The Young Football And Hockey Players Allegedly Disciplined For Making Harlem Shake Videos Are Getting Screwed By Alleged Adults

So, here are two news stories that illustrate the artificial (read: administrator-made) perils of being a young person who plays sports and does funny things with friends.

First, as Yahoo has reported, D-III Susquehanna University disciplined ("thrown off" was the verb used) 11 football players for participating in a silly video in line with the quote-unquote Harlem Shake meme that has made the Internet even sillier than usual this week. Dispute if you will that this bit of harmless performance art is consistent with the standards of great cinema, but I think we can agree that disciplining a college football player for air-humping a girder or bouncing around a weight room with an American flag as a cape is the very definition of grey-hearted pettifoggery.

Second, per a tip by a "rather tall alum" of Tappan Zee High School in Rockland County, New York, the school's hockey team has forfeited its upcoming playoff game because several of its players also made a quote-unquote Harlem Shake video. Theirs is decidedly more blue, and possibly NSFW if your workplace previously disapproved of how the Red Hot Chili Peppers put on sweatsocks. One might say that by booting teenagers out of the hockey playoffs at the end of their season, one of the only seasons they'll enjoy as young people before time ravages them and eventually kills them and atomizes their memory into the infinite universe, will teach them to be more virtuous citizens. As the LoHud Hockey Blog put it:

Here's the lesson … kids need to be reminded every so often what that omnipresent www stands for. They have to realize these hormonal snippets they keep posting on the World Wide Web are out in the open where friends and neighbors, parents and teachers, bloggers and journalists can see them.

A forfeit in this case seems a little harsh, they weren't being destructive, but they weren't exactly representing those uniforms that were discarded before somebody turned up the music and screamed, ‘Action!'

True as all that may be, the video is pretty damn funny. So was the Susquehanna clip. Like all of us, school administrators are going to be dead for a very, very long time—pretty much fucking forever, statistically speaking—and it's rather a shame that a few of them are spending their microscopic time on this wonderful planet as killjoys, purging the public sphere of all forms of simulated humping. Here's the lesson: You can't have any fun when some people are in charge because they want to teach you about the real world, in which you can't have any fun because there are people in charge who won't let you. They think of themselves as grown-ups. They're wrong about that, too.

D-III Players Allegedly Kicked Off Their Team Following Harlem Shake Video [Yahoo] Nyack/Tappan Zee Will Not Be Part Of The Dance [LoHud Hockey Blog]