The More Things Change... Yeah, It's Colorado Again! Bennish v. Media Hype

Back in the late '60s, the Black Panther Party in Denver provided breakfast to black children who, presumably, would not otherwise have received a good breakfast prior to their arduous trek to the white man's school. Or, so the Panther's claimed. Along with the breakfast, though, the Panthers also provided the children with coloring books and crayons. The coloring books portrayed police officers as pigs being killed, maimed by proud black folk hoisting automatic weapons, pistols, ball bats, etc.

Burn Baby Burn!

In the late '60s, I sat, twice a week, in a Sociology 101 class at the University of Colorado, Denver Center, presided over by none other than the Director of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Jim Reynolds. There were probably more than a hundred of us in the class. Only guessing here, mind you, but there may have been one other student in the class who took more than a little umbrage with Mister Reynolds' oft-voiced admiration, adulation of the Black Panther Party.

"But, Mister Reynolds," I said, "the Panthers advocate the murder of cops; they advocate the burning of American cities."

"The Panthers feed hungry children," was, consistently, the response from Mister Reynolds.

The more things change...

I suspect most of you have heard about Jay Bennish, a geography teacher from a Denver suburb, whose fiery lecture--he compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, for heaven's sake!--was taped (MP3'd) by one of his tenth grade students, a precocious, slightly pudgy youngster with a staunchly Republican father, a supposedly Democratic mother and surely a yen for stardom...bypassing American Idol all together.

Seems the youngster and his daddy, Sean Allen and Jeff Allen respectively, were so terribly outraged by the Bennish classroom rant, that they contacted a compadre of Rush Limbaugh, Walter E. Williams of Virginia's George Mason University who, outraged as well, wrote a column that was posted on the internet. Not satisfied with the reaction thereto, the Allen boys contacted a local, very, very, very conservative radio commentator, Mike Rosen, who carried the ball from there. (It, of course, should be noted that Limbaugh characterized the likes of the teacher, Jay Bennish, as "...maggot-infested...".)

Suffice it to say, the media went apeshit with this story and, even today, the story abounds on the airwaves, through the satellite dishes and remains splattered in black on more than a few newspapers.

Two points: One -Radio talk show hosts are the most prolific whores on the face of the earth who, through time and practice, have affirmed their savage tendency to hump (to oblivion) any bullshit issue that latches on to the hairs in their nostrils, like beer farts from the dumb shit sitting on the stool next to them.

Two-Public education in this country is, has been and, most likely--with the exception of those holy roller enclaves of intelligent design--will forever be the marketplace of ideas where liberalism soars and where youthful minds need beware to think for themselves.

THINK FOR YOURSELVES, YOUNG'UNS! READ! Surely, without the media frenzy and sans a sure place in the fifteen-minutes-of-fame spotlight, the integrity, the substance of your beliefs can withstand the whining, dramatic, classroom rants of a twenty-eight year old blond Rastapharian, who--forty years ago--would probably also have voiced the unarguable sentiment: "They feed hungry children."