The first slogan that came to my mind when we were told about this assignment was the Penn State t-shirt recently made about the NCAA sanctions against the football team and the school. The first day these shirts came out I remember seeing everyone already wearing one. They were a huge hit among the students here on campus. Signs went up in stores and restaurants everywhere downtown. You couldn’t walk two steps without seeing this slogan. It is a clever way to use Penn State’s WE ARE slogan and make it more effective in relation to the football chaos and everything that’s gone on in the past year.
Although this t-shirt slogan WE ARE… PISSED OFF is very clever and catches people’s attention, what people are missing is the other side of the situation and why the team was punished in the first place. For most of the students, the sanctions against the team were an outrage, and I’ll admit I initially felt that way too. But after I thought about it more, I realized there was another side to this. The side of the kids that were hurt in the midst of the scandal. To them it may have felt like the university and the surrounding State College area were more concerned with the punishments to the Penn State football team than with what happened in order for these sanctions to take place.
This shirt definitely got to the point and was a clever way to catch people’s attention. I see people wearing them all over campus everyday. I’m not saying I completely disagree with it, honestly I wanted one when I first heard about them, but I just think we sometimes need to take a step back and think about the bigger picture.