Marshall plane crash, get over it

I am hesitant to post this but ... (I don't want to savage a 20-year-old student)
Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of the Marshall University plane crash. As usual the school held its annual ceremony at the fountain.
One of the writers at the school paper penned a column saying 42 years was long enough. It's time move on.

It's going over about as well as you imagine. Epic. Fucking. Fallout and Fail.
I feel for this kid. I do.

http://www.marshallparthenon.com/time-heals-all-wounds-1.2794374#.UKUmVGftpkj

The first Facebook comment is from Randy Burnside, former SID in Marshall.

 

Wow. What an idiot. Let's just forget 9/11 while we're at it. Have some frickin' perspective.

 

Uggh. File this under "Shit you write when you're 20 that will make you cringe in 10 years."

 

Moddy was.

/runs away as fast as possible

 

I didn't write for the school newspaper, but don't most of them have faculty advisors to review the contents of the paper before they go to press, to help kids from making mistakes like this that they'll regret down the line? If not, I'm surprised instances like this aren't more prevalent.

 

Is it at all possible to redeem yourself after you've written something like this? In my first full-time job out of college in the early 1990s, I worked at a small daily that covered two high schools -- the "city" school and the county school. We had an SE (not me) who covered the city school and me, who covered the county school and also split time on the news side. Saturday comes and I'm in the office putting out the Sunday sports section because the SE has the day off. I'm also assigned to do a column, a duty which I neglect until the last possible second. In fact, I wrote the damn thing right on the page. Without going into details, let's just say I managed to piss off damn near everyone in the whole county, including -- and this, it turned out, was the most important -- ALL the major advertisers. I knew I'd f'ed up as soon as I finished writing and long before I sent the page, but I pushed forward anyway.

Monday comes and the publisher meets me in the parking lot. I knew I was in trouble, big time. So before he could say a word, I produced for him an "I screwed up" column I had spent the entire day Sunday working on. He still gave me hell, then told me I had to meet with him and the advertisers in his office later that morning. I kissed so much butt, it's not even funny. We ran the column, with a few minor changes mandated by the publisher, front page above the fold in Tuesday's paper, then AGAIN on the sports front the next Sunday.

But the damage had been done. No one in that county wanted anything to do with me and it was obvious. I couldn't even go out to lunch as the local Burger King without hearing the snickers. I lasted there another three months before I couldn't take the self-inflicted misery anymore.

So I don't think it's possible to be redeemed. But maybe I went after my attempted redemption in the wrong way.

 

At least once a week, I am reminded of how great it was to grow up in the era before the Internet, when the things that would embarrass me most were confined to the small local or campus audience that actually read the newspaper.

I'd hate for any 20-year-old kid to get an industry death sentence for a bad column. But college is for finding out what you're good at and also what you aren't good at, and maybe he just isn't good at this.

 

You pissed off everyone in the county and all the advertisers? I know you won't want to self-reveal with too many details, so I'm gonna guess you were a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writer and you wrote, "The Packers should go with Aaron Rodgers over Brett Favre."

Seriously, what was the topic that was so incendiary?

 

My grandfather attended Marshall in the early 1940s and loved talking about that place. Part of the movie was filmed where I live and some people I know were extras. Also one of the high schools uses the scoreboard. I thought the kid did a stupid. You will make people mad but I would hate to be this guy right now.

 

Nooooo ... I wouldn't want to spend the rest of that young man's college career.

Unless he transfers out.

And even then.

 

You pissed off everyone in the county and all the advertisers? I know you won't want to self-reveal with too many details, so I'm gonna guess you were a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writer and you wrote, "The Packers should go with Aaron Rodgers over Brett Favre."

Seriously, what was the topic that was so incendiary?
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Just be careful how you criticize Big State University's football team, especially in a county that's rabidly pro-Big State University, a county in which virtually all the business leaders are graduates of Big State. The newspaper is no place to go public with your juvenile and petty comments, which is exactly what I did. Twenty years ago, learned a very hard lesson, moved on. But still, probably, not welcome in that county.

 

Please stop blaming Yoko Ono. It's been 42 years, guys.