I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again, oh babe I hate to go—but it’s okay because my expenses will be paid and I get to enjoy the company of the rest of the worlds traveling people who spend hours in airports talking on cell phones, hustling their wares, advising clients on strategy, people with laptops, Blackberries and voices like machine gun fire.
Traveling people tend to be cynical and grim, which you would be too if you were trying to peddle your widgets in today’s market. They usually don’t sit at the departure gate and gossip. But lately I heard several people talking about a kid in Connecticut, James Tate, who was banned from going to his prom because of the way he invited the love of his life to join him on the dance floor.
James, motivated by passion, pasted in large letters a prom invitation on his high school’s entrance. The message read “Sonali Rodrigues, will you go to the prom with me? HMU (hit me up)-Tate”. The school system went ballistic, claimed he committed an unsafe act (he used a non-approved ladder—alone), trespassed on school property and used non appropriate signage and so was declared Prom non-gratis. Someone put this on the internet and it made CNN news which caused two state representatives to draft legislation to allow school administration, along with parents and the student, to create a community-service option to determine the best course of discipline. Then finally after weeks of pressure the school system was recently forced to completely reverse it’s decision. Oh the complexity, the contortions! People, get a grip!
Love crazed males have been doing dumb things ever since Adam looked and saw that Eve didn’t have a thing to wear to a garden party.
"Va-Va-Voom!" he said ( a loose translation).
The world has turned upside down when the high jinks of a love struck kid, under the influence of testosterone and emotion can make big time school officials and state representatives quake and react with the finesse of a bull in a china shop.
How does this happen you ask?
The internet is fundamental to social life as we now know it. You can sit anywhere---I’m sitting in an airport right now next to a cafeteria—and blitz the world with emails and check Facebook to see where your friends are, what they had for lunch and download anything you care to look at or read. You just need a laptop and a little plug-in wireless antennae and you can broadcast anything you want which can pressure big people like CEO’s, Senators and school superintendents to jump to absurd reactions. Small acts are amplified way out of proportion and context.
The internet has a way of putting steroids to the trivial and forcing a non-event to threaten people’s careers and so we go into overkill on rule making and over-the-top on reactions. The result is we have been conditioned to be too serious about everything-- a small prank and you’re banned from the Prom, hurricanes have to be named for both genders now and God forbid a person makes an honest mistake about ---anything. We’ve lost our sense of humor.
In the real world the sign prank was adolescent-- a cute silly expression of a boy’s feelings. It didn’t require banning from the prom or state legislation---his homeroom teacher should have just said, ” Don’t do that again kid. Now go help clean the toilets.”
Let’s find our lost humor. Tell someone a good joke or run some underwear up a flag pole. And just laugh.
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