Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes

I went into this blog post planning to do the "IMU Special" in which I write a post about nothing to try and get my creative juices flowing again, but instead I was sent this news by my older brother:

CP24 reports students pinned another student down and sexually assaulted him with a broom handle as part of a hazing ritual at Toronto's St. Michael's College in one incident. The school has since issued a statement saying expulsions have occurred. pic.twitter.com/OHbbdIdiZk

— Lucas Meyer (@meyer_lucas) November 14, 2018

My response to my brother, who also went to the school, was "I wish I could say I was surprised".

I have a complicated relationship with my high school and always feel awkward talking about it. I feel like every time that I mention it, I immediately get labelled as an extremely privileged upper class private school kid, which isn't the case and far from the truth. But if I went to the school, I am clearly privileged to have gone and I don't want to come off like I'm pretending to be lower class, which would be despicable. My mother was a high school history teacher and my father owned his own small landscaping company. Both made extreme sacrifices and went into a lot of debt to send me to one of Toronto's oldest private schools because they both placed an immense amount of importance on education and wanted me to receive the best one they thought that I could. My parents are also both Catholic (my mother brought up this way and my father as an adult convert) and this also undoubtedly played a role in their openness to me attending St. Mike's. Not everyone in Toronto is afforded the opportunity to go to a private school and I am immensely fortunate that I got to.

But I was also far from the average St. Mike's boy. Even though my parents were *gasp!* middle class, I was near the bottom of the St. Mike's economic scale. Other students often poked fun at "how poor" I was or how I couldn't afford things. I was reminded several times that I was the "poor kid" in my grade. When I entered the school, Father Daniel Zorzi was the school's president, and though I have nothing to base this off of other than hearsay from the time, I understood that he was behind a major push for St. Mike's to expand into richer suburbs around Toronto, especially the wealthier parts of Mississauga and Vaughn, to bring more money into the school. That worked, I guess, as the school had loads of new facilities while I was there, but it also brought in wave upon wave of entitled, asshole kids.

With entitlement comes mistreatment of others. Though the school loves to act as though its students' academics and values are what it places the most emphasis on, that's a sham and athletics are really all they care about. Look at their Wikipedia entry and pay attention to how much of it focuses on hockey. Football was a close second while I was there. How many intelligent, low-income students have been turned down in favour of meathead hockey players over the school's history? I can't tell you how many truly moronic people I was in classes with during my time there. If students have to write an entrance exam to get in and academics are so important to the school, how did these students get there?

Easy answer.

The rich, entitled, macho jock attitude was readily encouraged by most of the school's faculty. Teachers would reprimand Filipino students and tell them to tighten their ties and then playfully slap white hockey players with no uniform on a moment later. Loud, braggadocios jocks could do whatever they wanted and never faced repercussions. The school often tried to encourage its students to be a "St. Michael's Man", someone who studied hard, stayed Catholic, and participated in extra curriculars, but I feel like the true "St. Michael's Man" was a dickhead who thought he was better than everyone and rarely stopped dropping casual racism and homophobia. The school constantly turned a blind eye to this behaviour.

I didn't fit in well at the school and hard time there. My bullying experiences weren't nearly as bad as some of the other students there, but they were still there. If you didn't conform to some strange crossover between Wooderson and Tie Domi, you were, of course, "a pussy". Being quiet and skinny made me feel out of place at all times. I made a few friends while there, but didn't continue talking to anyone from the school after I graduated.

For what it's worth, I found the students at my local high school much friendlier and hung with them instead. Even the jocks there were welcoming. Crazy what class entitlement does to a person.

The problem with the school's treatment of its students is that they have ignored it for so long. This type of assault is, unfortunately, the logical endpoint of the toxic masculinity that is allowed to fester in the institution. Again, I wish I could say I'm surprised. Things similar to this assault have almost certainly already happened, but been either ignored or swept under the rug. I don't even know what to say other than that I hope this school dies the swift death it should have a long time ago.