Column:

Even from Rome, the Forum page is on fire

By John Hendel

Published March 6, 2007

ROME — I now sit in Rome, home to both Vatican City and arguably the greatest Western empire in history. The Colosseum and Pantheon make for a solid skyline. It's also damn warm and sunny, which is nice step up from the perpetually rainy London. The ancients chose well.

But what struck me more was the intense explosion of Friday's Forum page on The Maneater's Web site. Wow, Dan Friesen did not ingratiate himself to the MU community this week. There were, like, six letters to the editor about him, including one from an employee at Monsanto.

I'm amazed all this outrage is over a column about servicing a horse. Personally, though I can see some justified concerns from the agricultural community, Friesen's still an amusing enough guy. He's a wonderfully offensive person.

It's a column, and it sparked a Facebook group with more than 700 members as of Friday. All I can say is fine work, man. You succeeded in getting a reaction, possibly the biggest reaction in all four semesters.

This led to an important personal realization for me: People read The Maneater — 700 of them, at the least.

Lately, I imagine that no one actually reads the paper. Sorry, editors, I've worked for the paper and know how much energy goes into it. I read it myself back in the day and assumed a fair number of other people did back then as well.

Yet studying abroad changed these perceptions. I'm far away — in Italy, actually — and cannot envision the piles of Maneaters dumped into the bins at Brady Commons and Middlebush or wherever else. Each week, I type up a little piece, toss it in an e-mail message, and apparently, it ends up in print. It's that last step I can't fully grasp, conceptualizing the physical papers that students pick up and skim. I'm detached.

People read The Maneater and seem to really care. They care enough to protest, to write letters and to join Facebook groups. One reader even demanded censorship, disgustingly enough. That's a real deal community forum happening and bringing people together. Seeing the interchange of hostility warmed my heart because it proved The Maneater succeeded magnificently at what matters most: It created a genuine dialogue and kept people engaged.

I like community. It's one of the reasons I enjoy Columbia. It's the reason I liked working at the Missourian, which covered a nice enough, small little town. This also explains why I enjoy the dynamic downtowns and community centers more than chain-cloned suburbia.

Mind you, I don't engage in this concept of "community." I admire the concept from a distance and talk about how great it is. Growing up, I rarely involved myself in student politics, student clubs or things like that. I was content with not raising my hand half the time.

In no way do I validate not engaging community as a particularly good idea. While I, like virtually every other sensible college student, deride convention and dig Nietzschean Superman concepts and all that, I also find it critically important to contribute to what surrounds you, which is something I probably haven't done well enough. It's cliché, naive and idealistic in the extreme and more or less true. In any case, I'll salute Dan Friesen here for throwing the community into action. Much like columns, columnists stand for this essential dialogue and hold up the virtues underpinning all of society.