Season 3, Episode 20 - I Want Candy

Original Airdate - March 22nd, 2004

It’s almost time for finals, and the Grade 10 workload is really picking up. Paige and Spinner are overwhelmed and over it. There’s one solution. Take a day off. They borrow Dylan’s cool convertible, Spinner fakes sick with his mom, Paige forges a note from hers, and it’s time for fun!

But one of their classmates is not having fun. Ashley has been missing school a lot lately. Kate, her great mother who we haven’t seen enough of lately, has been letting her stay home because she’s clearly in a funk, but she’s starting to get worried. Even if Paige has been bringing Ashley all of the homework, exams are coming up and Ashley needs to be in school.

Ashley calls Paige about yesterday’s homework, and Paige tells her they’re skipping and were planning to swing by. But when Paige hears how down Ashley sounds, she has a better idea. They should bring Ashley with them! Spinner is not a fan of this idea. And neither is Ashley. But with Paige’s convincing, they get her out of bed. Everyone gets a wish - Paige wants a fun lunch, Spinner wants mini-golf, and Ashley wants to go see Terri.

They hit the hospital first. It’s clear that Ashley hasn’t been able to bring herself to visit Terri yet. Terri is awake and on the mend, but Ashley really doesn’t know what to say. When a nurse comes in to change her bandage, Ashley gets overwhelmed and leaves the room. This is Terri’s last ever appearance! It’s a nothing moment and a bummer way to send the character off. Sad!

The skipping students head to the same Italian restaurant from yesterday’s episode where the same gay waiter refuses to bring Spinner a beer. Ash says she’s not hungry, and Paige tells her she has to let herself experience good things. Ashley’s POV becomes clear. Between Craig and what happened to her bff Terri, Ashley feels like Degrassi is cursed. Things will not get better. Spinner says she should just transfer then, and Ashley says she plans to do exactly that.

Ashley heads to the restroom, leaving Paige and Spinner at odds. Paige says they have to help Ashley feel better. Spinner says let her leave. In fact, they should ditch her now and have an actually fun day. Paige puts the kibosh on that. When Ashley comes back to the restaurant, she spots Raditch on a lunch date. The three of them sneak out of the restaurant, and Spinner “forgets” to leave money for their food. Their poor gay waiter.

There’s a montage of fun as they go play mini-golf and watch a movie. They head to a modern art museum where Spinner makes fun of the art. Ashley tells him to be respectful, and he instead mocks a nude portrait. Ashley pushes too hard, and Spinner snaps at her to lighten up. He storms off.

Surprising Ashley, Paige takes his side. It really does seem like Ashley is determined to be miserable. She never lets herself have any fun. She gets a little victim blamey about Craig’s cheating too.

So here’s the thing. Ashley has genuinely dealt with a lot. To my eye, she seems pretty depressed, perhaps even chemically. Personally, I would advocate for gentle self-care and seeing a mental health professional. That said, in general, Ashley is a character who takes things too seriously and could stand to have a little fun. I’m not thrilled with the way Paige approaches this, but she is trying.

They head to the mall and run into a daytime mall Elvis impersonator contest, like they have all the time at malls in Canada, I assume. Spinner mocks it, Paige says it’s silly and fun, Ashley says she’s going to grab them snacks and will be back soon. But she doesn’t grab them snacks, she enters the contest! She lets loose and Spinner and Paige love it. Ashley smiles! It’s nice! She gets third place.

Back at the Kerwin house, Kate is pissed that she ran off with her friends, but glad to see Ashley coming out of her funk. Spinner and Paige drive off in the convertible. They got a parking ticket, but it was so worth it.

Emma is also having a rough time. Simpson has finished his final round of chemo and is clearly a little addled. JT tries to bother her during Media Immersion class about asking Manny to the dance, and lands them both with lunchtime defragging duty.

Modern hard drives are solid state drives (SSDs) which use integrated circuits to store data, but hard drives used to be literal spinning disks inside your computer. Your data was stored in a particular location on that disk that your computer would find and access when you needed it. Defragging was the process of reorganizing data’s physical location on a disk drive so that similar stuff was in the same place. This made things more efficient and helped with the computer’s longevity and is a thing we don’t have to do anymore!

At lunch, Emma finishes all of her assigned computers except one. The one Alex is using. Alex refuses to get up and move to a different machine, and Emma is pissed. Meanwhile JT goes to his last computer, Mr. Simpson’s. He goes to save and close the file Simpson was working on, but he’s surprised by what he sees. Emma comes over to look. Mr. Simpson was working on his will.

Emma goes looking for her dad and runs into Alex in the halls. Alex mocks her, on yet another mission, and Emma simply doesn’t have the patience. They get into a physical fight. Simpson goes to her after the fight to try and figure out why she did something so out of character. She comes right out with it. She’s pissed. They said no more secrets. When was Simpson going to tell her the chemo didn’t work and he’s going to die.

Mr. Simpson explains. They don’t know yet whether the chemo worked. They get the results today. But his doctor told him to prepare, because if this round didn’t work, there won’t be more rounds. The Simpson-Nelsons decided not to tell Emma until after they knew for sure, but Emma says she wants to know this stuff. Simpson invites her to join them for the appointment.

The chemo worked! Simpson is in remission. After their own rough year, the family finally gets to feel some relief. They have a sweet moment of happy tears together.

I’m writing this on Friday, January 30th, the day of a general strike organized to resist the fascist takeover of American cities by ICE. And then this episode is about not going to school, so now I get to talk about that. I’m having some complicated feelings about it but want to start with what I don’t feel complicated about. ICE must be abolished. Agents must be fired and placed on no-hire lists for future law enforcement positions.

The leadership and agents who committed crimes must be held accountable, which in our current system looks like criminal prosecutions and prisons. We cannot wait to do these things for the midterms or the 2028 presidential election. People are dying and suffering now.

Any efforts made by any person to try to achieve these goals have my complete support. I am not in the business of telling people how to resist. If your heart is in the right place, I support you. I don’t think there’s one way to exist during a fascist takeover, and if there is, I am certainly not educated or experienced enough to tell anyone what it is.

Anyway, time for my weird feelings.

I live in Los Angeles. I work at an office job, primarily from home. I’m a white man. My friends, family, and coworkers are primarily liberal or at least on the left side of moderate. There are many reasons why resistance to all of this is a relatively easy proposition for me.

I am less likely, though not immune, from being the victim of anti-protest violence. I work at a job where I am unlikely to be fired, replaced, or judged if I choose not to go to work for a day. My employer posted in a slack channel saying as much explicitly. My friends and family support my decisions to participate in protest. I have food in my house, so I don’t need to spend money today. I have a stable financial situation so I can choose to shop at more expensive stores to avoid giving money to Amazon, Target, etc.

I try to use these privileges where I can. I try to do my part. But sometimes I leave a protest feeling not energized or inspired, but a little numb. I’m glad to be physically putting my body somewhere that demands attention, but I can’t help but feeling like this isn’t The Way Forward.

America has a long history of protest. You may be familiar, but we became a country by overthrowing our leaders and declaring independence. The right to protest is enshrined in our constitution. It’s the first amendment! That makes it important!

America also has a long history of putting guardrails and asterisks around our constitutionally protected right to protest (and other rights that ICE is violating every day). You can protest, sure, but you have to do it in the right way. You have to get the right permits. You have to comply with police commands. You have to stop protesting when we tell you it’s over.

This is stupid and unconstitutional, no matter what some dumbasses on the Supreme Court have said over the years. Protesting the state with the state’s permission is not protest. Protest is meant to be a disruption of the system. We have surrendered that in the name of protecting the peace.

And so what we’re left with is showmanship. And showmanship isn’t nothing! Attention is good! It is all too easy to turn away from the horrors. Dominating social media with images of resistance is a good thing. But awareness cannot be the end game. Awareness must become action. And I’m worried we’ve lost the ability to do that here.

This idea that protest must be civil and controlled gives permission for those in power to ignore it or only pay it lip service. It creates a structure for members of the alleged resistance political party, the Democrats, to scold protestors or get lost in endless discussions of process instead of actually taking up the popular will of their base. Protesting is meant to create disruption so as to motivate action, but those in power have defined such clear rules around it that it becomes a tool of distraction. When it’s not disruptive, they can largely ignore it. When it’s too disruptive, the protest becomes the problem.

I think a strike as a tool of action is a really interesting one in light of all of this. On one hand, it’s an undeniably appealing idea. One of the great strengths of the fascists is their alliance with the ultra wealthy. Many of those with money are racist pieces of shit, but others are regular pieces of shit, happy to accept the racism if it benefits their bottom line. Hurting their pocket book could cause a rupture between the administration and their funding stream.

But is that what’s happening today? When my employer tells me it’s okay for me to strike, am I disrupting anything? The people working at Walmart and Amazon and on factory lines, working for the people funding the administration, cannot walk off the job or they risk losing their livelihoods entirely. The economy is so broken that people can’t take that risk. Are we doing what we think we’re doing?

I’m glad it’s happening! I support it! I just feel the need to caveat that again.

I keep finding myself in this trap. I look around at everyone just trying to do something and feel a sense of “is this going to work?” because we desperately need this to work. And I keep feeling dissatisfied because we are forced to play by the broken system’s rules when we resist that broken system.

I don’t want us to have to use platforms that raise advertising dollars for Meta and Elon Musk to organize and get information out there. I don’t want us to have to play nice with the cops while we protest their brutality or the brutality of other law enforcement groups. I don’t give two shits if Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries think we’re protesting the right way. They need to understand they work for us. They need to be more afraid of us.

I have few solutions to this frustration, beyond refusing to let it be a tool of inaction. All we can do is what we can do, and we must do it. I am in awe of the way the people of this country are fighting back however they can. It is the thing that makes me feel good about America.

But I think maybe our tactics need to be bigger and our targets need to be smaller and more specific. One that comes to my mind is getting our Democratic city officials to use our local police to actively protect people from ICE.

I think we need to be honest that the thing we need more than people in the streets is money in the hands of organizations working for the people. People who are much smarter than me who would probably tell me everything I’m getting wrong with this essay. I think the money stuff today is so good and important. Stop giving the wrong people your money if you possibly can.

I think we need to stop letting the state decide the parameters of our resistance. I think “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” are great slogans because they’re the things we actually want to do, and politicians who want to do those things should run on them. I think we need to stop letting the Democratic party institutionalists and operatives tell us how to behave. We wouldn’t be here if they actually knew how to stop fascism.

I think we have to be bolder about telling people who voted for Trump because of the economy that they were fooled, and they need to be smarter next time. I think a lot of moderates in politics and the media need to realize they were part of that too. They were fooled too, and they helped fool others.

I think the astrology that is happening with all of this is wild! Slow moving planets are in positions that echo the Revolutions of the late 1700s, the American Civil War, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And Jupiter is in Cancer still to remind us that we more than enough when we focus on caring for each other.

I think love and community are stronger than hate and violence. I think we will win. I think many people won’t be there with us when we do, and every one of those lives lost is a tragedy we could have prevented. I think we have to keep having fun. I think maybe I’m the Ashley, and I need to let myself feel joy in trying and seeing other people try.