just slightly better

Well, I learned more about the ugliness on campus.

The big comfort to me is that the troublemakers were NOT students or faculty - it was a group billing itself as a "church group" that got allowed to come on campus and then apparently went off-message, and said some fairly hateful things about the African-American students on campus (And I suppose, by extension, the Black African students: we have quite a few students from Gabon and other African nations who come here).

One young man interviewed on the news tonight made a comment along the lines: "I am a Christian, and what these people were talking about isn't the Christianity I know. All I can do is pray for them because what they believe is wrong."

And I was feeling especially sad when I first found out about the protest because I then thought, "Will I be looking out over my classes the next few days and wonder if any of my students were there saying the bad things that were said?" Instead, I will think, "I wonder how many of my students feel like the young man interviewed on the news" and I will feel better about it.

But, crikey. My mom sent me a clipping from her "back home" paper she get about a woman who showed up drunk at a political rally and started painting phalluses in peanut butter (!) on people's cars, and while she meant it to be amusing, I just found it distressing because really - being needlessly ugly. So many people now are being needlessly ugly and it seems the ad hominem has replaced the "finding logical counter arguments to the points the person is making that you disagree with."

Though one other bit of good news: my last piano lesson of the fall was tonight and at the end, my teacher wished me a good winter, and said, "I'll probably see you next spring" - meaning she's going to teach again when DST rolls back around. (She doesn't teach during the winter because she has to do it after work, and it's too dark for her to drive the 20 minutes or so home after a lesson that ends at 6 pm or so.)

I had been worried that at some point she wanted to give up teaching but it sounds like not yet. I can practice on my own during the winter.

But yeah. Gonna wash my hair (the bun really messed it up and I have the talk to give tomorrow, so I want it to look decent) and eat some dinner and then either knit or maybe just go to bed early and read, because this day has been awful.