To the children of Lincoln Pius X High School who made fools of themselves at the football game against Lincoln High:
We are some grown-ups who live in your state and we are going to tell you something straight that you are not hearing from the other grown-ups in your lives.
You are growing up to be a bunch of ignorant little asswipes and you are rapidly diminishing your own potential in life.
There’s a good chance that many of you will graduate and go to religious colleges that will limit what your professors can teach you, because your parents have already chosen to put you in a high school like that. So it’s possible that you will proceed for some time not knowing what your peers in general think of you and your ideas. But eventually the day will come when you realize that you are utterly unprepared to cope in the larger world. And here’s why.
You live in a very white city in a very white, conservative state, and still your parents have so little faith in their own ideas that they have opted to cloister you in a tiny little universe where the ideas and people you come into contact with will be even more limited. They put you in that school because they are terrified that exposure to new ideas will result in you abandoning the ideas they want you to hold.
And it’s working. Indeed you believe that the little sealed pocket inside the little conservative state of Nebraska is somehow telling you the truth, that you are special because you are white boys or because you believe that white Christianist boys should dominate you. You believe that when you have the opportunity to go about in the somewhat larger world—say, to a football game against your peers who live in the same city as you but come from a much greater range of racial, religious, linguistic, and economic backgrounds than the monoculture of your high school—that you will not enter with open eyes, open ears, and open heart, but instead will enter believing that somehow you and your religion and your whiteness make you… what? The representatives of the “USA! USA!” whose name you chanted, whose colors you wore? You are not. Your beliefs are minority beliefs. The disgraced former president whose banner you held has never once earned a majority of the vote. You represent nothing except the idiotic racist worldview your parents locked you in and where you now happily reside.
If you think this behavior serves you well, you will learn in coming years—assuming you ever set foot outside your cage—that it will not. Go to school somewhere that doesn’t hang emblems of your religion on the wall, where you have to get along with people different than you, where you have to be able to understand opposing ideas to succeed. What you will find is that your peers find you repugnant. They find you ignorant and nasty. They find you dangerous and potentially violent. They will want nothing to do with you until you change. Change starts by having the basic sense to realize that “patriotism” is irrelevant in a game against your cross-town rivals because you do not represent anything about this country, which is also their country, except its backwardness. Change starts by realizing that just because your parents tell you you are awesome for being a fascist little shit, the rest of the world doesn’t think so.
Follow up from September 12:
When the Lincoln High School cheerleaders performed at halftime on Friday, a bloc of Lincoln Pius X High School students and adults turned their back on them. The school said it was because they were trying to “clean up a mess” because the wholesome youths didn’t want to leave trash behind. No, wait—it was because it’s a tradition of the school for the seniors in front to turn around and engage in “harmless shenanigans” with the crowd. Yeah, one of those—either a mess that everyone had to turn to clean en masse or a well established tradition we didn’t think about when we gave the mess theory.
