You didn’t hear anything about “Hit A Tall Person Day” because tall people hit back.

Hmmmm……this is the land of Todd Akin and the religious right, I believe. Could it be their children have been taught intolerance? How could that be? I find it ironic that one of the Parkway High schools has a hebrew school practically on the same grounds along highway 141 at Ladue Rd.

Unfortunately, junior high students don’t exercise the best judgment. Those little brats will hopefully learn from their mistakes.

Willys- You are always complaining about the mix of politics and religion on this blog. You are the one trying to make this political, when it has no political relevance whatsoever. Quit trolling.

It may have been just a stupid prank by young students. But it is a good thing to explain to them the difference between harmless pranks and something that is hurtful. They need to know that “Hit a Jew Day” crosses the line and is unacceptable. It is an opportunity to educate them on respecting people different from them.

Over on “The Grade” blog, it reports that the principal got the 6th graders together and asked them how many knew what “Day” it was…and the majority raised their hands. She then asked them, “Ok, is tomorrow going to be ‘Hit the Principal Day’? Apparently you could have heard a pin drop.

So, it is being used as a teachable moment…and that is the best one can hope for.

Actually, a comment about today’s youth…the ones who I’ve known in the last few years as my kids made their way through the high school and college years. What I’ve seen in this very white, very conservative, very rural Illinois small town I live in is that the kids are a lot more service oriented, a lot more socially aware, a lot more willing to stand up for the ‘little guy’ than they get credit for. They have resentments, certainly, but they are more class based than race based. All this is good, I think. (These are kids who watched 9/11 unfold in school, in the classroom….and it changed them.)

My concern lies in why the parents of the “hit” kid went to the ADL first and not the school district. I do believe that what the kids did was wrong, but why didn’t the parents try to work this out with the school district first? (it could just be the media not giving all the details but nonetheless I think the school has a right to “solve” the problem first before taking it to a higher level.)

Sorry to be the voice of dissention on this topic, but it is utterly ridiculous that a bad decision by literally a handful of immature 6 graders causes the ADL to feel they need to discuss “broad, structured programs” in that school. It isn’t the schools job to be teaching kids “tolerance”. That is for their church and their families. Schools have enough things to teach on their plate without this double standard nonense being thrown in.

That’s right, I said double standard. For starters, these kids started this whole mess by “Hit a tall person day” to start an impromptu spirit week. This was not some systematic plan to single out Jews for persecution a la Hitler in Germany. They needed a new thing for the next day, and one kid said the wrong thing. No one got hurt or was going to get hurt. It was dumb, but it was not malicious.

If it had been “Hit a Baptist Day” or “Hit a Cub Fan Day” or “Hit a Catholic Day” no one would have given a hoot. Let’s be clear, I am not trying to ignore what happened to the Jews in WW II, it was horrible and devastating on many many levels. Hit a Jew Day in some middle school is in no way, shape, or form connected to that in any realistic thought process.

The Tutsi and Hutus killed over a million of each other a few years back and no one says boo about that. Stalin killed untold millions of his own people and no one did squat. The Chinese are still forcing people to have abortions and locking up dissidents without a sniff of a trial. Yet this few dumb kids are creating all the uproar? The sympathy for the plight of the Jews is important but all too often overblown, as we see in this case.

All we need is for these kids to go home and face their parents, and the problem is solved. Keep the double-standard ADL out of our schools and make sure the kids have time to learn what they are supposed to learn there, like math, science, writing, and spelling…

Tim- I was with you initially til you went off the edge of the planet. The bad judgment, in my opinion, was on the part of the parents. They asked the ADL in and they had little choice but to respond. You were correct in your analysis that this was the act of a very few and should’ve been handled, as we used to say in the Army, at the company level and never hit the media at all. As to whether no one “would have given a hoot” if some other group had been the target you would have to be pshycic to know that.

It hardly takes ESP to know what groups would draw over the top anger from media whores like the ADL and which ones would be lucky to make the back page of the Everyday section of the paper. I know that you are not a fringe poster or an unrealistic thinker so I don’t understand where your comment comes from. Ask 100 people what the reaction of “Hit a Baptist” day would be. My comment makes no stretches on the imagination and I think you know that…

And no blaming the parents here either. Think back to most of the racial, sexist, and other bad jokes that you learned as a kid. Most of that stuff I learned from friends and in school. That is true for almost everyone. Parents try to hide that stuff from their kids. Granted there are a few people in this world that talk uninhibited in front of their kids about race or sex or whatever, but it only takes one bad apple to spoil the lot. There may be one bad apple, but they aren’t all bad apples. And you know as I do that most of these parents are shocked that their little pumpkin could ever be involved in this since that is NOT how they raised them.

What an incredibly overblown event…

As a Muslim I am no fan of the ADL which often has Muslims in its crosshair. But the issue of prejudice against minorities is one that effects all minorities and the majority as well. We are as strong as the weakest among us. Our diversity is our strength. I have come to realize that when any minority is persecuted, it could be any of us and we all need to speak up.

However, reading between the lines of ‘hs’s’ excellent comments, it seems this may have been more about economic difference rather than religious. Either ways the principal seemed to have handled it well and we are not harmed by hearing of it.