Really dumb students push the envelope with dumb sweatshirts...

It's the Class of 2011. They were sitting around, no doubt smoking dope, and trying to think of clever things or slogans they could associate with "11" for a "class spirit" t-shirt. I'm afraid that's all there was to this particular brain-storming drizzling session.

(I graduated in '76 so it was obvious we had to do the whole red-white-and-blue thing.)

 

How do you know what they were doing when they thought of this?

 

Re: dumb things kids do.

We had an incident at one of our high schools a few years ago, guy walked onto campus with a gun and took hostages in the band room, fired 2 or 3 shots into the ceiling, fortunately no one was hurt and, for obvious reasons, the school was on lockdown until everything ended.

Two weeks later, it's the cross town rivalry game and the visiting teams students unfurl a banner that says "OHS defense will lock you down tighter than your band room"

Funny? Maybe, but it freaked out a couple of the kids that were at the game and had been in the room, was definitely too soon and the students that did it had no idea that anyone would be upset.

High school students rarely see past the end of whatever it is they are doing.

A much funnier and less offensive, but still clueless, incident. My daughter attended OHS and the softball team wanted to design the team sweatshirts. They put the "O" in the middle with a slightly smaller "H" on the left (as you looked at it) and the "S" on the right of the "o".

They did not realize, until they took them out of the box, that they were calling themselves "HOS"

Made their parents proud, it did

 

I was there.

 

Finally clicked on the link to see the shirts.

Maybe I'm naive, but I can easily see that being something kids would design as a "tribute" thing. I think it's distasteful, and surely wouldn't wear it, but regardless of the ethnic tensions, I see absolutely nothing negative behind its intent.

You gotta remember: The next generation has never -- and will never -- hold onto their parents' sensibilities, and they can't be expected to. I think that's what we're seeing here. 9/11 is going to hold a much greater personal significance to us than it is to our kids, just as Vietnam and the Kennedy/King assassinations are a more sacred memory to my parents and their peers, and Pearl Harbor is to my grandparents and their peers. To us, you just don't joke about 9/11, but to someone else, you just don't joke about Pearl Harbor. Those kids will have their own generation-defining moment, too ... but that wasn't it. Time moves on.

Case in point: My friend once wore a band T-shirt to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. One lady almost fell down the stairs when she saw it coming out the door and we almost got kicked out of the damn place. The band? ... The Dead Kennedys. He didn't think anything of it, "distasteful" or not. It was a T-shirt of a band he liked. To these Detroit kids, this might be just a class T-shirt. Time moves on.

 

I'll admit it. I laughed.

 

C'mon. All the kids who wore the sweatshirt were Arab Americans.

You think they had no clue it would be view negatively by the rest of the school?

 

I'll say this: I'm never surprised when kids have no clue.

Think back, man.

 

Bobby Bowden took shit in 2002 because his team had t-shirts that said, "let's roll."

 

I see your point, but these kids -- and everyone else in the country from the Middle East -- are viewed differently since the Twin Towers and would be particularly sensitive to how the shirts would be taken.

 

I think these kids wanted to be in everyone's face with these shirts. That wouldn't make them different from a lot of kids, but you've got to have an ounce of sense. Unless they're simply trying to provoke something.

 

I know kids can be clueless, but I also don't buy the story that they didn't know. Tell me they didn't know about the Holocaust or something and I would buy it, but to not realize how this relates to 9/11? No way.