This post is from Buffy’s original blog.com site from March 2015, marked by both spring break for many and a bad situation on a frat party bus ride.

 

Unless you’ve had your spring break head in the sand on an island that doesn’t have high-speed internet or cable TV, you’ve seen the nine-second video. You know: that one.

Endless media coverage tells us that two students were quickly identified, punished by their university and forever branded as “those guys.” Believe me, I’m not making light of their conduct or punishments or viewpoints. They’re jerks and a hot potato that’s not the focus of my thoughts today.

But this is. Tyrone Speller, President of the Phi Delt chapter at OU, wrote a letter that has gone viral. Since I sat down to blog, seven Facebook friends have shared it on their timelines. If you haven’t read Tyrone’s letter, you should, and here it is: https://www.phideltatheta.org/2015/03/message-tyrone-speller-phi-delta-theta-chapter-president-university-oklahoma/. This young man is smart and articulate; it’s worth three minutes of your time. I promise.

Another friend posted a similarly interesting article yesterday, titled “A Message to the World from an Anonymous Fraternity Member at the University of Oklahoma,” which you can read here: http://totalfratmove.com/a-message-to-the-world-from-a-fraternity-member-at-the-university-of-oklahoma/. Anonymous has plenty to say also, primarily out of concern for safety.

And while I’m linking you to links, don’t miss this incredibly insightful blog post by SMU professor Maria Dixon: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mariadixonhall/2015/03/a-teachable-moment-how-ou-failed-transformation-101/

Thankfully, the students at the University of Oklahoma are now on spring break. The two students in the video are not only on break, but they’re gone for good. Whether or not the school had the legal right to kick them out remains to be seen, but they needed to get the heck Norman and go faaaaar, faaaaar away because they’re “those guys.”

The media is now reporting that the chant just might be a deep dark sickness shared by Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapters across the nation. I’m not buying it. If you’ve ever seen people chant at a sporting event or even on a picket line, it’s usually just something with a cadence and some words. Once the leader says them a few times, the others follow along. So no, you don’t have to belong to a fraternity, participate as protestor or be brainwashed to pick it up quickly.

I don’t know much about a lot of things, but I do know this: Our society gets the gold medal for talking out of both sides of its mouth. We’re told with a big wagging finger in our faces not to profile people or groups, and yet SAE chapters from coast to coast are now under the microscope and likely to be profiled as racists. According to Anonymous, the entire Greek system is under attack at the University of Oklahoma. My cloudy crystal ball predicts that it won’t be long before all fraternities, and possibly sororities, are All. Very. Very. Bad. At least they will be until something else becomes the new target of all media focus.

Anonymous tells about heightened security at OU. Oh the irony, as SAEs across the nation now have something in common with the police force: They’ve both been unfairly labeled. Fraternity boys are racists; cops are killers. And both of those labels are utterly ridiculous. Whether members of a fraternity, a police force, an exercise facility, a medical group, a real estate company (Krazy K comes to mind) or the PTO, there’s at least one jerk and two bad apples in every bunch. And that’s enough to make Buffy bitchy.

Only Buffy isn’t bitchy because Michael Jackson’s song “One Bad Apple” reminds us that it “don’t spoil the whole bunch.”

And it hasn’t.