Kenneth Cole Tweets about Egypt Situation to Promote Spring Collection

I’ve heard of making jokes in light of tragedy, but Kenneth Cole may have taken that a little more than overboard. Last week Kenneth Cole tweeted what he thought would be funny involving the situation in Egypt. He tweeted “ Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo- KC”. The initials at the end imply the post was approved by Kenneth Cole before it went public.

As according to Huffington Post, Kenneth Cole immediately removed the post and created a new one apologizing for his actions. His second post said “Re Egypt tweet: we weren’t intending to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment-KC”. Even though Kenneth Cole immediately apologized, the Public Relations damage had already been done.

As if this wasn’t enough damage angry viewers continued to add to the publicity nightmare. Viewers were furious about the “Hijacking” of the Cairo hashtag that was intended only for tracking the latest news in Egypt.  Many viewers thought it would be comical to create fake Kenneth Cole PR twitter accounts with posts such as “People from New Orleans are flooding into Kenneth Cole Stores!” and “Our new looks are dropping faster than the World Trade Center”.

Kenneth Cole’s purpose may not have been to create such a whirlwind of bad decisions, but it certainly doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the problems with a satirical tweet on such a sensitive situation. Hopefully this string of events will lead Kenneth Cole to think twice before posting another one of these publicity mayhem tweets.

This I believe

I Believe Our Elders Deserve Utmost Respect

As a young child I was always surrounded by my grandparents. Whether the occasion was birthday parties, Christmas Eve get togethers, or just a mommy vacation weekend where I would be shipped off to grandmas. One of my favorites was sitting on grandpa’s lap for him to read me the Elmo book time and time again. He used to tell me that by the time I was three years old he could recite the book backwards by memory, and that he had lost some feeling in his legs from how often they were my favorite chair.

My grandfather told countless stories about World War II, the German troops, the Soviet Union, his ships, and other memorable events to him. He could go on for hours just telling one event. Something as simple as the word “hatchet” could start him off on an entire day’s worth of story telling. 


One day he pulled out his stash of illegal pictures from a naval base bombing that he took. As I looked through his photos and compared them to those of my history books he had many similar photos of the same places in my book that he had taken. He would point to the event and chuckle. “If only they told you what really happened”, and expand on the all of the details of historical events that my history books left out. My grandfather may not of been coined as the smartest man in the world, but in my world he was. He held so much knowledge beyond that of just book smarts, literally. All the events that we pay hundreds of dollars to learn about he actually lived through. And for that he deserves the utmost respect.

My grandmother on the other hand may not be an expert on history, but she has the biggest heart of anyone I have ever met. Her passion in life is loving. The kind of love I watched between her and my grandfather is the kind I’ve only ever heard about. At eighty-five years old my grandmother told me about the first time she met my grandfather. She was sixteen at the time, and here she is seventy years later still getting butterflies as if it were yesterday. My grandmother is a breed of person that you really don’t see so much anymore.


My grandfather passed away in October of last year. Reminiscing on his stories I wish I would of gotten involved in them at an earlier age. I wish I had learned to respect all of the knowledge he had to offer. On the day of his funeral I looked around me and it was amazing to me how many people knew and respected him so very much.


I developed a true solid respect for not just my grandparents but also the older generation as a whole.  My grandparents and the people like them are my heroes, and I have learned to give them true, utmost, genuine, and everlasting respect