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Any breach of this etiquette must be dealt with swiftly, surely, and completely, so the hierarchy can remain seamless, safely unacknowledged, hidden from the possibility of change by either victim or perpetrator. That this is as true on the larger social scale as it is on the more personal or familial should be obvious, but I’ll provide a couple of quick examples. Just last night I spoke with a group of students from San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara, California. The kids were delightful, intelligent, passionate, and defiant. One told me she had asked the school’s administration for permission to put up posters containing these words from the Declaration of Independence: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Far from rewarding her interest in history and politics (Who says kids these days don’t know important historical documents?), administrators not only denied her request, but threatened her with “forced transfer” to another school should she post them anyway.

She asked my advice.

I suggested that since her request had already identified her to authorities, other students should put up the posters. Another student objected to this, saying that many students had already been threatened with expulsion.

“Why?”

She answered that they’d planned a one-period walkout to protest a school policy of administrators giving students’ names and phone numbers to military recruiters. Teachers had infiltrated the organization planning the walkout, she’d said, under the guise of being advisors. When students rejected the teachers’ advice to limit their protest to writing letters for the administration to ignore, teachers and administrators stood as one, telling students they’d be expelled if they walked out of any classes.

I told these kids I was proud of them, and that I was glad they had at such a young age experienced participatory democracy in action.

I wish I’d have told them another idea I had for the posters, but this didn’t occur to me until much later: that they form alliances with students at other schools, so that other students put up posters of resistance at this school, and these students put them up elsewhere. Not only would this lessen the easy power of the administrators to harm those who speak out, but more importantly it would begin to make networks of organized resistance, cadres for the revolution we so desperately need.

No matter what they felt in their hearts, the teachers had probably been in a very bad position. My understanding of the school climate was that had they not gone along with this silencing of dissent, they could have lost their jobs. That’s one of the ways the system works. If I complain about a woman in a uniform putting her hand in my pants, I miss my flight, and possibly get arrested. If these teachers do not stifle dissent, they possibly get fired.

This statement of course does not excuse their actions, but merely helps us understand them. Or maybe they had their actions fully rationalized, as presumably did the administrators.

The slightest real dissent—that not confined to places, times, and means designed or approved by those in power—must be perceived by those in power as an attack on the legitimacy of their rule.

Probably because it is.

It’s a wondrous thing to get up off your knees, to stand again (or for the first time) on your hind legs, to say “Fuck you”—classes in “verbal nonviolence” notwithstanding—or to say “You have no right,” or “No” to those in power, to choose where, when, and how you will express yourself, where, when, and how you will fight back, where, when, and how you will defend what and whom you love against those who exploit and destroy them.

You should try it some time. It’s really fun.

The next characteristic is that abusers are at least insensate to the pain of children and nonhumans. Bringing this to the larger cultural level requires, I think, only one word: vivisection. Okay, another: zoos. A couple more: