Good morning pals. I wanted to share my excitement over my guest editorial being published, and the somewhat unusual and unlikely way in which it happened.
Now, it's just a student paper. It's the University Observer here at University College Dublin, but between the campus, online, and mailed copies, the readership is approximately 23,000 (at least that's what they tell me) and it is the largest student newspaper in Ireland. It comes out twice a month. Anyway, I'm pretty excited about it.
Thursdays are a great day for me. I have an early class, and when I get out, I always go get a nice big breakfast and look forward to the weekend, because I don't have Friday classes. I saw that there was a new edition of the Observer a couple weeks ago, and when I got to the Editorial Opinion, it was a piece that pretty much bashed the Movement--I'll spare the details for a) brevity and b) because you already know them--basically it mocked the Movement, gave a standard run-down of the no-goals/no leaders mantra, and ended by saying that the Movement had run out of ideas and was quickly going to disappear.
I must admit, it got under my skin. On my way to the bus, I fired off an admittedly ineffective email to the editor which basically asked if the paper ever accepts guest editorials from students, because there was no way that a simple LTE could possibly respond to the lack of facts and general garbage that they had printed. I ended by asking essentially if they had the guts to print an opinion which was directly counter to what they had just run in their main editorial. Now, again, admittedly, this was probably not the best approach. I definitely let my emotions get the better of me (which was a lesson in and of itself) and I didn't expect a response.
To my surprise, I received an email back from the editor of the paper just over an hour later. In it, he said that the paper usually doesn't run guest editorials from students because the space is typically reserved for professors, politicians, and other authority figures, and that being said, he would have welcomed a response, but was in no way going to provide a forum for a response which would simply lambaste the previous editorial. He closed by saying that I was welcome to submit a letter, and that he would consider it.
I kind of sighed as I read it, and I also rationalized my initial email by telling myself that he was just trolling me--there wasn't any way someone who had written the editorial that I read would print a pro-OWS piece, and he was just jerking me around by telling me that he would have but now he wouldn't. He was just messing with me.
I decided to take a shot. I emailed him back. I said that I appreciated his response and the quickness in which it came back. I admitted that it was an emotional reaction, and that not only should I have thought it through a bit more in this case, but also that it was a good lesson for the future--take a breath, walk away, and come back when you can be clear, concise, and not overly emotionally driven. I thanked him for his time, and said that if in the interests of alternative viewpoints for our students he should reconsider, to let me know. Again, I expected no response; frankly mine was a bit of a catharsis so that I didn't have to beat myself up/kick myself as much as I inevitably would for not taking the time to compose a more respectable request.
I was surprised a second time a few hours later when he wrote back and said that he was glad to hear it, and that if I could submit an 800-word editorial by Tuesday that he would be happy to consider it. "Yeah, yeah, yeah..wait...what?"
So, I wrote one. While I understand some of my views might not be completely matched by everyone else's, I was trying to write for my audience--18-20 year old students who would find the piece placed between stories about the band that was playing the student pub (LMFAO in case you were wondering--no, not the acronym, the band) and the latest soccer results.
I tried my best to make it an opinion piece. Not a response that preached to the choir, but one that might just get some young people to see the issue differently than they perhaps had before. It ran this week. When I went by the office to say thank you, the same editor who had written the piece which had incensed me a short time before said that he really enjoyed it, and although our politics are different, the op-ed gave him perspectives that he didn't have before. The features editor also told me that he really thought it was strong, and that prior to reading it he imagined the protesters on Dame Street here in Dublin as just “hippies camping out, but now he understood the Movement was much more than that.”
So, I think it was a success, and I wanted to share. The even happier ending is that I was asked to contribute a feature to the final edition of the year which comes out shortly—off-diary-topic, but I will be writing a big piece on the troubles that foreign students who come to America on J1 visas face (a big, big thing here) and how to avoid being exploited as cheap foreign labor and how to stand up for themselves. The feature centers around the story of the Hersheys factory in Pennsylvania for anyone that is familiar. When it comes out, I will post it. Needless to say, I am thrilled.
And there you have it. An unlikely path to getting a pro-OWS piece published, but it happened. The article is below the Great Orange Squiggly™. Many thanks to Kossack DSWright for his help and ideas for putting it together. Thanks for reading!
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