The Tale of the Breakaway Lanyards

Early this school year, the administration announced that, in its ongoing project to make our high school more fascist, an identification badge policy would be instituted. Little yellow stars! [Sorry. Now that the obligatory Nazi comparison is drawn. . .]

For a while now, all the teachers and such have had little ID badges on lanyards that many wore in their pockets. This seems reasonable; they are, after all, employees of the school. Never before, however, has the school presumed to force the student body to wear badges. Sure, we have our student ID cards, but that's just to get better rates when you go see movies.

So after months of anticipation, we finally received our 'breakaway lanyards' with little IDs on. The breakaway part, for those uninitiated among you, means if someone grabs your lanyard, it'll snap off your neck rather than choke you. We were advised that we must wear our lanyards at all times, otherwise we would not be permitted to go to the bathroom, etc., etc. And they must be worn around your neck, so don't even try to get away with the hip lanyard-or-belt? alternative.

Of course, the policy has been fairly loosely enforced this far. I've only had to flash my lanyard a couple times. . . once when I wanted to visit the loo in health class, twice to get into 'open study hall,' and whenever the hall aides ask me where my lanyard is, a vague shuffling about in my bag tends to do the trick.

So this is step one of my plan. Ignore until given no other option. Seems to be working pretty well so far.

Eventually [though maybe not, considering I'll be graduating in not too many months] I suppose I'll be forced into step two a la Georgia Nicolson's If You Want Us to Wear Our Berets, Let's Really Wear Our Berets campaign. Haven't quite figured out what the lanyard equivalent of pulling your beret down over your face is yet.

Have seen some people with photocopied IDs blown up really big which is amusing. Suppose making it the size of a poster and wearing it like a sandwich board would be taking it to the nth degree. Also people have been really creative in replacing pictures & decorating and such. All I've done is replace the eyesore maroon lanyard with my pink Harvard one. I figure there's no sense in wasting my time being all creative about it when I'm not even wearing it.

In German class today, people randomly started making a chain out of lanyards snapped together. Eventually it went around the entire room, this long strand of maroon lanyard. It was excellent. There's definitely potential there for protesting. Stringing everyone's lanyards around the school would be hardcore. And really, what could they do? Not let anyone in school? It would definitely be a better senior prank than letting live mice out in the school. Ooh, how subversive!

It saddens me how easily people accepted the lanyards, though. Those lemming sophomores, especially. I'm sure lanyards will soon be just as everyday as . . . something very everyday. I don't know, bad cafeteria food.

People have no sense of protesting authority for authority's sake. And honestly, what do the lanyards do? Not to be all heartless about it, but the boys at Columbine would have had lanyards too. I think it's the guns that are generally the tip-off.

Vive la revolution!