As I walked with the now 4-term president of the Arcata High senior class, John Adams, adorned with his Eureka Costco-sponsored sweatshirt he received as part of a massive donation to his campaign, I got the sense of pure, unnerving confidence.
“Restoring Arcata High School to its historical glory has been my sole purpose these past four years,” Adams said as we walked through a hall at Arcata high, now adorned with a colorful mural of a map displaying AHS territory expanded to control all of Humboldt, put up recently to display “educational pride, and the pursuit for more living space for Arcatians,” according to him.
“We’ve unambiguously succeeded in that goal of educational rebirth,” Adams continued, “but there is one more horrid problem left to deal with… the Trinies.”
The day prior, Adams proposed to a joint session of the school board that he was unilaterally banning all intra-district transfers from Trinidad. This has been an item on his agenda he has been attempting to pass for all four years of his admin, now finally available to him after his “enabling act,” passed 2 weeks ago. This gave him more presidential discretion and removed the very constraining “term limits” set up by the AHS constitution, which only allows class presidents to serve up until their graduation.
“A lot of people have been clamouring for me to stay, no one wants me to leave after my ‘graduation,’” he exclaimed as we climbed up the stairs to look over the parking lot, “and now I get to make sure those filthy Trinies from Trinidad get cleansed from our beautiful school.”
I originally had planned to ask him during this interview about the rumours that he was leaving for Columbia University after graduation, and about his potential city of Trinidad ancestry; but after some stern looks before the interview from his new Intra-district Transfer Police, or “IDTP,” as they looked over my prospective questions, I decided against asking.
“Filthy flea-ridden Trinie maggots have been flooding into our school over the northern border, through the 101; creeping in from the dirtiest corners of Trinidad and taking our parking places,” Adams screamed, gesturing at the parking lot we were looking at from above. I could see most of the parking places were filled up, as he said.
“…Crowding our halls,” he continued, “sticking random pieces of trash in our urinals, vaping in our bathrooms, and ruining the bell schedule to the point of no one even knowing when periods end on Mondays and Fridays to this day! Despite three long years of it!”
Then, without a prompt, the president bolted left, still within the upstairs hall, in the direction of the cemetery. Quickly, I followed him, trying to keep up.
I caught up to him at the end of the hall, and we faced the cemetery. I was out of breath, but he hadn’t skipped a beat; a testament to his disciplined and martial training in cross country that has kept his body strong “for the school,” according to him. He is a true “New Arcatian,” as he likes to call it.
He then stuck his head out over the railing and pointed left, towards the gym. “Let’s not forget these goddamned animals are the reason for our decline in athletic success. They join our teams, the basketball team, the baseball team, the volleyball team; and then they stab us in the back! We would never lose a game in any sport if the Trinies were ravaged and exorcised from our divine school grounds!”
He shook his fists wildly in the air as he said this, still hanging over the railing, yelling at no one in particular.
“The only team where there weren’t any Trinies!? The football team two years ago! And they won the state championship! Coincidence? I think not! They sneak over the northern border, and they neglect to decorate or organize float construction for our parades, and they poison the blood of this once great school! And they pollute the decency of this once educationally pure campus!”
I noticed two IDTP recruits, Chase Bickmore and Lincoln Neuman, were passing by below and had now stopped to listen to the president’s rant. When they thought he was done, they clapped and shouted words of support towards their president, but then he continued.
“…and now finally we get to do something about this! We are going to build a blockade and checkpoint along the 101, and we are going to make Trinidad pay for it! The blood of our people will no longer be defiled by biologically inferior Trinies! They will be deported or executed like dogs in the quad!”
These are strong words from the president, I thought to myself. Controversial they were… no doubt; but I felt then and still feel now that all sides of the political spectrum could agree that, if he wasn’t agreeable, then the president was at least strong in his stances.
I never got to ask him about his administration’s recent order that mandated the FFA creed and Owl god principles must be posted on every classroom door, bending the long-standing tradition of separation of creed and school. I also didn’t get to ask him about the disappearance of his former vice president, Violet Villareal, last year after she broke from him, following his big win at the polls, where he won 99% of the popular vote.
However, I did get to ask opposition leader Gabby Cavinta about Adams’ statements on Trinidadian students going to school at AHS, which she didn’t have anything to say about, but she did say she was “strongly concerned about the president’s rampant trading of Carmela’s and Wildberries Marketplace stocks,” which she claimed, “breaks down longstanding democratic norms around stock trading.”
I wasn’t able to interview the militant Redwood Radicals leader, Gemma Caruso, about her Arcata community forest-based guerrilla war campaign against the Adams administration, as she was too busy also going to war against Heron Cromwell’s equally radical Parliamentary Army, over whether or not to have an 8-person or 10-person parliament after they theoretically toppled “the Adams Regime.”
I was, however, able to interview a lone Adams voter, Rowan Magnusson, about why he voted for Adams all four times.
“I got 7 hours of school every day plus band and sports and homework and taking care of my siblings,” he said. “And John promised he’d clean up the hallways and get new textbooks and all sorts of good stuff that would make the day easier. And I’m just trying to get through the day, man; I’m just trying to get through the day.”
