engage in spirited discourse regarding the “touchy” issues with the eventual goal of restoring balance to a nation about to topple off the edge of logic and into sheer insanity

...can be far more productve than arguing with other people set in their ways and beliefs. I don’t need to express my ideas to the world in order to feel validated, nor do I need to convert others to my way of thinking. Let’s face it: I don’t agree with most things other people consider fundamental and obvious, but I don’t need to advertise that at every turn. I will, of course, answer a legitimate question if it arises and I feel that the discussion will be beneficial to all parties involved, but I’m not willing to put myself in situations where I am clearly disadvantged by the very nature of the topic discussed, and will inevitably come off as a cruel, uncaring person if I allow such a dialogue to take place. Religion, for example, is a topic I flat-out refuse to discuss. You do your thing, I’ll do mine, and we’ll leave each other alone. End of story.

Sometimes being quiet is an unfortunate necessity when one lives in a society that is, for the most part, unaccepting of noncomformity. That’s definitely something I’ve learned. 4 years ago

• Dialogue & Conflict Resolution
• Fundamentalism
• The reality of bias5 years ago

PEOPLE ARE SO FLIPPING RETARDED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I was driving to class today, right? I get to campus, and right from the main entrance I find myself behind this little blue car that just so happens to drive right to the lot where I usually park. No biggie. The lot is pretty full, but I follow this blue car in anyway, just on the off chance that I’ll get a spot.

So, the blue car ahead of me finds a spot on the left and starts pulling in. I stop my car behind it because the lot is too narrow to go around. The blue car is about a quarter into the spot when suddenly, out of nowhere, the driver just decides to go backward. And not only does this driver want to go backward, this driver wants to go backward FAST – so fast, in fact, that I barely have time to take my hand from the top of the steering wheel and lower it three inches so I can blast the horn at this idiot that is about to slam my front end.

The horn doesn’t help. The blue car bangs into mine. I rattle off every swear word I can remember, then turn off the ignition and get out. The driver turns out to be a young girl (who to me looks barely 16) and who begins apologizing profusely for her act of complete lunacy; she claims that she didn’t see me behind her, but I don’t buy it because I follwed her to the lot, which is nearly a half-mile drive. I am relatively calm, explaining that backing out of a spot without checking to make sure that the coast is clear is possibly the most insanely stupid action on the planet. The girl looks like she might cry, so I turn to examine my car. No damage. All right, I think. I’ll be charitable. I tell her to ALWAYS watch where’s she going and I leave.

God, I am such a friggin’ nice person. I probably could have gotten her to buy me a new car – she looked totally impressionable. Obviously the fault was completely hers – for God’s sake, I would have been happy to reverse a little bit if she needed more room to pull in. But like I said, I didn’t even get a chance to take my hands off the wheel before it was over.

ARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHH. This little incident further affirms my undying belief that the entire human race is a fantastic mix of incompetent morons. 5 years ago

Why why why why why does everyone my age appear to have a drinking problem? Is it possible to go to college and attend a party where no one is drinking? And what compels people to take pictures of themselves, drunk, and post them on the net for the entire world to see?

I am so frustrated with trying to find people who have goals in life beyond getting wasted every night. And even when I’m home, I can’t escape it – it’s on TV, online, everywhere.

And then there are the real posers – the ones who don’t drink (mostly for religious reasons), yet regularly attend parties and “pretend” to be drunk for the sake of fitting in with the rest of them. That, above everything else, drive me insane. Why do people not stand up for their principles and tell the drinkers that they are destroying their livers and brains and that there’s a reason why kids under 21 are not allowed to buy alcohol?

I just don’t get what, exactly, is so wonderful and appealing about alcohol. How does making an idiot of onself and possibly sustaining organ damage make a substance “fun?” I can’t see how losing control of myself would be anything short of terrifying. I mean, if I have a bad cold and I take basic OTC meds and I get a little loopy, it’s not a nice feeling. Why someone would want to deliberately create a handicap is beyond me.

And one last jab….for all the people who call themselves Christian conservatives, doesn’t the Bible mention something about drinking? Something as in banning it?

I wonder what would happen if I started toting a Bible around and pointing out all the ways so-called Christian students are violating their own rules. Would it help? Probably not. I almost wish some prominent kid at my school would die in an alcohol-related car crash so for one weekend, maybe I wouldn’t have to listen to drunk people parading around campus and making my studying difficult. 5 years ago

The local newspaper published a letter on to the editor on April 30 that completely bashed my school, the school administration, our new Saudi exchange students, and the Muslim community at my school for “letting the barbarians [the Saudis] in.” This letter was in response to another story that had appeared a few weeks earlier which portrayed our new exchange students in a very positive light. The opinion letter essentially accused the exchange students of being terrorists and the university of willingly harboring them for their tuition money. It really caused a ruckus – we held a protest outside the student union and got quite a crowd. In just over an hour, about 350 people, students and professors alike, signed our petition in support of the school and the Saudi students, and denouncing the intolerant ways of the letter-writer. We got a fair bit of press coverage, and we sent the petition to the paper and directly to the offending letter-writer’s office (a local dentist – apparently 8 years of higher education taught the guy zip). It’s quite amazing to watch how Americans react when you tell them they’re un-American. Gives me a little bit of faith in the future (November 2008 anyone?).

Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, my best guess as to why the paper would even publish such a bigoted, ill-informed, right-wing mess of crap is to generate business. It certainly got out attention this time. As for the dentist…I hope he loses a few clients. It probably won’t happen, but it would be a nice bit of retribution.

About a week after our protest, the coordinator of the event and a good friend of mine found this is his inbox:
you fucking moron. You have cultural diversity figured out, but you are clueless about intellectual diversity, sniveling like a baby about opinions you disagree with. Go home and go back to fucking goats and camels. You may have papers, but you will NEVER be an American—you lack the mental capacity

The guy didn’t even have the guts to use his real name (he gave the name of a local lawyer, but obviously no decent lawyer writes like that), so we have no way of figuring out who he was. The whole thing just pisses me off. Here we are, trying to do the American thing and bring people together to fight intolerance, and this is how some idiot responds. And of these two angry attacks on students at my school, there is NOTHING constructive in either of them. It would be one thing to have an intellectual debate on a delicate topic and agree to disagree in the end, but there’s no way to do that when you’re dealing with nutters like these. I mean, I know it’s rural/suburban PA and there are some uber-conservative crazies out there, but honestly! This type of cowardice really grates on my nerves. These are the people who give America a bad rap, and, as one of the professors said as he signed our document, “I’d sign a petition to get this guy deported.”

If only it were that easy… 5 years ago