Focus On Issues

Boston University students, you can do better.

The editorial pages of The Daily Free Press have been and always will be a forum for your opinions. The printed word has always been a sacred thing to me — a way, trite as it may seem, to immortalize thoughts that are important enough not just to be said, but to be read, taken in and reflected upon. This venue to air concerns is a crucial thing to have at such a large school, where there are so many important issues to be discussed and debated. But more than being a cool thing to have, these pages are a luxury. So to all students who complain they don’t have a voice: you do. This is your voice, as a student body and as individuals, heard by roughly 50,000 people every day reading on the web and on paper. Now more than ever we’re realizing the importance of thinking critically, as well as the importance of expressing meaningful points of view. That brings me to my point.

Over the past week, some letters have hurled scathing criticisms at writers. And while I’ve never been one to want to silence what people have to say, I wonder, do these people have anything to say? Call me an optimist, but I think they do. I think BU students have a lot to say, but rather than being trained to debate issues, we’ve been trained to debate each other. BU, when you think you’re waxing intellectual about someone’s lack of writing talent, can you make sure that you’re not actually slinging high-handed insults that go beyond debating an issue? It’s a futile argument and really does nothing more than make the writer feel (falsely) that they’ve just written something meaningful, while making someone else needlessly feel quite crappy.

There are many issues to put our pens to use toward: there are a few folks over in the Boston City Council who want to take away the resident parking stickers of students who live in dorms; the crime rate in Boston is going up and BU still isn’t extending the hours of its Escort Service; the higher-ups at BU are overwhelmingly men. Those are just some of the many issues that I hope someone will have the courage to write in about. It doesn’t take much courage or thought to decide you don’t like the way a column reads. Plus, it borders on, to use someone else’s phrase, “brain flatulence.”