The madness.

I feel another editorial coming on. Two to be precise. One is going to be about the amount of vandalism I see on this campus. Having worked with the custodians and maintenance, not to mention worked such jobs at other places, I actually respect these people and what they do. I'm also not so stupid as to think crap I wrote on the wall would "stick it" to any administrator. All it does is make more work for people who already work rather hard.

That's the one I'll likely articulate and print. The second one pertains more to the Critic's content, which I don't feel the need to defend in print.

So I'll defend it here.

The Critic is not a family newspaper. It's written for college students old enough to not read it if something in it is offensive to them.

If you see your eight-year-old picking up a copy of The Critic, I advise you to slap it out of his or her hand and tell the child that The Critic is not for him or her to read.

I'm no parent, but I realize keeping things out of kid's hands isn't easy. My advice: tell them that The Critic is boring. It's about school budgets, people retiring, ambassadors visiting, and other lame things children don't find interesting. Children, from what I've seen, hate boring things.

I'd be dumb if I thought this was really about the children. It's my humble opinion that it isn't about eight-year-olds picking up The Critic at all. It's about people who find the Holy Sheet column morally wrong (or gross) using their children as a debate point when it comes to ultimately deciding the content of a student-run newspaper.

Let's be honest, your child doesn't read The Critic. If they do at all, they look at the pictures and mess around with the Fun Page (which isn't for children either, so take it away from them).

Through conversations I've overheard, I know the exact people that The Critic is corrupting, and it isn't the children. Some students, as in people who are over 18 and are adults, know their parents would be upset if they were to see what's being printed in the school's newspaper.

This is the point where most student editors would say something about how you're old enough to deal with mature subjects and your parents should've known they were sending you to a college and not a convent, but I'm not going to do that.

Instead, I'm going to tell you that I don't care what your family thinks. The Critic's job isn't to protect people's innocence. It's our job to print things college students would want to read about and inform them about what's going on around the school that will affect their lives. If anything, it's our job to remove people's innocence (not that of eight-year-olds, though. Again, I implore you, keep The Critic away from your children).

We don't get much in the way of letters anymore regarding Holy Sheet. Most people were just mad that their school e-mails were being spammed up. I would hope that anyone who didn't care for the column would feel welcome to write a letter saying as much to us. We're supposed to be the voice of the student body, but I don't see why we couldn't be a public forum for everyone's use.

I'm getting a little off subject.

To sum up:

1. The Critic is not a family oriented newspaper.
2. Don't let your children or your parents read The Critic.
3. Why settle for grumbling when you can see your dislike of The Critic's content in print? Write a letter.

Of course, with all the problems on campus, including vandalism and the deficit, the only one fit to get angry about is a sex column in the school's newspaper...