Enough is Enough

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August 2001 - June 2017

The School Survival Forums are permanently retired. If you need help with quitting school, unsupportive parents or anything else, there is a list of resources on the Help Page.

If you want to write about your experiences in school, you can write on our blog.

To everyone who joined these forums at some point, and got discouraged by the negativity and left after a while (or even got literally scared off): I'm sorry.

I wasn't good enough at encouraging people to be kinder, and removing people who refuse to be kind. Encouraging people is hard, and removing people creates conflict, and I hate conflict... so that's why I wasn't better at it.

I was a very, very sensitive teen. The atmosphere of this forum as it is now, if it had existed in 1996, would probably have upset me far more than it would have helped.

I can handle quite a lot of negativity and even abuse now, but that isn't the point. I want to help people. I want to help the people who need it the most, and I want to help people like the 1996 version of me.

I'm still figuring out the best way to do that, but as it is now, these forums are doing more harm than good, and I can't keep running them.

Thank you to the few people who have tried to understand my point of view so far. I really, really appreciate you guys. You are beautiful people.

Everyone else: If after everything I've said so far, you still don't understand my motivations, I think it's unlikely that you will. We're just too different. Maybe someday in the future it might make sense, but until then, there's no point in arguing about it. I don't have the time or the energy for arguing anymore. I will focus my time and energy on people who support me, and those who need help.

-SoulRiser

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Threaded Mode \| Linear Mode Enough is Enough
Author	Message

Rebelnerd Offline

Fanatic

Posts: 8,781
Joined: Aug 2005

Thanks: 0
Given 113 thank(s) in 97 post(s)

Post: #18

Re: Enough is Enough

There's a lot I could say in this thread, and a lot I want to say but probably shouldn't due to our desperate push to keep things civil. But if the other people here (TrueAnarchist excluded) who've laid out some thoughtful refutations didn't change your mind, I doubt I will. So I'll try to keep it relatively short, if not sweet.
I don't buy your story about "maturing" for a second. If someone is causing you harm or infringing on your human rights, you don't "mature" out of it. Nor do I think that you "cracked" or got brainwashed, or any Orwellian shit like that. Using those buzzwords would be a cop-out, and, to be honest, it would be going to easy on you.
Reading between the lines, it sounds to me like you just got lucky. One thing you said was absolutely correct: your school experiance wasn't bad at all. All you had to motivate you was theory and politics, and once you went up against someone who could argue effectively for the other side, you realized that you, personally, had nothing with which to reinforce your beliefs. You accuse us of extrapolating the flaws of a few bad schools to every building in the country, but ironically you've done the same thing in reverse. While looking back at your own memories and realizing that they weren't so bad, you assume that it's been like that for all of us. I'd like to tell you that that's bullshit.

Look, do you seriously think I'm here because I hate homework, tests, and unfair teachers? I actually don't give a shit about any of that. They're nuisances, nothing more. Just petty indignities that could probably be fixed with enough studies and petitioning. I can't speak for the other members of this site, who I'm sure have their own horror stories to tell, but can tell you that I'm here because I saw with my own eyes how fucked up the system is, and once you've seen that, it is impossible to go back. I don't need a Gatto book to motivate me, all I've got to do is look at the scar I've still got from two years ago to remind myself why we're doing this. If it happened once, it can happen again. When a person has the kind of power that schools have over students, anything can happen. Even if it didn't happen to you.

If someone else would like to provide a list of all the terrible wrongs in our society that would still be around if people had decided "you can't change the system," that would be excellent. All I have left to say is that my sister is starting middle school in the fall, and I would burn that buildling to the ground before I let her experiance some of the things I saw.

I think Buenaventura Durruti is a pretty cool guy. eh kills fascists and doesnt afraid of ruins.
The quickest way to kill a revolution is to wait for it.

05-02-2009 08:24 AM