“Party 2 Nite. R U Going?” Feature, 1/2
Editor’s Note
Our cover story on Berkeley High School parties in the age of text messaging and Facebook prompted more than one hundred online comments. Some of these letters originated as comments of that type.
Fire Rachel Swan
I was victimized by Rachel Swan, who published false information about me. She published at least four false things about me, and others in the article. She put details in the paper that are false, and including things that I never said, as well as things that she agreed she would not. She is a liar who poses a great threat to everyone. As a victim, I would like your board of representatives to please have a hearing in regards to letting Rachel Swan go from your staff. It is a very foolish and unsafe mistake to have someone on your team who creates violence, and bigger problems in the communities. She is creating issues that do not need to be occurring. She is unsafe to your company as a whole, and it would be a good thing for everyone if she was “let go.”
I would appreciate if your board could get a hearing to fire Rachel Swan. Please consider my offer. Thank you very much.
“Max,” Berkeley
Fire These Kids
Where do these kids think they are going with behavior like this? I don’t agree with some of the posters who think that we as a society are simply going to let these kids escalate in their criminal behavior until they burn down our town. For the time being, they might get away with stealing things from houses where they arrive uninvited, or getting into “fights” which because of the context and the participant’s ages are made to look more innocent than they are, or because an existing criminal justice system is burdened with just this type of juvenile crime. However, time will soon come when these kids have to deal with the real world. They’ll graduate high school, perhaps graduate college, and then have to support themselves. I have to tell you, that whereas your dear old parents might have turned a blind eye, employers don’t take it lightly when their employees steal another employee’s iPod or the company’s computer, embezzle funds, harass co-workers, pick fights, or in any other way demonstrate a poor attitude or tendency to criminal behavior. If you haven’t spent your teen years becoming a mature and responsible person, you’ll have precious little time to do that when it’s time to support yourselves. If you aren’t ready when the time comes, perhaps we’ll see you coming down our street with a shopping cart, collecting recyclables from our trash cans, because you aren’t fit to do responsible work among decent people. Or maybe you’ll be breaking into our cars and houses or robbing us or selling drugs: and if you escalate your criminality in that way, it’s only a matter of time before you end up spending your life behind bars. Then you might finally get it that life isn’t a video game and you made the wrong choices.
Kristen Cochran, Piedmont
Not As Bad As You Said
I love how you wrote all the negative aspects of these parties. I know “Max” and many of the other kids in this article and I have to say that you vastly exaggerated many of the parties. Honestly, I was at MLK and Derby and it was not as bad as you described it. Maybe you need to get a dose of diversity and see that not all African Americans are going to jump you. I suggest you document the positive aspects, because you are giving BHS a really bad name by publishing a biased article like this. So you are presenting an image of Berkeley High by saying that we are basically a bunch of robbers and inconsiderate kids. That’s a load of garbage. I don’t think people are going to take this article lightly, honestly I think you got a whole bunch of kids “fucked up.”
Jacob Horn, Berkeley
Worse Than You Said
As a graduate of Berkeley High in ’04 who was very active in the party scene, I have first-hand experience with these kind of events. This article portrays a very tame depiction of parties that are “blown-up” (slang we used to describe a party consisting of mostly uninvited guests). Now that I’m almost out of college, I can assure you that these “blown-up” parties continue, and can be even more out of control with the “higher-educated” students. As annonymous jan-2-2008 stated, “Much of their depictions of ‘typical’ Berkeley High parties were exaggerations. Parties tend to be much safer, as long as kids are smarter and more responsible.” This scenario has a variable that is never controllable. Partygoers will do what they want, especially if they’re drunk, and especially if they think it’s cool. I can give you countless incidents of house parties getting out of control where kids I was very close with were both victims and perpetrators. There were even a few parties I went to where almost all the items in the home were stolen: chairs, a microwave, computers, jewelry, and even stuff from the bathroom. This is typical party behavior. Isolated house parties may be manageable and fun. But parties with an unknown host are almost always like this.
Kevin Tharp, Santa Cruz
It’s Just a Few Kids
The sensationalistic reporting in your article about BHS simply related the obvious exploits of a few kids who got in trouble. Many issues were left unexplored in order to focus on the tawdry details, most of which are more than a year old: What is the social scene like at BHS for most kids? Can kids have gatherings without fights, thefts or police? Who are the kids causing the problems? What is our city doing to provide healthy outlets for our young people?
We all know teens can get in trouble and are connected like never before. However, exploring the implications and causes of the changes in our society are what the East Bay Express should be doing — not making your paper into a pulp magazine exploiting our fears and prejudices with the “Party 2 Nite” story and the Apprehension column.
Paul Lecky, Berkeley
It’s Our Whole Society
And we wonder why we have a crime problem in the Bay Area? Increasing reports of ratpack incidents where a group of youths assault a passing pedestrian for kicks, or knock someone over the head badly enough to leave him unconscious, then run away laughing, or groups of depraved kids ambling down the street throwing rocks through house windows, teenagers armed with guns commit armed robbery. Other teens kill people over what amounts to spare change or a wrong look or because someone didn’t move fast enough as Anneli Rufus reports in the article “Rite in Front of my Face.” Black thug kids call each other “Nigga” (Anneli’s column reports one called himself a “Nigga Dawg”) then whine about the racism of the white folks who they prey upon.
This article on teen parties further suggests that these crime problems don’t merely issue out of ghetto thugland, but are insidiously working their way into the fabric of our “nice” neighborhoods as misdirected teenyboppers try out the gangster style for size, and in a spell of mindless lassitude, check out how it feels to indulge in a bit of assault and larceny. Uninvited strangers descend in mobs upon a house free of grown-ups: parents return, find house wrecked or denuded, do they prosecute, or return to their more cozy somnolence? Schools too, as other comments point out, are to blame, schools where it seems the adults in charge have long ago checked out of reality, and are asleep at the chalkboard or lectern, watching theft and battery go by, and by, and the scales are stiff upon their dull and sightless eyes. Criminal beginnings flourish in these inept environments, where everyone passes the buck but no one dares to set a limit or mete out a punishment. The criminal justice system, full of murder and drug crimes, grinds its heavy iron wheels but cannot keep the pace to the number of young people pressing in from all sides, needing the direction that all the adults in their life have utterly failed to give them.
Delighting in the resultant circus atmosphere, young thugs flaunt their freedom in a newfound limitless world where no longer do the old, stupid adult rules about punishments and consequences apply. Stymied by liberal thinking that innately suspects all authority, Oakland and Berkeley deprive themselves of the ability to manifest any authority, and fester under a fire of rampaging crime and antisocial behavior while the fiddling goes on. Persons at the helm lack the will or the spine to do anything, anything at all, except sit back and congratulate themselves on how politically correct they are, while their town burns to the ground.
David Knauer, Oakland
Hanging Out With the Criminals
In the latest incarnation of the Express, Anneli Rufus has branched out from weepy, feature-length sob stories to reading the police blotters and making snarky comments about local crimes. But Rachel Swan has done Anneli one better. In “Party 2 Nite. R U Going?” our Rachel actually decides to hang out with the criminals and spice up her own text (not just the reported dialogue) with cool words such as hella, like, and gnarly shit. The content of the Express has truly deepened since once again becoming independently owned.
Marc Herman, Oakland
Enabling the Criminals
I found the teen parties article quite troubling. The article provides further evidence that there is a disturbing trend of widening acceptance of anti-social, ghetto “street” values (including the legitimization of criminal behavior) among young people. In urban ghettos, a crime-sodden and amoral culture exists, which glorifies the “gangster” lifestyle, normalizes anti-social, hostile, violent, and criminal behavior, and where the voice of a sane and principled, moral adult, where it even exists, is a lone voice drowned out by lack of social and institutional support. But this problem is not confined to urban ghettos: it appears to have infected the mainstream middle-class culture as middle-class youth increasingly adopt the twisted anti-social values that flourish in the urban ghetto underclass. The result is a “Lord of the Flies” scenario, where all responsible adults who should have been there teaching their youngsters right from wrong, have simply vanished or become mute and spineless observers. The big, pressing question for our times is, “Where have the adults gone?” Schools too seem to have become spineless dimwitty entities, tolerating assaults, thefts, harassment, foul language, obscene behavior and clothing, and thus allow inadequately parented youth to spin further out of control. How long are we as a society going to sit back and let our youth spiral into increasing violence, crime, and self-destructive behavior? Is anyone going to take responsibility or is everyone going to sit back and do nothing?
This article on teen parties demonstrates that many teens think that assault is okay if someone “deserves” it, e.g. if they are a “smart ass.” It demonstrates that many teens buy into a codependent system wherein paying off a thief or robber is “the thing to do” or “the way the system works.” It also illustrates the essential naïveté that so many youth and adults too have about their toleration of a criminal and anti-social atmosphere: that they needn’t be concerned about crime, because if they are “cool” then somehow they will be immune. This illogical reasoning seems to feed into views on those who were victims: the belief that somehow they “deserved” to be victims. Mature adults understand that there is no one who deserves to be a victim.
The most disturbing part of the article was the disclosure that the teens who attended a party where a MURDER occurred have banded together in silence to shield this murderer from justice. That young people do not even realize the gravity of a murder, and feel impelled toward justice in the face of such a serious crime, demonstrates how grave the problem is among certain youth today.
The moral development of these young people has not yet reached the point where they understand that ROBBERY IS A CRIME, ASSAULT IS A VIOLENT CRIME, or even that MURDER IS A VERY SERIOUS CRIME and that these are things that can send a person to PRISON. That so many young people are committing crimes without any crimp in their conscience is most certainly in part a fault of parents, schools, and a social system that has failed to set limits and then provide, in a regular and dependable way, CONSEQUENCES for those who choose to act in defiance of social norms. Spineless adults and the anti-social youth that they failed to guide will both be imperiled as the “Lord of the Flies” scenario escalates further and further out of control, until it reaches a place where jokes fail to reach.
Deborah Cloudwalker, Oakland
Letters Policy
Please provide your full name, address, and daytime phone number, although we’ll only print your name, city, and affiliation. Send letters to [email protected]m or Letters, East Bay Express, 1335 Stanford Ave., Emeryville, CA 94608. Letters are edited for length and clarity.
