The mainstream media is in full self-flagellation mode right now.
“There’s always more to the story.” “We watched the WHOLE video.” Those are paraphrased lines from quotes on the CNN main page yesterday in regards to the Covington Catholic incident in Washington last week. Please, if you want to beat yourselves up, there are better ways to do it.
Maybe instead of hand-wringing themselves over the obnoxious protesters who arrived at the Lincoln Memorial before the Covington Catholic boys did, they should take a look at the statement right before their eyes by the now-infamous Nick Sandmann, as drummed up by some PR firm. Let’s take a look at some excerpts.
When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.
The protestors said hateful things. They called us "racists," "bigots," "white crackers," "faggots," and "incest kids." They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would "harvest his organs." I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.
Okay. Pop quiz. You’re out with a group of people, minding your own business, and you come across a Black person or persons yelling nasty things about white people. You’re not being singled out or physically threatened yet. Assume that this is a wide-open area such as a park. Should you:
A. Leave immediately
B. Hang around to see what they will say next
C. Get into an argument with them
D. Start doing chants to try to drown them out
Anyone with any sense knows that the correct answer is A. B is a foolish risk, and C or D is just asking for trouble. The boys chose D. Slow clap on that one.
But wait. It gets worse. Just so you’ll know, I watched the video made by the five Black Hebrew Israelite protestors who were initiating all the nasty speech. I saw how, as the confrontation began, as the boys became more frenzied, there was very little adult presence. From the perspective of the video it was if the boys were acting of their own will. I heard the chants that the statement describes thusly:
Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events. They are all positive in nature and sound like what you would hear at any high school. Our chaperone gave us permission to use our school chants. We would not have done that without obtaining permission from the adults in charge of our group.
Oh dear god. Let’s break this down.
Assuming that there were even any adults keeping an eye on these boys at the time, it is clear by now that the boys were acting as they pleased. And assuming that Sandmann is telling the truth about asking a chaperone for permission to act in an absolutely stupid manner, what in the fuck were the adults doing letting them act like this? First of all, did these boys not get the simplest of reminders prior to the trip to behave well in public? And second, kids of all ages are notorious for making stupid requests such as these. When you’re an adult and you get such a request, you must say No, no matter how much they beg you to the contrary! What kind of idiot adults were these chaperones to let these frenzied boys act as they please?
But most of all, when you’re a chaperone on any kind of outing with kids, you absolutely must be their eyes, ears, and brains. Letting kids run wild on a field trip is simply dangerous for them. The adults in this group failed to be adults.
I never understood why either of the two groups of protestors were engaging with us, or exactly what they were protesting at the Lincoln Memorial. We were simply there to meet a bus, not become central players in a media spectacle. This is the first time in my life I've ever encountered any sort of public protest, let alone this kind of confrontation or demonstration.
Again, I am going to assume for the moment that this is true, and I’m going to just pretend for the moment that I didn’t see the MAGA gear that Sandmann and a bunch of the other boys were wearing. Any of you who have ever been to a political protest where there are verbally clashing sides know just how emotionally hot the situation can get. Inexperienced people can get caught off-guard by this tense dynamic and can make some bad decisions in the heat of the moment. It seems likely that the boys were not sufficiently briefed to recognize that they would be in Washington, DC, not suburban Cincinnati and that they needed to mind their P’s and Q’s at all times. And again, the adults in the group failed to be adults when the situation started getting tense.
Oh wait, there’s more. Yes, more. (Note, they have a paywall but you get 7 free articles.)
It turns out there were at least five [chaperones] on the scene, one of the chaperones told The Enquirer on Monday.
That chaperone, Val Andreev, stands by how they handled the situation.
"There was nothing the chaperones could have done differently," said Andreev, a Hebron-resident. "I’m very proud the way the boys handled the situation."
Andreev and the other four adults were negligent in their duties as chaperones. Full stop. They allowed the boys to exercise horrible judgment and make a national embarrassment out of themselves and their school. They should have recognized the situation for what it was and immediately shepherded the boys out of there. One has to wonder why they didn’t.
And one has to wonder how this all would have played out had it been five obnoxious white guys at the start countered by a bunch of frenzied Black young men.
EDIT: Covington is a suburb of Cincinnati, not Louisville, KY.