The headline in The Washington Post on Monday declared that "the viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed."
Really? You don't say? Are you implying that sometimes there's broader context, more to the story?
There was this woeful episode of modern American ugliness Friday in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where thoughtful people might try to behave.
As captured initially in video, and virally, kids from the all-male Covington Catholic high school in Park Hills, Ky., in Washington to march against abortion, some wearing Make America Great Again caps, were mocking a Native American elder from the Omaha tribe who was beating a drum. One of the kids stood stationary in front of the drumming elder, giving no ground, staring the old man down, saying nothing, but smiling creepily.
The instant leap to conclusion was that these were racist kids revealing the cultural decline represented by primitive Trumpian thought.
Maybe that was the case, for some of the kids, anyway.
But, later, a longer video of the episode surfaced to provide broader context, as almost always will exist.
Before the originally revealed incident, four Washington, D.C.-area blacks representing the Hebrew Israelites, who think they're God's chosen ones and hate a lot of people, were shown and heard in this second video. They were shouting vitriol toward the Trump-capped kids, nearly all of them white.
Members of the Hebrew Israelites shouted that the kids were crackers, future school-shooters and children of incest.
The youths became riled under that bigoted barrage. They began doing chants and cheers that they say were from school but that a couple of onlookers say contained references to building the wall and going back to Africa.
There were a couple of dozen kids or more. That individuals shouted different things seems possible. People react to hurled hate in different ways. Young people might be especially prone to variant response.
The Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, 64, left his position in a previously planned indigenous persons' demonstration. He waded into the middle of the kids. He was beating his drum with what he said later was a peace prayer. He said he was concerned about escalations in racial intolerance and was trying to make a point for peace, for calm.
He came face-to-face with the silent, non-moving, creepily smiling kid.
Youngsters flanking the stare-down were either frolicking to the beat or mocking the old man, or, as seems likely, both, depending on the particular youngster.
The kid doing the stare-down, an 11th-grader, went back to Kentucky to receive death threats and hear talk of his possible expulsion. He and his family issued a statement through a public relations firm.
They said the young man was concerned about escalating events and didn't know what to do when the old Native American drummer walked silently straight to him. Fearing saying the wrong thing or making a wrong move, the statement explained, the young man chose simply to say no word and make no move.
So, let's restate the players in this little modern American drama:
• You had a few religiously weird blacks shouting racist hate and who got quite out of sorts when these mostly white kids came along exercising the utter audacity to be wearing those caps.
• You had Catholic-school kids from a deep red state, in town for a conservative march, and peppered with MAGA logos, who suddenly found themselves denigrated from nearby shouts and who reacted by making noises and motions of a disputed and probably disparate nature.
• You had indigenous Americans doing a demonstration, one of whom decided to stick his drum into the unfolding business and came away telling the press he had been fearful when surrounded by the kids' mockery.
• You had people beholding the first video and saying, aha, Trump hate. You had people beholding the second and saying, aha, fake news.
• That original video, by the way, was said to have been posted by a California schoolteacher but turned out to have come from an anonymous account in Brazil that Twitter suspended Tuesday.
I could advise people displaying primitive hatred while cavorting in the public square to shut up, but they wouldn't.
I could advise people in that public square to ignore the bitter hatred of others, but they wouldn't.
I could advise everybody to think only good thoughts of Abraham Lincoln and an American union while at the Lincoln Memorial, but they wouldn't.
The only thing I might relate of value in this horrid episode is what I learned as a young newspaper reporter. It is that the breathless tip you get in the morning will almost always, by evening, through your day of inquiry, be substantially different--maybe less, maybe more--from what you first heard.
What's happening in the digital age with social media is that the breathless tips go viral before a day's inquiries can be made to produce an article of broader perspective for publication in the filtered and professionally gathered print variety the next morning.
That's not an advancement for civilization.
Advancement would be for everyone to doubt the superficial appearance of everything they hear and see at the moment they hear and see it, especially if it's viral on the Internet.
Images can be doctored. True images appear different through a wider lens.
Could you at least wait to see if there's something about it in the newspaper the next day?
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/23/2019