A Fight Worth Fighting

This week at school, we had an incident...a cutoff jeans wearin', Confederate flag wavin', line-crossin' incident.

For context, a few years back, some young men at BHS, dissatisfied with the prescribed spirit day themes and gluttonous for attention (positive OR negative), decided to buck the system and stage their own spirit day, an anti-spirit day of sorts. Dubbed "White Trash Wednesday," the day was marked by a small contingent of young guys attempting to look as stereotypically backwoods as they could. Flannel shirts without sleeves, cutoff jeans, muck boots, a healthy dose of orange hunting gear; all standard apparel for the day.

In its inception, this move was laughed off as a simple boneheaded joke; boys will be boys, right? Unfortunately, our parents, staff, and students couldn't see exactly where this was headed.

In the years to come, the shorts got shorter, midriffs began to be common, the redneck sterotyping became more crude, and--this I consider the saddest part--the stars and bars of the Confederate flag became a unifying symbol for participants. In addition, the revelry spread beyond a few young men with country in their blood and expanded to include females ready and willing to join in the counter-festivities, too often sporting outfits that looked like they'd come from the female wardrobe of the Dukes of Hazard set.

With our hesitance to truly confront the issue for so long being a primary culprit, what started as a silly, one-off gag grew into a perennial problem at the high school. However, this year, the line had to be drawn; this yearly non-school-sanctioned distraction needed to end.

I'll spare you the long form of the story, but I can assure you our administration handled the issue courteously and firmly. Students were simply told (a week in advance), those dressed in a manner that fit the WTW mold would be asked to return home, change, and head back. No harm, no foul; do what you want before school, just make sure you're out of costume and ready to go when school fires up at 8:10.

Most students obliged, others balked; some students walked away, some flipped administrators the bird as they did so. I've been in public education for 9 years now, so I'm no stranger to such disrespectful actions. However, for one student, it didn't stop there.

One young student, a kid I've had in class and grown to appreciate, made the decision to turn the moment into a statement. Coming back into school in full WTW regalia, and with Confederate flag flying, he essentially attempted to play the part of the martyr by riling other students up against the administration he felt was denying him the "right" to do whatever he wanted while at school.

And that's the hill he chose to stand--and earn a lengthy suspension--upon.

So here is what struck me in the wake of the incident. Somewhere in this young man's poor choice, there is actually a desirable behavior. We should not want our kids to be so passive that they stand for nothing; we should want them to dig their heels in against greed, prejudice, injustice, and the like...this particular young man's furor and indignance, if funneled in the right direction, could strike a meaningful blow against bullying, poverty, violence, or a number of other social ills.

He simply doesn't know what battle is worth fighting.

And when I thought about this for a while, I kept coming back to the same questions. Why can't he see how trite and silly his kicking and screaming is? Why can't he just trust that we have his best interests at heart and know when to push and when to be at peace? Why would he, and I'm not exaggerating, put his very future at risk just for the right to thumb his nose at a high school administration?

When I ask these questions, God tends to answer in ways that I don't always like, though in ways I very much need to hear.

Maybe I wouldn't see this so clearly if I were not a father, but it is not lost on me that children learn by watching those ahead of them. They are emulators who often take their cues from those ahead of them. Thus, the battles they fight are most likely not that dissimilar from those they've seen fought by adults.

And what types of grandiose stands do adults take? We fight to make sure our kid gets the lion's share of playing time in youth sports. We fight to dupe people into thinking we don't buy Apple products largely because they're in vogue. We fight to make sure our church appears "cool." We fight to convince people Tim Tebow is a legitimate quarterback. We wage wars over things that DO NOT MATTER, and by doing so, we train those behind us to do the same, leaving them to repeat a cycle of futility.

I work among kids and hear what bothers them. There are certainly those kids who want to stand up for something real, something vital; those who honestly want their efforts and labors to make the world a better place. Those, however, are often rare among their peers. It is far more common to find a high schooler railing against a school disciplinary procedure than to find one railing against bullying. It is easier to find a student crying to the heavens about the tardy policy than to find one crying over the fact that some kids in the lunch hall won't get a meal outside of BHS all week.

But who has taught them any better? Have I taught them and helped them believe that there are real battles that need to be fought? Have I modeled for them what it looks like to be righteously indignant when a fellow human's basic dignities are stripped away? Have I shown them what it looks like to draw a line in the sand when a person denigrates another human with a racist/sexist joke?

I know there have been times that I have, but to my own shame, I cannot tell you with any level of certainty that those instances outnumber the times I have not.

Yet this is our duty to our young people, to both tell and to show them which battles must be fought and which are of no consequence. The world will not teach them to fight poverty; it will teach them to fight for material possessions. The world won't teach them to stand against oppression; it will teach them to stand against replacement NFL referees. The world won't teach them to be their brother's keeper; it will teach them a million ways to rob people of their dignity.

For this reason, it is my prayer that God would grant us the urgency, willingness, and boldness necessary to teach young people by entering, ourselves, into battles of eternal significance, such as prescribed in Psalms 82:3-4 or Proverbs 29:7, so that we all--old and young alike--would not waste our lives on futile fights of no lasting consequence.

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