Facebook is Forever

I don't get how some people can be so stupid.

Not only do they engage in demeaning behavior, they document it with photos and then post them online.

Remember the photos of students at Tarleton State University "celebrating" Martin Luther King Jr. Day?

They were proudly posted on Facebook.



No shame there.

Facebook is forever.

Now, more offensive photos have been found on Facebook, these from a Halloween party.

Now that they're out, so is the outrage.

From MSNBC:

Some members of the Virginia Tech community were outraged on Thursday night after some pictures of a controversial Halloween costume were posted on the Internet. The pictures displayed on the social networking site Facebook showed two Penn State students dressed as the Virginia Tech shooting victims.

In the photos, the students are wearing Virginia Tech T-shirts, have bullet holes in their clothes and are wearing elaborate makeup.

The students said the costumes were worn to a small Halloween party and were meant to be private.

In an interview with Roanoke's WSLS-TV, one of the students in the pictures called the costumes "crazy controversial" and said they were trying "to push the envelope just for shock value."

"The thing is, everybody's making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26,000 that happen in America every day," he said.

"That's the problem with college students," he continued. "They all live in an ivory tower of privilege. They don't understand, when it all boils down to it, it's someone wearing a costume."

The student quoted above has a lot to learn.

He exhibits a remarkable degree of immaturity. To argue that it's acceptable to mock the murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech is to reveal that he doesn't understand the preciousness of life and the depth of the tragedy.

After seeing the pictures, a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group for people against the costumes. Some of the upset members have left threatening statements to the Penn State students.

"This is a group of college students who now think it's trendy to be upset about their friends being killed," the student in the photos told WSLS-TV.

Of course, threatening statements are inappropriate.

I wonder if any threats were made by Penn State students posing as Virginia Tech supporters. Did they pull a "James Buss"?

Again, the student quoted is really a jerk.

Would he take the same stance if his friends had been gunned down on campus?

Penn State officials said they are appalled by the students' actions.

"We are appalled that these individuals would display this level of insensitivity, indifference and lack of common decency and sense by dressing up in this manner," officials told the Roanoke station. "These two people do not represent 90,000 Penn State students. They represent themselves."

"These two people" have a problem.

They may have thought that it would be fun to wear a "crazy controversial" Halloween costume, but they're in for some long term crazy unpleasantness. Not fun.

I suspect that their costumes will come back to haunt them when it's time to apply to graduate school or when they are out on job interviews.

They should attach the photos to their resumes.

They're famous now. The photos will live forever.

They wanted to be crazy controversial. They succeeded. Crazy.