LUNCH WITH...

The Courier has a feature in the paper once a week now, that I usually like. It's called "Lunch With..." They choose individuals from the community and invite them to lunch and interview them while lunching. They have a variety of people and not people with celebrity status necessarily. As an example, one of the people they interviewed a while back was the man that turned O.J. Simpson away from his restaurant on Derby Day. Neither O.J. nor his party were allowed in.

Today they interviewed MeShorn Daniels, a name very unfamiliar to us. He, however is a crusader. He is with a company that is called GARMY. GARMY is an acronym for God Ain't Released Me Yet. MeShorn is 47 years old and says he is a baby boomer in the middle. That means, according to him, the young baby boomers who are in the middle of those who are older than them, who went through the civil rights of the 60's and lived through the 70's while still very young. They are older than Generation X, the hip-hop culture, the saggy pants and all that.
He says that the deal is they are still trying to hold onto some of the values that they had to deal with, that the older baby boomers put them through...he said they are going to try to mandate some things in this 21st Century.

He is advocating a "Pull Up Your Pants "campaign. He wants to get a dialogue going with anyone that wants to participate. He spoke to the Metro Council and ask them for a show of hands of how many of them were affected by seeing the sag pants and talked about the "Pull up your Pants" environment . Everybody raised their hands and he heard murmurs of agreement from the audience.

He was asked if he thought there should be laws against sag pants. He said he is not advocating laws but thinks it can be handled by dialogue and proposed a resolution that would encourage discussion. He made it clear that he is not just targeting African Americans (he is African American) he wants it talked about across the board.

I know that at Meredith-Dunn we had a dress code and absolutely no sag pants was in the code. Even though the uniform pants were khaki, some of the boys pulled them down as far as they could, to the point that their underwear showed, and then had to be sent to the office for dress code violation. As soon as they got out of the sight of the office, they pulled them down again. So much quality teaching time was spent trying to get them to obey the rules that I did a pants ,belt, tuck- in -shirt check as they entered class and if it had to be addressed again there was extra homework assigned to make up for the lost teaching time. I didn't see too many sag pants during my classes.

MeShorn said he wants to empower people to say, listen, I see something I don't like and I want to effect change. He wants to encourage people that they can effect change by saying something. He mentioned the Dooney "Da Priest" CD that inspired him to get involved. The rap version that explains the different talking points of saggy pants piqued his interest. The sag pants style was started in prisons by the homosexuals and it was to indicate to fellow prisoners that the prisoner wearing sag pants was already "taken" by another.

MeShorn says his intention is to bring the issue of "saggy pants" to the whole community, state or country as public indecency awareness,to encourage more responsible and accountable adults, men, women, parents, mothers, fathers, wives or girlfriends that this is unacceptable form of expression.

I applaud his idea and hope it gets results. He has an e-mail address : ) pullyourpantssup@ garmy.com

I wonder what happens when the saggy pantsers have to run out of the way of harm or danger. Do they leave a trail of pants in their wake?

Ciao