 "Photo:")
Remember last spring semester? Yeah, it was great. Carolina went from sub-par regular season to NIT champs. There was also a mini-controversy about my last column, which wasn't totally unexpected. I had let a lot build up during the year and called three people out.
Turns out, they weren't game about being called out, and we had a nice little meeting about it in which I promised to write a column about "what I'd learned" at the beginning of the fall semester. So here we go.
In retrospect, I regretted the furor it caused, but not so much what I said. I didn't write anything that I knew was untrue, and I didn't commit libel, though I was accused of both.
One of my favorite parts of that meeting is that I kept being told I was lying. I don't have to lie about what I write about. Writing the truth is better, and easier.
Two accusations stick in my mind because they were so classic. One was that I wrote my column at the end of the semester because I didn't want people to be able to rebut what I said and that I never allow people to challenge what I said in my columns. Each time my column ran and I got a response I could verify, I would run it. In general, I also allowed for the exchange of ideas, which lead to a school-sponsored debate on the Confederate flag.
One participant in the debate wrote a column about the flag, the other wrote a letter to the editor disagreeing with the column.
The other accusation I liked because it challenged my logic in ways that hadn't happened since Dan Quayle announced his campaign for the presidency during the 2000 campaign. I was told I lied about the "three white guys" around the TV at a gathering of College Republicans in a photo because I had been told one of them was Jewish. Last time I checked, religion didn't denote skin color, and all the guys in the picture looked white to me.
In the end, though, it came down to one thing - I messed with people that didn't have senses of humor. It happens, and should be avoided. If someone had written the things I had about me, I would probably say the guy was full of a barnyard expletive and move on. Life isn't worth getting bent out of shape about what some dude says in a column in a college newspaper.
However, I can say that if I had the chance to do it again, I wouldn't. It wasn't worth the hassle. I'd probably just talk bad about the president and Jim DeMint and say something about how Bama's totally going to beat the crap out of Carolina in football this year. And that's the advice I'd give to anyone else: Don't make fun of someone unless you know they're game for it. It's just not worth it.
Be the first to comment on this article!