It's fair to say that Americans are far more adept at preaching freedom than practicing it. In all manner of ways, Americans routinely surrender freedoms and liberties and expect their fellow citizens to do the same. The tired and moronic refrain is inevitably: "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide".
This refrain, of course, is a surrender to the power of the state, in that it assumes that a) the state has the right to distinguish "wrong" personal behavior, and b) the state would never do "wrong" itself and is therefore the legitimate judge of all that is "right". Two very pre-1776 assumptions.
Drug tests are a perfect case-in-point. Most people support drug testing because they think they would pass the test. Their thought stops at that point. This logic would also allow us to round up Jews, because most of us aren't Jews. But that's beside the point.
The point is that drug tests are a widely-practiced police-state measure that tramples on the 4th and 5th amendments by their very nature.
But first, we must distinguish what drug tests are. Drug tests are, for all intents and purposes, marijuana tests. Since any thinking person will admit that alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug in any and every workplace, the absurdity is obvious.
I used to work in a warehouse with forklifts and tractor-trailers whizzing by all day and all night. The "drug" policy there did not prevent men from coming to work drunk and driving industrial equipment around all night (which some men did), but it DID prevent me from smoking a joint on the weekend.
So, since drug tests focus primarily on the most benign drug in our pharmacopoeia, while completely ignoring a drug whose use could injure or kill workers in any number of ways and in any number of workplaces, the mental decrepitude of the policy is obvious.
Now, for the constitution. The 4th amendment prohibits arbitrary search and seizure. Put simply, nobody can search my person or my property without documented reasoning that I have committed a crime. You can search me if I am fleeing from the direction of a recent armed robbery, but you cannot search me if you simply dislike the way I dress.
But drug tests require no proof, no evidence, no reasoning at all. There is no supposition that the testee has committed any crime, or has ever used a drug in his life, legal or otherwise. No, the only thing that makes a drug testee "suspicious" is that he wants a job.
So, if you want a job in this country, you have to prove that you have not violated the state's (idiotic and ignorant) drug policies. Wanting a job is probable cause. And all of a sudden, citizens have no rights and it is incumbent upon them to prove that they have not done something "wrong" rather than it being incumbent upon the state to prove that they have done something "wrong".
And here is where all the proto-fascists chime in: "well, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about", and its insidious cousin, "well, if you're under suspicion, you must have done something wrong".
And what of the 5th amendment? The 5th amendment, among other things, tells us that no citizen can be forced to provide evidence against themselves. Drug testing shreds this amendment just as surely as it does the 4th.
Requiring a drug test of a job applicant means that a business is forcing that person to provide evidence against themselves. Even if that person has done nothing "wrong", they are forced to submit to a search and forced to provide evidence proving they have done nothing "wrong".
This is not just a problem for stoners, and not only scumbags have reason to fear it. It is just a piece of the architecture that American government and corporations have erected together, making most workplaces into places where the constitution simply does not apply.
It is all part of an edifice of intimidation that has been erected to deprive the American worker of his dignity and his self-worth. You want a job at Wal-Mart? That's fine, just promise you'll never form a union, you'll work unpaid overtime, you'll skip breaks, and you'll pee into a cup upon our request.
There used to be a time in this country when workers had a sense of their rights and were utterly and entirely unapologetic about telling management to piss off. I'll smoke to that.
Being a substitute teacher in so-called "Level 1" schools is to be on the front lines of a disintegrating society. "Level 1" is shorthand for the worst of the worst. If the name makes no sense, perhaps we can assume it was coined by a product of these very schools.
Even a lifetime of living in "Level 1" neighborhoods and having "Level 1" neighbors cannot prepare a person for the reality of inner-city schools in 2010 America. By this I mean that I have lived and worked next to "Level 1" people my whole life, but even that could not prepare me for what I see every day in our public schools.
To be a 31-year old man returning to urban public schools for the first time since attending them in my youth is to be instantly morphed into an 80-year old Republican. I have been meanly and swiftly reduced to waxing reminiscent and nostalgic about a simpler, more civilized time. By which I mean 1993.
The amazing thing is not that students fight, or swear, or show a lack of innate interest in learning. The amazing thing is that these behaviors have been completely mainstreamed. What used to result in immediate suspension now, in the very same schools, barely registers as a disruption.
It used to be that fighting, for example, or calling a teacher a faggot or a bitch or something far, far worse would result in immediate suspension. Now, in the very same schools, this behavior is simply the cost of doing business, an annoyance rather than a red line.
What has changed? Certainly music and movies have become more coarse and explicit. But that is not the fundamental issue. When I was in these schools, the n-word was just as prevalent in rap music as it is today, but it was not a word that was heard spoken in the hallways. Now, it is a word I hear as often as I hear the word "the".
This word, and others equally vulgar, are common currency now. So are all other types of behavior that simply would not have been tolerated in the good old days, if there ever is such a thing.
The fundamental problem is two-fold. Firstly, adults (parents, guardians, and teachers) have tolerated this behavior. It doesn't take a doctorate in child psychology to know that if there is no consequence to calling an adult a bitch-ass motherfucker, then that behavior will occur far more often than it otherwise would.
Secondly, and most importantly, kids today are entirely incapable of dividing their identities. All of us today live atomized lives and are required to assume several different "identities" in any given day. It is possible to be a father, a son, a husband, a teacher, a shopper, a driver, and a friend in the course of a single day, for example.
What today's children lack is any understanding that different identities require different conduct. People my age understand that the language you use around your friends in a casual setting is very different from the language you would use towards your mother, or during a job interview, or when seated in a restaurant.
Those dividing lines are not acknowledged by youth today. To them, there is no sense that school is a different realm from home with an entirely different set of conduct, communication, and behavior. The sullen and hostile glares from students who are told they may not listen to headphones during class attests to this.
One hypothetical I use to (vainly) attempt to illustrate this for students is Jay-Z. When Jay-Z walked into a boardroom to negotiate the purchase of an NBA franchise, do we think he sagged his pants? Do we think he smoked or drank during the meeting? Do we think he referred to his prospective colleagues as "niggas"?
Two things are clear when I ask students to think about that scenario. Firstly, they are intrigued. Secondly, any serious consideration of the merits of the point I raise lasts about 5 seconds.
"Know thyself" is an old adage. In this day and age, however, that can be crippling, especially if the "self" you define yourself as is the "self" you are with no adults around. The costs of defining yourself that way are crippling. What students need to do today is to be able to incorporate different identities. They need to know thyselves.
There are certain islands of American life and culture into which black folks were accepted even while most walks of life were closed to them.
The first, cynically enough, was the military. There is, I think, something cynical about a nation that would pride itself on "allowing" black folks to die for the flag well before those very folks were allowed to vote.
Around the the time the military was fully integrated in 1946, two more realms of our culture were opened gradually to blacks: music and sports. Music and sports, however gradually they were opened to black participation on equal terms, remain the twin loci of ghetto youth to this day.
Again, this can be said to be a bit cynical, since the dynamic remains that the best a poor black child can hope to do is to one day amuse and entertain everyone else. However, a bit of this angst is surely assuaged by the fact that young black men can now make tens of millions of dollars for doing nothing more than entertain white people.
Another realm which was opened up to blacks relatively early was TV and movies, but at first it was only a specific genre that welcomed blacks. In the 40', 50's, 60's, and onwards, blacks were rarely featured in any remotely empowering roles in TV or movies. The exception was science fiction.
Blacks, and minorities in general, were feature far more often and far more prominently in science fiction movies and TV shows far before more mainstream and more "realistic"fare.
Watch any old sci-fi movie or TV show, from Star Trek to Star Wars, from Planet of the Apes to Alien, and you will see black astronauts, female generals, and everything in between. They literally jump off the screen when compared to other mainstream movies and shows of the same eras, which are dominated exclusively by white men.
While I have never been interested in Star Trek per se, I can't help but notice that a black woman and a (gay) Asian man were officers on the spaceship when the show premiered in 1966. Vintage sci-fi has endless examples of empowered minorities of all stripes in a time when all other genres conspicuously lacked melanin and estrogen.
This speaks to the reason that sci-fi appeals to so many people. Sci-fi is about the future, so the authors can project aspirations that don't seem "realistic" to the audience. Flying cars. Talking computers. Black presidents. 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
By planting the seed in the audience's consciousness, could sci-fi material have played a part in the growing tolerance and inclusiveness in our culture? Perhaps. Or I suppose it could have been done simply for shock value. But I'm inclined to feel that it was indicative of an open-mindedness that was ahead of its time.
I recall the first time I ever saw a movie with a black president. It was Deep Impact, about an asteroid headed to destroy the earth. Morgan Freeman was the president. The most interesting thing about the film was that the asteroid actually hit earth and killed most people on the planet. No bottom-of-the-ninth Bruce Willis heroics to be found.
What was also interesting was that the president was black. This film was made at a time when the idea of a black president had been made at least plausible by recent speculation that Colin Powell would run in 1996.
In retrospect, it was a master-stroke by the writers; it appealed to liberals by portraying a black president as entirely realistic. And it appealed to everyone else by making it clear that the first black president would be the last, and hey, at least it was Morgan Freeman.
I have been convinced that tolerance for diversity is not inevitable; it takes pushing. It takes confrontation. These confrontations need not be overt, however. Sometimes they are accomplished passively, artfully, by the kids who got picked on in high school. Sometimes it takes a Trekkie.
