Someone apparently smashed in our box across the street from the UO Bookstore yesterday. Now we won’t be able to distribute there until we make repairs or get new boxes in.

All you really need to know about the valuation of free speech on this campus is that our issues are routinely dumped and our distribution boxes oftentimes stolen or vandalized. Some people just don’t want other people to be able to read our publication, it’s as simple as that. Contrast this with our view of MIM Notes and The Insurgent. We disagree with nearly everything written in those papers, but we’re all for people reading them.

Open and free discourse is one of the most fundamental aspects of any decent society, and the manifestation of this discourse on campuses is a war of ideas, a pull and push over topics such as politics, society, and the human species in general. The fact that people on this campus have apparantly resorted to the sad gimmicks of theft and violence is proof that their speech can no longer stand on its own merits. When there’s a book burning afoot, it is those who are throwing ideas into the fire who are truly in danger of becoming obsolete.

It’s unfortunate for us… now we need to spend valuable time fixing this distribution point rather than working on an upcoming issue. Damn.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 2:00 pm by Ian and is filed under Campus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.