Were the CovCath Students Wrong?

I haven't commented a great deal on the incident involving the Covington students in Washington, D.C. because I hadn't had a chance to watch the videos. Until now, I had only seen the reports, and a few screengrabs and clips. Now that I've watched some of the longer videos (which can be watched here), particularly those showing how the confrontation between the student (I'm not a journalist, but I generally refrain from naming minors) and Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist and Marine veteran, I'd like to offer my thoughts.

First, the arguments from both sides contain a grain of truth, but one side is still in the wrong. The students do not appear to have started the confrontation, but they are responsible for not ending it. They are correct in their claims that the group speaking before the confrontation, called the Black Hebrew Israelites (not Muslims, as some of them and their parents have erroneously claimed; the fact that they claimed this shows they are at best ignorant and at worst blatantly Islamophobic), which is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, did say numerous hateful things. Whether or not every single insult and slur was directed at the students is difficult to say from the videos, but they were saying indefensible things. I am a staunch advocate of the First Amendment, but some of the things they said honestly border on hate speech.

Musical Nostalgia

I often spend my evenings transcribing sheet music into MIDI files.  Sometimes I do this to create backing tracks for later use, but often, I simply enjoy being able to listen to the music.  Be it piano solos beyond my ability to play, a song I’m thinking of covering, or a choral piece I once performed, I thoroughly enjoy this process.  Music has always been a critically important part of my life, and even something as simple as transcribing it warms my soul.

Recently, I spent a couple of weeks working on a song called “The Kid Inside” from the musical “Is There Life After High School?”, and it has brought an interesting feeling of nostalgia.  I’ve not seen the musical, but the synopsis is essentially laid out within this song, which is the first in the show; it is about a group of adult men and women remembering their experiences in high school.  This song has long been a personal favorite of mine because I performed it in one of the last concerts of my high school career.  At the spring concert every year, the graduating Seniors perform a choral piece as a way of saying goodbye, and this was the piece chosen for my class.  Though it has been fifteen years, I can remember performing it as if it were yesterday.