When I was in high school (1967-1969), this country was beginning to be rocked by protests of increasing length and breadth, mass demonstrations intended to urge Washington to get us the hell out of that war we were fighting in Vietnam. The war was unwinnable, some said. Others said that if it was winnable, it was not worth the cost in American lives and resources to win. Both groups argued with those who insisted that fighting it was a necessity to ensure the future of Democracy and…well, I don't need to revisit those arguments here and now.
At the time, I didn't buy that the war was unwinnable or unnecessary. I didn't particularly side with the protesters or the defenders of that military action but if pressed to take sides, I unenthusiastically sided with the latter. I suppose my main opinion — as a youth approaching Draft Age — was that whatever the merits of the war, I didn't want to go off and fight it. I didn't want to go into the Army at all and a few years later, thanks to a high-enough draft lottery number, I didn't.
If you want to fault me for my unwillingness to serve, fault away. I think I would have been a terrible soldier. If I'd absolutely had to join some branch of the military, the best thing I could do for my country was to go fight for the enemy.
Back when I was still attending University High in West Los Angeles, the campus was consumed by a big protest not unlike the ones we were seeing on the news. It was about 'Nam in a way but it was really about what then seemed like a much more important issue…
Mr. Foley.
Mr. Foley was the principal of Uni. He was a serious man, not particularly liked but for a long time, not particularly disliked. Before the protest broke out, I suppose the main thing most of us heard about him was that he often uttered what we now call "gaffes" — clumsy, insensitive things. Foleyisms, some called them. He tended to talk to us like we were tiny tots and not Young Adults who were soon to be entering the workplace, starting families and maybe even going off to fight a war.
Suddenly one day — and a key point here is that it was sudden — Mr. Foley had to go. I'm just guessing at percentages but it felt to me that out of seeming nowhere, 5% of the students at Uni were demanding that Foley resign or be fired…and 95% were going, "Huh? Why?" I did not fully understand the issues until years later when some articles were written about it, long after it was over.
The last straw — the Foleyism that triggered demands for his dismissal — began with an essay in the school newspaper, The Warrior.
(Why was it called that? Like all schools, Uni had a "theme" and ours was Indians of the American variety. Our mascot at football games was a gal or guy in an Indian suit. Our drill team dressed like Indians. Our football squad was the Warriors and the school paper was called The Warrior. All this, as you might expect, has since changed and the school team is now the Wildcats. Uni, by the way, was mostly white but we had a lot of black students, Asian students and Hispanics with no apparent racial tensions…and no apparent students of American Indian heritage.)
In this one issue of The Warrior, someone wrote an editorial urging support for the Vietnam War and harshly condemning those who were against it. One reason the whole protest came as an utter surprise to most of us is that almost no one who didn't work on The Warrior read it. I sure didn't — and an unscientific poll of my friends yielded a lot of shrugs and responses of "Who ever looks at that silly thing?"
Well, a few someones must have. One or more fiery rebuttals were submitted to run in the next issue of the usually-apolitical school paper. The Warrior's faculty advisor — surprised at the emotional blowback — kicked the matter upstairs to Mr. Foley. We later heard — and I still have no idea if this was true — that it had been run in the first place at Mr. Foley's urging. At the very least, it reflected his personal views.
In any case, he decreed that no rebuttal would be run and I believe he took the position that the first opinion piece should not have run. The Warrior wasn't a place for political debates, he now believed. The Warrior was to announce bake sales and football scores and vital news like that the horticulture area would be closed next week because it was being sprayed for aphids.
Most, I suspect, agreed with that but some students took the position that since the piece had run, the fair thing to do would be to grant Equal Time to the opposing viewpoint, then drop the matter. Foley's position was that to run the rebuttal would be to compound the mistake and extend it because then someone would demand that the paper publish a rebuttal to the rebuttal and so on. And it was on that decision that his long tenure as principal of University High School would end.
I am a little fuzzy on how this argument suddenly went volcanic but it was something like this: The outraged students, then small in number, demanded that the issue be decided not by Foley but by the Student Council. We had this thing on campus called the Student Council where every homeroom sent representatives to vote on certain issues affecting the students. Mr. Foley said no, the Student Council would not rule on this, then he wrote an article to run on the front page of the next issue of The Warrior. It said, in effect, "This is what I've decided, the matter is closed, I run this school, my word is law, there will be no further discussion." Those were not his words but they were the general interpretation of them. As I said, Mr. Foley was not good at communicating with younger human beings.
Before the issue had even been printed, the (then) small group of protesters knew about this and of course, it did not satisfy them. Some responded with an act of aggression of which I am still in awe. I never found out how they pulled it off but here is what they did…
The day the issue of The Warrior came out with Foley's decree, it was generally ignored by everyone on campus. They all were. I certainly didn't bother to pick one up.
As I walked to the bus stop to head home that day, there were students a block from campus passing out what appeared to be that same issue of The Warrior. It wasn't. It was an issue of The Worrier, a one-shot parody/replica printed on almost the same paper with much the same art direction and with the same photo of Mr. Foley on the front page. Needless to say, the text was quite different with "Foley's" little editorial reading like the ravings of a demented dictator.
I did not and still do not know who did this or how they financed it or how they got it printed. I was especially amazed and impressed that they somehow got their mitts on that issue of The Warrior before it was distributed and whipped up and published The Worrier so rapidly that it could be distributed almost simultaneously. It was free, though donations were accepted. Mostly out of admiration for the effort, I kicked in a buck…or as I then viewed a dollar, the cost of 8.3 new comic books.
The Worrier was such an amazing feat that everyone paid attention…and that's how most of the student body learned of the controversy and the protest and the drive to have Mr. Foley find a new occupation. Which is not to say everyone joined the cause. Most, it seemed to me, did not.
My sense of the campus was a huge groundswell of apathy. Maybe you could have worked up a widespread lather if the idea was to protest the War in Vietnam. The War in the Principal's Office didn't seem to be of the same urgency. There's a saying you hear now — "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." We hadn't heard that phrase then but most of us said something similar.
If Foley was removed, his replacement would surely be a guy enforcing the same rules and policies — at best, with somewhat better social skills. We were also told by the protest leaders that we had to fight for the power of the Student Council, which Foley was attempting to turn into his obedient puppets. Most of us thought Student Council was a pretty useless marionette show from the get-go and that it managed to do nothing with great pomp and puffery.
I'd served on it briefly and while I was involved, its biggest accomplishment was this: We launched a fund-raising drive to earn enough to buy paint and then we got students to volunteer to come in on a Saturday to repaint all the trash cans on campus. Even that had to be okayed at every step by the principal's office. In one meeting, just to make a point, I introduced a resolution to abolish Student Council. Our Faculty Supervisor consulted Foley's office and we were informed that Student Council did not have the power to abolish itself.
So no one wanted to fight for Student Council — which, by the way, did a pretty crappy job repainting those trash cans — and no one thought anything in The Warrior could possibly have even the teensiest impact on the Vietnam War. More importantly, no one thought that any demonstration was going to lead to a redistribution of power where the principal's office had any less than all of it. And frankly, most of us weren't particularly unhappy with the way things were run in this school we would soon be leaving forever…
…so none of this amounted to the kind of hill upon which one chooses to die. There are plenty of causes in this world worth fighting for. This did not seem to be one of them.
But I will say this: The protests were kind of a fun diversion. In high school, almost anything that disrupts the normal, day-to-day routine is kind of a fun diversion. This one took the form of boycotting one period of classes each day and it lasted for much of three days. The first day, it was fourth period and it felt to me like about a third of all students played Protest Hooky as a kind of a colossal mass dare: "I'll do it if you'll do it."
The prevailing assumption was that the school couldn't possibly discipline everyone who skipped Geometry or English or Chemistry that day if enough did…and enough did. Had the administration tried to dole out mass punishment, it would have served as an example of the kind of Draconian Principaling (I just made that term up) being practiced by Mr. Foley — further proof of why he had to go bye-bye.
I went to class that period but no actual teaching or learning occurred. The protest rally was too great a distraction. Outside the main building, there was a big grassy area where 1000+ students could congregate. Many hundreds did. Uni was on a hill so the campus was built in tiers and there were staircases all around leading up and down from tier to tier. Many of the boycotting students were massed in the grassy area looking up at a landing on one staircase from which speeches were being made.
Someone up there had a crummy portable audio system. I'm not sure if a student had brought in it or if it was something the school had and which the leaders of this rebellion commandeered for their purposes. But up on the landing, various speakers were fighting for the one microphone, taking turns having their glorious moments of leading the crowd, firing up whoever could be fired up, demanding in increasingly incendiary terms that Foley submit his resignation or be fired.
The next day, the jungle drums decreed that fifth period would be the boycotted period. The principal's office countered by sending around mimeographed announcements to be read in every room. They said that there would be no classes during fifth period that afternoon.
Fine with me. My fifth period was Gym and as far as I was concerned, any reason to not take Gym for a day was a darn good reason. I thought of trying to get to the protest leaders to urge them to make every fifth period a boycotted period, this plan to continue until my graduation day even if Foley committed harakiri.
We assumed it was Mr. Foley who decreed that there would be no classes during fifth period that afternoon, though we weren't sure of his reasoning. Maybe he thought this capitulation would somehow appease the mob. Maybe he was afraid so many would boycott that it would make the news that some high percentage of UniHi students were marching against him. This way, no one could say how many students skipped classes because there were no classes to skip.
Or maybe he just thought there was no point in anyone trying to teach anything while this kind of thing was going on. Whatever, we all found ourselves roaming the campus during fifth period like it was an extended lunch break.
I tried to listen to some of the speeches but it was hard. The portable audio device had apparently been borrowed from that guy who announces the next stop on the New York Subway. Students who couldn't understand what was being said were cheering the end of each sentence just in case that was an appropriate place to cheer.
I made out enough to come to this conclusion: That not only did I not know what greater good would occur if Mr. Foley was removed but the folks giving the speeches didn't seem to know, either. It was all talk about Lack of Communication and A Total Breakdown of The System and the word "power" popped up in every single sentence I could decipher. No one said Mr. Foley had hit a student or harmed anyone or violated his oath of office. He was just kind of guilty of being an asshole who somehow thought he was in charge.
The third day was the last day of the protests. It was sixth period this time — a bad tactical choice. Sixth period was the last period of the day so everyone just went home early. As I left, the protest leaders were up on that staircase landing, shouting to departing students that they had to stay and listen. I thought, "Gee, I don't know how inept Mr. Foley's supposed to be but he wouldn't be dumb enough to schedule a protest for last period."
Still as I recall, that was almost the end of the whole matter. The next morning, it was announced that Mr. Foley was taking a "leave of absence" and the Boy's Vice-Principal would take over as Acting Principal. The protesters declared victory and there was much glee and celebration and talk of Student Power. They didn't seem sure what they'd won but you couldn't tell them they hadn't won something.
A day or six later during lunch, a mutual friend introduced me to one of the main ringleaders of the protest, one of the guys who'd been up on the staircase landing shouting into the inadequate P.A. system. He was still glowing with victory when I asked him if he could explain just what he and his brethren had won. The fellow — his name was Tony, I think — talked about how Foley was a bad man, a tool of The Establishment, a tumor which had to be removed, a symbol of everything wrong with the world today, etc.
I said, "Yeah, but what did you get out of all that? What's different because you 'won?'" I think I even managed to pronounce the quotation marks around the word, "won."
Tony thought a moment and then admitted to me, "Basically, it was all about the win." In other words, we won in order to win. We proved we had some power. It doesn't matter how it directly affects anything. It might even make things worse for us. All that matters is that we won and they lost.
I think about that a lot as I watch grand-scale politics and I often find myself thinking, "This isn't about what they say it's about. This is all about the win."