I attended a violent high school. Teachers were overwhelmed. One broke my bones and made me walk to a hospital on a broken leg. Death threats every single day. Humiliation every single day. Degradation every single day. Enforced nudity every single day. Our problems had nothing to do with pushups. My problems were all about sexual abuse. I was already in athletic shape because I had to be. It was life and death. Most of our torture was dished out by young teachers-in-training, where what the community taught you was how to punish. Strip searches came before anything else. The school district hired monsters. Not one second of any of this stuff was about learning anything whatsoever. Lansing, Michigan was a deadzone of moral squalor and Vietnam was the punishment. If your hair touched your ear, your head got shaved. Adolescent boys were animals. There was no consensus as to what constituted psychological and physical terrorism. It was us versus them. I will rip the mask off a life and death proposition. The enforced nudity aligned exactly with the kind of treatment female athletes received when the sacred doctor in the community, Larry Nassar, abused dozens and dozens of females, and I would argue that boys did not have it easy either. Yet respect for authority was a fetish no one could live up to. Eyes to the ground. The animals must be caged. It all begins with pushups and your acceptance of giving away personal authority to men who were going to sexually abuse you. – Tim Barrus