A professor named Prof. Gregory F. Sullivan was showing a video (the article in NY Times doesn’t say if it was a film or video) in his classroom at Merchant Marine Academy in New York the other day. After he turned the lights out, he said “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room, run for the exits.” That’s it. That’s what he did. That is the entirety of the controversy.
Mr. Sullivan did not bilk thousands of people out of their retirement savings. He did not buy thousands of rounds of ammunition at a gun show, for no obvious purpose. He didn’t launch a failed war on a foreign country on the basis of falsified intelligence documents. He didn’t provide a legal justification for torture to the U.S. justice system. He did not pollute anyone’s drinking water or steal the oil under someone else’s property or destroy any wildlife habitat.
Now, just because someone did not do a number of enumerated things wrong does not mean that what he did was not wrong. I’m just curious about our public culture that destroys the careers of people like Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer while allowing the people responsible for the banking debacle to continue to make huge profits destroying other peoples’ livelihoods without consequence.
While somebody gets all hysterical about a lame joke like, “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room, run for the exits.”
Professor Sullivan did not know that the father of one of his students died in Aurora in the attack by the orange-haired Mr. James Holmes. When he found out, he immediately apologized to the student.
So what’s the big freaking deal? Why are they now talking about firing this prof? For a single tasteless but inoffensive remark? What is offensive about the remark? It’s a lame joke, without the slightest overtones of anything that would be unduly offensive to any identifiable minority, except, maybe people with orange hair.
People need to get a life.