nothing has changed in south hadley

they're calling it "the mean girls of south hadley" and 2 girls are being "disciplined" for bullying a girl who came there from ireland, and killed herself. like everything else involving groups of ppl that don't want to look at themselves it's being treated as an isolated incident. but if you read the comments after the article, it's SO clear that it's not.

i don't like to admit that i ever lived there. it was a terrible place. no one has ever believed me when i've tried to tell my story. south hadley is a place of physical beauty. it's full of nature. there are horses, there are trees. there's a lake. sort of. there's a prestigious women's college, so one would assume that it's like any other "college town", full of intellectuals, rich with culture. right? wrong... if any intellectuals live there, they send their kids to private schools. the south hadley public schools are... well until i read this article i would have said "were" and i might have gone along w/the belief that it's all in my head... but no, it's real and it's still happening. they're bigoted and racist and closed-minded and basically horrible. the kids are encouraged to root out anyone who's not to their liking and torment them. the adults look the other way if they don't outright egg it on.

i was off to a bad start when i started public school for the first time in south hadley in 4th grade, having skipped 3rd after just returning from a year in holland, where i'd attended a very small village school with only 8 kids in my 2nd-grade class, so we were combined with the 3rd grade. we wore those pointy wooden shoes for practical reasons - stuffed with a bit of straw they were warm and they kept the mud out. before holland, i'd gone to private school in northampton. but then we returned to the states and a decision was made that i should start public school. i was having trouble remembering how to speak english and even before school started, kids on my street were laughing at me when i accidentally would start speaking dutch.

my mom didn't know better, i'm sure... but she told me to wear those wooden shoes to school on my first day. i remember her saying to me "the kids will be so fascinated!" but it wasn't just the kids who were fascinated. my homeroom teacher enjoyed my shoes so much that she made a mockery of me, sending me on errands up & down the stairs all day, so that the sound of my shoes echoed loudly throughout the school for everyone's entertainment. they didn't have to try very hard to figure out i was weird. i can't blame them for that.

i posted this after the other comments i read about this girl's death, tonight. it has grieved me. just knowing a) that south hadley hasn't changed, and b) that all the ppl who told me it was all my imagination were totally WRONG, and c) that still it's not being looked at as a town-wide problem w/a long, long history... it's made everything kind of come pouring back, all this stuff i've tried to forget. things could have been worse. no one raped me in the woods. i didn't get murdered or kidnapped. but how to explain to anybody in my adult life who i am and why i act weird sometimes? i can't. it's impossible w/out context. so i read this article and context is all it is. i wish i could be there to do something to comfort this girl's parents. i just wish i could hug them. i wish i could make south hadley STOP being south hadley. i can't do that. i don't even know if what i'm about to do is totally stupid or not.. but i'm doing it... i'm copying here the comment i left after the other comments. there were stories not so unlike my own. i have been ashamed my whole life of the way i was treated, because it feels like it was my fault. looking at the picture of this beautiful girl makes me feel a bit less ashamed for me and more ashamed of that horrible town. it's not *me* who's disgusting. that's what i've spent my whole life trying to convince myself, anyway...

---

i attempted suicide when i was 18 and having spent a number of years being tormented in south hadley public schools was ABSOLUTELY one of the main causes. i was tormented by my entire class from 4th grade through 8th, at which point i finally got my parents to send me to private school. 8th grade was so traumatic that i deliberately started in 8th grade again at my new school and pretended that the first 8th grade, in south hadley, had never happened. for many years i actually blocked it out of my mind, completely forgot about it. when it came back, it was almost too much to handle.

i know why i was tormented. i was the new kid, and i was different. i did not come from a catholic working-class family but rather from a non-religious, academic family. i did go to church to try to fake catholicism, but it's hard to hide a jewish nose. i could not go out in public w/out fear of being bullied. i did make some friends: if you look at my 5th grade birthday party picture you'll see the vietnamese girl (i remember the day the class bully took her glasses off her face and smashed them...), the bow-legged girl, the one black girl in town, her little brother, one "normal" girl who lived down the street, and me.

i had a crush on a boy named colin who lived on my street. he killed himself when he was 16. i don't remember anyone asking why, and no one bothered to tell me b/c no one knew or cared that i knew him. but colin was the ONE person in my neighborhood i was not afraid of. he was schizophrenic, they said. but we would make eye contact and a communication would pass between us, when we saw each other on the wood-path. colin was nice to me. but then he was dead.

i lived my life in fear. my parents, unfortunately, were no help at all. i couldn't decide if it was worse being at home or being out, so for the most part i stayed in my room, hid in bed under the covers and read books to escape.

on the school bus, i'd be yelled at by the driver for not sitting down, but all the kids would scream "UGLY!" at me as i came by trying to find a place to sit. no one would let me sit w/them. i got in daily fistfights (even to this day i marvel at the very thought that it is such a luxury, not getting punched in the stomach every morning, not getting the wind knocked out of me every day.) i got spat on, and entire classes of kids, and often the entire cafeteria, would chant at me. when i walked down the halls of the middle school, all the kids would make monkey noises and scratch their armpits.

kids would yell "ugly!" "disgusting" "eeew!" at me... i didn't know what i could do. i couldn't get a great haircut or perfect clothes and even if i did, i knew that wouldn't fix it. i was just cursed. i went to the teachers for help but of course i was told to ignore the kids & they'd stop it (they didn't) and so i withdrew into myself, learned to stare at the ground as i walked, developed bad posture, learned to trust no one. the best i could do was to hide in a bathroom stall during lunch, to avoid the cafeteria, but i was rarely able to pull that off. the most luxurious week i ever had was when i managed to get in enough trouble that i "had" to eat in the principal's office for a week. i remember how angry he was when i thanked him, because i was supposed to be unhappy with the "punishment" and not "enjoy" it... but for me it was one week of relative safety.

back then they had "tracking" and i was in the highest-level classes, where kids were a bit more decent, and i remember one girl trying to talk to me in a friendly way... but i couldn't talk to her... i couldn't trust that she hadn't been put up to it and there wasn't a group of kids somewhere waiting for her to report back so they could mock me more.

i did my best to escape south hadley but somehow little traces of it managed to follow me. there was one particular kid who started the bullying and led the hoards in their chants... i remember going on a trip to mt. tom when i was in boarding school, and he was on the lift & he spotted me, and yelled out the usual insults. i couldn't get away.

it is so many years later now... but three times in the last three years, car-fuls of young adults have passed me by and shouted out the window in unison, "UGLY!" as they drove past. i know it's not possible that these were the same people, or that they knew who i was. i have learned, after many many years, that i am not ugly. i know it's not ME those kids are yelling at now... but they're doing it... it has to be a coincidence that i've been shouted at 3 times, but just the fact that it's still happening i think is pretty sick.

there is no doubt in my mind that i would be long dead if i had not been saved by books... and by having the good fortune to get the hell out of that place and go to where nobody knew me. i did learn, even at a young age, that only in south hadley did they know i was to be mocked, and so long as i could go elsewhere and hide my identity, i would be safe, so long as none of them could find me and tell everyone in my community that i was to be tormented.

i have lived in many places and i have never been treated as horribly as i was in the south hadley schools, or seen other kids treated that way. i hoped that with the 70's being over with teachers would have better sense now. in other countries, teachers will intervene if kids start mobbing one another. not here. it is extremely disturbing to learn that this still goes on. it's disgusting, it's sickening, and i know that it's based on bigotry and ignorance. the things i heard kids say about other people - puerto ricans mostly (and anyone non-catholic... i heard kids explaining to each other that jews, for example, did not believe in "god") were horrible. i know they learned it from their parents and grandparents.

there is nothing wrong with being different, but in south hadley at least, difference is treated as a valid reason to be singled out and treated absolutely horribly. not even the teachers were innocent. even my favorite teacher did things to me that people can't believe when i try to tell them about it. i got in trouble in 4th grade because we got to put our classroom seating choices in a ballot box, and my mom got a call because not one kid wanted to sit near me. my mother yelled at me for that - for some reason she was furious, it was if i'd done something to get "in trouble". and the next day i went to school and found that my desk had been put behind a barrier, next to the one other girl who was also entirely rejected. she was poor & got free lunch. her teeth were green. the two of us sat at our desks hidden from the rest of the class by a row of bookshelves. that's how the teacher dealt with the situation.

and she was the best teacher i had. in 5th grade my homeroom teacher was such a drunk that he gave me 13 detentions at once for talking back (i.e. speaking w/reason) and at recess i erased the detention marks off the board. he was too drunk to notice.

i have recovered inasmuch as i have entirely changed my identity and i rarely admit to anyone that i ever lived in that horrible place. thinking about it brings back more trauma than i can handle. the fact that a girl committed suicide after landing in south hadley from another place is sadly no surprise at all to me. i know that every "new kid" in any school has some trouble adjusting, but south hadley takes the prize for racism, hatred, bullying and general.... well, what i would call "evil" if i believed in evil. but i don't. i just think that kids there are encouraged to root out anyone who dares to be different, even if it's not their fault, and smash them to bits. my heart goes out to this girl's family and her friends... she had at least one. to everyone else: i hope they will understand that they helped push her over the edge and i hope they will learn something from this and teach themselves to become better people, as it is clear that there is no culture of acceptance there to guide them in a better direction.

in defense of me - about a year ago

hi freedom centers,

i used to be a freedm center in good standing (& my downward dog was alrite too). i lepht the groop because 1) i found it hard to communikate because i have mental problemz and 2) becoz i felt like there was a higharchy to the groop which went against my own inner anarchy. i felt alienated by the groupthink & thinktank and i always felt like a fish out of a watertank.

follow me now. i must be brief. i have hash browns sizzling in a pan, and i don't mean that metaforkickly.

if you freedom centers let jenna wikler go & leave the fredum center you are shooting yrselfs in the foot. she is a foot souljer who works in the trenches and who kares deeply about saving people's lies. mr. will haul does a great radio show whose library should be kept in the National Archives. i think he's a decent human being and has a nice set of hair. but he & his kind have alwayz struck me as being more into the cause of the freedum center (and cause-celebré) than the atchual people in the centir. and here cums jenna wikler with her monkey backpack and anybody who thinks she hates the freedum center is like those fox newshounds who think protesters hate america. ok, just so that's understoood.

will haul has a nice set of teeth and he is a great propagandist for the freedim center, which is to say that he makes it look like the freed em' center is a great giant organisation that has all the alternativ answers to proper mental health for those krazy like us. it's a mission that's doomed to fale. because there ar no eesy answers. "dey's only mo' questions", says niggah sambo. and people to look at questioninglee with kare.

the chickens have cum home to roost.

sure jenna's bin half crazy lately. dat's wut make her poifect for being a fredum center. but i'm afrade that gal is also perfectly sane. and wot she points out about "the guidelines, goals, and facilitation of freedom center are not personal opinions that should then be turned into the subject of debate on the list and meetings. that is not the purpose of the list. our guidelines, goals, and facilitation are terms of agreement that you enter into when you become part of freedom center." points to a facscism not meanly intended but nuntheless stubbornly klung to by the old guard who won't let the new guard IN 'cuz they don't want to let their gard down. i just thought this sekund of garter belts, teehee. if that makes me a racist, then throw me in a cell with a buncha niggaz and i'll wear my garter belt and get fucked in the ass. dat's what's happening wif da phredim center right now only they don't even know it.

you are failing a test to fall in love.

i wached many many peeple leave the freedum center all becuz of wot's going on here, this hype. c'mon peeple, smile on yoor bruther but don't be afrade to call a nigger a nigger, or a jew a big-nosed money grubber.

furthermoor, yoo should take all of the people that have the ansers in freedum center and poot them in a concentration kamp, only one where they are forced to wach marx bruthers moovies all day. then take all dem niggers dat don't know day from nite and give dem freedum centers badges and let them houl at the moon and spread their day-glo pheces around and party like its 1984.

in my unhumble & eegomaniacal opinyon, you shood get miz wikkler back even if yoo haf to beg. otherwize yoor center might as well cell itz sole doun the river for a blowjob with the noo york tymes.

kindlly & respeckably,

marc israel

grrrrrrumph!

3 things what piss me off:

1) sheeple.

2) sociopaths.

3) the willfully ignorant.

another one from the archives

jenna & sage go to hollywood! from Jenna Wikler on Vimeo.

i had a little something to say to the ci-tay... as always...

oh, paradise city...

wow... adam cohen, surveillance-cam apologist extraordinaire, i am truly impressed by your flood of posts over the last several days, offering "evidence" of the wonders of surveillance.

i would like to make you a proposal. i am willing to consider your position(s) under one condition: that you buy me one of these amazing high-tech spy cams that can do what you claim - work at a slow shutter speed in the dark to capture would-be wrong-doers. i'll set it up in my window, and i'll see how things go. if things get better in the city i'll publicly admit on this very forum that you're not out of your mind. but i get to keep the camera after the experiment is over.

i'm not joking! please buy me a camera. because in truth, i have (for purposes of my own, involving a desire to find out who's outside my door before answering my doorbell) done a bit of research into spy-cams and i have not been able to find anything in my miniscule price range that would actually work in any way. now... i know you have experience videotaping stuff in well-lit rooms and i don't know anything about what experience you may or may not have videotaping in the dark. but i've been playing with cameras for many years and my experience and research have taught me that your claims about the wonders of modern spy-cam technology (as far as what regular people can afford) are a bit exaggerated.

i'll just address the shutter speed issue. i believe you mentioned slow shutter speed as a way to slow down the recording so that one could capture more video on less tape (or hard drive) as well as bring in more light. 2 different issues. the first would actually be addressed by stop-motion, something that's not a feature on all cameras - like having the camera capture one frame every ten seconds, for example. slow shutter speed itself has one major advantage: it brings in more light. but the down-side is that anything that moves will be very blurry. my own video camera has about the best night-mode i've ever seen, but people have to hold still if i want to capture their faces in the dark.

i'd really love it if you bought me a camera so you could prove me wrong. i LOVE being proven wrong! i don't want to be right about how creepy all of this is.

but now onto other serious matters: i have a few things to address and i might as well address them all now.

i am the first person who invoked the spectre of "1984" and suggested people read it. i admitted that it sounded far-fetched even to me, but i stand by my original statement that it would be informative for us all, and help us consider how we react to these incidents. and actually i don't think it's as far-fetched as it sounds. if you don't feel like reading (or re-reading) the book, check out the movie. i just happened to watch the movie for the first time a couple weeks ago (before this spate of fires.) it was shot in london in 1984. watching it, i was struck by how much of it really resembled things that have gone on in this country and others since 9/11/01. consider the fact that all of london, for example, is now under surveillance 24/7. did that prevent more bombings of the subways? maybe, or maybe not. did we ever find out who caused those? the only thing *i* ever found out was that the emergency response personnel had been running mock emergency scenarios involving subway bombings at the exact same time when the real bombings occurred (just like how all of our airborne emergency response teams of the U.S. military were in training scenarios on 9/11, involving mock hijackings, which caused the FAA to be unable to distinguish actual hijackings from mock ones and were the reason why jets were not scrambled in time to intercept the planes that flew into the WTC. EVERY SINGLE military air base was doing practice exercises on that day at that time.)

i say watch that movie, 1984. it's creepy. it's probably a lot more creepy now than when it first came out, because it resembles our current reality much more closely now.

next issue: let's pretend that i'm "the arsonist" (personally i don't think that one or even three people could pull off 9 successful fires and many other attempted fires in 175 minutes, but let's suspend disbelief for this one.) i am on this forum. i am going to the meetings too, and i know everything the rest of you know about how little anyone knows. this is encouraging. but now i realize that there might be more cameras put up all over town. am i worried? no, i'm not! why not? ski mask, that's why not! black clothes and a ski mask. that's all i'm going to need to maintain my anonymity. but boy do i feel like i've got one over on y'all for lurking on the forums.

next issue: i totally second everything caty has said so i won't repeat it but her posts are worth re-reading (not in small part b/c she backed up my own points... heh...)

next issue: i'm assuming that the mad scramble for citizens to purchase their own cameras to spy on their neighborhoods is due to an assumption that there are no resources for such surveillance within the policing community. that is probably true in terms of northampton itself. but will someone PLEASE explain to me, then, how it is possible that a friend of mine who lives on main street (and is involved in NO illegal activities whatsoever, although there are surely one or two drug users in any given apartment building and his would be no exception) has been having to live with daily surveillance of his building for the last several months? when he first told me about it (he watches the watchers with his binoculars) i thought perhaps he was just really sleep-deprived, but i've seen enough to know that it's true, as have at least two of his other friends. for some reason his building has been under surveillance for a while. it seems very clear that the spies (i'll use that term because i don't know what agency these people are from) come from out of town. i suspect south boston, simply because of the "undercover" dress the spies wear (which is unlike how anyone in northampton dresses - it's a true southie style) and because of the transponders in the windows of the SUVs they arrive in, which indicate that they drive on the mass pike. every day he has watched as these SUVs start arriving at 6am and they stay until nightfall. those of us who have gone outside to have a closer look have noted some high-tech gadgetry inside... i'm talking remote-controlled cameras that follow movement, monitored on laptops. i'm talking hinges and ball-bearings. i'm talking about people with money, or people tryign to justify getting some money from homeland security funds. or something. whatever... there's money involved. there is no other way to have multiple spies devoted daily, for months, to the surveillance of one building. these people must be making some sort of salary and the equipment and vehicles cost money...

so there is money for surveillance out there somewhere. why it is being spent on spying on innocent people is a mystery to me. but i'm NOT making this up. in fact, i've seen them watch me as i left his building and walked back to my own, and then saw them waiting for me to come back out, hours later. when i made eye contact w/one of them who was smoking in the usual non-vehicular hangout, by the side door of one of the municipal buildings, he immediately tossed his cigarette to the ground & ducked inside the building. but he was not a local person (seriously... a local undercover agent would be more likely to dress as a hippie than to wear a baseball cap with a hoodie over it & a big puffy jacket over that, which is the uniform-du-jour of the high-tech SUV spies.)

i know that mr. cohen and others will react to what i am saying with some retorts involving my wild imagination. so i will preemptively retort to that. you know how you may never notice a mazda miata until you decide that you want to buy one, and then all of a sudden you see them everywhere? it's like that. i am indeed hyper-sensitive to surveillance people and surveillance cameras, in large part because of my own personal situation in the building i live in. i already wrote about how much i do not like having a camera on me when i take out my garbage & recycling (and yes, i've run into a "hobo" at the dumpster myself but he wasn't setting it on fire... he was trying to survive by scavenging and my immediate impression was that he was ahead of the game, because more and more of us will be living that way as time goes on.) but i've had other issues. for example, the management of my building had a surveillance camera aimed at my own door for several months. it was there, in theory, to stop homeless people from coming in the hallway and resting their weary souls. it was also there to try to catch the bad, bad person who kept using shims to prop open the hallway door so that delivery people and/or guests could get to their destinations, i.e. the very sturdy dead-bolted doors (w/peepholes for extra security!) of their target residents. so the camera was supposedly looking at the entrance to the hallway, but it just happened that i was the only person on my floor who could not enter or exit my own apartment without being on camera, due to my proximity to that hallway entrance (every other person on the floor had the option of avoiding the camera by using the other door. i could not get to the other door without first passing by the camera.) i took offense. and then the management installed wireless doorbells for everyone as a solution and insisted that we keep the hallway door locked at all times. this made my apartment door's peephole useless, and i had a big problem with the situation because if the doorbell rang there was no way for me to find out who was there without revealing my presence (and often much of myself, if i happened to be coming out of the shower & just wearing a towel.)

i have my own personal stalker in town, so i petitioned the management to allow me (at my own expense) to install a spy cam in the hallway so that i could see who was ringing my doorbell. they refused, and the only option they offered me was to remove my doorbell entirely. this is how i wound up researching spy cams in the first place and finding out that they were too expensive for me - and those were the ones with no options on shutter speed and no low-light features,etc. (i don't mean to ream the management of my building personally, but they were also major backers of the BID and i did the head hancho the honor of singling him out for violation of my privacy, at a city council meeting.)

and then... i've videotaped our local cops occasionally when i've seen them "in action" (harrassing hippie kids in the park, etc.) and they have always been on the defensive & asked me if i was part of "copwatch". i have told them in all honesty that as long as we citizens are under surveillance (bush at the time was pushing to grant local police the power to infiltrate "suspected terrorist organizations" and spy on innocent citizens - and if you haven't checked out the way terrorist is now defined, let me inform you that it includes vegans, animal-rights people, and anyone opposing big pharma, for starters) that i thought we citizens should be surveilling them right back. the cops didn't even know about bush's plan. when we talked about it, they were nice, i was nice, we worked it out, i didn't film more than a few seconds... we have nice police here. but they're just local cops. there are larger forces at work.

and it is my personal opinion that all of us should be thinking hard about exactly what forces might be at work in this current situation. what i said before about getting people to relinquish their rights willingly is something i stand by, as it is a proven technique for sneaking fascism in under people's noses. but that's only one possibility. we do not know what the motive/s of the arsonist/s are/were. but to assume that the motive was just "evil" or "destruction" would be naive. what has happened so far was carried out thoughtfully (not humanely, but with thought. could any of you - i mean aside from the villain/s who is/are surely lurkign here as you read this - seriously pull off such a stunt without getting caught? whoever did it had some brains and/or some backing and most likely some forethought.) given that, i have to assume that there was a larger motive at work as well. someone who could cause such destruction so successfully without getting caught very likely was looking for a partiuclar outcome.

i posit that the outcome of the mystery villain (or phase 1 of the desired outcome, anyway) has been successful so far. we're all up in arms, people are terrified and pointing fingers and blaming "hobos" and the "mentally ill" (i don't know how on earth that arsonist-profiler even got away with posting that description of the mind of an arsonist, as it did nothing but help people point more fingers, stigmatize mental illness - a term we already know is entirely relative - and i did not see any reference to primary research articles or anything else to back it up.) people are leaping onto the spy-cam bandwagon. people are willing to give up their privacy rights (which are already well eroded. see: patriot act. see: RFID chip in your passport.) so, let's think about why someone or someoneS (like an agency of some sort) would want to cause a whole town to start freaking out. i don't have the answer for this, but i'm pretty sure it would have to be something more than just enjoying watching people freak out. that can be done without murdering people. that can be done without harming a fly.

to sum up:

1) adam cohen, i'll take you seriously after you buy me my very own camera that can actually capture discernable images of moving people in the dark. oh - and thank you in advance! i really love when people buy me presents, especially cool gadgets. as it's such a rare occurrance, i'm super-duper-extra grateful in advance.

2) adam cohen, why don't you buy me a camera just for the hell of it, because coincidentally my favorite camera was stolen from that very building that was under surveillance, WHILE it was under surveillance. it only seems fair.

3) adam cohen, not to single you out here, but regarding your defense of single-family homes with 2-car garages and happy motoring, i'll get back to you on that later. i believe it was ellen who already pointed out the obvious - that more people would ride buses if they had useful routes and sensible schedules. the fact that our buses don't run at good times, stop running at night (and many of them take 2-hour breaks right around noon as well) and that we don't even have late-night cab service here does not in any way mean that cars are the solution. but that's a discussion for another day.

4) SOMEONE has the money to spy on one apartment building using high-tech gadgetry and multiple spy personnel. and i think it's state and not city funding.

5) OBVIOUSLY whomever is behind all this is lurking at meeings and in every forum possible so let's keep that in mind. (hey lurker/s: you can buy me a camera too, if you like. i'm willing to put on a good show of acting hysterical and pointing a terrified finger at every person crossing my path who looks "off" in any way. but i expect a really extra-super-cool, expensive camera with hinges and ball-bearings, if it's coming from you.)

6) it has already been pointed out that it took a lot of marbles (all in one place, i.e. someone/s had their marbles together, not bats in the belfry) to set 9 successful fires in such a short time span without getting caught.

end of today's rant! coming next from yours truly - keep your eyes peeled, your teeth gritted and your fists clenched - a manifesto on the duty of northampton's citizens to stop the destruction of our city (die, hilton, DIE!!!) no matter what it takes, propriety be damned (to any dyslexics reading this: i said "propriety" not "property" so don't accuse me of being a wannabe property-destroyer. i'm a wannabe historic landmark-saver!)

all my love and kisses too,

jenna