You’ve got to love Monday morning. Most spend it with a bitter sense of injustice at having to wake up after a relaxing weekend. I partake in that activity with the added sense of injustice at having to go to Orgo 2. This particluar Monday, however, I was greeted with a new sense of wrong.
The story began over the weekend when I went home on a spontaneous decision to visit my family. Sunday morning, I woke up bright and early at 7 a.m. to watch my beloved Celtic Football Club take on its bitter rivals the Rangers Football Club in what is, without a doubt, the most heated and intense derby game in all of sports. As a Celtic fan, I’ve gotten used to having decisions during the course of the season go against my team. Celtic is the Irish-Catholic team in Scotland, a group that is discriminated against to this day in the country. Rangers is the team of the establishment. A team that, until recently, had an internal policy at the club to not sign Catholic players for the team.
Sunday morning was slightly different from any other Celtic-Rangers game I’ve seen in recent history, though. The blatant cheating against my team was increased, believe it or not, as Rangers players took it upon themselves to kick every Celtic player off the ball at every opportunity. This came with little-to-no discipline, and most times a free kick wasn’t even awarded to Celtic. To make matters worse, Scott Brown, the Celtic’s captain, was sent off for inexplicable reasons. Rangers finally scored in the 93rd minute of the game. The goal came from two players who shouldn’t even have been on the park at the time due to previous bad fouls.
The referee was praised after the game by the biased Scottish media, as Celtic Football Club declared an official appeal into the red card for Brown.
And then came the later sense of injustice. I’ve noticed that on a number of occasions this year, while writing for the Alligator, my words have been twisted and turned around on me. Usually, though, after hearing a counter-argument to my piece, I understand where the person came from, and I formulate a new, bipartisan opinion on my own.
The letters I don’t understand are the ones like the one Frank White, UF alumnus, sent Monday. I completely understand if Frank disagreed with my view on the Conservative Political Action Conference. What I can’t wrap my head around is why someone would take the time to try to make me seem like a bad person for a throwaway line in my column. The line that Frank was, in a satirical or serious manner, so incensed over was the following: “And Democrats must call attention to the – let’s face it — crazy groups represented at the CPAC and the seeming endorsements by the Republican speakers.”
I would like to make the following point clear, because it apparently wasn’t clear to some: I am not saying that everyone at CPAC is mentally ill. I’m saying that what some of the groups represented at CPAC are saying is crazy.
Far too often, it is evident that Alligator readers are very quick to attack the person writing the article and not the opinions in the article. There have been letters criticizing what I have been writing about but offering no specific reason why I am, say, “unoriginal.”
These letters frustrate the hell out of me because I write these opinions columns for fun. I genuinely enjoy writing for the paper. I guess what I’m saying is, if you are going to take the time to write to the paper about my columns, try to offer some sort of advice so I can improve my writing.
The point is, whether it is injustice over waking up early for class, getting cheated in a sport or having your words misunderstood in a public arena, we all suffer from wrongs.
So thank God it’s Spring Break. Have a good one everyone, and be safe.
