OUR VIEW: Don’t lose sight of the college experience

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled ranting and raving to bring you a special public service announcement.

This is going to sound strange coming from the same gray box where it seems like every week we get caught up in the middle of some tense campus issue – partly because that’s our job, to get you guys talking – but we feel like the tension is just running a little too high right now.

Instead of a happy-fun time full of carefree hand jiving, the Statesman office has been the scene of a lot of rancor, throwing of things, and some mild swearing.

We all just need to chill.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Good.

With all the controversy about smoking, Tier II tuition, fire extinguishers, etc., we think some Aggies – truth be told, we’re as guilty as anyone – may be losing sight of what college really is.

A time to party, stay up late and eat ice cream and Fritos for every meal because we’re adults and we’re going to do what we want?

Not exactly.

A time to learn and prepare ourselves to be productive citizens of this nation?

Partially.

College is supposed to be the time of our lives, right? You ask any old person and they’d probably trade a lot for just one more year of college. So instead of wasting all of our time bickering and further driving a wedge between the student population on campus, maybe we can all just take a second to realize that we’re all really a part of the same experience. Man, that sounds weird, because we bet there are people reading right now and saying, “Well, I really think the paper is the one trying to drive the wedge.” We aren’t wedge drivers, just conversation facilitators, but we can see how that conversation may lead to some divisiveness, which we all could use a break from.

We don’t need to forget about campus issues, though. They are important, and should be discussed. But in the whole discussion, we can’t lose sight of the fact that college – except for a couple weeks out of each semester – is supposed to be fun. We’ll have all our lives to yell at each other about a plethora of different problems, and there sure will be problems to yell about.

But, we only have four years, some have five or six or eight, to be in college. After this, we’ve heard it’s pretty hard to squeeze in an eight-hour block of “Guitar Hero” or four or five day marathons of “The Gilmore Girls” or “Lost.”

Basically, life sucks after this, so soak it up, kiddies.

Maybe we all need to take ourselves a little less seriously, loosen up, button down a little. If we’re too high strung, we’re liable to turn into our parents. And we can all agree that terrifying transition can wait.

So let’s all just try to make USU a fun place, especially since the sun will be coming out soon. Everyone just hold hands and maybe even hug. Well, that’s a little much actually. We don’t know where that came from.

Thank you for your attention. Shortly, we will return you to our regularly scheduled programming of angry ranting and perpetual complaining.