A call to action to on-campus Aggie to stop and evil among us
Friends, Aggies, countrymen: I come before you today with a call to action in a time of crisis.
Our honor, our pride and our school are all under direct attack from an enemy every bit as pernicious as terrorists. With all the focus on war, cancer, corruption and crime in the liberal media, I am afraid that we have been overlooking an equally serious threat: kids wearing apparel from other universities to the USU campus.
There are degrees of seriousness here: I don’t really begrudge anyone who wears the colors of a major, perennially ranked football or basketball team. Schools like USC are in another stratosphere from USU; taking umbrage to a Trojans ball cap would be like getting angered because someone wore a Yankees hat.
Next we have level-2 offenders: people who wear colors of universities which are in direct conflict with Utah State, either because of geography or conference alignment. I don’t want to make a federal case out of it here, but to the kid I saw walking by Ray B. West in a Louisiana Tech shirt last Monday: Didn’t you have anything else to wear? Or does your Bulldog pride just well up inside you and force you to make highly questionable wardrobe decisions?
If the latter is the case, I have a bright idea: Why not go there? You might be happier in Ruston. You could wear your ratty gray Hanes t-shirt every day, complain about how everyone calls your school “La Tech,” and get your butt kicked in basketball by USU twice a year.
Besides the La Tech guy, I have seen the puke green and gold of Colorado State on our campus this year, and also the dook brown of Wyoming. But that doesn’t bother me so badly, on the whole. What really sets my threat level to cadmium red is the sight of a level-1 offender. These are the people (or “tools”) who wear the insignia of our in-state rivals to school.
Even among the level-1 offenders, there is a subcategory of tools who are not merely satisfied with wearing a shirt which proclaims them to be a giant tool to the entire student body. They choose to wear colors which at a casual glance may appear to be USU’s … but aren’t. They were stolen.
You all know what I am talking about here, the Yoobies. Brigham Young University steals our colors, eradicates free speech on their campus, has the gall to have a big-league football program that routinely knocks off PAC-10 schools, creates a massive in-state fan base due to being predominantly LDS and being on TV all the time in a predominantly LDS state, and then sends out drones wearing officially licensed BYU apparel to attend college at the very school they stole the colors from. I would say it’s irony at it’s best, but I like irony.
Wearing BYU apparel on Utah State’s hallowed campus grounds not only makes you look like a slack-jawed nitwit, it is offensive to everyone around you. I’m assuming you would have enough common sense not to wear Crip clothing to a Blood neighborhood. Well that is basically what you are doing, except unfortunately you are probably not risking being beaten within an inch of your life here in Logan.
But you say, “Apples and oranges, Terry. I grew up watching BYU and I don’t see what is wrong with continuing to support the university I loved as a kid, even though I didn’t get in and had to go to a different school, and they are pure unadulterated evil.”
By wearing that ugly garbage to school, you are basically putting yourself in a position where everyone will hate you. Your fellow Aggies loath the very sight of you because you are a turncoat. Years from now, maybe you will be attending a party with a bunch of BYU alumni (you could call it the most boring party in the history of the universe, or just say there will be BYU alumni there, I don’t care) and you will interrupt a riveting conversation about who came to Relief Society last night to mention that you went to USU.
“But I have always been a BYU fan at heart,” you say, preparing to tell your new friends about how you would wear your stupid BYU shirt to school every day, when you notice that everyone is looking at you as if you were emitting an unpleasant odor.
“Pathetic…” you hear someone whisper. People are talking quietly to each other while shooting glances in your direction.
“I guess he couldn’t get in… He wasn’t good enough,” you overhear.
You have just realized that you burned all your bridges at your own school because you were too busy sucking up to another school, but the people who go to that other school will never, ever accept you because you went to what is, and will always be in their eyes, an inferior school.
Ultimately, I don’t blame the tools who insult us all with their offensive attire. I blame my fellow Aggies, for being a bunch of cowards and letting our school get dissed. Showing full school spirit at all times is not your prerogative, and it doesn’t switch off when you leave the Spectrum. It is an obligation of near-holy seriousness.
I am not advocating the formation of gang-style stomp circles around the bodies of BYU fans here, but for crying out loud, can’t we ostracize people anymore? I know most of the fun has been litigated out of the college experience, but I think we are all still well within our rights to make guys sporting the Cougar logo feel… uncomfortable here at USU.