These are but examples--tell-tales--of the "hypocrisies and mendacities" Cornel West wrote strongly about in Democracy Matters:
Like every younger generation, our kids today see clearly the hypocrisies and mendacities of our society, and as they grow up they begin to question in a fundamental way some of the lies that they've received from society. " This often leads to an ardent disappointment, and even anger, about the failures of our society to consistently uphold the democratic and humanitarian values that can be born in youths in this phase of their life. [5]
The disappointment is real--so is the anger. And at a time when the indifference with which Youth are treated couldn't be more evident, it's appalling to have otherwise "open-minded" editors and publishers blind to the suffering and deaf to the screaming.
The last 6 months alone have yielded gut-wrenching reports of:
A 15-year-old special-needs student slammed into the ground and battered by a police officer for walking down the hallway in an un-tucked shirt.
25 middle-school 12-year-old students arrested for a food fight.
A 10-year-old suspended for bringing peppermint oil to school.
An 11-year-old autistic and cognitively-impaired student charged with felony assault for simply resisting being subdued by school officials.
8 Afghanistan children, aged 11 through 17, executed based on inconclusive--and most likely mythical--evidence of bomb-manufacturing.
An 8-year-old frisked each time he travels by plane, for sharing the exact name with a Department of Homeland Security person-of-interest. (At 2, he was patted down for the first time.)
Four 8-year-olds bound up with jump rope by a substitute teacher for "whispering" instead of "writing," upon which they were informed, "This is what it's going to be like when you're in jail."
A 7-year-old having her braids cut off to quell the "frustration" of a teacher.
A 6-year-old suspended for possessing a Cub Scout utensil--deemed a weapon and, by zero-tolerance standards, grounds for suspension.
A 4-year-old suspended for long hair. [6]
And these are all, of course, elements of the "hard war," as Giroux describes. The "soft war" is just as insidious. ABC News reported last November of corporations bypassing parents to target kids directly. A telling example was of giant soda company Fanta unveiling "technology that teens can download on their cell phones, which allows them to send audio messages to each other at high frequencies, sounds that adults over 25 cannot hear."[7]
Many of those cases highlighted above have, indeed, found solace in some of the same progressive online journals leery of reviewing or publishing excerpts from Youth in a Suspect Society. And for good reason: Sensationalism sells. Like it or not, it's sensational to read about preteens suspended or expelled or arrested for "crimes" which, only a few decades ago, were considered minor infractions expected of young people. It's even sensational to bemoan zero-tolerance policies and pound desks hard in blogging or editorializing about kids sentenced to life in prison for, as was the case with a 16-year-old, killing their pimps. [8]
