There has recently been a fierce but fruitless debate across the news over the rightful legality of water torture.
Some would call these persuasive essays; others would call them the rightful opinions guaranteed to all Americans by the First Amendment _ except for those who disagree with the opinions a la mode (for all of you who've taken your regular morning dose of vitamin American Stereotype, those would be the opinions with ice cream on top).
The value of any topic in the media is determined by one factor alone: gossipability.
The actual relevance or irrelevance of whatever's smoking on the hotplates of the major news outlets this week is about as important to its successful reception by the public as Stephen Hawking is vital to the romance novel business.
Waterboarding is a sexy debate topic; jazz it up with some government scandals and nudge some terribly embarrassed officials into a reality television show to confront a few suspiciously attractive torture victims, and you've got a news buzz that will keep the coffee-shop college intellectuals howling enthusiastically at one another long after the fire hoses come out.
If all else fails, you'll have another show for MTV to milk mercilessly in the pursuit of convincing the public that a celebrity whose only claims to fame are the 2 million icons spattering her MySpace page actually has some sort of talent that's legally viewable for those 13 and younger.
But how many of the nation's caffeine variety nonconformists-in-black actually care about waterboarding?
How many of them, you might wonder, could list the technical aspects of waterboarding and its verifiable effects on the human psyche?
How many could explain how waterboarding violates the Geneva Conventions?
Furthermore, how many could do this without summoning up their handy dandy Google adviser on their laptops?
If you manage to burst through the wall of "Fascist!" catcalls and the stubborn repetitions of "It's torture" that issue themselves from the answering machines that are many left-wing minds, you may come to realize the truth that's been driven into a corner along with so many others that have been banished by the media's love affairs and by its corporate sponsors: waterboarding is not important to the average American. It isn't. I apologize to the 30 people or so across the United States whose families have been torn to pieces by the effects of waterboarding, but you are to the American public what Vladmir Putin is to the American public; you have funny names and as long as you leave the nuclear weapons behind the childproof locks that we installed, no one cares what you think.
However, there is a form of torture that has quietly crawled around the borders of the modern world to infect it like some horrible 10-word song in a movie commercial that makes children incapable of singing it less than 50 times daily. This torture is not merely for the criminal and the annoying; this torture is used five out of seven mornings on almost all of the population older than 12 and younger than 19. The federal government need not concern itself with implementing this sort of torture, for it begins at the individual's consent and in most cases halts its ascent after afflicting an entire district. Some scientists suspect that this treacherous method disperses itself through word of mouth, but recent studies suggest that it's linked to the growing and ever-dangerous spread of afternoon sports.
This torture is the use of sleep deprivation on teenagers and young adults. Specifically, this refers to the beginning of the first-period class in high schools nationwide before 8 a.m. Perhaps this torture is only sometimes intentional; perhaps it is more often than we know. However, the use of sleep deprivation in the school system is as widespread as it is irrational. This is because the purpose of torture is to effectively obtain accurate information from a difficult interrogation subject. It's widely known that a lack of proper sleep muddies the mental process and interferes with memory timing and accuracy.
Nevertheless, this fact is apparently only accepted among people who have nothing to do with school administration systems. I suspect that there is a secret pact among school officials to never speak of any scientific studies that have to do with sleep's effects on performance, especially among the young.
The juxtaposition of fact and reality is stunning; dozens of studies prove the students in high schools that begin class at 8:30 a.m. or later consistently perform at higher levels than the students of the work-by-the-light-of-sunrise 7:30 schools (Google this and know it to be true). Regardless of this discovery, schools nationwide continue to cling stubbornly to their late-to-bed, early-to-rise morning hours. If sleep deprivation is being somehow justified, then its results are most decidedly measured in quantity of school hours instead of quality.
It is so wonderful to know that the degradation of high school performance is accepted for the sake of another school function: athletics. I have had it explained to me that school begins so early so that sports team practices will not overflow into the twilight. The truly anti-alien might use this to adapt a simpler tactic for keeping immigrant families out of America; simply explain to them that the education of the education system is held second to football. Be sure to point out to them that you mean the REAL football: American football. Especially if they're European.
Perhaps the sleep deprivation method of torture is simply a motivational effort to get teenagers to go to bed earlier. However, like the motivational tossing of witches with rocks bound to their feet into rivers, students have and will continue to spectacularly fail to take part in the spirit of the test. The advent of the Internet provides a nightlife to teenagers that far surpasses the lulling sounds of late-night television and the appealing if rather monotonous lures of the midnight phone chat.
Again, science has proved that teenagers are biologically bound to later sleeping times than children and adults; if you'd like the full details of this factoid, then ask Professor Yahoo. Of course, the universal 24-hour café that is the Internet doesn't help, but American teenagers as a whole are not going to go to bed at 9 p.m. unless Big Brother descends from his throne and whups them into next 1984.
Then again, we all know that officials are fully capable of re-creating this reality and others as they choose; look at all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which due to some strange technology only members of the Bush administration can see.
It is a shame that some of the enthusiasm devoted to such a minor topic as waterboarding cannot be redirected to a cause that is closer to home: a silent torture that has your children collapsing over their desks every morning and drugging themselves with caffeine to keep up some semblance of life. How many hours are enough for little Tommy? How many hours do we have to take away for him to remember that the formula for memory is ZZZ?
Jessie Matus is a junior at Oneonta High School.
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