Feh. How childish can this get?
Gonna get worse before it gets better.
Yup. This will promote understanding and healthy international tolerance.
And silly me thought that much of the point of these exchange trips is to foster international understanding.
Oh - well - does that men an end to Kinder Eggs too?
Well heck, when was the last time Germany ever stood by the US of A?
Fucking idiots.
Agreed.
Celyn, Austria makes a lot of those chocolates, too.
With any luck, the anti-German mailman will say `Candy, mate.’ as he delivers it. 
An American school district does something dumb.
The sun rises and sets.
Birds poop in flight.
What German goods are we supposed to be boycotting? No one’s told me.
Wouldn’t want to wear lederhosen by mistake.
i live in Murfreesboro, & the local educational system, indeed all local goernment at the City & County level, is run by utter amatuers.
We get the bottom-of-the-barrel quality personnel in teaching & school administration, & all local elected officials from the Mayor on down are part-timers. They split their day between running their businesses & running the City.
In the past 20 years,we have rapidly transitioned from a small-to-medium-sized town, to the 5th largest city in the state.
Unfortunately, our local politicos aren’t changing their mindsets, & cling to power like dictators defying the mobs. A handful of “old” families have virtually run this community since before the Civil War, & fight change like Furies.
And the core of the community won’t even countinence the idea of a paid proffesional, full-time government, as they regard it as a “Sure Road To Higher Taxes”.
I ashamed, but not really able to act. I’m a government employee, & getting active about these entrenched losers could cost me my job.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. On the other hand, I suppose it’s marginally better than having the German kids come to the US and then having their hosts treat them like they’re not welcome. Pretty damn depressing either way.
Well, there may be another round of silly name-changing. They’ll probably keep German measles, and slipshod construction should still be Gerry-built! Back in WW I, lots of things lost their German names. The American Eskimo dog was a White Spitz. The German Shepherd dog became the Alsatian Hound for a while, then it regained the original moniker. It’s possible that American football teams will find a new name for the **blitz ** pass defense. Maybe they’ll call it shock and awe. If that’s the **wurst ** that happens, though, it’s no big deal.
I was reminded over the weekend that German kids, like British kids, have a kind of font of knowledge / wisdom available to them that American civilians don’t. It’s their grandparents, the civilians who remember what it was like to be bombed.
What reminded me was overhearing two teenage lads talking on a park bench about what their grandparents had said about their parents during the Blitz. I was almost startled by the way they spoke in such quiet, sober terms.
It doesn’t matter if it’s expressed or not. It’s there, somewhere in the conscious of the society, a reluctance to visit on others that which you know to be so utterly, indescribably terrorising. And brings random death to you, your family and friends.
I feel it manifest in the generation in between, my parents generation. And because it influences them, it influences me, also.
I guess that’s what Rumsfeld calls ‘Old Europe’ i.e. the experiences of my Grandparents as resident in my conscious, of the experiences of all Grandparents in the collective conscious.
May God save us from the arrogance and the ignorance of that very small man (Rumsfeld) , and those who made the decision to cancel this trip.
If I can’t get wurst at the supermarket, then the terrorists have, indeed, already won.
For a moment there, I thought the OP was about how some school district had renamed their kindergardens to “Freedom Classes.” :rolleyes:
As another from “old Europe” (alas, what an apt adjective ) , I’d say that London Calling makes a very valid point. And, yes, it certainly would be hard to describe properly. For instance, as a teenager on trips to Germany, it was somehow nice - even although we were all to young to remember WWII, to be talking happily with friends in a country that had once been the enemy. And knowing that my city, like many others, suffered a lot of bombing, but that the people I was talking to had similar , well - sort of family experiences, I suppose.
As London Calling said - well - very hard to describe. And I don’t want it to sound like so much like claiming some special superior knowledge, not at all. So, I had better give up trying to explain that, I think! 
It’s hard to make sense of things at the moment.
But I do think it really rather rotten for the kids, and dimwitted of the local council.
All the same, Bosda worry not - you are not alone - where I live, we have a set - ok, tribe might be better - of local politicos who, by now, think they rule as of right.
So - when do they start boycotting the Swiss and so on? Hell, to borrow from Flann O’Brien’s “Dictionary of Cliche” - the whole thing would be funny were it not so tragic.
laughs I thought the same thing when I saw the thread title.
Somehow, with this sort of bullshit going on, I doubt that’s too far behind. 
In the interest of fighting ignorance, it should be pointed out that they would have to change the phrase to Gerry-built, since the (19th C) expression is Jerry built, (apparently from the 18th C. use of the name Jerry as a pejorative) and is not associated with the nickname Jerry as applied to Germans, (from whence (AFAIK) we only take jerry can–the flat-sided metal fuel container that we adopted from them around WWII).
(And the Murfreesboro city fathers and mothers are twits.)
Five bucks says Madden does this at least once this season.
The Plano, Texas city council (or possibly it was the school board) decided not to have a soccer-student exchange with Russia for fear some of the kids might be KGB agents. And this was in the 1990’s.
Calling German “the old Europe” was one of the stupider things I’ve heard Rumsfeld say. I can’t think of a country that better exemplifies the new Europe than modern Germany. The “old Europe” saw countless wars, many of them started by the old Germany. The fact that they’re now strongly arguing against war is evidence enough that Germany is very much part of the new Europe.
Now I feel like some saurkraut and weisswurst.