Look out! The marching band has escaped onto the field!

Ah, yes...the marching band takes the field. I was never a band geek in high school, more the writer type than anything else, but stories like this never fail to make me crack a smile. Down in San Antonio, Texas, the Churchill High marching band is under fire for the routine they have been performing as of late. The complaints started after the performance of their routine, "Symphonic Schizophrenia," at the recent University Interscholastic League state band competition, where it placed eighth out of thirty, by the way. The routine featured fake padded walls and some band members in strait jackets rambling around the field erratically.

Despite the fact this routine had been performed several times by the band at their schools' football games, the first complaints came after the state competition. I guess it would be kind of irritating for the kids at Dallas School for the Criminally Insane, you know, the only school in the Lone Star State with multiple personalities.

Ed Dickey, head of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness said that he had received several calls from people upset over the performance, and that Churchill's band lacked sensitivity and were trivializing mental illness, adding "This is ignorance." Damn, and to think of all the times I have used the phrase "batshit crazy" in blog posts or on my radio show. What a shot to my ego, finding out a high school marching band has less sensitivity than I do.

Aw, come on Ed...how many other examples of insensitivity toward mental illness are out there, and you want to pick on a high school band? Have you had a sit-down with the composer of the piece they were performing, from which the band chose its theme? No, probably not. I'm just saying is all. Besides that, you have to give that band a hand for creativity. Honestly, you show me the kid who can play a trombone while in a strait jacket, and then tell me they only got eighth place. What the hell did the winning school do, freakin' levitate?

"We're taking a step back and looking at what we do here, and we're going to make some changes.""We don't want this to happen again," according to Laura Calderon, a yeshole for the Northeast Independent School District. "We don't want this to happen again." Calderon added that NISD will add an additional layer of review before allowing student to perform potentially controversial routines.

Some people may chalk this up to simple political correctness, but think about this story the next time you twirl your finger around your temple, or better yet, next time you have the urge to tell the cashier that the gas prices are crazy, keep it to yourself. While it's a perfectly valid opinion, you never know what crusade lurks around the corner.