Do other than Xbox

staff

Although I am not a student at South Dakota State University, I am a casual reader of the Collegian. Normally, I flip through the trivial articles and columns, but one writer, Roxy Hammond, has always struck me as knowledgeable and amusing. A few weeks ago, she wrote a column on her disgust with the video game Halo 2, and it seems people were literally coming out of the woodwork to attack her stance on the game.

Like a responsible and professional journalist, she ignored the personal attacks made against her and wrote a second column, on the various forms of racism. Once again, readers felt a need to attack her personally. I feel the readers have completely misinterpreted her stance on both Halo 2 and racism. Her beef with Halo 2 is that it is a waste of time.

Instead of twiddling a controller all day and then writing ridiculous letters defending the game, people should be doing something constructive.

In the time it took each person to write a letter about the game, he or she could have donated cans to the food pantry, picked up trash outside of their house, or have been a mentor to a small child. But instead, he or she is defending fantasy and doing nothing to benefit our REAL world.

I also feel it is irresponsible and completely baseless to call her a racist because of one line in her column. The point of her second column was to mock racism, not to encourage it. She was also not trashing her home state, she was defending it, as well as the thousands of students who live in it. Instead, readers chose to focus on one phrase in particular and draw all of their conclusions around it. No wonder a person in Seattle thinks Midwesterners are dumb, because clearly, many are.

It is not hard to read a whole column and then pick out the argument being made, but I guess the students of SDSU cannot do that simple task. Roxy Hammond is not ignorant, as one reader wrote. The only ignorant person is the one who cannot see the true point of the article.

Sara IbisJunior- Augustana CollegeSioux Falls