Still blind to swastikas in school:
I’m going to commit an act of lazy blogging here because I really don’t have anything else to add. Anyway, this is from an op-ed piece from The Boston Globe…
As happy as everyone should be that the plot at Marshfield was stopped, the Globe’s profile of one of the two accused youths was deeply troubling. “This was a boy unafraid of a fight, a boy who once smirked as he wore a swastika-adorned shirt through the halls of Marshfield High School,” the Globe wrote. The boy was also known to have worn a T-shirt that had the date of Columbine and “Remember the Heroes” in German.
Other students, the Globe wrote, thought the youth was “just posturing.” There was no further information about the wearing of the swastika, which leads to obvious questions. Did his parents know about the swastika, and did it not make them wonder what was in their kid’s head? Did teachers see the swastika and ignore it as a passing adolescent stupidity? Did the students who saw it feel so intimidated that they shrank into a self-defeating code of silence?
In schools across the nation, principals and superintendents are banning gang colors, which are usually associated with violent African-American and Latino boys. Yet somehow, glorification of Columbine is “just posturing.” Though Columbine and Oklahoma City demonstrated how antiblack and Jewish hate can take out lots of white, non-Jewish folks, perhaps white Americans are still tempted to look the other way at such garb because deep down, they feel the swastika is not meant for them.
If that double standard is true, then no lesson has been learned. Columbine was scary enough to result in stopping actual violence. It was not scary enough for America to make the fight against racism and anti-Semitism as mandatory as mandatory tests. With so many incidents that echo Klebold and Harris and so little done to stop the reverberation, we dare kids to go from posturing in swastikas to cooking up a massacre.
Emphasis mine.
Now here is where I insert the lazy blogger’s credo…Indeed
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