Students and free speech

For newspapers, hardly an edition goes by where someone does not upset by something in the news. Actually, this is pretty much true for ANY publication read by the public. Just read the letters to the editors to see what sorts of things irritate folks.

When I was editor of the paper in Piggott (a town of nearly 4,000), I heard some mumblings after we ran a photo of some PHS students wearing “I hate Corning” (a bitter rival) tee-shirt. Most of what we heard was folks talking about sportsmanship and all that. One or two tried to accuse the paper of poor sportsmanship, though I wasn’t even aware that we’d participated in any event. Kinda like the Iraq war, we don’t make the stuff up, we just report on it.

One letter writer went on to suggest the moral superiority of Corning. I guess they missed the “I hate Piggott” tee-shirts during the football game the season before. Most who talked to me directly simply expressed the opinion that it was poor sportsmanship on the part of the three young men wearing the shirts.

So why print the photo?

School pride.

Plain and simple.

After a discussion with our sports writer, who was at the game, we decided the three young men wearing the tee-shirts had done so in a display of school spirit. We didn’t think they expressed the opinion that they hated the entire community. In the famous words of Bugs Bunny, they wanted “to murderize” their opponents. As a competitor, you WANT that attitude in your team. Just ask any coach.

The biggest issue, though, is that of the administration “allowing” them to wear these shirts. While I personally wouldn’t wear that shirt, the students had and have the right to wear that shirt. It didn’t display anything profane or even suggest any foul language—which would be a reason for demanding they change them—nor did it disrupt the learning atmosphere in any way. It certainly wasn’t destructive—like tossing eggs at a vehicle, or vandalizing the elementary school, both of which have been done before.

It is a very dangerous thing to toy with the rights of students. Under the United States Constitution, the rights of Americans do not end at the school house door. Sure, there are certain rules that must be followed and certain actions (defined as those which disrupt the learning atmosphere) aren’t allowed, but students still have the right to free speech. Being seventeen doesn’t mean you’ve lost your free speech rights.

The thought of a school administration trampling on the rights of students, or of “offended” members of a community demanding the rights of students be denied quite simply scares me.

Instead of going on about how the administration should not allow these tee-shirts (which, could lead to serious prosecution for violation of First Amendment rights, something that has been done at several schools already across the U.S.), we should encourage the administration to teach WHY shirts like this might not be the best choice. We should encourage the administration—and parents—to create a teaching moment out of the event and suggest alternatives; even discuss pros and cons of the shirts and pros and cons of possible alternatives. Oddly enough, the administration reacted excellently about the entire thing. They didn’t make a big deal of it, but I’m guessing they pulled the students aside and chatted with them. After all, isn’t that what we want schools to do: to teach our kids?

We should applaud the students for HAVING an opinion and for having the courage to express it. That’s pretty rare in our day and age and getting rarer each day. All responsible adults who disagree with what the students displayed on their shirt should use their free speech rights AND their maturity to try to teach and instruct, not whine and moan that they were poor sports. If we spend our time whining about everything that offends us…we’ll be doing an awful lot of whining. And, as mom used to say, wouldn’t it be better to find a more constructive way to use our time?

I’m at war!

That’s right. War! War I tell you. And it’s become very personal. Why?

Because they bit me.

What, may you ask, am I talking about?

Fire ants. It seems we’ve had several thousand fire ants decide to set up camp in and around our yard. And the problem is, they’re everywhere.

And they’re so danged hard to get rid of.

I’ve never liked ants of any sort. Well, that’s not exactly true. I watched a documentary one time about ants that showed two different ant colonies; one red, one black; go to war. Yes, I mean they literally went to war. Two huge groups from each side met somewhere in between their mounds and fought it out. When it was finished, the narrator’s words were nearly something to the effect of: “the battlefield was littered with the dead and dying from each side.”

Plus, I’ve read that fire ants down in South America can survive flooding by all clinging together and floating like a big ball on top of the water. I’d like to see that…but not up close.

My first real fight with ants, however, was when we moved to California. It seems CSUN is built on top of one huge ant bed. Sure, we’d had bouts with ants before, but we’d just put a little Terro down and they were gone in a day. Those California ants just snacked on the Terro and wanted more. We went through four or five packages before doing them any harm.

In general, though, you’ll hear me sing praises of Terro. Matter of fact, if you’re battling with ants, go grab you a package or two and it’ll take care of them.

So, I wasn’t too concerned when I saw a mound or two a few weeks ago. After all, I’d grown up in Mississippi and fire ants are just part of the package.

Funny side note here: Around 1997/8, after I’d returned to Mississippi from California, my former Editor-In-Chief Chris Ulm came out for a visit for a few days. His only excursion into the South had been Atlanta, and well—we all know Hotlanta isn’t really “Southern” anymore. So I snag my good pal Ashley Koostra and we take Chris out to the Battlefield at Vicksburg. We have a nice tour and stop at the USS Cairo to sit down for lunch. Chris sits right in a fire ant bed and gets 20-30 bites! The next words out of Ashley’s mouth were something to the effect of, “Oh yeah. We forgot to tell you about the fire ants.”

So I put some poison on the mounds and think that’ll at least knock them down some, probably not out. They multiplied. I can’t figure out why, either. Now, instead of four of five mounds, I’ve got 13 or 14 mounds of varying sizes. They’ve come up close to my house—that’s when I declared war!

This video is of Brittany playing volleyball. She plays on the JV team for Lafayette County and they’re doing well. This video shows them trouncing cross-town rival, Oxford. Brittany wears jersey #1.

On television in 1989

I’ve been going through some old video tapes recently, mostly because we’re still unpacking and trying to figure out what stays and what goes and so forth. I stumbled upon a box of tapes in which the tapes had no box covers on them and recognized them as the ones from our house flood in Tennessee. For those who don’t know, after we’d moved to Piggott, Arkansas, we were still trying to sell our home in Loretto, Tennessee. We went back periodically to check in, clean up, get things we needed, etc. But, we weren’t really living there.

One day BJ got a frantic call from the realtor. Seems water was pouring out of our basement. Clayton Wilbanks, the Music Minister at First Baptist Loretto, where we had been members, had a key and he sped over to open up the house. The basement had about six inches of standing water. It seems a water filter under the kitchen sink sprang a leak and best guesses put it running for about three days.

Needless to say, we lost thousands of dollars of things in the basement. I lost a bunch of expensive board games (one a very rare war game from 1930) and we had several boxes of home videos in the mix.

I say all that to say I found one of the boxes and started wondering if they would play. The first one I came across was a tape that we had started making in 1989, right after I’d graduated college and was living in a rented house in Hattiesburg with three roommates: Steven Butler, Ashley Koostra and David Rogers. We started taping all the creative processes that were going on…

Anyway, just after the release of Cat & Mouse #1 by publisher EFGraphics, Steven and I somehow found ourselves on Midday, a noon local news show in Hattiesburg. I’ll just tell you here and now, we were nervous as can be. If you happen to watch the video (embedded below for your entertainment), notice how we sit stiff as boards! We’re too nervous to even move!

It’s been fun watching some of the old videos. It’s amazing how much people change in nearly 20 years. J I may post some other stuff if I find anything interesting…or humorous like the video below.