Alternet asks the question . . . Civics Student…or Enemy of America?

A high school student created a poster for a civics class as part of an assigned demonstrational project in freedom of expression. Basically, the teacher of a civics and economics class for high school seniors assigned a project for her students in which they had "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights."

In creating his project and fulfilling this homework assigment, one student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster." Get the picture?

This is simply freedom of expression and the right for political dissent.

For instance, while I love America with my heart and soul, I do not support the current administration’s policies. I may respect the office of the presidency fervently, but I am not required to respect the man who holds that office. In America, unlike some countries, the right to political dissent can and does include the use of images as powerful means for political discourse. The image with this post is NOT and SHOULD NOT be considered a personal attack on the man who happens to be the current US President, rather, the image is a reflection of a political stance that disagrees with the administration’s policies, an administration that is often personified in discourse as represented by the man. The two are not the same but one often stands for the other. Some kid giving a "thumbs-down" to George Bush is not a national security risk nor should his images be considered a threat to the person of the president. However, for some unfathomable reason, the Secret Service was called in and they treated what they were told was a threat in all due seriousness (in fairness, that’s their job and as stupid as it may seem they have to treat all of these complaints with some seriousness so please don’t fault them in this too much rather fault the rather strange person who complained to the police who then sent it on to the Secret Service . . . albeit, the SS should have ended things fairly quickly before it got so far, but they do have a serious and weighty job to do and once in a while a crackpot does turn out to be a genuine threat). My guess is that the red thumbtack threw ’em off as some folks might interpret it as a symbol of aggression while others will just note it’s a means of holding an image of the wall so one can take a photo of it.

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students. But that’s what happened on September 20. Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster." According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect. An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High. "At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster," Jarvis says. "I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others." She says the student was upset. "He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business," says Jarvis. She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service. "Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room," she says. "Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble." Then they got down to his poster. "They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious," she recalls. "I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!" At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident "would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted," she says. The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further. "I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody," she says. "I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service." When contacted, an employee in the photo department at the Wal-Mart in Kitty Hawk said, "You have to call either the home office or the authorities to get any information about that." Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period. Sharon Davenport of the Kitty Hawk Police Department said, "We just handed it over" to the Secret Service. "No investigative report was filed." Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, "We certainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee." Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: "ridiculous."

Rather than getting bent out of shape over an image of a thumb’s down next to the president’s photo, folks should be more concerned about photos like the one here which is a portrait composite of President Bush created from portraits of American soldiers who were killed in Iraq in the weeks after the president declared all hostilities over and mission accomplished. If that were true, then why did we not find any of the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, why are American soliders still in Iraq killing and dying, and why did military spending for the conflict bring the United States further into debt and deficet than any nation, empire, or culture in human history has ever been? Of course, that was before Katrina so the downfall of the American economy has only accellerated further.

The current American administration should be more worried about these things and how they are so easily tied into powerful images of this type than with high school kids doing a school project.

At least that would be my take on the whole thing . . . you are, of course, free to disagree and to say so in an appropriate forum. Isn’t freedom of dissent and expression a nice thing to have?