Post by eJm on Nov 27, 2007 14:46:13 GMT -5
At Uni, we've just launched the first issue of our student paper. It's really awesome looking (and I've even got a column in there *cheap promotion*) and people seem to be taking a hand to it.
But that was before this email came in. Basically, we're starting a letters section near the back of the paper and asked people to email in their things and since I'm part of the Opinions section of the paper, I got this email too. I won't tell you who this person is because it wouldn't be right to do so,
After I finished reading all this, first off I started to shake in shock, but then I got angry and for the first time in a very long time, I was 100% pissed off. Why? Because, as you can see, there was no point to this letter at all. No insight, no 'Great/Bad job on the Newspaper', nothing like that. Ho No, this guy thought it would be the most awesome idea ever to send a stupid email that did nothing except make him look like a jackass.
Do we live in a generation where everything we do is crapped on? Alot of people I know put alot of work into this paper and yeah, maybe it wasn't the most perfect thing ever and yeah, maybe it wasn't the best thing ever, but to go out front and insulting what we did is pathetic. Yeah, maybe
This is why we aren't as good a generation as the Eighties or the Sixties or even the War Vetrens. People crap on everything you do. Noone gives you a chance to do anything without it either being for your own good. Noone does anything for themselves or for the greater good anymore. We just live in really shallow times. Everything can be made into a joke, every story can be mocked, every cause turned into a running gag.
I don't blame just one person, no too easy. There are several factors for this. Executives who think the only things we care about are whether we have the latest gadget or what Paris Hilton is doing now in China. The majority who let this still happen by keeping to their routine. The popstars/celebrities/public figures who keep reminding us we're all a flock of sheep who just parade around whilst everyone else whips us into shape.
But I don't get it. What did we do to deserve this? We spent time out to make a newspaper for the students all funded out of our deparment's budget (most of it coming from the head of department) and alot of people worked hard to get it out there. What did we do? Maybe it was cliche to do a student paper, but at least we were doing something with our time instead of acting like everything sucks and doing drugs/drink or waste the whole 6 months of the course not learning a thing and basically flushing £1500 down the toilet.
If this is going too political, I apologise, but this has riled me up more than anything else has in a really long time and I wanted to get it out somewhere.
I need to calm down....
But that was before this email came in. Basically, we're starting a letters section near the back of the paper and asked people to email in their things and since I'm part of the Opinions section of the paper, I got this email too. I won't tell you who this person is because it wouldn't be right to do so,
The star letter will win a canvas hoody! Well, smurf me, I better write something pretty groundbreaking. ‘If there’s something that’s got you wound up or an issue that you want to high-light then let us know’. What winds art students up? Nazi’s, I suppose, although Hitler and his posse were quite into art, weren’t they? So perhaps art students and Nazi’s have more in common than either of them would like to admit. Maybe if we had a little chat, we’d actually quite like each other. We could play volley-ball in good-humour. And, lets face it, their flag is quite eye-catching.
Perhaps I should dictate the nature of art, just in case everybody’s forgotten. That would be useful and interesting and intelligent, wouldn’t it? Or maybe talk about the sixties and how revolutionary everybody was compared to today’s youngsters? Because it really was brilliant; free-love and hippies and the human-rights movement. My parents were there and they told me all about it. They were young, then, and actually had sex. They say that young people these days are just ironic little vaginas. ‘It’s not true!’, I say. ‘Our drugs are just better than yours!’.
So, I was sitting in a pub-garden with a mate and a middle-aged lady walked past and, as she did so, she whispered to her husband - ‘Did you remember to lock the M-I-R-K?’. She spelt it to him, the way you’d spell ‘biscuit’ in the presence of a dog. We did look a bit dodgy, I suppose, but she could have at least spelt it properly. And these are the kind of people we trust when they tell us how much better they were than us. Paranoid, middle-aged Mercedes drivers. The very same people who told us we could have a Hamster for our fifth birthday and then gave us some caged, shredded newspaper instead. Three years I spent poking through those bars with a pencil, desperately trying to wake him up from under his shreds and run around the wheel for my friends until, one day, you come home to find the cage gone and a drunken note from your mum telling you that Kevin is dead. Luckily, I’m lying to you for emotional reasons, as we were never actually bought a ‘hamster’, although, my brother did have a Sylvanian Family. But even that ended in tears, as my dad, fearing my brother’s unwillingness to stop playing with them after the age of twelve might make him a homosexual, took them down the tip and told us they’d all caught myxomatosis.
But who else can we trust? We didn’t fight in The War. We didn’t Love in The Sixties. We just watched Neighbours and Fresh Prince and, on Saturdays, Casualty, Gladiators and Blind Date. And we all know television is evil. Television kills ten whales a week. The eighties looks like the craptest decade until you’re about nineteen, and then you start to quite like it and, if it wasn’t for all those years of repressed love for the eighties you never lived through, you’d jump straight into a shell-suit and a pair of Nikes and hit the coke. When I finish my time machine I’ll visit all of these decades I’ve never seen and the next time somebody in the pub tries to tell me how crap the world is compared to a decade they’ve never lived through, I can imagine ploughing their head through the glass of the pin-ball machine, safe in the knowledge that I know for certain that they are a lying bastard. And, that night, you will go home to your families and sleep soundly, completely unaware of how much blood you lost.
Perhaps I should dictate the nature of art, just in case everybody’s forgotten. That would be useful and interesting and intelligent, wouldn’t it? Or maybe talk about the sixties and how revolutionary everybody was compared to today’s youngsters? Because it really was brilliant; free-love and hippies and the human-rights movement. My parents were there and they told me all about it. They were young, then, and actually had sex. They say that young people these days are just ironic little vaginas. ‘It’s not true!’, I say. ‘Our drugs are just better than yours!’.
So, I was sitting in a pub-garden with a mate and a middle-aged lady walked past and, as she did so, she whispered to her husband - ‘Did you remember to lock the M-I-R-K?’. She spelt it to him, the way you’d spell ‘biscuit’ in the presence of a dog. We did look a bit dodgy, I suppose, but she could have at least spelt it properly. And these are the kind of people we trust when they tell us how much better they were than us. Paranoid, middle-aged Mercedes drivers. The very same people who told us we could have a Hamster for our fifth birthday and then gave us some caged, shredded newspaper instead. Three years I spent poking through those bars with a pencil, desperately trying to wake him up from under his shreds and run around the wheel for my friends until, one day, you come home to find the cage gone and a drunken note from your mum telling you that Kevin is dead. Luckily, I’m lying to you for emotional reasons, as we were never actually bought a ‘hamster’, although, my brother did have a Sylvanian Family. But even that ended in tears, as my dad, fearing my brother’s unwillingness to stop playing with them after the age of twelve might make him a homosexual, took them down the tip and told us they’d all caught myxomatosis.
But who else can we trust? We didn’t fight in The War. We didn’t Love in The Sixties. We just watched Neighbours and Fresh Prince and, on Saturdays, Casualty, Gladiators and Blind Date. And we all know television is evil. Television kills ten whales a week. The eighties looks like the craptest decade until you’re about nineteen, and then you start to quite like it and, if it wasn’t for all those years of repressed love for the eighties you never lived through, you’d jump straight into a shell-suit and a pair of Nikes and hit the coke. When I finish my time machine I’ll visit all of these decades I’ve never seen and the next time somebody in the pub tries to tell me how crap the world is compared to a decade they’ve never lived through, I can imagine ploughing their head through the glass of the pin-ball machine, safe in the knowledge that I know for certain that they are a lying bastard. And, that night, you will go home to your families and sleep soundly, completely unaware of how much blood you lost.
After I finished reading all this, first off I started to shake in shock, but then I got angry and for the first time in a very long time, I was 100% pissed off. Why? Because, as you can see, there was no point to this letter at all. No insight, no 'Great/Bad job on the Newspaper', nothing like that. Ho No, this guy thought it would be the most awesome idea ever to send a stupid email that did nothing except make him look like a jackass.
Do we live in a generation where everything we do is crapped on? Alot of people I know put alot of work into this paper and yeah, maybe it wasn't the most perfect thing ever and yeah, maybe it wasn't the best thing ever, but to go out front and insulting what we did is pathetic. Yeah, maybe
This is why we aren't as good a generation as the Eighties or the Sixties or even the War Vetrens. People crap on everything you do. Noone gives you a chance to do anything without it either being for your own good. Noone does anything for themselves or for the greater good anymore. We just live in really shallow times. Everything can be made into a joke, every story can be mocked, every cause turned into a running gag.
I don't blame just one person, no too easy. There are several factors for this. Executives who think the only things we care about are whether we have the latest gadget or what Paris Hilton is doing now in China. The majority who let this still happen by keeping to their routine. The popstars/celebrities/public figures who keep reminding us we're all a flock of sheep who just parade around whilst everyone else whips us into shape.
But I don't get it. What did we do to deserve this? We spent time out to make a newspaper for the students all funded out of our deparment's budget (most of it coming from the head of department) and alot of people worked hard to get it out there. What did we do? Maybe it was cliche to do a student paper, but at least we were doing something with our time instead of acting like everything sucks and doing drugs/drink or waste the whole 6 months of the course not learning a thing and basically flushing £1500 down the toilet.
If this is going too political, I apologise, but this has riled me up more than anything else has in a really long time and I wanted to get it out somewhere.
I need to calm down....
"Is there a problem here?"
