Playing in the News-Leader

The 400-word edi­tion of my open let­ter to the admin­is­tra­tion of Missouri State University was pub­lished as the Voice of the Day in the Springfield News-Leader on 1 May, 2007. The com­ments forum is of par­tic­u­lar inter­est. On the whole, I’m quite dis­pleased with the responses, both in sup­port and in oppo­si­tion — and not just here, but also on the live­jour­nal threads which caused a bit of a stir.

RE: The Opposition:

Alrighty, what’s the deal? I’ve been trumped in argu­ments count­less times. Admittedly, not as often on the firearms issues, but even then I’ve had times in which I’ve had to back off and con­tem­plate. That hasn’t hap­pened this time… at all, and I don’t know what to make of it. Except, per­haps, that the oppo­si­tion just doesn’t have a leg on which to stand. Good thought, but I hes­i­tate to rest in that.  Seems a touch intel­lec­tu­ally lazy.

RE: The Support:  

Must you be so idi­otic? Let’s be prac­ti­cal. When you blindly refer to all those crazy “lib­er­als”, you deny them any abil­ity to rea­son with you. If you can­not be rea­soned with, then your ideas are weak and inde­fen­si­ble. When you make ref­er­ences to “Sodom and Gomorrah” and the end times, even I shut you out — and I’m a polit­i­cally incor­rect fun­da­men­tal­ist evan­gel­i­cal Christian. What’s the deal? Do you have that lit­tle inter­est in show­ing peo­ple the log­i­cal grounds for both your faith and your polit­i­cal opinions?

In short, I’m clearly the only intel­li­gent, wise, and mod­er­ately sane human being on our planet. Time to chan­nel The Brain.