While the Threat showed us that responsibility is an easy thing to abandon, it also revealed that it is a hard thing to define. The Threat made us all think a lot about what our responsibilities are as students.
As students, we have the obligation to take responsibility for our own actions. As members of Aragon and the greater community, we must allow ourselves to be held accountable for the things we say and do.
The actions exhibited on the “AHS Confessions Page” betray this obligation Aragon students have to themselves and to their community.
By posting on the page anonymously, students eschewed all personal responsibility. Abusing the anonymity of the page allowed students to say things without any accountability for the repercussions their words may have had. Ironically, what the Confessions page essentially provided was a public forum for students to talk about others behind their backs. The fact that many (perhaps even the majority) of the posts on the page were harmless does not excuse the page for providing namelessness to anyone; as the Threat showed, the danger posed by such an act is too great. Under the guise of anonymity, anyone could threaten the school again, at any time. While, admittedly, anonymous threats to the school can still be made without a confessions page, there are countless additional dangerous “confessions” besides threats to the school that could be made more exclusively on the page: anonymous admittance to the urge to commit suicide, admittance to committing a crime, or comments that amount to sexual harassment—the possibility of abusing anonymity outweighs the supposed “benefits” of harmless, anonymous fun.
Essentially, a group of people who abandoned responsibility by refusing to connect their words to their names allowed an anonymous person to threaten to “shoot up” our school. Eschewing accountability allowed a coward to hide behind a computer and terrorize us all; all it took was a Facebook post in broken English to send swarms of police officers to Aragon’s halls.
I’ve now felt the full effect of a community abandoning responsibility around me. Five weeks ago, a person threatened to kill my teachers, my classmates, my friends, and my twin brother. Beyond forcing me to worry over the lives of the people I care about, the mere fact that this person could threaten to kill some of the people who matter most to me was completely and entirely unacceptable. Even if it was just in words, the Threat was violence in it of itself. And the fact that it was made anonymously makes it all the more despicable.
That’s why it can never happen again. If abandoning responsibility allowed such poison to enter our community, taking responsibility will be the cure.
If we, as students, had realized that the original confessions page presented a possible danger, we ourselves could have had it shut down before the administration had to interfere, and before police came swarming to our school. While this “self-policing” is a high standard to hold high schoolers to, if it means preventing events such as the Threat, then it is the standard of responsibility we must hold ourselves to.
After the Threat was made, many students assigned the duty of preventing such an event from happening again to the administration. As students and citizens, we hand over far too much of the responsibility of maintaining a safe, dependable community to other people like teachers, policemen and other adults. In other words, we pick a group of people whose “job” it is to be responsible for the community, and dump full responsibility on them.
But I don’t want to abandon the responsibility of preventing another threat on my life to teachers. I don’t purport to give teachers the responsibility of my life. I claim that responsibility as my own.
