Outrage of the minute
“Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by, And feed them on your dreams The one they picks,
the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry.
So just look at them and sigh.”
—Graham Nash
APPARENTLY the song was inspired by Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, a photograph by Diane Arbus. Also, the photo is said to have inspired Bart Simpson. High culture meet popular culture. And the picture didn’t even tell the full story of the child. Does that sound familiar?
Is it just us, or does every day bring another story that’s mistaken for an outrage?
Earlier in the week a story circulated over, you guessed it, the Internet, with variances of this headline: “Report: 11-year-old arrested after refusing to stand for Pledge of Allegiance.” This headline succeeds in doing half of its job. It interests the average reader. Good old outrage.
What it doesn’t do is anything much accurately.
Technically, yes, some kid in Florida was arrested after refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. But it’s all the stuff that happened in-between that should be the real story.
One can’t be arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge. In 1943, after West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the First Amendment protects students from being forced to salute the flag or recite the Pledge. It’s a free country.
The Washington Post reported a substitute teacher asked the student to rise for the Pledge, and the kid said no because the flag was “racist.” (Teach your children well. Double sigh.)
Dispatches say that after arguing with the substitute teacher, the student was asked more than 20 times to leave the classroom and refused. That’s what led to the arrest on charges of disrupting a school function and resisting arrest without violence.
But a misleading headline, created to draw clicks, doesn’t further any useful discussion. And it continues to feed into a problem facing journalists, one of distrust. Check the comments of this story wherever it’s posted, and you’ll likely find people who did read the full article calling out the media for posting such headlines. The local police department that made the arrest even posted about it on their social media:
“A student was arrested for disrupting the classroom on Feb. 4. To be clear, the student was NOT arrested for refusing to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance as some media outlets reported.” And the police are right.
That’s the place we’re in, though. The land of freedom and fake outrage. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re gonna go for a walk, just to take a breather.