By Rebecca Goldstein
I have been a member of the Binghamton Review for about two years now, and within the past two semesters I have noticed that we have some big issues. See that joke there? In all seriousness, many of our issues (otherwise known as our property) are being defaced and destroyed. Reminiscent of notes your mom left for you in your lunchbox, we’ve had cute notes left for us declaring us “fascists.” A particularly heartwarming one was on a small stack of issues left at the top of the Marketplace stairs near M&T Bank, declaring our issues “toilet paper.” We’ve had issues torn in half and left hanging; we’ve had whole stacks literally just stolen and put somewhere else.
The whole mission of the Review is to encourage free speech. Although we have an agenda to preserve a conservative/libertarian voice on campus, we want to be able to show that we are truly devoted to a free discussion of people’s ideas. However, there is absolutely a line between “free speech” and “destruction of property and defacing someone’s work because you’re a triggered little snowflake.” We quite literally are all adults here, and we are all bright enough to have been accepted into a “premier public university”. I guess we cannot have civil discourse and instead must act like a bunch of little bitches apparently.
It is appalling to me that the “tolerant left” acts so intolerant! Because let’s be real – we know exactly what kind of person is causing all of this drama. The far left – the anarcho-communists, the extreme socialists, the die-hard Bernie bros, and every so-called forward-thinking “progressive” – preach tolerance until it doesn’t fit their belief system, and then they claim that the political right is the true intolerant and hateful side. Literally it’s a bunch of pieces of paper stapled together. How is it that big of a deal? If what we print is such an issue to you, don’t touch it, and instead write a long hateful email to our editor. Just walk away. It’s a printed magazine; what is it gonna do, jump out and bite you? If it’s really that offensive to you then I can understand ripping a page down to wipe your leftist tears but that’s the ONLY thing.
You might think it’s so “edgy” to destroy our property or that you’re impacting real change in our organization. All you are doing is wasting SA funds by destroying the issues that they help us pay for, and preventing serious fans or critics from reading what we have to say. You might say, “But my actions are totally justified! You print hate speech!” (Spoiler alert: views expressed by the writers don’t necessarily represent the views of the publication as a whole.)
It couldn’t be made any more clear by rational apologists for the right: speech is not violence. If someone says or believes something you don’t agree with, or that you think constitutes a call to violence but does not literally rouse soldiers in battle, it’s not justified to respond with violence against them. Changing one’s assumptions about the world and human nature can provide a valid defense of the left and the right. Understand that they’re just that: assumptions. That is, until you can prove them in a rational debate, which seems to be something that a certain side of the political spectrum is incapable of having.
I hope that people start to notice your defacement of our property. I hope that your vandalism will not go unchecked, and that justice and sanity will be restored to our campus. And if my words are triggering to you because they defend the right of anyone to speak freely in a forum of ideas, you’re going to think twice about responding in the way you have the past two semesters. You’re going to find a mature way to express your thoughts and feelings about our mission and what we do. If you can’t, I pity the fool.
GIF from http://www.therichest.com/shocking/15-sjw-fails-that-made-us-cringe/