While polls in the 2012 presidential election were closing across the country, things were a little rowdy at the University of Mississippi.
Ole Miss students gathered in front of the student union chanting the “Hotty Toddy” fight song and according to the AP burning a Barack Obama campaign sign. The president was re-elected to a second White House term after defeating former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
YouTube has a couple of clips posted of the disturbances. In one video, a man in a uniform tells a young man standing in a pickup, draped in an American flag to “sit down.”
And later an off-camera voice shouts, “Go to your (expletive) dorm.”
In 2008, Ole Miss was the site of the first presidential debate between Obama and then Republican nominee Sen. John McCain.
Ole Miss recently commemorated the 50th anniversary of its integration by James Meredith, the school’s first African-American graduate.
And now this.
I hope there were a few sober-minded (or just sober) students there to counterbalance out this knuckle-headed cacophony. I would commend them for shouting back or for simply walking away from this crude underbelly of our population that still doesn’t get it.
I’m glad no one was hurt.
This was no riot. Not physically at least. But it was a riot of the mind and the conscience.
November 7, 2012
Politics