Lou Gosset? I seem to remember Montel Williams going around to schools, wearing his navy dress whites, yelling that.
You could be right, it’s only been…erm, 14 years or so.
Dammit, Eve, you beat me to it about Smashers of Shit for Jesus.
My motivational speaking experience includes a WWII veteran who never stopped talking, EVER…and a bunch of cloaked middle schoolers acting like drugs.
Only a few months ago actually, we had the WWII veteran. He happens to be one of the many many Medal Of Honor recipients living in Pueblo, which BTW has the highest number of Medal of Honor recipients in the country.
His entire speech was stories about him blowing up German “bastards”, getting shot by one, shooting another, finding a whole bunch of them wounded in a building and saying “What the hell” and then killing them too. He talked for hours. That’s a long time to an auditorium of teenagers.
Then he asked if anyone had any questions, and someone asked him…something, I don’t even care enough to remember. Then he started up again, talking for another, 20 minutes at least that was cutting into our lunch time. I could swear that the poor schmuck who asked the question was going to get jumped in the hall shortly after dismissal.
The second one was a bunch of middle schoolers who dressed up in black cloaks with name tags such as “LSD” “Alcohol” “Cocaine” “Heroin” Etc. etc. etc. They did some cheesy play that nobody payed attention to, until the end, where they brought up again the deaths of a kid last year in a drunk driving accident, the guy who still goes to school at our high school and was permanently injured in the same accident. Side note: This kid was the 3rd best basketball player in the state of Colorado, and he can’t walk correctly now. And a girl who died literally days before the play in a drunk driving accident.
Other than that, I think that we all just sat in the back and made out. Everybody else just talked.
The only one of these things we were subjected to in school that I remember was when we had Dave Toma come and talk about drugs when I was a freshman. He was a plainclothes detective in New Jersey, about which they did a TV series entitled (imagine!) Toma. He was also the person upon whom “Baretta” was based. Actually a pretty cool event.
Does it count if we had a detective come to teach us about sexual harrassment and rape?
Well, this guy asked the class what we believed rape was, and I put my hand up and answered something like “When someone has sex with you without your consent…”
…and he replied “What if I put my penis in your mouth?” to which I replied “That’d cost extra”
…yeah, I got in trouble for it, but it was funny.
And it was funnier because the detective used himself for examples in rape/sexual harrassment cases. That’s bored, immature high school senior students for you.
I went to a small high school in rural Michigan (yes, this is important, bear with me). From grades 7 - 12 we had 150 students, one third of them in special ed from inbreeding (no, I’m not exaggerating). For the most part they were white, lower class and of Finnish ancestry.
One year, our school kept bringing in motivational speakers from inner city school districts. I could see the look of fear on their faces when they spoke to us (mostly African-American speakers). One guy showed us his bullet wounds in an effort to keep us from joining gangs. Gee, thanks for the tip. I’m still wondering what the hell our administration was thinking.