Kids again

As I wrote yesterday, untamed youth is not the exclusive domain of any nation at the moment. It just seems to be the young ones have lost their boundaries again and find it difficult to make judgements about how much is too much. At worst they destroy themselves and others, at best they offend and are confused. This article about a Dallas High School is a case in point. As I have said before, judging things from a distance is always difficult, but given the teachers appear to be offended and the paper has chosen to make Thug Day news, is probably an indication that the community in general is not happy with how things are. Time to realign the picture. Lessons to be learnt. You get what you are prepared to accept. When I first read it I thought it must be some kind of a send up. No, the school really does call this day Thug Day. Perhaps they use the word differently in Dallas because a thug here is a very heavy duty, brutal kind of person who hurts others gratuitously. We’ve had Gangsters and Gals parties and Heroes and Villains parties but we wouldn’t use the word thug to create a theme event. The kids probably didn’t have any intention of offending and they probably had no idea it would offend. They applied themselves to the costumes and outfits and not the cultural/political statements they might be making. This is where we really need to leave the airheads behind and get back to thinking again. I’ve said that too before. The airhead approach really has to go. These kids have also probably missed out on all the mainstream education and raising of awareness to do with sexism and racism which society would have got about 10 years ago, so in all fairness, it’s probably not something they gave a great deal of thought to and their comments reflect that. They were thinking about celebrating and having fun. The one that got me was the girl dressed as a wife beater.

“Lauren said she wore a "wife-beater" tank top and tennis shoes with only one sock. "We're just having fun," she said.
Katie said the theme days had been a subject of conversation among students recently, and that she'd heard that some teachers were offended. She said the student who showed up with a leaf blower crossed a line.
"I thought it was funny, but that's probably offensive," she said. “

Dallas News
It’s just not something you make fun of. But every country is having this kind of problem. Over here we had to go through a realignment process because year 12 students celebrating at the end of the year were doing far too much damage to property and then couldn’t understand why people were getting angry with them. I think they thought the fairy godmothers would be out cleaning up the trashed areas. Worse than that, they were getting too drunk and driving. So we had to go through a process as a community to straighten these young ones out. They were calling it Muck Up Day. A day to run amok. The damages were irrelevant to them until they had to start footing the bills and clean up the mess themselves.

The Dallas kids aren’t as destructive as that but they are doing nothing for racial stereotyping and it would appear the community needs to work on better integrating the different ethnic backgrounds they have. It’s horrible when you see the clock go
back. Today we put our clocks forward…we need to put our multicultural clocks forward too.

I easily found the article last night but it’s archived now and you have to register for the Dallas News. The community seems to be discussing it and dealing with it in much the same way as we dealt with Muck Up Day.
Q and O