Stealing or preventing others from reading 700 issues of the Voice is not only viciously selfish, it's dumb. Nothing on Oberlin's campus, written, spoken or whispered is so powerful that it warrants capturing or caging and the subsequent martyring accompanying this capturing and caging. Was there really something in the Voice that poignant, dictating and mind-altering that the only way to stop its venom from spreading was to throw the Voices away?
Here's the thing: The Voice could be immensely better in writing style and depth of the content, but it's a quality political student journal. It definetly ain't one of those ideological-identified, exclusive political publications like Below The Belt or the Harvard Crimson. The fact is that anyone from anywhere can write anything for the Voice. The leftest and the rightest writings, draped in varying prose forms, are plastered across the pages of each issue. If you don't like something that someone wrote, write an even more marrow-chilling, frightening, and safe-space threatening response, or talk and listen to the person that wrote what you might not agree with. Or if your "change the world" urges really need quenching, why not tear out the particular article that you don't like. But don't take 700 issues. Other people, probably just as revolutionary (or weak and warped) as yourself took time to work and think in the issue. Other people, just as revolutionary (or weak or warped) as yourself wanna read the Voice. Do they count?
A few weeks ago, we printed a splotchy story of an ex-student charged and sentenced with vehicular homicide. If we're talking about justifiably throwing publications away, with all the character assasinations abound in that piece, one could understand the ex-student or his friends wanting to throw away issues of that Review. But what would make someone throw out issues of this past Voice? Some revolutionary has convinced themselves that the magazine, like everything else on this campus (except their Mao Mao righteous minds), is the propagandous tool of the seething administration or some wrath-filled hegemony.
Oh well, it's all moot. You'll probably never read this editorial. It might piss off the same folk who stole the Voices and they might get courageous and active again. Cool! Will you martyr us too ... pretty please? We need it more than the Voice. Think 700 issues of the Voice can change the world? It's sad, but someone else seems to think so too.
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