She was Betsy to her mother, who expected her to marry. Liz to fellow high school debaters, whom she regularly beat. Now, the lessons of an Oklahoma childhood are center stage in the presidential race.
OKLAHOMA CITY — It was 1962 in Oklahoma City and Liz Herring, a new student at Northwest Classen High School, was feeling insecure. She was good at school, had skipped a grade, and now, as a skinny freshman with glasses and crooked teeth who had grown up in a town south of the capital, she was hungry to fit in.
She joined the Cygnet Pep Club to show her school spirit and the Courtesy Club to help visitors find their way around the school. She became a member of the Announcers Club, reading messages over the school’s central sound system. But it was the debate club where she really found herself. At a time when Home Ec and preparing for marriage were priorities for young women, debate was a place where they could compete on equal ground.
She loved learning about the big topics of the day — Medicare, unions, nuclear disarmament. She began carrying around a large metal box with hundreds of index cards with quotes and facts written on them.
She was competitive and had extraordinary focus and self-discipline, spending hours after school each day practicing. Joe Pryor, a high school friend and debate teammate, remembers her “ruthlessness in preparation.” By the time they were juniors, he said, “she was just flat out better than me.”
Christ Means “Anointed”
In 1969, I was sent as a deacon to work at Acoma Pueblo, a Native American community in western New Mexico. When I got there, I was amazed to discover that many Catholic practices had direct Indigenous counterparts. I saw altars in the middle of the mesas covered with bundles of prayer sticks. I noted how the people of Acoma Pueblo sprinkled corn pollen at funerals just as priests did holy water, how what we were newly calling “liturgical dance” was the norm for them on every feast day. I observed how mothers would show their children to silently wave the morning sunshine toward their faces, just as we learn to “bless ourselves” with the sign of the cross, and how anointing people with smoldering sage was similar to waving incense at our Catholic High Masses.
Foxnews: Rush to Judgement: Buzzfeed and Covington High School Encounter
Developing now, Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019
RUSH TO JUDGMENT – AND ITS LESSONS: The much-discredited BuzzFeed story alleging that President Trump urged former personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress and the viral video of the encounter between Covington High School students and Native American protestors in Washington, D.C. last weekend have two things in common and one very important lesson… Both were examples of the media’s rush to judgment before the facts surfaced. And both illustrate the media’s hatred of Trump and shows how that anti-Trump bias infects the way they cover the news.
BuzzFeed still stands by its report, even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller has said it was “not accurate.” But as “Media Buzz” host Howard Kurtz points out, the damage had already been done, with several media outlets repeating the erroneous report, drumming the impeachment alarm, seemingly on loop, with the somewhat flimsy caveat “if true.” Pundits and Democratic lawmakers followed in tow, on the airwaves and on social media.
Coverage of the encounter between the Covington students and Native American group – specifically student Nick Sandmann and activist Nathan Phillips – was arguably much worse. Initial coverage, fed by an abbreviated video of the encounter and a rabid social media mob, portrayed Sandmann, a junior, and his classmates as young “MAGA” hat wearing, Trump-supporting racists who were taunting Native Americans and people of color. And people on both the left and the right jumped to condemn the students before a longer video told a different, more nuanced story.
Kneejerk pundits rushed to delete their kneejerk tweets. Some journalists, pundits and celebrities, like actress Jamie Lee Curtis, owned up to their own mistakes in rushing to judgment. But not everyone did. The lesson learned here, as Kurtz writes, is this: “There’s no harm in waiting for more details before denouncing people based on fragmentary information, even if you have to restrain yourself from joining the hot-take crowd.”
- Trump defends Covington Catholic HS students, says media ‘smeared’ them
- Gutfeld: Always be skeptical – next time, I’ll take my own advice
Student in Viral ‘Confrontation’ Claims ‘Character Assassination’
A Kentucky high school student accusing of mocking a Native American protester in a viral video spoke out for the first time Sunday night and claimed the video does not show what really happened during the encounter … Nick Sandmann, a junior at Covington Catholic High School, said he was “mortified” to find that so many people believe he and his classmate were taunting African-Americans and Native American protesters with racist chants during an encounter between protest groups on Saturday. “I did not do that, do not have hateful feelings in my heart and did not witness any of my classmates doing that,” Sandmann said.
The students initially were accused of mocking a Native American participant in the Indigenous Peoples March, which coincided with the March for Life. A snippet of video from the apparent confrontation quickly gained traction on social media, with many condemning the students — some of whom were wearing “Make America Great Again” apparel — and other critics calling for the students to be identified and harassed.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and the high school issued a joint statement apologizing to the activist, identified Saturday as Nathan Phillips. However, the emergence of longer video that appears to show some students being harassed prompted some conservatives to take back their earlier criticisms of the students.