Juno News - January 23, 2019What happened to the Covington Catholic students could happen to anyone
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Words per Minute
216.26239
Summary
A few weeks ago, I was on the subway with a bunch of high schoolers and they were just doing what teenagers do. They were goofing around, talking, goofing off, making jokes, saying swear words, and just being teenagers. And then, out of nowhere, a MAGA hat-wearing white man wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat comes up and confronts them with a Native American man.
Transcript
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Hey guys, I got a whole lot of thoughts on this whole Covington High School, non-story,
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social contagion, mass hysteria, fake news, whatever you want to call the thing.
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And I'm sure you do too, because there are so many different angles, so many different
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things to talk about what is really just a random exchange between two people in a public
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But the main thing, the main scene, the main image that keeps coming back to me is the
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It's something that happened to me the other week when I was heading home and I got on
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the subway and I'm sitting there and I'm reading my book and a bunch of high schoolers, a bunch
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of teenagers all got on en masse at one stop where their high school was, they were heading
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And they were totally oblivious to the rest of us and they just come on and they got their
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backpacks that are kind of jostling around and they're just telling their jokes, they're
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goofing around with each other, they're saying stupid stuff and there's some swear words here
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It was a mixed bag of girls and guys and it was an ethnically diverse crowd and so forth
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and they're just, they're just being teenagers.
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And at one point I guess someone jostled into me and they kind of knocked the book I was
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reading and I had a brief moment of grumpy old man writing all those darn kids.
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And I said to myself, Fury, come on, don't kid yourself.
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I'm sure you were just like that, heading home from school all excited.
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Maybe they just, you know, had some candy, some sugar or what have you and they're all just
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just doing their thing, doing what teenagers do.
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And if at any moment during that I had brought out a camera and done snap, snap, snap, snap,
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snap and caught a whole bunch of images, I'm sure you could see a frame where one of them
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had a nasty look on their face where it looked like they were looking at a person of a different
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And we could have gone and we could have put that up there and we could have made a whole
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national conversation about it and named them and shamed them and said horrible things
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What kind of person even cares about a scene like that?
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And that is the thing that is most troubling about all of this.
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We're learning more about the Native American man that casts all this nuance onto the story.
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But the whole bottom line, the thing that frustrates me so much and puts it why we're in such
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dangerous territory right now and why it is so shameful that so many media people and politicians
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even said anything about it, period, is that something like that could happen to anyone.
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Now I know this one had the perfect ingredients, a young white man and a MAGA hat and a Native
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But in a different situation, the role is a little different here and there, something
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It could happen to your younger brother or sister.
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And that's why this whole thing is such a shame.
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And it's a scandal for all of the people out there who perpetrated it, who played a role