Screenshot: YouTube/Emily Gipson
While videos of people eating Tide Pods are going viral, you may have missed a video that also went viral, a video that is a lot more important than people eating detergent. And that important video was made by 16-year-old Emily Gipson.
Gipson, a student who attends Lebanon High School in Tennessee, decided to make an anti-bullying video called “Welcome to Lebanon High School.” This video criticizes the school through spoken word, as she makes a point that her school seems to accepts bullying towards students dealing with mental health issues.
“Posters say ‘smile’ and ‘be happy,’ but how am I supposed to be happy in a world—no, in a community—where creativeness is put down, where the people who make fun of others never get punished because ‘there’s no proof,’ or ‘there’s nothing we can do about it,’ or, my favorite, ‘kids will be kids,’” Gipson says in the hard-hitting video. “Sometimes I wonder just how many kids it takes dying to make a difference,” she adds.
Take a look at it below.
And guess what? Apparently that was enough to hurt her principal’s feelings, so much so that Gipson was suspended. The principal, Scott Walters, says this video “hurt his feelings,” as well as the feelings of other teachers, so he suspended Gipson for “trying to incite violence.”
“I can appreciate the perspective of the video,” Walter explained to the Leader-Post. “Of course, she’s 16, and her perspective is going to be different from mine.”
Even though Gipson was suspended, she still made a follow-up video.
It’s tough to side with the principal here as I don’t think anyone will. If kids are going to be suspended for speaking out then we are just going to have a bunch of people growing up to be complicit.
What do you think? Is the principal in the wrong?
h/t Someecards
