Well, They Didn’t Use Tasers
The Associated Press reports on the new standards for high school graduations in South Carolina: 7 busted after cheers erupt at S.C. graduations
COLUMBIA, S.C. – When Rock Hill school officials tell commencement crowds to hold their applause until the end, they mean it — police arrested seven people after they were accused of loud cheering during the ceremonies.
Six people at Fort Mill High School’s graduation were charged Saturday and a seventh at the graduation for York Comprehensive High School was charged Friday with disorderly conduct, authorities said. Police said the seven yelled after students’ names were called.
“I just thought they were going to escort me out,” Jonathan Orr told The Herald of Rock Hill, about 70 miles north of Columbia. “I had no idea they were going to put handcuffs on me and take me to jail.”
Can we just admit we have a police state and stop kidding ourselves. I don’t remember having to go to a bail hearing after my high school graduation.
[update: I just noticed the misspelling in the title.]
15 comments
Welcome Gestapo. Seriously, how can they justify arresting some kids for being a little jubilant on what, for many, will be their last academic milestone and the end of 12 years of school. Many of the kids are facing a lifetime of marginal employment and who knows what else. Lighten up folks!
I am relieved to know law enforcement in Columbia, SC has no better way to spend their time. (/snark)
That’s madness. Nuts. Full-blown batshit crazy. Whatever were the officials thinking?
Back in 1994 (or was it 1995), a good friend graduated from University of Houston. The graduation ceremony was simultaneous with a Houston Rockets NBA championship game. Half the graduation crowd had radios in their pockets, and that’s a lot of radios, because UH is a huge school. When the Rockets regained the lead with 7 seconds left in the game, the entire crowd at the graduation burst into applause. When they won, they went wild. The university’s president did the sensible thing: he paused the ceremony, made a brief announcement congratulating the Rockets, and moved on. That’s how it was done back before the world went insane.
How unsurprising. 🙂
That’s just routine for the Volkspolizei and STASI. Or… am I confusing the USA with East Germany again? It’s getting awfully hard to differentiate the two.
Hey, I was always curious about why the CIA stalled Germany for years about returning the many thousands of STASI documents they had. Guess it took them a while to translate and read them all. I see their implementation is progressing well. Strange… The USA is useless with dealing with anyone outside the USA, but dealing with it’s internal population is progressing according to plan. 🙂
Well, the USA has completely squandered it’s *good will capital* outside the USA, (the word *bankrupt* springs to mind). It will take a lot longer before a majority of the sheeple within the USA realise that it’s long gone, and the implications finally dawn.
Here’s a couple Wiki entries that might help:
Wikipedia – Ministry for State Security – STASI (E. Germany)
Wikipedia – People’s Police – Volkspolizei (E. Germany)
FAIR began exposing the DoD National PsyOps campaign in 2000:
Why Were Government Propaganda Experts Working On News At CNN?
Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal
Military’s media manipulation demands more investigation
But, it didn’t get far (nobody was listening), and just to play safe, Rummy had a plan:
Rumsfeld’s Roadmap to Propaganda
And most Americans think this is now news uncovered recently by NYT and reported on Crooks & Liars:
The New York Times exposes manipulative DoD propaganda racket
Too bad nobody was listening way back when…
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
I smell a lawsuit.
…the paragraph at the end of that story is just as amazing: 5 Illinois students denied their diplomas until they performed 8 hours of public service because their families cheered at graduation. Being one of those late-’60’s/early-’70’s high school radicals, my first thought would be for the junior class to get together and devise a plan to just not even show up for next year’s graduation and let the school mail them their diplomas. Maybe that would help school officials get over themselves…
I graduated from the same high school as my Mother, and her brother and sister. I was in the biggest class ever, 52, and high school graduations were a village event. Everyone went to the graduation, because everyone was connected to someone who graduated.
There was nothing “choreographed” or coordinated about them, and they went on a lot longer than was absolutely necessary, but no one minded. This wasn’t a show, it was a celebration.
I realize that things were different back then, but this demand for order makes graduation a job, not something you want to remember.
It all changed when we moved to mega-high-schools because then the students became a product rather than a person. You have a high school with 2,000 or more students, graduating 400 kids at a time, and things like graduation become a cattle call where the cattle err students are mooved from one side of the stage to the other at a rapid pace rather than a celebration. But ve must haff efficiency, y’know, and those older little high schools just were too expensive yessiree. So our students become product to be processed in an “education factory”, rather than people. And since they’re just product, it’s okay to treat them like product rather than people.
And folks wonder why I don’t teach anymore…
— Badtux the (Former) Teacher Penguin
When a profession becomes a job, everyone loses.
They are making everything they can into a job, to be sure people “know their place” in the new world order.
i dunno if i quite agree with your timeline badtux. i went to one of those high schools, with a graduating class of 450 students. fortunately they didn’t have tasers back then, because while we weren’t quite in the same class with the grumpy forester’s early 70s radicals, we were close.
People probably don’t appreciate the fact that Oriskany Central School was one of the largest school districts in the state of New York, and the it was one of the few public high schools in the area. The building was a WPA construction project.
My parents were the first generation in the area who could attend a free public high school, as schools in the area only went through 8th grade in my grandparents generation.
Hipparchia, the move to mega high schools started in urban areas probably 100 years ago, then slowly migrated to rural areas. The last rural school district where I taught, they integrated three K-12 schools, a high school, an elementary school, and a middle school into one mega-complex where every student in the district whether 5 years old or 15 years old is on this vast campus (by the standards of rural schools of 40 years ago) because “we must be efficient!”. Meanwhile, the old neighborhood elementary schools that had maybe 200 students in the city that I grew up in were combined into mega-schools with 1,000+ students for the same reason. I was lucky to attend a high school that had roughly 400 students, that was few enough students that you could know the name of everybody in your class and a lot of people not in your class and the teachers could learn everybody’s name too. Then I transferred to a “small” urban high school that had 1600 students. Sigh.
In New York the schools are tied to individual towns and villages, while in Florida they are tied to counties. Outside of the big cities in New York the progress has been from one school for everyone to the three schools based on grade levels.
When the suburbs sprouted, they usually ended up incorporating and forming their own school districts.
You didn’t bus unless it was absolutely necessary, because of the winter snow closures and the costs.
at the other end of the spectrum, they tore down the one-room country school house, 1st-8th grades, near our family farm only about 20 years or so ago.
Three out of four of my grandparents attended one-room schools. They have preserved the original one-room school that my older brother attended here for a year before the new school was built.