Why Are College Kids Mocking the Dead?
“I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster but please understand that I just don’t want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life. I just want to take a few peices (sic) of (expletive) with me.”
These words are taken from the suicide note of 19-year-old Robert Hawkins, the gunman who murdered eight people in an Omaha mall on December 5. While Hawkins succeeded in destroying innocent lives before taking his own, he incorrectly predicted how he’d be viewed by “everyone” in the aftermath of the massacre. Committing a monstrous crime, it turns out, doesn’t automatically qualify you as a monster in the eyes of many people. For example, sympathy — maybe even respect — for Hawkins is what’s expressed in an interview one of his friends gave to a local television station:
I don’t think anything less of him because I know that Robby would have never done anything like this just for the fun of it. … He wanted to go out in style, and that’s what he did.
Apparently murder isn’t even enough to retire the usage of the diminutive form of the murderer’s name. In fact, the reporter also referred to Hawkins as “Robby” when asking the friend questions like “What are you thinking about now that you know that Robby was involved in this shooting?” (The word “commit” can’t be used by the nonjudgmental.) It’s hard to disagree with talk show host Dennis Prager when he makes the case that such rhetoric is symbolic of society’s inability to make moral condemnations. But aren’t some crimes so horrific that everyone should abhor them?
More proof that tolerance for murder is becoming a trend comes from the story of two Penn State students who dressed as Virginia Tech shooting victims at a Halloween party. Not even a year has passed since Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, yet one of the Penn State students was disgusted that a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group called “People Against This Costume” in response to the tasteless choice of attire.
This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed. … The thing is, everybody’s making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26 thousand that happen in America everyday. That’s the problem with college students. They all live in an ivory tower of privilege.
While it’s not politically correct to make a “big stink” about the killings of privileged college students or holiday shoppers at the mall, honoring the murderers of Israelis is PC approved. Consider last year’s big college costume controversy. When Syrian-born engineering student Saad Saadi showed up at a Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann had no problem posing with him for a photograph. Gutmann later explained that she wasn’t aware of Saadi’s choice of costume even though he’s shown in the photograph with a kaffiyeh around his head, a toy Kalashnikov rifle in his hand and six plastic sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. Moreover, Saadi explained that Gutman jokingly asked, “How did they let you through security?” when he asked her to take the photograph with him.
One wonders if Gutmann would have also found the humor in the Nazi costume Prince Harry wore to a party in 2005. Harry would have fit in perfectly in the class of one Harvard University professor, who has described his shock upon learning that the majority of his students didn’t believe anybody was to blame for the Holocaust. He referred to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”
Indeed, a report commissioned by the National Association of Scholars in 2002 found that, “A large majority of this year’s college graduates report that their professors tell them there are no clear and uniform standards of right and wrong.” That’s not surprising when you consider this selection from the text Peace and Conflict Studies by Professors David Barash and Charles Webel, which many students read in their peace studies classes:
Placing “terrorist” in quotation marks may be jarring for some readers, who consider the designation self-evident. We do so, however, not to minimize the horror of such acts but to emphasize the value of qualifying righteous indignation by the recognition that often one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter.”
Christina Hoff Sommers, who has taught ethics courses, has written about colleges’ responsibility to provide students with what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called “moral common sense.” Sure, young people hear their professors’ opinions on capital punishment, abortion, stem cell research and, yes, suicide bombings, but “they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or honor.”
Until they do, we shouldn’t be surprised to see college students dressed up as suicide bombers or shooting victims. After all, one person’s monster is another’s hero who just wanted to go out with a bang.
Few things are as deliciously amusing as twisting the knickers of self appointed arbiters of propriety. While I think dressing up as a suicide bomber or mass murder victim is in very poor taste, I do not trust anyone in academia to address this problem without creating a p.c. nightmare that unreasonably limits free expression of all types.
Why would kids know anything about values when institutions like Boy Scouts are routinely condemned as intolerant and thrown out of public spaces? Since tolerance is the only virtue preached today why is it remarkable that students are tolerant of intolerable behavior?
oh god, is this blog turning liberal?
Duderino is right. The university is one of the remaining value-free green zones in society. Groups that can readily be attacked and mocked on campus are religious people, dead white males, the American military, and straights of any color. Those groups are specifically excluded from other groups given pc protection.
It might not be remarkable that students are tolerating this behavior but that is precisely why we mustn’t shrug our shoulders and say “such is life today.” These Penn State students should not be let off easy merely because they are existing in a “green zone.”
Penn State does not need to punish these students. Moreover, that may not be the appropriate thing to do. The morally nihilistic students should instead be shunned by their fellow classmates and friends. They should be treated with disdain, if not outright contempt.
I grew up in the Bible Belt in the 70s and 80s and even then and there people dressed up for halloween based on the most controversial recent event. High school and university students rebel and try to shock their peers and elders. This has been true for some time now and is not likely to change any time soon. The internet in general and social networking sites in general make each instance of this more readily found.
Since at least Socrates, each generation of kids has always been seen as ruder, lazier, less studious, and less moral than the previous one.
We can fume, but I guarantee those students and their friends are laughing their asses off about the reaction. The outrage only makes them feel more special – in on the joke while the rest of us aren’t.
Liberal, conservative, write, wrong, etc. These kids need to grow up and live the world of debaucherie and hedonism that is the modern university, where classes and knowledge (not to mention compassion & religin) take a distant back seat to parties, sex, drugs and alcohol. Facebook is also part of the self aggrandizing problem. Education is the key. The left wing hippie profs are part of the problem. Hopefully in ten years, it will slowly change.
We can fume, but I guarantee those students and their friends are laughing their asses off about the reaction. The outrage only makes them feel more special – in on the joke while the rest of us aren’t.
One interesting side effect about sites like Facebook and MySpace is that employers and universities are looking up applicants. Wouldn’t it be nice if these two morons were declined future employment opportunities because of their self-indulgent and hateful actions? After all, no company should be forced to hire a**holes.
State run universities and colleges depend heavily on state taxpayer funds for operations.
We taxpayer/voters can contact our STATE representatives and senators requesting reduced appropriations for institutions that actively support or ignore faculty or student behavior that is antisocial.
Enough voters doing that will have an effect come election time. Like,say, in 2008.
Rather than mischievous, witty rebels sticking their tongues out at the hypocritical “system,” these mind-numbingly insipid demonstrations of ammoral banality are nothing more than the rituals of the pliable, obedient, half-witted sycophants of the entrenched dogma of our cultural elite- relativism. They are simply mindlessly regurgitating the prevailing worldview that a thousand TV programs, books, articles, movies, songs, opinions, teachers..ETC., ETC. incessantly inculcatated into their passive minds- there is no right or wrong, no truth, no God. We should not be surprised when seeds bear fruits.
I like the guy who said of the mass murderer Robert Hawkins “I don’t think anything less of him”.
How low was his opinion before?
But the rest of these shocking comments are just teenagers telling sick jokes. There is nothing new here.
I disagree with your last paragraph:
“Until they do, we shouldn’t be surprised to see college students dressed up as suicide bombers or shooting victims. After all, one person’s monster is another’s hero who just wanted to go out with a bang.”
If young adults have been given no grounding in moral common sense by the time they leave home to go to college, then it is almost certainly too late for the college to make up for the parents’ dereliction.
True – there IS a freedom of speech no matter how pathetically stupid and self-centered. These nihilistic children at Penn State (refusing to apologize and reveling in pushing the envelope to elevate their own popularity) are really a symptom of the times. Not that there is any excuse. I suppose their parents are whacked too… no one ever taught these creeps any manners. Karma. I tell myself, Karma!!
These are not the witty, sardonic, intellectual rebels tweaking the nose of hypocritical “bourgousie” values of yesteryear. These acts of mindless, ammoral banality are merely the products of the catatonic sycophants of popular culture and the modern religion of relativism. They have been passively induced by innumerable TV programs, movies, books, articles, songs, ..ETC. -the pulpits of the modern faith of non-faith, the intractible dogma of anti-dogma, the unquestionable value of non-values. And we should not be astonished when seeds bear fruits- either in the nihilistic perpetrators acts of savagery, nor in the beer-soaked college brats’ elevating that savagery into meaningless popular culture icons.
Ooops. Sorry for the repost. Sometimes the internet service in Mexico is crappy and emails don’t make it.
These collage kids are sick!!
The devil made him do it. Nice rack!
Hey, costumes are just costumes. They don’t necessarily reflect sympathy or lack of sympathy for the characters being represented. Some are in worse taste than others, but the maximum penalty for an offensive costume should be a few remarks by people on the scene.
When people make national issues of fake suicide bombers or fake nazis or fake murder victims, it’s no wonder that their outrage tank is empty when they encounter the real thing.
Will you people just give a well-to-do college kid a break?! I’m mean what’s wrong with a little fun dressing up…say as a murder victim at Virginia Tech…or going to the airport with a fake bomb on, like MIT student Star Simpson. You people are sooo sensitive. It’s like you hate our nation’s best and brightest…what do you want me to do….end up in Iraq?
DON’T TASE ME BRO!
For full disclosure, I once went to a Halloween party dressed as Yassir Arafat.
The male student in the photo was on “Fox and Friends” this AM – he was more upset at the person who posted the pictures and didn’t have the guts to say that what he and the others did was in poor taste – his line was “it was a private party”… both Brian and Steve grilled him hard for the 5 minutes he was on the air. Didn’t even have an answer when they asked him if a future employer didn’t hire him because of the pictures, what he would do – “I probably wouldn’t want to work for him anyway” was his pathetic, narcissistic behavior.
Dude was living proof on what tomorrow’s society will probably end up like – “DON’T TAZE ME BRO”
I agree with Amy. If you don’t have a sense of what’s decent instilled in you by the time you’re 18, a college ethics course won’t help you.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29036
Life is rapidly approaching _The Onion_…
They should be kicked out of Penn for being fools. My guess is the administration is to gutless to do anything about it.
“they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or honor.”
When did they drop that at West Point or Annapolis? We taking the ‘case’ not the ‘exception’ here.
Perhaps I’m crazy, but isn’t the entire point of many halloween costumes to dress up as ‘bad’ things?
Pirates, Monsters, Vampires, Nixon?
Perhaps people should just relax a bit and not read an entire lack of morals into someones choice of a costume.
Perhaps people should just relax a bit and not read an entire lack of morals into someones choice of a costume.
Stupidity should be painful. What these students did was not only heartless, it was stupid. Their right to free speech doesn’t shield them from criticism. After all, we have free speech rights, too.
In this case, I strongly suspect that this idiocy was more a reaction to Penn State’s massive support of Va Tech after the murders than the murders themselves.
In how many other cases has society acquiesced to similar or worse behavior? What about those WTO “protests”, for example? Is disrupting a speaker with whom you disagree legitimate behavior? IMHO, no.
However, universities have acquiesced to behaviors which interfere with the rights of others. We are merely experiencing the consequence of bad behavior with which we disagree. The decision to tolerate bad behavior was made a long time ago.
When I checked your archives, the two students who dressed as Virginia Tech victims (and caused an apology by the University president) were from the UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, which is in Philadelphia, NOT Penn State.
I burst out laughing when I saw their costumes.
Does that make me bad?
“When I checked your archives, the two students who dressed as Virginia Tech victims (and caused an apology by the University president) were from the UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA”
No, they are from Penn State. There was extensive coverage in both the local rag and the campus newspaper.
Fortunately, Penn State is doing the right thing, as opposed to what most universities would do, and what many here have called for, and will not discipline these students. Tasteless it is, indeed, but calling for these idiots to be kicked out of school or otherwise disciplined is nothing more than a First Amendment violation.