#reduce collateral

But I also want to give you all an example of collateral and how to think about/minimize collateral in nonviolent activist situation.

So this is a story from my final year of high school. We had one particular teacher who was very abusive to us. Unfortunately, she also taught five classes, so it was VERY hard to avoid interacting with her at some point. She assigned massive workloads, tasks designed to be impossible, and she had frequent mood swings that she took out on us. If you confronted her about it, she'd just blink and be like "Well I didn't know I was stressing you all out," fake apologize, then go right back to doing it. The general consensus was that she must have some form of mental illness or a medication imbalance because she'd go from bringing us snacks in class and letting us watch a movie as a surprise to ranting and raging at us unprovoked.

She was specially HORRIBLE about workload. Two major projects per week that required massive amounts of time and effort and group coordination. They were also frequently juvenile and completely unrelated to anything we needed to learn (for reference the class with her I'm talking about now is AP Gov). Presidential paper dolls comes to mind. But here's the thing, we had to abandon studying for the tests, which were based on the textbook, because none of us had time to read the textbook to study for the tests because if you got a bad grade on one of your average 8 projects per month, that was worse than completely bombing an exam. My test average couldn't have been above 60, but I made it out with an A because I nailed every stupid project. Unfortunately, the textbook is what the AP TEST is based on, which is what determines whether or not we get college credit for the course. So not only are we losing sleep over 8 intensive projects per month for one class (for me, out of the EIGHT classes I was taking), we're all mortally terrified we're going to bomb the AP exam.

Aside: Also in class, sometimes she'd come up and yell at one of us for nothing just to personally victimize us individually, and some days she'd assign double digits of electronic readings that we had to take quizzes about immediately afterward, and if we couldn't get them all done in class, we got zeros for what we couldn't do. She assigned homework over the weekend (i.e. after we had already left on Friday) to be done on Monday, and you got a zero if you didn't check Canvas all weekend to make sure she didn't assign anything. Some kids in the class did not have internet at home btw, so we had to team up to text the people we knew couldn't know about the assignments, send them the readings, and help them get to internet sources to complete assignments before Monday.

Anyway! I did not like her. She filled me with rage. But I also knew her more personally that I would've liked to. She was the faculty sponsor for one of the clubs I was in, so I had, in fact, been to her house before for a charity activity on the weekend. I met her husband. Icolored with her toddler-age son. In early high school, I also spent a lot of time with her as the coach for another extracurricular. She drove me home from a meet when my parents' car broke down. We talked. Against my will I knew her pretty personally, and I knew 1) she was the breadwinner, 2) her husband is an asshole, and 3) her son, who she really did seem to love, was an unplanned pregnancy.

Fast forward to April of my senior year: I have all of her projects under control through the end of the year, but I am fed up. I gather all our previous projects into my backpack, and I march myself down to the guidance office. I ask for a meeting with my counselor, and I tell her what's been going on - the mood swings, the abusive homework, the crazy ass projects that only vaguely relate to AP government. After I dumped out all the projects and went on my rant, my guidance counselor looks at me and says, "I can't do anything to help you this close to the end of the year."

And I say, "I've got the work handled. This isn't about me. This is about me leaving here in a month and knowing she's going to do this to everyone who comes after me. I cannot, in good conscience, let her do that unchallenged."

Administration at my high school knew I was one serious 17-year-old, so the guidance counselor pauses then says, "What do you want done about it?"

And here's where the calculation about collateral comes in:

Me: "I don't want you to fire her. If you fire her, she'll just go somewhere else and do the same thing [collateral calculation: another whole body of high schoolers at a school that doesn't know what she's like]. Also, she has a young son, and I don't know what's going to happen to him if she loses her job [collateral calculation: the kid], and her husband is a jerk, so I don't know how he'll react [collateral: her. I don't want her abused as punishment, just stopped from doing what she's doing]. I want you to reign her in. I want you to watch her and limit how much and what kinds of things she's allowed to assign."

Counselor: "Do you think other students would tell me this if I asked them?"

Me: "Yes, but only if you push and make them understand that it's okay to tell you how they really feel. You can tell them I started this to make them comfortable, but don't tell her [the teacher] it was me directly until after I graduate. She's going to know who it was anyway, but I don't want her to know officially. Otherwise they're [the other students] just going to laugh uncomfortably and say 'Oh, it's fine' because they've been trained to minimize their issues with people in authority."

Counselor: "Okay."

And then that's what happened. I watched them interview all my classmates one at a time at lunch, and then I got it confirmed from a rising junior the next year that they'd reduced what she could assign. Eventually she found the restrictions so stifling that she left on her own and went into online K-12 teaching. I don't love that for the reason I said before - new people don't know what she does - but at least the kids can shut the laptop or fake a faulty internet connection now.

The major point of this story is that this is how I started developing a concept of "ethical revenge." This is one facet of that idea: Minimizing collateral damage, even in a situation that didn't have very obvious collateral like exploding a building does. I could have gone full fire and fury and protested to have her fired. That would have hurt her more than I intended and put other people at risk (unacceptable collateral for me). No matter how much I might have hated her, I did not hate her 3-year-old son, and I did my best to take firing off the table for him, because I didn't know what her husband would do if she got fired (I wanted her to stop victimizing students; I didn't want her hurt or verbally abused in return), and because I didn't want to improve life for people at my high school at the expense of a whole other group of students at whatever school she went to next. I thought long and hard about this before I went into that guidance counselor's office and devised a plan that would only affect her.