When Dr. Cole, my middle school principal, stopped me in the hallway earlier this spring, he told me that I wasn’t in trouble. I should have been more concerned.
What he meant was that I wasn’t in trouble as long as I did what he wanted. What he wanted was that I not wear my sweatshirt to school anymore. The shirt causing this commotion is a simple black sweatshirt, with a four line poem in pastel, bubbly font:
Save the bees.
Plant more trees.
Clean the seas.
Punch Nazis.
Dr. Cole told me not to wear the shirt to school again because he ‘had received some student complaints’ from students who ‘felt threatened’. I was floored. I wanted to ask how anyone (other than a Nazi or someone with a bee related anaphylactic allergy) could feel threatened by the shirt. I had a feeling it didn’t have to do with the bees.
But I did not say that.
I told him that I understood.
Not that I agreed.
Because I simply can’t agree with censorship, especially given my family’s history and how my shirt relates to it. When my great-grandmother Irene was my age, she was imprisoned in a German concentration camp along with her mom and her younger brother. From across an ocean and multiple generations, I’ve heard her story from my parents and seen a video of her talking about her experience in her own words.
Day in and day out, she would have to build gas chambers that would eventually kill other Jewish people so she wouldn’t be killed herself. She talked of lack of food and terrible conditions. Of watching person after person who she knew die.
Her early life was dark and terrifying, and yet she grew up to be so joyful, an act that took so much strength. She was one of the happiest people either of my parents knew. She didn’t come out of camp angry, rather she lived, moving to the United States, finding a job, falling in love, and starting a new life. She didn’t let all the terrible things she had seen and experienced stop her from living.
It must have taken so much bravery to believe that the world would not let the past repeat itself.
When she was growing up, she knew when she needed to keep her mouth shut for survival. Over 6.5 million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust. Against that horrific backdrop, it is a miracle that I exist. I know when I need to open my mouth and speak up. I do this through shirts, typically. My closet is full of snarky shirts, since it’s how I express myself and share my thoughts with the world. From reading books to fighting patriarchy, my closet covers it all.
My shirt is perfect for the mornings when I wake up feeling feisty (since I’m an eighth grader, I wake up feisty a lot). I had been wearing the shirt for over a year. No one had ever complained about it, although I’ve got plenty of curious looks. I understand those. Not everyone would be comfortable wearing a shirt like mine. It’s a little bold. But despite that, even some teachers have told me that they love my shirt, friends have asked where I got it, and kids have come up to me in the hall to tell me that it means a lot to them.
Which is why I am enacting my own forms of resistance against what I believe to be my principal’s overreach. I’ve been wearing other pointed shirts to school, and have had meetings with Dr. Cole (with no progress made), and am doing what I can to make my voice heard. My great-grandma endured so much when she was my age. I don’t know if I’ll ever be as strong as her, but at the very least I can do this.
Because our world today is scary. Because hate speech is on the rise in my school and we are facing a government that is eerily similar to what happened to Irene. And if I give in, if I stop wearing my shirt quietly, I am letting history play out again. I would be letting down everyone at school who told me that my shirt meant something to them. I am doing everyone a disservice if I stay quiet.
Some may say that Lexington is as comfortable as it can get, and if I’m making people uncomfortable, I should just comply. But my shirt getting banned did not occur in a vacuum. This is a school where students drew neo-nazi symbols on the bathroom walls in December and the only schoolwide response was a statement on the announcements telling us to be kind. This is a school where I frequently hear white supremacist, anti-immigrant, racist comments, and there is little I can do because it has become all too common. The school is rapidly tipping in a direction that few in my town would feel comfortable with, and by removing my shirt, the scales are tipping further and further from kindness.
Among all that, I was making a safe space in the hallway with my shirt where I could silently fight back against the antisemitism in my school. By stopping wearing my shirt and giving in to my principal’s demands, it would appear that I was agreeing with an administration who is uncomfortable with that message against anti-semetism. And that will never happen.
Because I’m angry. I’m mad that people can’t see that my shirt isn’t a threat. The people it offends are the threat.
So you have to do something.
You have to be willing to remember. To have the hard conversations, to make sure that we don’t forget. To address the hate in your community.
And if I tell my story, if I speak up, I can remember. And I can use my words to help others remember. My shirt was never about actually punching Nazis. That’s only a fourth of the message. Part of a rhetorical* device for dramatic effect. My shirt is about making the world a better place. It’s about the future. It’s about planting seeds for tomorrow.
Because I want a tomorrow with bees, a tomorrow with trees, and clean oceans. And a peaceful tomorrow without anti-semitism or hate for people based on where they come from. And I think that’s why I’m so upset that I can’t wear my shirt. Because my shirt is me hoping for a better tomorrow and working for a better today.
Is that so much to ask?
Teagan Murtagh
*A paraprosdokian