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The
Michigan Socialist | News | Michigan
News
Nuggets of wisdom
By L. MEYERS
The Michigan
Socialist
SOMETIMES, it is in the small things we find
the big lessons.
Take the case of Robert Struck, a freshman at
Anchor Bay High School in Casco Township, Michigan.
Recently, Struck was suspended for five days
for an awful and heinous crime -- a crime so horrendous that
the school administration made an example out of him.
"One of the things we don't want to teach is
that a child can go around the rules of society," said Paul
Rogers, director of human resources for the school district.
What exactly was this great crime? How did
young Mr. Struck attempt to "go around the rules of society?"
He ate a chicken nugget. Or, more accurately,
he ate a chicken nugget that he was too poor to afford.
Struck, like millions of school-age children
around the country, receives government-subsidized school
lunches.
In the Anchor Bay School District, those
lunches are something just above prison food -- formally a
"balanced meal," but about as appetizing as the plastic
wrappers around the students' drinking straws (or those little
pink erasers they sell for an outrageous price).
But, as one might suspect, those kinds of
school lunches are not very appealing. So, in order to "jazz
up" the lunch line, the school district also offered less
nutritious, but more appealing, selections.
Next to the unidentifiable "mystery meat" and
corrugated cardboard they call "lasagna" sit freshly-prepared
pizza, chicken nuggets, french fries and salads.
But those latter selections are for those who
can afford them, not those whose meals are paid for by the
government.
The school administrators are adamant about
the importance of preserving this class-based division among
the students.
That is why they have gone to great lengths to
paint this situation in the coded language often reserved for
gang activity or other forms of "anti-social behavior."
"He was trying to steal the chicken to impress
his friends," asserted Rogers.
"Impress his friends?!" Certainly, if Struck
wanted to impress his friends, he could be more creative or
audacious.
Eating a chicken nugget is not exactly on a
level comparable with graffiti art or bringing a weapon to
school -- a point Struck's mother, Hope Sauer, made clear to
the media repeatedly.
NEVERTHELESS, for capitalism, such "crimes" as
that innocently committed by Struck are to be treated as if
they are a mortal threat to the fragile fabric of civilized
society.
Why? The answer to that can be found in the
so-called "expert" sought out by the bosses' Detroit
News: Roger Stollak, psychology professor at Michigan
State University.
According to Stollak, teenagers need to be
able to accept the fact that some kids will have better food,
better clothing, better housing, etc.
"Are our children so fragile they can't handle
that?" Stollak pointedly asks.
That's not the point, Professor Privilege.
In fact, teenagers from poor and working-class
backgrounds not only accept but also fully understand the fact
that they will not have the same kind of future as their
fellow students from wealthy or privileged families.
However, school teaches them something else.
Schools, as distributors of capitalist
propaganda, build a mythology around the idea that if poor
people "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" they will be
able to get ahead.
Traditionally, this is called the "Horatio
Alger" myth -- Alger being one of a number of literary
characters used by hireling scribblers to bolster capitalist
ideology.
But in 21st-century America, there is no
longer any room for Horatio Alger or any kind of mythology
that allows poor and working people any thought of a better or
decent future.
Nowadays, public schools are nothing more than
holding cells for young people, a way station on the road to
minimum wage McJobs, workfare and/or prison.
To better prepare them for their bleak future
as modern slaves, as per the "rules of society," capitalism
has to crush their desire for a better life.
Deprive them of good jobs, health care, decent
food, proper education, adequate housing and democratic
rights.
And if they dare to step out of line, punish
them ... severely. Keep them "in their place."
That is the ideology of today -- a modern,
class-based version of the same theories and concepts that
justified slavery, segregation and second-class citizenship.
CAPITALISM CAN NO longer afford to hold out
the "carrot" of a better future for poor and working people.
The kind of social security that has been
offered for decades is now far too expensive (i.e.,
unprofitable) for the ruling class.
Capitalist "lean production" and globalization
have made millions of workers (and their families) little more
than "surplus population," to be discarded like a broken or
rusted tool.
At best, these millions can serve capitalism
as an army of unemployed, to be used to keep wages low and
working conditions miserable.
At worst, young men like Struck are to be
cannon fodder for one of capitalism's new wars of colonial
conquest (in the same way another teenager from a poor
background, Jessica Lynch, was used in Iraq).
In the 1840s, a young Karl Marx commented that
if social progress were only partial or half-hearted, then all
the "old crap" would come back.
This is what we are seeing today. Capitalism
tried a partial and half-hearted attempt at social progress
with the New Deal and Great Society programs.
Now, because these social advances left
capitalism in place, all the "old crap" -- social barbarism,
fascism, corporate slavery -- is coming back.
The case of Robert Struck provides us with
many valuable lessons, the most important of which is that
capitalism cannot and will not offer a better future for
working people.
Instead, it offers second-class citizenship,
punitive class-based "rules of society," and a future as bleak
and unappetizing as the "mystery meat" Struck was forced to
eat.
This is why capitalism cannot be reformed;
this is why socialism is the only road that leads working
people to a real, meaningful
future. | 
