The Pink Shirts are coming!
By raincoaster
Those tricksy Canucks! Trust them to start a polite, nonviolent, globally accessible, wordless, self-esteem-building uprising.
The Pink Shirt Movement.
Forget the wearin’ of the green, the wearing of the pink is what it’s all about here at the dawn of the 21st Century.
Let’s go to our stringers at the Halifax Chronicle Herald:
Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt.
The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.
The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.
“It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something,” said David.
They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.
“I made sure there was a shirt for him,” David said.
They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink.
It was hard to miss the mass of students in pink milling about in the lobby, especially for the group that had harassed the new Grade 9 student.
“The bullies got angry,” said Travis. “One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted.”
Given that Canada still has a Queen, is it too early to start a public movement for the knighting of these two lads? This is an idea whose time has come.
While Travis and David appreciate the recognition, “we don’t want to move the focus from the situation onto us,” said David, who is leaning toward joining the RCMP after high school.
“People say, ‘You’re celebrities, you’ll go down in the history books of the school,’ but that’s not what we set out to do.”
“People say you’re famous, heroes or celebrities,” added Travis, who plans to take criminology next year. “We’re not, we’re just two kids who stood up for a cause.”
Here’s just what your munchkin needs to join the Think Pink movement, my friends! For some peculiar reason, I couldn’t find any catalog shots of bigger boys in pink shirts, but I have a feeling that’s about to change.
September 25th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I love this story. Makes me feel like human kind isn’t going down the drain after all. Bravo to these 2 guys and the rest of the students who joined in.
September 25th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
That totally rocks!
September 25th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
What a great story.
Can we have some more of these uprisings, please?
September 26th, 2007 at 12:06 am
Good on them! This bullying problem is outrageous. But obviously the “neo-prep” movement is truly not like the ancien prep: Plenty of masculine boys wore pink shirts in the 80’s, and there were no problems then. Does Abercrombie & Fitch even make a shirt in pink? Anyway, you can still get nice pink shirts for boys from Brooks Brothers, Lands End, Polo, and, depending on the season, L. L. Bean. Think pink!
September 28th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Just to let you know we don’t have a Queen. Canada is a country seperate from Britian and we have a prime minister but no queen. Congrats to the boys who took a stand it is great to read a positive news story about teenagers!
September 28th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Yes, we do indeed have a Queen. When Trudeau repatriated the Constitution and changed it the thing was re-written so that Canada is no longer a Dominion of the United Kingdom, but the Queen is still the titular head of Government, represented by the Governor General. But we’ve got the system down: we invite her over once every like, five years, get all the PR we can out of her, and send her back, where the Brits have to deal with her (and pay for her).
September 30th, 2007 at 4:48 am
I should probably clarify that I am a Canuckistani as well.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:30 am
[...] cast your minds way, waaaaaay back, to this time last year. That was when we blogged about David Shepherd and Travis Price, two students in Nova Scotia who, outraged by seeing a fellow student bullied for wearing a pink shirt, took arms [...]