When I left you I was but the learner

Like many of my fellow alumni, I was disappointed to learn that Rick Santorum was making a campaign stop at my high school. Even worse than giving that Christian sharia law advocate a recognized platform, though, was how school teachers and administrators meddled with the students being able to share their concerns directly with the candidate.

While some students got to ask Santorum some "tough questions" -- just barely -- others felt that Santorum tried to dodge real answers. School officials admitted filtering out certain questions from the ones that students submitted to ask. Per the Daily Herald:

Questions were screened by both school officials and Santorum’s advisers, said English department head Charles Venegoni. Ones that asked about social issues such as gay rights or religion were rejected.

Below is my letter written to a local newspaper criticizing the excessive oversight. I may have connived to get their attention with some fulsome notes up top. Gotta know your audience ;)

My sly reference to Nirvana's Serve the Servants ("self-appointed judges judge / more than they have sold") is intact, something I imagined in my ancient wisdom "the kids" would appreciate. Hi kids! My reference to my high school era 'zine, Another Point of View -- which no one but a tiny handful of friends would have noticed -- is also there.

APoV may or may not have been printed on photocopy paper liberated from Hersey storeroom shelves, by the way. Which reminds me, when a controversial letter I wrote as a student to the school newspaper, The Correspondent, was published before administrators could intervene, I briefly earned the nickname The Hersey Anarchist.

Some things never change. Here's my latest letter (headlined by the newspaper):

Hersey Sets Bad Example At Candidate Event

Editor, Journal: Thanks for reporting on Rick Santorum’s visit to Hersey High School in Arlington Hts. with some critical insight and greater detail than I found in other local newspapers’ coverage.

The notion that a school would filter questions from students to a political candidate sends a pathetic message to young people. In a land where free speech is a unique founding principle, to communicate to children that their thoughts and words must be moderated by self-appointed judges, undercuts the “inalienable” rights that Americans have always been taught make us who we are.

I applaud you for speaking with Santorum’s opponents outside the event and for indicating that not all citizens, in Chicago’s suburbs as elsewhere, are content to watch the nation’s most essential principles of liberty be trampled ignorant social overseers.

As a graduate of Hersey High and a professional journalist -- the same trade that my school’s namesake, John Hersey, plied -- I am disappointed that my alma mater chose to muddle its mission of teaching students how to think critically and participate in the greater society that the school is a microcosm of.

A lot has changed at Hersey in the past couple decades. The ideas that bullied students are now told “it gets better” and that openly gay youths be unafraid to reveal who they are, is lightyears from the turn-the-other-way attitude that I and many other students endured for many uncomfortable years at Hersey. Yet the school itself seems to be bullying its students in a more insidious way: by kowtowing to a dubious guest whose visit was supposedly to cast light on his beliefs, effectively silencing another point of view.

To coddle a candidate instead of putting him to the true test of answering to his fellow citizens directly is a foolhardy and cowardly capitulation to social modesty and philosophic meekness. Hersey administrators and faculty should be asking themselves if they fell short of a liberal arts education’s mission: to foster intellectual enlightenment and build character, not facilitate status quo complacency and image conscious hypocrisy.

Todd R. Brown, Hersey Class of '88

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And wouldn't you know. The day after Santorum's visit, a spate of homophobic graffiti occurred around Arlington Heights, Ill., where the school is. Sometimes people wonder if I'm gay since I identify with their rights struggle. Typically my silent answer to the unasked question is none of your business. But basically, I abhor bigotry, and these days as a former underdog, I fight the power for the people.

By the way, who woulda thunk, there's another John Hersey out there. And one more trivia note: Hollywood came to town and shot some of the new A Nightmare on Elm Street at Hersey. Talk about a nightmare ... "you're in high school again."