Editor:
I find myself seldom affected by on-campus demonstrators and boisterous ecclesiastics anymore.
Each semester begets a controversialist atop a soapbox who eventually fades into the week’s memories, only remembered once they reappear the following school year.
But a particular group of loudmouth sign-carriers caught my attention this week. It wasn’t so much the group that caught my attention, but instead the attention that they were receiving from students.
The group, which offered the typical buffet of homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-evolution and anti-sex, was challenged by students’ screams and debate. It was a tense atmosphere created by a group that should have otherwise been ignored.
While in college, it is fun to protest and voice our ever-forming opinions, but we must do so with caution and forethought. It takes a certain kind of finesse to move the masses and convert the believers, and many of the religious are capable of doing that. But Ken Fleck and his group’s barbaric bigotries and grunts and moans display not only a lack of finesse but also an ignorance that is déclassé of a university and its students.
Yet students gathered around indulging and oppugning — giving them exactly what they wanted, as if to say that their radicalism and bigotries were worth debate.
While their protested topics are indeed heated-debate issues, the way students and Fleck’s group argued undermined the importance of fighting these battles peacefully and passionately.
It would be more fitting for the student voice to be raised with passionate, thought-out clarity in a classroom or among friends and not with self-proclaimed radicals on a nationwide tour.
As those pursuing higher education, we should strive for civil debate and shun egocentrics looking to stir the pot.
Ben Moser
UNM student
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