Accompanying Lev

I watched the youtube videos that accompany the reading this week. Funny stuff, especially the Kairos and Kairos reply. It is a tricky thing to choose a powerful rhetorical statement and not offend someone, but to offend a population that suffered past genocide is especially tricky. For some reason, lots of videos use that Nazi footage to re-meme the dialog into something else.

I remember late one night on the news desk at my college newspaper we had a front-page above-the-fold story about the third jaywalker hit by a car in two weeks (urban campus). I was responsible for writing headlines. I jokingly suggested "Feel Like Jaywalking?" as the headline and my editor thought it was funny too. Somehow the late hours sucked the good sense out of both of us and it was printed with that headline. The student's family was applicably upset. Somewhere in trying to get our story out there we forgot that it was a real person that had been hit by that car. I was young, but that is a lesson I never forgot. It's one thing to get people's attention; it's quite another to use words as a weapon. Especially a "fair and balanced" newspaper....