On the weekend of Jan. 18, several marches were held in Washington
D.C. Two of them included a March for Life rally and the Indigenous People’s March.
During these rallies, an incident involving students from Covington Catholic High School and Native American activist Nathan Phillips went viral.
The viral video showed Phillips face-to face with one of the Catholic students while he performed a Native American song. The student just stood there. He didn’t make any physical or verbal threats. Many were quick to jump to conclusions over the ten second video. People made a lot of assumptions about the situation.
The video of the entire scene is about 30 minutes and multiple groups were involved. The Catholic school students were taunted and made fun of. They even had things thrown at them, but they just stood there. They didn’t yell back or physically attack anyone. The reactions were so wild and out of hand that it got to the point of death threats. We all need to step back and think: is letting this get to the point of death threats to a 16-year-old high school kid because of his smirk acceptable? Political affiliation aside, how did we let it get to this point?
It’s very sad that we’ve gotten to this point as a society. So many were willing to jump to conclusions and openly wish death and violence on a teenage boy. How did we end up here? How have we let supporting a party or president get to the point where many feel it’s appropriate to have these emotionally extreme reactions toward them and justify it? How have we gotten to this type of dehumanization?
The original reporting about the Catholic students has been found to be totally untrue. One thing being that they were chanting “build the wall” at the Natives. That was found to be false, the Washington Post and many other news organizations retracted their original reporting on the incident given how false the information on it was. The justification of dehumanizing one another for political reasons is truly eating at the fabric of American society, and it breaks my heart.
