There is something vital missing in the hand-wringing, name-calling, insult-hurling - and even some reasonable debate - over the way the Carroll Community School District and Daily Times Herald reacted to a photo in which some high school football players displayed a hand symbol widely regarded nationally as a obscene gesture representing a particularly vulgar sexual act.
With high-profile Omaha World-Herald stories today and Wednesday and emails and innuendo flying around town with the ferocity of the storms the other night, it's well chronicled that this newspaper scrubbed the images of the offending players from a Carroll High School team photo we published in a special section.
The Carroll Community School District also sought disciplinary action, which is reported in a Page 1 story today on a special board meeting.
Parents, students and community members can debate whether we, respectively, made the wrong calls.
We've received various versions of the boys-will-be-boys defense, an aw-shucksism that dismisses children's disrespectful behavior in a way that is shocking to readers of more seasoned generations when people readily accepted responsibility for their mistakes instead of engaging in Clintonian equivocations.
What we aren't hearing from the community is any genuine acknowledgment of the deeper issue at play: that this symbol, the shocker, is a debasing gesture being made about women.
All around the nation, in places where people under 25 congregate, there is no mistaking what this symbol means: the forefinger and middle finger are extended with the thumb and pinkie wrapped behind, exposing three digits that are intended to be in position for a man to perform a sexual act on a woman.
Do a search for "shocker" on the Internet if you aren't getting the drift of what's going on here.
One interesting punishment for the offending players would have been to have them explain what it means to their grandmothers.
Whether flashed knowingly by the players or out of what would be a stunning naiveté (which we doubt in this wired-globally age of Google and MySpace and YouTube and countless other outlets) the gesture is an indecent one that carries a wallop of a cultural statement: women are sexual objects, toys, things with which to be played and dominated.
Even if, as some suggest, this shocker is all a big misunderstanding, that those who used it were just innocently ignorant of what their hands were doing, or appeared to be doing, there is, as preacher types would say, a teachable moment here.
Educators and others who care about high schoolers (which is presumably all of us) should be using this issue for a meaningful examination of how words, gestures, policies and other elements of our culture in Carroll may create an atmosphere in which women (your daughters and mothers and sisters) are getting the wrong messages about their value.
The other night at a Carroll City Council meeting, Peggy White made an astute observation. "Are we going to be big-picture people, or are we not going to be big-picture people?" Councilwoman White said.
She, of course, was speaking about the potential of Carroll establishing a city-run natural-gas utility, not this column topic.
But her point holds true for so many issues in Carroll.
Nearly 15 years ago, as a reporter in Ames, I covered many beats, including education.
Former Carroll Middle School principal John Kinley was then at Ames Middle School. One morning, several middle school girls came into the Daily Tribune seeking an impromptu meeting with me. They were wearing T-shirts that had renderings of roosters on them and contained the word "Cocks."
The double-entendre was meant as a comeback to what they felt was the offensiveness of a growing number of male students who were showing up to class sporting Hooters T-shirts from the then recently opened restaurant in West Des Moines, a place widely known to celebrate attributes of the female anatomy.
The story unfolded over the next few days with a variety of parties upset over one thing or another Kinley said or did. (Both shirts were eventually banned.)
In the middle of this outcry, Kinley held a major assembly on the matter, invited parents and the media, and stood on a stage taking heat for what he said, or didn't do, or could have said or done, about the Hooters-Cocks controversy. He opened a dialogue that revealed much about gender issues in Ames, Iowa, and indeed, the nation.
It no doubt wasn't the easiest day John Kinley had as an educator in Iowa. But it was among his best.
And that day can't be seen in a vacuum. It revealed something about how Kinley and a school community can respond when they eschew bunker mentalities in favor of robust, honest debate.
Last year, when I interviewed Kinley, now superintendent of the Gilbert schools, for one of our "Where Are They Now?" features, he told me that schools must start to see themselves in a global picture. At the time he was reading New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's best-selling book on the changing international economy, "The World Is Flat."
"We have to understand we're not just competing next door," Kinley said.
And in order to do that, we must have the courage to discuss powerful undercurrents in our lives - one which was clearly exposed here.
