- Multinationals -

Coke day in school-student suspended for protesting in GA

This morning, I read in the Washington Post (3/26/98) that a high school in Georgia had a "Coka-Cola day" to advertise Coke with aq special assembly with students dessed in Coke shirts in return for corporate donations. Two students were suspended for "disruption" for wearing shirts advertising Pepsi(coke's #1 competitor) to protest the event. One of the students wore a pepsi shirt IN THE PEP RALLY, thus scoring a square hit on the corporate promotion. The ther was suspended just for wearng one to school. Given that the corts have held that schools cannot prohibit shirts dvertising drugs, acohol, satanism,etc. ,this incident will probably be held to be a blatent first amendment violation munless Coke buys off the courts.

This kind of thing is exactly what I am talking about when I say that public education serves only to prepare people for a life of corporate submission. In this case, Coke's agents openly used the schools to dicipline someone. While I am sure Pepsi would do the same, it is Coke that is that school's "donor" soda.
The first thing students in any school that sells out to corporations can do is to buy any soda BUT the one the school advertises, any shoes BUT Nike or whatever is being promoted, etc. Perhaps the administration in the school mentioned above would have preferred to see the students wear the '70's era shirts that lampooned Coke by replacing the word "Coke" with "Cocaine", in the same colors and script. After all, Coke used to really contain coke(instead of caffeine). Certainly this is as good a reason as any for those of us who like soda to consider store brands, RC, etc.

Follow Ups:

• maybe its still the real thing f@rtm@n (only for now) Oglesby Anarchist League Earth May 12 1998 (0)