| Spoil Sports?
Last weekend, senior golfer Angela Stanford won the Lady Paladin tournament on a play-off hole, and junior tennis player Esteban Carril battled against an aching back to maintain his No. 1 ranking in Region VI. But few people at TCU know either of those facts. Both of the Horned Frog golf teams are consistently ranked in the top 25, yet few students or faculty are able to find time to make it to the golf tournaments. Carril has been a nationally ranked player in collegiate tennis since his arrival in Fort Worth, yet less than 10 students have found time to cheer him on during his three years of dominance in Texas tennis. It's your loss. We'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe last weekend you were napping during the afternoon so you could listen to the TCU vs. Hawaii football game at 11:05 p.m. But this weekend you have no excuse. The football team has a bye week, and they are spending the weekend visiting Cook's Children Hospital to brighten the days of ill children. As those children are enlightened, you should also broaden your horizons. We suggest going to see the Volley Frogs play against Southern Methodist University at 3 p.m. Saturday in Dallas. Try supporting a team that is having its best season since its induction. Or cheer for senior outside hitter Jill Pape as she makes strides to be the best, most prolific point scorer in Western Athletic Conference history. Maybe even attempt a trip out to the TCU Soccer Complex to watch the men's soccer team make a run at making the NCAA tournament. The Frogs play a WAC game at 3 p.m. today and at 1 p.m. Sunday. Don't be a spoil sport; the small-revenue athletes deserve to see some of their peers in purple on the sidelines.
Battle hate with critical thinking Brent Scarpo, a Hollywood casting agent, seemed to have appointed himself the main crusader for hate crimes in America, pointing out his friendship with the mother of Matthew Shepard, the homosexual University of Wyoming student who was brutally murdered, and blending complicated messages into a presentation that was neither inspirational nor informative. Although Scarpo brought a powerful message on video, his own image seemed tainted by optimism and an impossible goal, "A Hate Free Millennium." While I'm am not opposed to the idea of a hate-free millennium, I do, however, believe the violence that caused the deaths of Matthew Shepard, James Byrd Jr. and the students at Columbine High School are not the products of hate. They are the symptoms of social conditioning and education placed in the hands of the media and a lack of critical thinking. These crimes are symbols of an increase in the acceptance of violence manifested through our lack of critical thinking in the realms of media and art. We find it necessary to immolate, rather than extrapolate. The students who executed their classmates at Columbine were not ruthless killers, but scared children, unaware of alternative solutions to the intense turmoil inside their heads caused by other students. Simply put, "bullies." It is the same kind of hate manifested in name-calling and exclusion that drives people to kill. While we may believe that this final step is too extreme to comprehend, we must re-examine how many times we've witnessed killings on television or films. Scarpo himself cast the movie, "Air Force One," in which people who stood up for their beliefs, through a desperate and inconceivable plan, were killed by Harrison Ford's character, the president of the United States, a person who should embody peace at all times. There is a contradiction in the message and the messenger. No doubt Scarpo is adamant about his cause, but who can we trust, an insider who deals whatever culture seems to bring in the most ticket sales, or are we to look somewhere else? I found it difficult to listen to Scarpo's plan to create a hate-free millennium, in which people would simply wake up on Jan. 1 and choose not to hate anymore. The idea seems good until we consider the practical forces behind it. I consider myself a forward thinker, but isn't it a contradiction to follow peace blindly as much as it is to follow hate blindly? It is our job as students to be the critical thinkers in society. We are able to delineate between what is possible and what is real. A world full of hate is impossible, but a world with the absence of hate is also inconceivable. Scarpo seems to want to tackle the battle between good and evil with a placebo of unchallenged statements. We are unique as a people because we have a choice. We make moral decisions every day concerning how we will treat others and how we will present ourselves. Our society is rich, not just for the good things we do, but for the opportunity to make mistakes and to evolve from those mistakes. Hate crimes are always evil, however; they deliver a powerful message concerning our times and values. They ask the question of whether we will think more about the messages we let into our minds or if we follow blindly the values presented to us by people driven by a capitalist culture. Behind the pictures of all art, if that's what we can call it, are messages. We can trust these messages, or we can criticize them and bring them into the open. Otherwise, kids with guns will do it for us.
Matthew S. Colglazier is a freshman news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth. He can be reached at (mscolglazier@delta.is.tcu.edu). Newspaper thefts fail to deter readers The Skiff sure has been taking a beating lately. Tattered pieces of our beloved student newspaper roll gently across campus like listless pieces of tumbleweed drifting in the wind. Scattered sections of it sit abandoned in classroom desks or lay strewn about the floor like orphans abandoned by people who leave The Main in a hurry. The Skiff has been torn, ripped, discarded and used as a rag for dirty tables. It's been stepped on, sneered at and ignored. Heck, it's even been burned once this semester. For a name that conjures up an image of a handcrafted newspaper sloop floating idyllically down a quiet stream, it really has incurred a lot of rough damage. But that all pales in comparison to the newest injustice that Skiffs are now being stolen. On Tuesday, almost all copies on campus were taken and thrown away by a group of unidentified people. Unfortunately, they repeated the act the very next day, once again withholding vital information that all students, faculty and staff have a right to know. Now, we could go into all the legal issues and moral ramifications of this whole event, but I'm more interested in other aspects of this story. Why did the individuals decide to grab more than 4,600 copies and throw them away? Why did they cheat the student body of news information? And what purpose did they think their actions could possibly serve? If they wanted to hide information, then their plan drastically failed. Not only did they blunder their original goal which was presumably to hide the Skiff candidate endorsements, but they also drew huge attention to the fact that they were preventing people from reading just that. It seems to me that hiding something only makes people more curious to find out what's being withheld. For the majority of the campus that faithfully picks up a Skiff for whatever reason to do whatever purpose, I'm sorry that a few others ruined that privilege to let people think for themselves. Obviously, the thieves decided to censor the information just because of something they didn't agree with. It's honestly one of the dumbest ideas ever perpetrated. If journalism worked in this fashion, all we would ever read about is the weather and we would certainly never read about opinions or the truth. It's like the Rangers stealing all copies of the Dallas Morning News because a sports columnist criticized their post-season performance. For the rest of the people who never noticed the Skiff missing or don't even know what the Skiff is, again I apologize. They are probably part of the faction that also doesn't know what SGA stands for and probably wouldn't bother to read this column either. But one thing is certain: The Skiff is impossible to ignore. Whether we pick it up for sports, to disagree with know-it-all opinion writers or to figure out crossword puzzles while our professors lecture (nobody does this, of course), we pick up the Skiff to read about events presented in a timely, concise and effective manner. We pick it up to read the news. Some people lambaste the Skiff for being unfair or editorializing. But for the most part, the reporting is accurate, fair and well-written. Sure a few mistakes might be made, but it is, after all, a college newspaper. The reporters working in the newsroom are dedicated to presenting information in a non-biased fashion, and they do so for long hours coupled with little or no pay. They work until morning for students to get a fair look at the Student Government Association candidates only to have their hard efforts swept away the next day by people who disagreed with what was written. And this isn't just coming from the viewpoint of a jaded Skiff writer upset over stolen newspapers but also from the perspective of a Student Government member and a fraternity member. Being a part of all three of these organizations, I can see three different viewpoints, and I know that what the Skiff prints is the story as it really happened. The excuse, "The Skiff messed up the story" generally doesn't cut it. So by stealing Skiffs, the people responsible proved nothing more than the fact that they are idiots. They also caused a lot of frustration from students who couldn't find a newspaper, from reporters who couldn't have their stories read and from the student publications division, which had to spend extra money trying to fix the problem. But the people also provoked a renewed interest in the newspaper because of what transpired. So from now on, grab a Skiff and look for an issue or a story that interests you. Or find out something that day about what's happening on campus or in the world that you normally wouldn't take time out to notice. There's plenty of information waiting in the pages, and there's plenty of Skiffs on the newsstands to go around. Let's just hope that we're always given the chance to read them.
Kevin Dunleavy is a junior advertising/public relations major from Spring, Texas. He can be reached at (kduns80@airmail.net). |
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