Irvington’s administrators’ new approach to ending the “IHS Confessions” crisis is gratuitous

By Hugo Vera

I am a teenager. It is my essence to do stupid things without the proper contemplation beforehand. I make mistakes and learn from them to hone my personal actions. The IHS Administration should take what I just wrote into consideration.

Let’s begin by first analyzing the situation. Someone, we do not know who, created a new Facebook page titled “IHS Confessions” to challenge the popularity of its predecessor, Waylon Yen’s “IHS Compliments”. The administrators at Irvington despise both Facebook pages as they consider these pages fine examples of “cyber-bullying”. Waylon Yen eventually agreed to be more cautious when approving the compliments that were posted on “IHS Compliments”. By doing this, his page was saved. The same cannot be said for “IHS Confessions”. “IHS Confessions” is operated by an anonymous coward who has ingeniously used an untraceable Google filter to post over 250 “confessions” on Facebook. Everything was just fine until a few posts began to offend teachers by making vulgar/sexually-harassing comments about them, claiming that some were engaging in drug abuse, and all sorts of satirical insults that were created (anonymously) by Irvington students. On April 17, 2013, the administrators of Irvington did the most cliché thing to end this satire.

Anyone who simply hit ‘like’ on any one of these posts (including me) was forced to attend an assembly during advisory in the main gym in which the IHS Administrators told us that we were behaving like inconsiderate delinquents be ‘liking’ these offensive posts. Nonetheless, we were released as the U.S. Constitution protects our rights to Freedom of Speech.

Nonetheless, I am ashamed of Irvington. When this was all occurring, Irvington students were denouncing their own friends and classmates to save themselves from the administration’s persecution out of sheer fear, hysteria, and paranoia. Irvington had basically engaged in modern-day McCarthyism and turned into Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Other students have described the administration’s assembly as “Nazi-like” and “just like George Orwell’s 1984”. If you ask me, this is all gratuitous. Regardless of whether you do it on a bathroom stall or on Facebook, students will always make demeaning statements about their teachers. It is wrong, it is cruel, but it is also inevitable and we need to move forward as a school and embrace that. As far as I am concerned, there are two ways to react to any sort of bullying. Naturally, we can prolong the stupidity by stooping down to the level of our bullies (as the IHS Administration did) and retaliate in violent manner that accomplishes no peace. The other option is that we can all act like mature adults and simply ignore the “cyber-bullying”. After all, all cyber-bullying and other forms of malice eventually degenerate to the point where it is no longer popular or relevant.