I’m sick of MSU students. My family and I have lived near the campus for seven years now. During that time our trash cans were stolen - twice. Our house and car were egged three times, one of which nearly broke a bedroom window at 2:30 a.m. Our children’s Halloween pumpkins were stolen in one year. Another year they were smashed in the street in front of the house. That was rather painful to try and explain to a 5-year-old. Our yard and tree were toilet-papered. A fence was damaged when someone couldn’t see it in the middle of the night and attempted to walk through it. A pack of cigarettes and a pen continued the journey into my back yard. My yard is littered every weekend with trash. Beer cans and bottles, cups and fast-food wrappers are most common. I have been woken up during inhumanly early hours of the night and morning by excessively loud music from passing cars. The stop sign at the intersection in front of my house is treated as a challenge, not a traffic directive. This one particularly worries me since I have three kids, two of whom ride their bikes in the neighborhood.

And now the latest incident. Sometime between last Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, someone cut off a small maple seedling that had been growing in my front yard. This was a tree that my young son had rescued and begged me to transplant into the front yard. Now I have to, yet again, explain to him that sometimes people do these bad things.

I can hear your howls of protest in my own head already. Phrases like “shouldn’t condemn us all for the actions of a small minority,” and “It wasn’t necessarily students who did that,” are coursing through my mind as I write this. I used them myself in my day. They are no more valid now than when I was an undergraduate - at another university - myself. The MSU student body, the majority, must step up and bear responsibility for fostering an atmosphere of tolerance for this sophomoric nonsense. Rather than, “You shouldn’t condemn us all,” try something like, “We’ll take care of it.” Remember that while the actions of a minority don’t speak for the majority, they do present the image for the majority.

Now let me revise my opening statement. It is not the students I’m sick of. It’s the things in the incomplete list above, which happen to correlate to a high degree with MSU’s school year.

Dennis Blankenship
East Lansing resident