The Revolution Will Not Be Televised or Printed or Broadcast or Referenced or Implied or Suggested or Discussed or ...

To: The Pleasant Hill Community, School District, Administration, Faculty, and Students
From: The Spare Gary
RE: Reference and Promotion, The Issue of Censorship

The Spare Gary was borne out of a desire to enhance the educational and cultural environment of Pleasant Hill and is the only public outlet for artistic and literary expression for many of our students outside of the classroom.

At Pleasant Hill High School we are expected to take classes and complete coursework at a high level and to deal thoughtfully and rigorously with the difficult issues posed by others. For this we are glad. We appreciate the challenges and opportunities for growth that these standards provide for us. At the same time, however, we are told that our words, our ideas, our art do not deserve the same treatment, regard, or respect.

The staff of The Spare Gary feels that its content is under attack and we do not understand why. We have been censored for exploring themes and ideas that are certainly no worse, indeed they are far less obscene, than much of what we are exposed to every day at school by our peers, the books in the library, and the required curricula of many of our classes. We have heard, but do not understand, the administration’s attempts to explain why this is so and why different, more restrictive standards for expression have been applied to us.

We’ve been told that the reason for much of the censorship we have endured is the belief that reference is the same as promotion. This doesn’t make sense to us. If true, however, this means that by teaching us about sex, drugs, suicide, war, racism, and genocide through its courses and required videos, the school is thereby promoting all of these things. We hope this is not true or, at the very least, this promotion is unintentional.

We don’t understand how a brief and subtle fictional depiction of “gentle neck kisses” in a tender story cannot be tolerated when we are required to go to sex education classes and study videos that graphically and explicitly depict women giving birth and the physical consequences of sexually transmitted diseases.

We don’t understand how the suggestion of homosexuality in a student story is deemed unacceptable with a single word, “omit,” by the administration while we must read poetry by gay poets, stories with gay characters, and history with gay people.

We don’t understand how the discussion of drug use is unavoidable and required when studying the Beat poets, Lewis Carroll, Whitman, Poe, Freud, or local legend Ken Kesey in English or Psychology classes, but is not acceptable when a student voluntarily writes a poem or a story about recovery and survival in which drug use is cast in the most negative light.

Perhaps a list of guidelines is in order. By what criteria is the content to be censored? How, where and when will these criteria be applied? Who will apply them and, perhaps more importantly, for whom will they be applied?

We only want to understand. Please respond to our concerns in clear, unequivocal, specific, and authoritative terms so that we can.

Thank you for your consideration,
The Spare Gary