There is no crime more heinous than the cold blooded murder of innocent Americans while they exercise their constitutional rights, except perhaps the disgrace to their memories and ignorance to their sacrifices after the fact. If you have not been following the news, I am speaking of the recent debacle involving the sale of a faux blood stained and tattered Kent State sweatshirt by the clothing company Urban Outfitters.
The event, to which Urban Outfitters has been so ignorant, occurred at Kent State University on May 4th 1970, when four college students were murdered and another nine were wounded when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of students protesting President Nixon’s decision to begin the US Cambodian Campaign. It was a tragedy that caused outrage across the nation at the time, and to this day is still a painful memory for many and is acknowledged as a dark moment in American history. So how is it that, a company based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could be so ignorant to such a decisive event that is so culturally impactful?
My short answer is I have no freaking clue. The only explanations I can muster are either some sick bastard at Urban Outfitters thought he would pull one over on a college-age consumer base that they deemed to be too unintelligent to decode the reference, or somebody lacked any remnant of foresight to let this atrocious gesture escape the production line. Either way there is a couple of hard lessons that Urban Outfitters stands to learn from this public relations nightmare.
The first of which may come as a surprise to whoever thought this would be funny, but your college demographic consumers are not stupid. Although we tend to spend a large part of our days looking at electronics, the power behind those screens makes us more culturally aware than any generation before us by a long shot. So if someone really drops the ball and I don’t know, tries to sell an offensive sweatshirt that pokes fun at a national tragedy, all it takes is five seconds and a person with a smart phone to figure out exactly what is going on and then spread it like wildfire.
Which brings me to my second lesson; as a company, you now operate in a society that is saturated in information technology and you are no longer in total control of your media exposure. Therefore, when you do something wrong it cannot be fixed anymore simply by throwing unfathomable amounts of advertising money at it. Which is a lesson they have learned the hard way, because no matter how hard they have tried, a simple Google search of this issue can bring up a countless number of hits from news sites, blogs, and social media platforms, showing that the web as a community is doing their best to hold this company, and others like them, accountable.
In conclusion I hope that is exactly what happens to Urban Outfitters. I hope that we, as college students and their consumer base, hold them accountable. Not by demanding insincere apologies that come from some HR department somewhere, but where they actually feel it; their profit margin.
I hope they feel the impact of the hurt they have caused those involved in this tragedy, I hope they understand the disrespect that they have shown to many with their actions, and I hope above all that college students as a demographic make a stand to let them know what they have done is not acceptable.
