Ahmed's Clock

     Racism or not, Ahmed Mohammed did not deserve all the media attention he got. So before I ramble on, a bit of backstory is required. A 14 year old boy, Ahmed Mohammed, brought a strange looking clock to school in Texas, which was believed to be a bomb and the police were called. This was in the days surrounding 9/11, so paranoia about terrorist attacks was increased too. Anyways, the boy was arrested, but then the clock was actually found just to be a clock that he had built. He was released from jail and now media is making a huge deal out of it. Racist or not, Mohammed's teacher was simply doing her job when she called the cops after her student brought this suspicious clock into her classroom. Her job is to protect her students, and so she did. Regardless of race, if ANY human being brought a suspicious device into my classroom (if I was a teacher), I would call the cops immediately. But now the teacher is being accused of racism, and the kid is getting all this attention. Here's a list of all the things he got due to this event:   .

• Scholarship to NASA Space Camp
• Offer to visit Facebook/ Mark Zuckerburg
• A t-shirt worn up in space
• Tours of MIT and Harvard
• Offer to visit General Electronics Headquarters
• An internship from Twitter
• Possible internship from Reddit
• Offer to visit Autodesk
• Free circuit kit
• Scholarship to New European College (business school)
• Tweet from R&B artist asking if Ahmed wanted to join the music business, then he'd help him.
• And so much more attention, trending hashtags on Twitter, news interviews and stories about his "bravery", and so much more

           All of this for a fourteen year old kid. He now basically can go to whatever top achieving college he wants. will get a guaranteed internship and career at his pick of electronics companies, and even gets offers from musicians and business schools if he doesn't want to go into electronics. He never again needs to worry about college, getting a job, or any of these things. And all these things come from a questionably racist act and a homemade clock. Now does this seem fair to you? Even someone who excels in school and is at the top of their class can get about half of these things if they're very lucky. People work their whole life to achieve something like this and Ahmed just gets it handed to him on a silver platter. All this attention may have generated from racism (if it even was that and not just common sense to call the cops over a questionable object) but other racist acts happen every day and gain not even close to this kind of attention. And I'm not denying that he may or may not be a victim, I'm not denying that there may be some questionably racist acts involved here, but this kind of attention is really unneccesary. I almost feel bad for this kid for being suddenly thrust into the spotlight,recieve all this stuff and suddenly being super popular at school and online. But I suppose that's just how the media works, and the average American eats this stuff up and chews it for a couple of weeks before suddenly forgetting about it.                                                                                   ~~~ Ahmed Mohammed~~~