TO THE EDITOR:
Generally I believe that people should learn to develop thick skins when it comes to mockery and jest. But when I see a cruel attack on a young lady’s weight printed in a school newspaper, even I know that something is wrong.
Now, I get the humor in mocking general social patterns, even as manifestations in particular individuals. It’s amusing, and it keeps people modest.
It’s entirely different, however, when these attacks become personal, and focus on what the attacker believes to be a victim’s deformities. I don’t know whether people like this just don’t think about how their words might affect others, or if they believe another’s appearance to be a grievance against them.
Either way, such depraved individuals are bound to exist, and their inability to focus on the good things in life and obsession over what they see as negative traits in other people is something that all of us have to learn to live with.
What bothers me, and I suspect bothers victims of such attacks, is that the editors of our school newspaper seem to be of a similar mindset as these knaves and derive some sort of perverse pleasure in propagating these acerbic remarks for the whole school to see.
If the DTH thinks we find these insults amusing, they are sorely mistaken. These kvetches aren’t amusing and they don’t make anyone laugh. They just make us wonder about the editors of our newspaper.
I thought being a Tar Heel was about forming a sense of community with our fellow students, about having fun and about learning to be better individuals, not about deriding those we think are different or inferior to ourselves.
Graham Hawkes ’13
Mathematics
