Not here, anyways.

When I was a senior in high school, me and a group of friends actually kept a freshman from committing suicide by jumping off of the art building (chances are high that he would actually have… succeeded).

After seeing that he had actually climbed up there and began shouting that he was going to jump, which eventually drew the attention of everyone in the cafeteria that morning — you could see the art building from the cafeteria because it was… adjacent to it in a peculiar way — and seeing that everyone in the cafeteria with the exception of us was going to start chanting, “Jump! Jump! Jump!”, my friends and I knew that we had to summon help in the form of an adult so that he wouldn’t actually jump. The nearest adult that I knew we could find was the student activities director whose office was in the cafeteria on the stage, so my friends and I literally pushed our way through the growing crowd of students to get to her (mind, this was not a small school, so we probably pushed our way through the equivalent of a small mosh pit, a thousand or so students by that point), and as luck would have it, she was actually in her office, and we could tell her what was going on. She immediately stepped out of her office, saw the students practically cramming themselves against the glass of the cafeteria wall nearest where they could see this kid standing on the top of the art building, still chanting at him to jump, knew that we weren’t pulling her leg, and called the front office to tell them that they needed to call emergency services and why all of this was necessary.

Not long after, some of them pulled up by that side of the school and some of them climbed up there with him. This poor kid literally tried as hard as he could to get away from them and jump off of the building — we’re talking, he literally tried to drag himself out of their grip at several points, and we saw them sedate him at one point — but they did succeed in getting him down and keeping him from hurting himself. And we eventually found out that we were the only students who told an actual adult what was going on, which meant that if we hadn’t, he might actually have successfully jumped from the building. Out of a school with slightly more than two thousand students with approximately a thousand of them in the cafeteria at that time, only maybe six actually did the right thing summoning aid so that this student would not hurt himself.

Needless to say, a lot of students got to their first period classes late, but given what went on, there was reason for it. My reason was, well… I actually helped keep one of the school’s students from killing himself.

When I was a senior in high school, military recruiters practically fell over themselves attempting to recruit me for the military. They frequently called the house seeing if they could get me to sign up, and I repeatedly told them that I was not interested (ironically, it honestly seemed that none of them had known that I had to quit soccer because I could not keep up with my teammates and rode the bench in gym classes because my asthma was so severe — and, surprisingly, at the time, undiagnosed — that I could not participate). My parents had to tell them that I was not interested. And then my dad had to access their chain of command for what became the first time because they would not stop calling the house trying to “convince” me to enlist after I graduated from high school. Yes, this is actually a true story. It actually gets worse from here.

Some time after their chain of command was accessed and they stopped calling our house, I began to get approached at school by military recruiters. One of them actually had the nerve to tell me “that he was recruiting me at school (where my parents weren’t around) to see if I had the same opinions as my parents”. I told my dad that the exchange had occurred, and he accessed their chain of command again, this time to let them know that recruiters had been going behind my parents’ back when they had been told by my parents not to contact me for any reason about recruitment, and my dad threatened to sue them if all contact was not ceased. Apparently my high school conveniently lost the form that my parents had filled out at the start of the school year forbidding recruiters to contact me for any reason (they had filled one out at the beginning of the school year, and they clearly remember — as they had — not giving permission). The school “could not find the form on file”. In the absence of a denial of consent the school assumes consent is/has been granted.

I hate the fact that army recruiters even interact with high school students for a large number of reasons.

· until the system is reformed, willingly participating in it is continuing to condone it
· minorities continue to be incarcerated for non-violent crimes at a much higher rate than whites are
· children have been maced, and teenagers tear gassed, during non-violent protests during all of… this
· cops have hidden their badges in attempts to avoid being held accountable while they do these things
· cops willingly flash bombed and tear gassed protestors, and church priests, to give Trump a photo op
· when minorities attempt to reach for their wallets in many cases, cops have drawn their guns in response
· cops have lied on police reports and planted evidence to cover themselves when minorities have been shot
· cops can amass a list of complaints on their record but have them dismissed or very little done about them
· some cops have actually raped individuals in their custody and it has been very hard to charge them
· 40% of male cops go home and abuse their partners and/or children, which is very, very high for a single job

I’m positive that I could add more to this list, but I’ll stop there for now.

Active participation in this system as it is now is condoning it, even if “some cops don’t act like that”, “you know a good cop”, “you found a picture online of a cop hugging a child”, “a cop helped you” (maybe one did, and that might not have been a bad thing), or “some of them have taken knees at protests”. The system has to be reformed or it has to be dismantled, because as it stands right now, it is absolutely not working at all.