To the members of Ohio University Students for Liberty and OU Combat Veterans, with regards to your recent squabbles over the painting and repainting of the Bentley Annex graffiti wall – this is all very stupid.
You’re aware of that, right? Really, whenever this sort of fight over the wall crops up it’s rather stupid but this week it just happens to be you guys. Both of your groups should be mature enough to get beyond the kind of insults that only community sanctioned property defacement can provide and I honestly, don’t know which of you I find more annoying. No, I do. It’s OUSFL.
Look, guys, you painted the flag upside down. You did it deliberately because you knew it was offensive, or as Nathan Kelly called it in his letter, “provocative enough to draw attention to our cause.” No one is debating that it drew attention to you, as attention is frequently drawn to things people find offensive. I will, however, debate Kelly’s point that OU Combat Veterans “silenced” his speech.
I would ask that in the future, the OU Combat Veterans come up with a better rebuttal than “GET BENT,” but such a phrase scrawled on the graffiti wall is an expression of speech just as protected under the constitution as OUSFL’s upside-down flag. It is common for people of certain political persuasions to perceive their speech as conspicuously more worthy of protection than the speech of others, but commonality does not excuse hypocrisy. For a group as devoted to the idea of liberty as the Students for it, one would expect them to realize that free speech works both ways.
To the members of OU Combat Veterans, I say I agree that the upside-down flag was offensive, used not as a “universal sign of distress” as Kelly put it, but as a deliberately controversial marketing tool. However, perhaps there are better ways of expressing such an opinion than the phrase “GET BENT.”
To the members of OUSFL, I say that I agree that speech, even speech I find offensive, ought to be free and protected. Perhaps it’s time for you to think the same way about speech you find offensive. Also keep in mind that the graffiti wall is a wall for graffiti and that painting contradictory replies over previous messages is literally the entirety of how graffiti works.
Jesse Bethea is a senior studying media and is one of the co-founders of AVW Productions’ Newstime.
