starcraft tom,

Keep up the good fight. Too bad they aren't listening, but just maybe you can get someone to think with an open mind!

I had a class at CWU that made me read and report on a book called "The Religious Right." This book was supposedly written to expose the terrorist mentality of the far right wingers that we have all read and heard about (Branch Dividians, Aryan Nations, etc.). 60% of my grade depended upon the report I had to submit. While we discussed this book in class, the outrage of the students was evident, the bias of the professor was blatant, and I sat there quietly at the window wondering where the future was taking us. It just so happend that big game season started right in the middle of this, so I came to school wearing my hat with blaze orange tape on it. I wore it in every class, but got the most crap when in this particular class. As soon as they realized I was a hunter, they began asking me a myriad of questions and attempting to impose their one sided mindset upon me. So I fought back, in the only way I could.

I wrote my report... from the view of a white supremacist sitting in a class that was attempting to promote them as criminals for what they believe. I went far out on a limb here. My father was a blatant racist, my grandfather belonged to the KKK in Tx, I heard this garbage from the time I can remember... thankfully I had an open mind and looked past the hatred and saw people for who they were, not the color of their skin or religious preference.

9 pages of blasting my class and professor went into this. I dove fully into the rhetoric I was brought up with. This paper was filled with anger, hatred, bigotry.... most of all, it was filled with facts and dates to make it a viable paper. The professor told me I could not submit it. He told me I would fail the class if I insisted on submitting this paper. When he handed me my grade, I smiled and thanked him. Then I walked straight over to the Dean's office and waited there until I could present it to him.

He happened to be a black man and was appalled at what I wrote until I explained to him that it met the criteria and that I wrote it as a form of protest. I ended up getting an A on the paper and, as far as I know, that was the last time that book was used in class.

The best thing to come of it was 3 of my fellow students really wanted to learn more. They only knew about these things by television and what their parents told them. They never had the will to speak to Neo-Nazi's or Aryan Race promoters as they feared they would get into a fight. Now they had someone to talk to that grew up with that stuff all around them and came out of it a better person. They learned a lot that day. They learned about the hate and bigotry that is promoted to children by parents and siblings for no reason other than ignorance. They learned to examine who they truly were and to learn from even the most loud mouthed person out there. Most of all, they learned that everything being taught to them in college was not gospel and the professors teach as much of their own opinion and agenda as they do cirriculum.

You can make a difference in your class... but be willing to be labeled the outcast, the bigot, the idiot, the redneck, the barbarian... in the end, one of them just may call you friend

Maybe this is why I have so much out for the AR groups... promotion of disinformation, decision based upon opinion rather than scientific evidence, bigotry, inability to open ones mind, poisoning the minds of children with one side of an issue and never letting them see the other side, scare tactics, terrorist activities (remember the labs at UW that got burned down)... it all smacks too much of my youth.

Robert J.