Writing is Not a Crime April 29, 2007

The following was originally posted on Newsvine:

“The power of expression is greater than the power of fear.” -firsty

You know how it goes…inspiration hits and either you go with it or you don’t.

Since the tragedy at Virginia Tech, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the damage that will be done to freedom of expression. I wrote about it here, and seeded a couple of articles about a high school student who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct because an essay he wrote as part of a free writing assignment disturbed his teacher. Those articles are here and here. Brian White seeded an article about this same student, Allen Lee, that includes the full text of the essay. You can find that here.

My friend Ira Brooker, co-founder and co-editor of No Touching Magazine, sent the following bit of beautiful and frightening satire out via email, and this is what really got me rolling on this whole concept to begin with:

I certainly love how much the media is playing up the Virginia Tech shooter’s status as a creative writer. His fictional stories of violence are being held up as evidence of his deranged state and possible warning signs that the school should have acted upon sooner. This evening I saw a psychologist point to one of the fellow’s fictional revenge stories and say, “Well, he was obviously molested by someone at some point.” Yes, obviously!

I don’t write much violence myself – just not my style – but over the last few years I’ve met a lot of writers who do. Gruesome, detailed stuff, too. I’m grateful to the media for clueing me in to these ticking time bombs. Little did I realize how many hours I was spending in close proximity to potential mass murderers.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this played out before. Years before William Faulkner’s convictions for incest and forcible castration of a relative, ‘The Sound and the Fury’ gave us a window to his thinly veiled perversions. John Irving somehow continues to walk among free men despite his veritable confession to vehicular manslaughter in ‘The World According to Garp.’ Heck, even the late, beloved Kurt Vonnegut regularly shrugged off the laws of time and space. “Unstuck in time,” my eye!

We all know that creative writers are a dangerous and unstable breed. Thankfully, we have this stubborn tendency to tip our hands by spelling out our impending misdeeds on the printed page. The real danger here is inaction. We owe it to ourselves and the public to immediately report writers trafficking in violent and/or unsettling ideas. Too often our tendency is to shake our heads and wonder where our classmates come up with this crazy stuff. Instead, we should strive to keep them from acting out this crazy stuff, as they almost certainly will. If only this young man’s fellow writers had taken that initiative, this might all have been averted.

Thank God the mainstream media was there to give us this stark reminder.

So, I’m doing all this thinking, discussing in the comment threads of the above linked articles and seeds, and firsty says two things that stopped me in my tracks.

1. Writing is Not a Crime
2. The power of expression is greater than the power of fear

What followed was a frenzy of activity the likes of which my brain has not engaged in for months. Within an hour, I had set up a new group here at Newsvine: The Group and had purchased a new domain: Writing Is Not A Crime.com.

So now what?

The Newsvine Group

I invite everyone to join the Newsvine group. You may post articles or seeds to the group that tell stories of writers being oppressed. Attempts to silence writers through fear, intimidation, prosecution, whatever. Any writer, any age. This is not the place, however, for fiction. I do see the irony of placing restrictions on what people can post to a group called Writing is Not a Crime, but I want the focus to stay uncluttered.

Also welcome are essays expressing your opinion of free speech, how it works and where it doesn’t. This is certainly not limited to the United States, either.

In the coming week, I will write up a more specific set of guidelines for the group, and I welcome any and all suggestions.

The Website

Damn, it’s easy to set up a website. A couple clicks, a credit card, and you’re good to go. Right?

Ah, no. My experience with a web presence so far has involved blogging. My skills go no further than minimal customization of somebody else’s template. What I have in mind for the site goes further than what a standard blog set-up can do. I’ve had a couple of suggestions (joomla being one of them) from fellow Viners on what to use, but I have only just begun trying to figure it out. I’d really appreciate your ideas and suggestions on how I can do what I want to do.

What the hell do you want to do, Viki?

I’d like to have separate sections of the site for the following:

1. Original fiction. The disturbing kind. (This does not mean I’ll publish everything. It still has to be good.)
2. Original essays, opinion pieces, memoir, etc. around the subject of free speech/freedom of expression or the lack therof.
3. Links to news stories about the suppression of free speech.
4. Possibly a forum area for discussion? Is this a pain in the ass? Too big a bite to try to chew this early?

I’d like some additional “pages”:

1. A contact page with submission information.
2. An “about” page featuring the mission statement of the site
3. A links page. Links will need to be organized into separate categories.

The front/main page will feature links to all the areas of the site, probably the UN declaration on free speech and the 1st amendment, maybe quotes from various and sundry writers that relate to free speech in some way.

There’s probably more I haven’t thought of yet.

Eventually, I’d like to publish a print version. In order to finance that, I’ll likely need to run ads on the site. Any suggestions on the subject of advertising would be helpful, also. AdSense? Any others?

I need a graphic. A logo. I know we’ve got a lot of artists around here. Any volunteers? I can’t offer to pay you, at least not yet, but full credit will be given to the logo’s designer all over the site, and also links to the artists website/newsvine column, whatever you’d like.

So, what do you think? Is this doable, or am I insane?

Say Goodbye to Freedom of Expression… April 29, 2007

I seeded a story this afternoon about a high school student who was “was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with the misdemeanor for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.”

Come again?

Disorderly conduct, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine, is often filed for such pranks as pulling a fire alarm or dialing 911 unnecessarily, he said. But it can also apply when someone’s writings disturb an individual, Delelio said.

“The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content,” he said.

So, is that the consequence of the Virginia Tech massacre? That anyone can be arrested because something they wrote was disturbing? The contents of the essay were not released, nor will they likely be released. It would be an assumption to say that it’s possible the teacher was alarmed based on the recent tragedy, but that’s where I’m laying my bets.

I am a writing teacher. I go out of my way to make sure my students, be they 3rd graders or college students, understand that they have the permission to express themselves and tell their stories, whatever those stories might be.

I’m at a loss here. Where is this leading? Will writers begin to be afraid to write what they want for fear of being reported to the authorities? Are we really going back in time? I’ve written stories of violence, stories of rape. Stories that made my classmates uncomfortable, surely. I’ve also sat in class and listened to the stories of my fellow students and I’ve been frightened, uncomfortable. But at the work, the scene, what is being shown to me. I’ve never been afraid of the student.

Well, that’s a lie.

I had a situation last semester with a student of mine who wasn’t violent, but clearly unbalanced. It wasn’t until a loud and public verbal altercation (security called, etc.) that I was able to convince my superiors that this student might need some help that I certainly couldn’t provide. But it was a combination of her bizarre behavior and the patterns in her writing that led me to my conclusions. Based on her writing alone, I just thought she wasn’t cut out to be a writer and should never have made it as far as she did in the program. But when she began to talk about visions of dead relatives doing physically impossible things, and then returning the following week claiming these things actually happened, then returning the following week claiming these things were a dream…well, that’s when I started to get nervous.

But that’s the point. It was the combination of the behavior plus the writing that got me thinking, just as it was a combination of behavior plus the writing that made Seung Hui Cho’s writing teachers and fellow students nervous.

Do I dare mention that the young man arrested for his essay was Chinese-American? Does that add just one more crazy twist onto this nightmare? Is it too much to believe that this teacher would see an asian writing violence, have the VT tragedy on her mind, and come to some unfair conclusions?

It’s all too much, isn’t it? It’s too much to think about, so I should just stop, and pretend none of this is really happening, or that it will all die down and go away. Nevermind that the President of the United States reacted to the tragedy by telling the country to be vigilant for odd behavior, and to report it. Nobody listens to him anyway, right? Right?

I had some high school students in a class last semester who had never before been given the permission to write about their experience. Never before been given the opportunity to write in their own language; to put down on the page the things they hear, the things they see. When they realized I wasn’t kidding, it was like opening a floodgate. Stories about having to sell drugs as a middle schooler, being involved in sexual relationships at 13, 14. Having someone in their lives whom they refer to as their “baby daddy,’ even though they’ve just entered high school. Writing about parents arguing about meeting the rent, paying the bills, buying food. Writing about stealing, guns, violence in their schools. How the gang members know they won’t be able to get the guns into school, so they have someone pull the fire alarm, so that their target has to come outside, and shooting them there, nevermind who else they hit in the process.

I refuse to turn around now and tell these young adults that they’d better not write about that stuff anymore because they might get in trouble. They might get reported to the authorities and arrested. They might get suspended from school or sent to jail because they “disturbed” someone. NEWSFLASH people!!! Life is disturbing! I’ll be damned if I’m going to teach the next generation to keep their mouths shut about what they see and feel and experience.

Originally posted on Newsvine

What’s New Pussycat? April 4, 2007

I’ll tell you what’s new. Fifth Graders are having sex. In school, while their classmates watch and a student stands as a lookout. Sixth Graders are doing it too, also in their classrooms. And if they’re doing it in their classrooms when the teacher leaves for a few minutes, you better believe they’re doing it elsewhere.

Why does this concern me so? Why do I get a little hard, hot pit in my gut when I read stories like this? Because I have a 4th grade son and a 6th grade daughter, that’s why.

I’m going to let my thoughts wander for a minute here…

My son watches The Golden Girls. That’s right. You heard me. The Golden Girls is my son’s favorite show. He makes sure to get up early so that he can watch the two back-to-back episodes on Lifetime every morning before he leaves for school. When the second episode ends, he knows it’s time to head for the bus stop. We recently got a DVR (yes, we’re behind the times, leave me alone), and of course he figured out how to program it before we did, and when we got home from our recent vacation, he had 198 episodes to watch.

When he first began watching it, I’d be in the kitchen, making breakfast or school lunches, and I’d hear a line, maybe Blanche asking something like “You know what’s the worst thing about leaving a party?” and Rose answering, “Looking for your underpants in the big pile?” and I’d go in the den and say, “Anthony, I don’t think this is really appropriate for you to watch,” and I’d make him change the channel. You know what he’d switch to? MTV. After a week of that, I gave up. If The Golden Girls is slightly inappropriate, then MTV is hard-core S&M porn. With animals.

Just this morning, I walked in to make sure he was ready for school, and he was, sitting there on the couch, shoes on and tied, backpack strapped on, raptly tuned in to Blanche having a conversation with her brother. About his homosexuality. And his new boyfriend. I don’t know when this episode originally aired, but a quick check of Wikipedia tells me that The Golden Girls aired from 1985-1992. And in this episode, Blanche realized that her homophobia was foolish, especially in light of the love she had for her brother, and they came to a peaceful and loving agreement. Her brother even asked her, “So, you okay with a new brother-in-law?” She hesitated at first, and then smiled and took them both in a big hug. This was what? Fifteen, twenty years ago? We were just starting to accept the fact that AIDS was not just a gay man’s disease. More than that, we were just finding that out. And a show about four old women living together in Miami is tackling not only homosexuality, but gay marriage?

After he left for school, I went to Wikipedia and looked up The Golden Girls, and was reminded that it was a show ahead of its time. They tackled issues like “menopause, gun control, impotence, safe sex, domestic violence, suicide, cross-dressing, lesbianism, euthanasia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, artificial insemination and senility. Perhaps the most controversial episode involved Rose getting tested for HIV years after receiving an untested blood transfusion and having to wait 72 hours for the results.” (Wikipedia). In the eighties and early nineties? Nobody was talking about that stuff. Now, those things are regular topics of discussion.

So, what am I saying here? Am I saying that I wish we were back in a time where these things weren’t discussed? No. Maybe what I’m wishing is that we were living in a time when children aren’t having sex before they get out of elementary school. Literally.

We can blame so many things for this: bad parenting, ignorant teachers or administrators, hormones in our food causing our children’s bodies to mature faster, too much sex on television, in video games, on the internet. We can blame all of it. But what the hell does the blame game solve?

Nothing. Because while we sit around and argue about why it is that children are engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior before they are emotionally and physically ready, they’re still doing it. And we’re not doing anything to stop it.

What should be done? I have no idea. I didn’t write this article to provide you with an answer, because I don’t have one. I didn’t write it because I think I have a right to tell anyone how to run their lives or raise their children, because I don’t. I wrote it because I’m scared. I’m scared for my children. I’m scared for all children. I’m scared for the children of the future. Because if when I was in 5th grade, the thought of kissing a boy made me want to puke, and now 5th graders are having public sex, what are things going to be like when my grandchildren are in 5th grade? How much worse can it get?

I originally wrote this for Newsvine, but I owe this blog some attention, so I’m cheating by posting it here, too.