Teachable Moments in American History

On NPR this morning the anchor happily reported that Minnesota Police have started their own YouTube channel to show how well they do their job.  In response to a video that showed peaceful protesters "getting roughed up" before being charged with "impeding the flow of traffic," Minnesota's finest posted a video that shows them first yelling at the peaceful protesters over a bullhorn.  The story was presented as great news.  They made it sound like accurate information shows that the police in question are not bad people, and according to our cultural norms this may almost be true, but according to the ideals of our constitution and our legal system it's a long way off.

Aside from the obvious and irrefutable argument about the rights to peaceably assemble, speak freely and petition the government that are guaranteed to all Americans in the Constitution, which make any law against impeding the flow of traffic inherently illegal and un-American, we have another constitutional doctrine against cruel and unusual punishment.

This doctrine is often summed up by a belief that "the punishment has to fit the crime."  I would like to argue as a substitute teacher that if someone stands in someone else's way, there is no reason for anyone in that situation to yell over a bullhorn, let alone "rough them up."  These are two of the biggest misconceptions I face when I teach in kindergarten and first grade classes, so I know they exist, and I also know how to clear them up.  I could counter it with an enlightened Gandhi quote like, "your right to move your arm ends where my nose begins," but this is really too dignified a refutation for such a patently silly and immature justification for bullying.

A school bully is not justified in "roughing up" any of his classmates for being in his way or for saying how they feel.  My young students learn that instead of solving problems with violence they need to talk things through and, if that fails, go find a teacher to help calmly talk things through to a mutually agreeable solution that respects the rights of both parties.  When they do go get a teacher, the teacher's job is just that:  to talk things through.  That's also the Minnesota policemen's job if they are brought in to a trafficky, frustrated situation by a democratic government which disagrees with its people.

If a teacher came in to a disordered, frustrated, trafficky classroom and started "roughing up" defenseless children, that teacher would go to jail.  More than that, they'd be completely ridiculous, as a different YouTube phenomenon has pointed out.  They'd be ridiculous because we know teachers, as authority figures, are supposed to serve as behavioral models to show children how not to act as bullies.  They'd be ridiculous because once they start acting like bullies, teachers lose their moral authority.  A teacher who hits students is not only a physical danger to those she teaches, but a moral danger to those her students may encounter later in life, who have been taught that grown ups respond to bullying by simply becoming bigger bullies.

This Minnesota nonsense pits the Constitution of the United States of America against the Bully Doctrine of Move Because I Said So Very Loudly.  It is ridiculous that our public radio system, with a moral obligation to defend and explain the former, should glibly endorse the latter.  It's bad enough that many parts of America are policed by grown-up, heavily-armed people who believe more powerfully in Because I Said So than in the god-given right of all people to peaceably assemble.  It's bad enough that this can be presented as "News."  However, when bully policing is presented as good news, on the grounds that at least the bully said so very loudly before "roughing up" his fellow citizens, we have before our nation a teachable moment.