Rats and snitches

One of the advantages of having a Gold frequent flier card is access to the Business Lounge, specifically in Charles de Gaulle airport where, in the Lounge, the French are slightly more polite and one can get free coffee; one of the disadvantages is that to fit in the crowd, one has to look ‘businessy’.

I look nothing business-like, I travel in an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt and carry a backpack, which means that the lounge guards look twice at my boarding pass.

Another business feature is reading newspapers, which I actually love since I cannot afford to buy them at the exorbitant price you pay for English papers in Geneva. So today, I passed the guard with an indifferent quasi-smile and I pick up the weekend Guardian.

Sifting through the European fiscal trouble and the US congressional ones, I actually came across a piece of interesting news. The Beijing reporter informs us that “Police and education officials have ordered teachers to appoint pupils as little security informants in south-western Chinese city”.

The Chinese education officials are rearing a generation of rats and snitches, how interesting. Not because it is a new idea, after all, no one described the metamorphosis of innocence into destruction better than Orwell taking about his junior spies. It is more interesting because it gave me vivid flashbacks of my middle-school years in a Syrian public school. Then, we were wild, hardly innocent, and capable of atrocities that would give you nightmares.

Our principal, a man who’s career he new will never go further and who took everything we did personally, tried all he can to stop us. He punished us, called our parents, and even gone physical at times. He never succeeded.

Every time a problem happened, he would gather the usual suspects outside his office, call us in one at a time, and seat us between him and the cross-eyed administrator who’s head looked like a radish. Nothing ever came out of those interrogation sessions, none of us would ever snitch.

Despite the threats, lies, and sometimes begging; despite the bribes and shouting; despite the good cop, bad cop, and stupid cop; none would utter a word except “I don’t know!”

This wasn’t only blind loyalty of public school kids who new their friends will have their back; nor is it just the incontrollable urge see the principal go into rage fits; it was our yet uncorrupted survival instinct.

If no one talked, no one could be punished.

How beautifully simple is that! We understood it, he didn’t, and he kept offering rewards to those who snitch. The Chinese ‘education officials’ do not understand it either, it seems the concept is fundamentally not understandable by adults. The Chinese kids will, I sincerely hope, understand it.

Maybe, instead of corrupting children’s sense of loyalty and ability to survive, adults should try to get some of that back. But then, who would translate that to Chinese?

And here are your 500 words for today.