This is something I've been thinking about recently, what's been happening with Justin Carter, and upon reflection, I've noticed a pattern of chronic disciplinary action taken against me for bizarre reasons throughout my youth.

How often did this sort of thing happen to you. I wonder how prevalent my experiences in the post-Columbine atmosphere are among MRAs.

The first time it ever happened to me, it was in elementary school. I had drawn a picture of a monster of alien creature destroying the school. Of course it was only the abstract idea of the school itself I wanted destroyed, because I didn't like being there and I therefore thought if it were destroyed I wouldn't have to go. Like that old Calvin and Hobbes strip where he fantasies about blowing up his own school, it had nothing to do with harming my actual teachers or classmates. When my teacher saw my drawing though, she grabbed me very forcibly by my arm, yanked me out into the hallway and reproved me quite severely for it.

This sort of thing happened more times than I can count growing up. In 6th grade I questioned why we were being commanded to call people "african americans" instead of "black". It just didn't make sense to me, in a sort of innocent way of just wanting to know 'why?'. My teacher became "concerned" though and called my home and saw to it that I was given a stern talking to about how bad racism is.

In 8th grade, as I was entering puberty, in English class we were given a diary assignment. Keep a diary for a month or what have you. I had no conception of how what I wrote would be used by the teacher to police my thoughts. I typically had some angst and I thought the assignment was stupid so I was uncooperative and wrote many of the entries more to amuse myself than anything else. The emotions I expressed though, not because of any particular content or anything I actually said, were deemed "troubling" or "concerning" by my teacher and I was subjected to administrative intervention, grilled by the school counsellor and the principle, and just made to feel totally impotent and frustrated the whole time as they kept twisting things out of context and making everything innocent seem like it was part of this grand pattern of malicious behavior.

In 9th grade I was given my first formal introduction to neo-marxist Feminist theory. Our English class devoted several weeks to a unit on gender roles and stereotypes in the media and our project for that unit was to construct a collage of objectifying portrayals of women we found in magazines. I was just really instinctively against this for some reason. I couldn't really articulate why, I just sort of sniffed out that something seriously didn't feel right about what I was being told. I questioned the teacher finally, result? She became "concerned" and I again found myself under the microscope of a probing administration.

There are so many more, even in college I nearly got kicked out of student housing for a coarse bit of humor. The joke I told wasn't offensive to the person I told it to, but the female resident overheard, or perhaps was eavesdropping is a better way to put it, and though the joke wasn't at the expense of her race or heritage specifically, she felt a hypothetical person, had they been there, might have gotten offended and that I therefore required...correction from the administration via the use of intimidation and threats of substantial academic consequences being made against me.

Think about how frequently we hear all sorts of stories like this. Like the one involving Justin Carter, or the ones we hear about little boys being punished for eating their cookies into threatening shapes. Am I alone in having been routinely subjected to this sort of unnerving policing and humiliation?