Conform or die

Edwin Frost
Vice President, Kennewick School Board

Dear Mr. Frost,

I'm one hundred percent behind your decision to pick on the Goth kids by denying them the right to dress in "extreme" Goth fashion. These kids are different from you and me, and like a chick who displays unusual markings, they must be picked at until they either conform or die.

We didn't have Goths when I went to high school in the seventies. We had hippies, GA's (GA stood for "golden ass"--it morphed into "preppie" after I graduated), and Grits (cowboys--taken from the title of the movie, "True Grit). I was a Grit. That meant that I was a working class kid who rodeoed and smoked my marijuana while listening to Waylon Jennings rather than Steely Dan--later, I slipped into Foghat and underwent an identity crisis, but that's another story.

We wore "extreme" western clothing--cowboy hats, boots with tops split down the middle so that the inside half flapped outside of the bottoms of our Wrangler jeans, and big silver buckles--but we were also the enforcers of conformity within our small Northern Utah town. Cowboy values were American values in our community's way of thinking, and they were thankful that we grits were doing our part to promote those values at school.

We performed our duty with a vengeance. I doubt there was a hippy in the school who didn't have a rope burn from being lassoed or who hadn't felt the electrical jolt of a well placed cattle prod. They soon learned, like your Goths are learning now, that they would either conform or be eaten up by society.

Today, the hippies have been replaced by Goths and the grits are jocks, but the idea is the same. You reward conformity by punishing non-conformity. The Jock's clothing may be just as extreme--who wears that stuff as an adult--as any other tribal group's symbolic dress, but because they are the ultimate conformists, they are not censured for wearing it. The Goths, however, have dangerous, non-conformist ideas. You punish them by outlawing their clothing, and thereby send a signal to other students, perhaps jocks, that the Goths are "other" and must be forced to conform.

It's a good system, but have you considered cutting out the middle man? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just beat the hell out of the Goth kids, yourself?

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot