COPY-CAT, COPY-CAT
by: Alex Blackstone

This happened to me a couple of days ago. I have been told that I tend to overreact to annoying things that are otherwise innocuous in nature, and I have yet to determine if this is one of those things. There really are no words for it, except for irritating, obnoxious, and immature. I ask you all, in advance, to please excuse the hostility.

In my Intercultural Communication class, we had an assignment that required us to bring in a news article about or relating to an intercultural issue, intercultural being used in the broadest sense of the term (i.e., religion, class, race, ethnicity, age, sex, etc.) That being said, it made choosing an article almost effortless and also guaranteed a variety of different topics for discussion the next day.

So I searched fark.com and selected the first article that I deemed relevant. It covered the funeral of a man in Pennsylvania who shot and killed five girls at a school in an Amish community before killing himself. I am sure that by now, you all know of or at least have heard about what happened.

As I continued to read the article I was amazed to find that out of the seventy-five people that attended this man's funeral, over half of them were Amish. They came to give their condolences to his family and to pay their respects, and in doing so showed an immense amount of dignity, forgiveness, and empathy. I was amazed at the compassion exhibited by them, and I planned on expressing my thoughts and hopefully sparking a discussion in class. [You can view the article here.]

Before it started I was sharing my article with a girl that I sit next to nearly every day. She's nice, she seems smart, and I had faith that she would know where I was coming from, and I was so touched by this article that I decided to share with her before Akinde (my professor) decided to get his teach on. She sort of nodded along, but didn't seem interested. I saw that she had cut out the "The World in Five Minutes" section from the P.I., which seemed like sort of a cop-out to me, considering that section is just a bunch of pictures and blurbs of no more than 1-2 sentences about a variety of different topics. I brushed it off just as class began.

Akinde asked who would like to share. My neighbor and I both raise our hands, and she is called on, not me. "Oh well," I think, "I'll be next." When she starts speaking I am almost immediately irate. Keep in mind that I've censored out the word "like," a few times:

"Well, my article was about, like, the funeral for that dude that killed the Amish girls, and like, it was really coooool, because, like, a lot of Amish people went and paid their respects and stuff. It was really, like, cool, because like, I guess they Amish are really like, forgiving, I guess you could say, and that was like, really amazing."

Needless to say, I was fuming. I had just expressed those thoughts to her, not to mention in a way that was much more articulate. It was not only bothersome that she rambling about something she knew nothing about, but that she lacked concern for the issue. I picked up her paper as she was speaking and it did have reference to the shooting, but nothing about the funeral, much less who attended it and why. I spent the next fifty minutes looking around the room half listening to discussions, half contemplating beating this girl over the head with my notebook. I was so angry with her for not only expressing someone else's thoughts, but doing it poorly. She even had the gall to act as if nothing had happened at all!

What really boggled my mind was the question on what her reasoning for this was. Does she do this often? Did she feel the need to make me look like a complete asshole? Was she so nervous that she said the first thing that came to my, I mean her, head? Does she do it so often that she doesn't even realize she's doing it anymore?

If I am taking this a little too far, then I am sorry. Honestly though, aren't we all a little too old for things like this? Is the really the appropriate behavior for a college student? I was under the impression that we're all supposed to learn to think our own thoughts critically, here.