to make it better and fix the system. In other words, they propose band-aid solutions which they slap over the problems instead of dismantling a system that causes those problems to begin with. Liberals are 100% to blame why we are here on the edge of fascism, cause for the past 40+ years, they have wanted to play by the rules and legitimize the right while pushing real left policy to the fringe.
Just look at how smug they are and talk down to people they see as being below them. They can’t help but smugly talk down to minorities and poor people so condescendingly. They’re always lecturing POC about who they should vote for and the smug quotes like “if you don’t, then you work against your own interests”. As for poor people, they just mock us and assume we vote Republican if we’re white. If it’s not poor people, they have to dehumanize prisoners and former convicts who suffer from a prison industrial system that they defend and think is A-OK cause it’s part of the system. The West Wing is a crash course on smug liberalism. There was a reason those stupid “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS libs” videos would get millions of views. People in general see their smugness and don’t enjoy being talked down to.
You can see all of this with liberals from the Obama era. They ignored police brutality back then and the racism with events like the Ferguson shooting, Baltimore riots, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner. They ignored all this, cause at the end of the day, they had elected a black man to two presidential terms, so in their minds racism was solved.
The difference between liberals and conservatives is that libs legitimately love their party and will go along with it. Conservatives on the other hand, really don’t even like their own party and only continue to vote Republican as a way to put the gays back in the closet, go after minorities and stick it to poor people. That’s why when a Republican is out of office or they dare trying to reach across the aisle in their last year, the GOP base voters drop them like a brick in water and move on to the next ghoul who promises to hurt the people they hate. This is why they love Trump. It’s been 4 years and libs still haven’t figured it out. They love him cause he says the quiet parts out loud and promises to go after and hurt the people that conservatives hate.
