The Merionite, April, 1968: Students Plan Civil Rights Action
The Merionite, April, 1978: LM Prom Set to Succeed
If you ever get the chance to flip through The Merionite archives—and I hope you do get that chance—you’ll notice a pattern. Every once in a while, The Merionite gets… boring? Articles about sit-ins and walkouts and protests and actions are replaced for five to ten years at a time with article after article about prom venues and cafeteria lunch menus.
And it’s not just that every decade The Merionite’s writers started being lazier at their jobs. Stories in other local newspapers confirm that there have been periods of student mobilization and political involvement throughout LMSD history (In the ‘60s and ‘70s, and again in the ‘90s and 2010s) and years where LM students don’t appear to break into the news cycle whatsoever.
What I’ve noticed is that throughout LMSD’s history, we’ve repeated the same pattern over and over: periods of intense social activism, change, and progress, followed by periods of backlash, backsliding, and stagnation. Everything
happens all at once, and then nothing ever happens.
This is the part where this article has to stop being historical observation and start being a personal narrative, because The Merionite’s archives aren’t nearly comprehensive enough to prove my theory—but, I think this happens for a couple reasons.
#1: LM is a bubble. A community small enough that social change is often driven by only a few players. One dedicated teacher. A cohort of passionate students.
#2: LM isn’t a bubble: The social trends of activism and stagnation in LM totally mirror nationwide trends of progressive movements and conservative backlash. Maybe nothing was happening in the ‘80s at LM because nothing was happening in the ‘80s.
Here’s why I’m worried: any senior can vividly remember the chaos and energy of our freshman year. Not always good energy, of course—bubbling tensions and nearly routine fights. But good energy too. There were two abortion walkouts in the same school year. Students protested for climate change and in opposition to oil drilling projects, they formed new political clubs and canvassed in elections, and everywhere I looked I saw upperclassmen deeply involved in trying to shape the world around them.
In the last few years at LM, I’ve noticed that loud energy is being replaced more and more often with silence—intentional silence, in the form of censored art pieces and canceled speaker events, and casual silence, as we students decide to put our attention elsewhere. As national political trends shift, I’m scared to see the energy that made me love LM so much die out. How many of those walkouts and protests would happen at LM now? Would they look remotely the same?
Especially in the last two years, I’ve seen student attempts to hold discourse or discussion or action around the Middle East fizzle out before they could even take place—particularly around the crises in Israel and Palestine. Time and again: students try to organize a forum to discuss the conflict in the Middle East, only to be met with months worth of administrative pushback. Articles about the conflict are pulled from The Merionite’s website. Artwork about the war in Gaza is quietly taken down. Each instance is totally justifiable in the abstract, but helping to create a pattern of silence, where no one speaks publicly about the world in any way that could ever cause controversy.
I could argue that silence around issues that matter is destructive, but it’s also boring. It does nothing to help us learn, or make life interesting, when we shy away from conversations that scare us, or when we allow ourselves and our peers to go silent.
We are leaving highschool and entering into a deeply precedent world. Nothing we will face in our lives, or careers, or futures, is separate from its history. LM’s history is messy. You may not know that Harriton was the site of a slave plantation, or that LMSD’s segregated elementary school shut down nine full years after Brown v. Board of Education. But you’ve probably heard of the racial gap in standardized test results in this district, or looked around an AP class to see almost entirely white faces looking back at you. You don’t get to graduate from LMSD without carrying the weight of history in your backpack.
But LM’s history also carries lessons, about the students that came before us and the ways they fought to make our lives as students better. For a hundred years, students at LM have been organizing themselves to discuss and work on causes that matter to them. Throughout our history there are stories of progress, momentum, and change.
I can’t say for certain that every cause I’ve championed in high school was right. I can’t say for certain that I was ever as correct as I should have been, or as moral as I should have been, or even as kind as I should have been. But I can say that when I was right, and when I was wrong, I was carrying on LM’s most valuable tradition: finding something to show up for, and showing up for it.
If I have one piece of advice for LM, and for my fellow seniors as we go out into the world, it’s this: start showing up.
Don’t shy away from moments of discourse and discord, but lean into them. Show up to a school board meeting just to understand what they’re like. Join a group on campus. Find an organization that’s doing meaningful work, and visit one of their meetings. Find something you care about, and start caring about it so deeply you could give a speech on it off-the-cuff. Find something to show up for, and start showing up for it.
