Dakota Beacon

Well, the people of Grand Forks managed to get their dander up and their consciousness raised last week due to the important issue of tee shirts worn by young would-be and actual inebriates at the annual Springfest, an event which punctuates the end of the college semester.

To begin, we must stipulate that Springfest is not a UND-sponsored or UND-sanctioned event.  This paean to Bacchus is not held on UND property either, but in a public park, complete with all required permits.  I don’t know what the draw is.  I can’t imagine what is fun about drinking oneself into a sick stupor, but, as they say, that’s why they make chocolate and vanilla.  Chacun á son goût.  So, in short, UND does not have jurisdiction over nor responsibility for Springfest.  (In all fairness, I’ve heard of far worse behavior actually on some Michigan college campuses!)

This year some participants, some of whom are actual UND students on the side, created a commemorative tee shirt.  Perhaps they could have employed better taste or better sense, but the design consisted of the slogan, “Sioux-per drunk” and at the last minute someone added the image of a caricature of an Indian drinking from a beer bong.  If I were a Sioux I might well take some offense.  I might write a letter to the committee, or to the newspaper taking the kids to task for rudeness or thoughtlessness.  I might wish that people with four expensive years of “higher education” would have had something smarter to say.  But we enjoy the right to be stupid.  America’s genius has always been that we protect free speech – not “smart” speech or “sensitive” speech or “some” speech.  If we apply an adjective other than “free” we subject speech to someone’s judgment . . . and then “free” does not apply. 

In the case of the “Sioux-per drunk” episode, a mere play on words that was misinterpreted, we saw the absurdity of UND president Kelley “walking”, or more accurately, “shuffling along” with a group of “courageous” students, UND teachers and upper-level administrators in protest against the tee shirts and their creators.  One of the leaders of this protest, a Native law student, went so far as to declare that she was “ashamed” to be graduating from UND.  Why, ever?  Why should she do something she was “ashamed of”?  And what had the artwork of a few students to do with the mission of the University of North Dakota, which ranks among the highest in the nation for programs designed for the advancement of Native Americans?  True, UND is NOT Harvard, or even Yale, but still.  If it makes you ashamed, go somewhere else.  She would have been right to comment that the tee shirts were in poor taste or to have expressed a degree of fontrum for their creators’ lack of good manners (oops! “manners” are out-of-date).  But to call upon UND or, for that matter, some level of government or society, to punish anyone for an expression of free speech, however idiotic, is way out of line.  Here we have a law student who seems totally unfamiliar with the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Maybe it's the law faculty that should be ashamed.

And to label it in any sense “racism” is also out of line.  “Racism” properly defines at least some level of discrimination on the basis of race, or intolerance of someone based on his race.  Not a rude cartoon on a tee shirt.  We devalue the term when we use it for something like this.  It belittles the real racism which we have gone a long way to defeat, and UND has gone a long way to counter.  Now are we to say “First Wounded Knee, now THIS!”?

In America we don’t punish speech or self-expression.  Those who would are highly subjective and usually highly self-serving.  I doubt those “leaders” in the University community would wish to punish the artist whose “creation” was a crucifix in a jar of urine.  The University would not hesitate to invite an Angela Davis to speak.  Insensitivity might be bad manners but it’s not a crime. 

Perhaps if we brought our kids up to be more civil throughout childhood, if we showed more respect to others as an example, we might have kids who care about these things.  Perhaps if our schools and colleges actually taught real history instead of political correctness, these recipients of “higher education” would be aware of the struggles some groups of Americans have had and why.  Instead, we keep these students in ignorance – because the truth is deemed “politically incorrect” or “insensitive”.  The price is ignorance and when you put lack of education in our history together with a lack of basic etiquette (both of which our society and institutions have come to encourage), you get “Sioux-per drunk” tee shirts.

These kids would not know the devastating effect of alcohol on our Native population because it’s not “sensitive” to discuss it in class.  These kids, despite a lack of finesse or finely tuned manners and a lack of meaningful education, had no desire to hurt anyone.  They wanted to express the idea of free-spirited fun for an annual weekend celebration.

It is interesting to note that the “walk” protesting this exercise of free speech was protected at public expense by university police.  Several squad cars were strategically deployed and numerous patrolmen and women in uniform stood guard just in case some unruly artists from Springfest should pose a threat to THEIR free speech event.  This was ironic indeed, in that it was the Springfest tee shirt kids who were receiving death threats, not the walkers.  It has often been noted, but bears a repetition, that some speech needs more protection than other speech.  While certainly these professors, administrators and ruffled students are entitled to protection for their speech and self-expression, no one seemed too concerned about the tee shirt kids.  It goes without saying that we don’t need the First Amendment to protect a recitation of Washington’s Farewell to the Troops, the Gettysburg Address or Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Alexander Pope need not fear from the grave for his words.  But we must guard the right  of the dissenter or the minority view.  America was created on this precept.  It is our hallmark.  We must protect those whose speech is rude, or contrary to the majority view, or original and different.  We are supposed to be tolerant.  It’s no big deal to be tolerant of the powerful.  No one worries about agreeing with President Kelley on this one.  And, frankly, Kelley doesn’t look like much of a hero either.

Education is supposed to counter and be a natural check on unfortunate stereotypes by providing a truthful and more comprehensive understanding of causes and effects.  We have many stereotypes, some unpleasant ones (and an underlying historical cause for each) – the Sicilian Mafia, the “Thrifty” (read “cheap”) Scot, the “drunken” Indian, the brawling Irishman, the fretful Jewish mother, the “lazy” Mexican, the German Nazi or silly, such as, thanks to the Muppets, the “Swedish Chef” or thanks to Warner Brothers, “Pepé Le Pew”, a reference to the amorous French stereotype, and some more positive ones: the industrious Northern European, the artistic Japanese, the musical Gypsies, the brilliant Asian intellects.  As we find our world shrinking we have need of more understanding – not necessarily to say approval of – but in the sense of knowledge of cultural factors of others as well as a deeper understanding of our own. 

This does not happen in a climate of political correctness.  You cannot achieve the kind of understanding required to avoid unintentional insults by supposedly educated college students by a gag order or a mindless, uninformed “protest” or by proclamations of “shame” at graduating from UND.

You can pave the way for more informed and better-considered seriously free speech (rather than  correct platitudes without underlying understanding or belief) by first encouraging through example respect for others and old-fashioned good manners and then truly educating, without censoring for political correctness, about our history and experiences as Americans.

For example, did the tee shirt kids know that nearly all cultures have a form of alcohol, but a very, very few do not, and thus their people have developed no tolerance for its effects?  That Native Americans are among them?  No?! Why not? Because someone at the top decided for all the rest of us that it would be “insensitive” or politically incorrect to allude to that fact.  After all, “diversity” really means we’re “all alike”, right?  We can’t show our reverence for diversity if we’re to point out general differences apparently.

What can we take away from this annoying and very tiresome series of events this week at UND?

0. To some, their own free speech and right to self-expression are precious enough to post guards to protect it.
0. Those same devotees of the right to express their opinions do not extend this consideration to anyone else and therefore display no respect whatsoever for that right itself.
0. Our culture – or what is passing for our culture – does not support either REAL sensitivity to others, the basis for simple etiquette and plain good manners, nor real, fact-based education, substituting political correctness and this one-sided form of “sensitivity” for truth . . and our kids are thus trapped in ignorance.
0. If we are to have tolerance of anyone’s opinion we must tolerate all others and their expression, especially if we strongly disagree with them, short of immediate and actual threat to public safety.  I would say that if there was any speech last week that merited punishment it would be the death threats sent to the tee shirt kids.

Sending someone to “sensitivity training” either for a deed as simple as producing a banner proclaiming, “You can take away our mascot but you can’t take away our pride”, or an offensive tee shirt, or just as a prophylactic prerequisite for registering as a student is a fascist act of attempted thought-control, brainwashing indoctrination totally out of place in an institution of “learning”.  The last place we should even think of restricting free speech is on a college campus. If we can allow a Gus Hall or an Angela Davis to speak to a gathering freely, if we can call a man “President” whose mentors have been Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky, then we must also permit a tee shirt with a slogan that doesn’t meet with everyone’s approval.

There is no Amendment in the Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom from being offended.  However, the very First Amendment protects both the tee shirt and the walkers protesting it.  These two, facing off on this issue, share this common right and protection.