Shark bites, Cyborgs, and Pants

Last night, I learned from a NPR article the hard hitting issues Dallas is dealing with these days. This is the newest and biggest in public awareness campaigns:


I know after seeing that you'll want to donate your time and money to the campaign since apparently in Dallas, asses are the cause of more deaths than murder, drugs, shark bites, and cancer combined!

I just adore this quote: "In Dallas, an interesting mix of politicians, hip-hop artists and white businessmen are announcing a citywide campaign with a simple message: Pull Your Pants Up." What's that you say? The white business men are concerned too? Wow, this must be a serious problem. I mean low hanging pants only afflicts black males, right? It's one of those rare single sex, single race epidemics.

The article only gets better: "Deputy Mayor Dwaine Caraway's work life usually involves economic development, crime, housing-code enforcement and stray dogs." His life work are stray dogs and crime? Why doesn't he gather the stray dogs and create a crime/housing-code fighting team?

Lyrics from the song "Pull Your Pants Up Man" (There is even song in this campaign!) are, "Is that your underwear, man? Pull your pants up" but in the article I learned that these days, "some folks that don't even have on underwear, period." May I suggest some new lyrics more along the lines of "Is that your underwear, man? No, man. That's just my ass."

On on a more serious less sarcastic note, I listened to the song three or four times last night and I could help but wonder if the song was doing more harm that good. The article ends by saying, "Dallas is taking a different approach, trying for the hearts and minds of its young people." Yet, their billboard and song lyrics tell another story, to me at least. The billboard headline reads, "Pull your pants up. It's rude, not cool. Walking around showing your behind to other dudes." In the song it say something like, "...showing your behind to other dudes. be a man." Though I can't speak for the gay male community, it sounds to me like that their definition of being a man means never looking at a man in a sexual way. I'm not even sure if this would be found offensive by the gay male community but it offended me.

But this situation isn't unique to Dallas. In Connecticut, the same problem was addressed about a year ago. While there was no rap to prove it, I found this quote from an article written highly amusing, "Last year, the WSJ’s Serena Ng described all sorts of problems for criminals who choose to wear them (saggy jeans) while they flee the police. 'When I catch them, I tell them they’d do much better if they had pants that fit,' says Jim Matheny, a 41-year-old police lieutenant in Connecticut." I may have missed something, but isn't catching criminals a good thing, assuming of course they are actually criminals? Shouldn't we be pro-saggy pants since they seem to think only "the criminals" wear saggy pants? Shouldn't the campaigns be about wearing over-sized shoes and other things to slow you down when trying to escape?

I'm just saying that people have the choice to look at other people's asses just as much as you have a choice to look at their faces. (unless you are buying those evil criminal cyborg pants) You can't tell an old person, "pull up your face gramps you're sagging" or tell someone with glasses "when the sun hits your glasses in just the right way it blinds me so they can't wear them - ever."

My rap would be, "keep you head up, make eye contact when you see people. smile at them once in a while. stop judging people by what they wear."