The rise and fall of a hand-drying rebellion
Mandela students want paper towels, but can they make their voices heard?
Earlier this year, I was walking by the bathrooms at Mandela International Magnet School, where I’m a junior, when a bright-red poster caught my eye. On it, a six-fingered fist leaned against a roll of paper towels that looked more like toilet paper. Both objects were illuminated by rays of light. Underneath the illustration of the Soviet-style fist, the poster read, “Dry hands are a right — not a privilege REBEL.”
Paper towels had been an issue at our school for a long time. A lot of students felt the hand dryers in the bathroom were both ineffective and unhygienic. The posters — supposedly sponsored by the “Paper Towel Liberation Front,” a group that does not exist at Mandela — had everyone thinking: Will this be what it takes to finally get the dry hands we so desperately wanted? Ultimately, the answer was no, but it did make me wonder how exactly young people use their voices and what can happen as a result.
The Sovietesque propaganda didn’t work on many levels. It seemed like a big joke if anything, while it was a serious problem we had all complained about time and time again. Posters making light of the issue seemed less focused on making a change and more on eliciting a reaction.
However, the posters did spark conversations between classmates. Some people hated them, thinking they took a genuine problem, albeit a small one, and expressed it as a joke. Others thought it was incredibly unnecessary and we should just deal with using the hand dryers. After all, worse things are happening in the world. But what was most interesting to me was how passionate people had gotten about the lack of paper towels in the bathroom because of these posters.
The posters reignited how our grade felt on this issue. The creator of these posters, an 11th grader who declined to comment for this story, wanted to continue protesting. However, after a week of the posters being up, action-oriented conversations began to fade out, replaced by jokes about hands and the posters. Eventually, the momentum of the paper towel movement died completely.
The rise and fall of this conflict got me thinking about how we use our voices as youth to enact change or just to be heard.
It’s important to note our age when it comes to this issue. As high schoolers, we’re on the cusp of becoming adults but still get treated like children. From what I heard, we weren’t allowed paper towels for environmental reasons. However, after interviewing Mandela’s head learner, Randy Grillo, I learned paper towels were a “budget issue,” not something having to do with the environment.
In an interview earlier this year, Grillo also mentioned “getting the district involved” when it came to issues like this. He had not only encouraged students to reach out to the district but also to work with and support them. Grillo himself “called for four years” wanting to know “why we don’t have paper towels.”
This completely changed my view on the issue. It wasn’t a fight between the students and our school administration, but it had to do with our budget. The student who made the posters did not reach out to the district and instead put the posters up. While complaining about paper towels, it never struck us to go to the administration and ask for what we wanted. I reached out to district spokesman Cody Dynarski over email and was told “the use of paper towels in student restrooms has been proven to not be cost-effective.”
Students at my school were much more willing to talk to Mandela’s administration rather than the district. The issue wasn’t the politics of dry hands, but how being heard affected our ability to make change. If the adults in our lives could not enact the change we needed, what chance did we have?
As people, and especially as teenagers, we love to be heard. According to one Psychology Today article on listening to adolescents, “Listening sends a powerful message about valuing to the teenager.” When we’re not being listened to, it makes us feel unworthy of respect. Those posters were meant to elicit a response from those who supported the cause and those who were against it. While our school has helped in the fight for paper towels, teachers don’t face the same issues as we do. Teacher bathrooms do have paper towels but have locks that require a Santa Fe Public Schools staff ID. Though their support was very helpful, they didn’t have the same issues.
In her essay for The Atlantic, “Do Protests Even Work?”, writer and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci writes, “In the short term, protests can work to the degree that they can scare authorities into changing their behavior.”
The easiest choice for an authority that does not want to change its behavior is to simply ignore protests. This can go one of two ways: The protesters only get more passionate about their cause and secure some of their demands, or they feel dejected and give up. The latter eventually dies out. We saw this happen at Mandela. Though we had access to support and resources, the fear of being ignored or trivialized for wanting paper towels stopped the protest from reaching new heights.
But what makes a protest successful?
In a 2020 episode of the podcast Speaking of Psychology, a podcast published by the American Psychological Association, Lauren Duncan explains that causes are started by those with a problem who repeatedly feel oppressed or under harm. It’s not until the “silent majority” who are not directly affected by the issue come in and express discontent as well that an act of protest can incite change.
So, whether it is wanting paper towels in the bathroom or a more prominent political cause, people want to be heard. Even the possibility of being ignored makes us feel less than we are. Listening isn’t just giving a response defending an opposing point of view or belittling those asking for change, it’s trying to find common ground and compromising to create change. Ignoring the protests of students creates an issue that will follow them throughout their lives.
If at age 16 we feel our voices aren’t being heard, why keep trying? Even if our demands seem immature or unrealistic, eliciting a response is a necessity when it comes to student activism. It makes us feel valued and respected. That value and respect will lead to well-developed and politically active adults who can advocate for themselves.