Anger Management

Perhaps I should apologize for taking a un-notified hiatus. Perhaps not.

I realized somewhere pre-hiatus that I no longer had an opinion worth writing about. My stories no longer seemed funny, my days dull. My opinion usually someone else's, verbatim.

Today, I have an opinion. I also have a story.


~~

Kel and I did movie night tonight. Did you ever wonder why on the back of Blockbuster movie boxes, (specifically under the section about the movies rating,) it says "contains strong language?" Why strong? I didn't find a suitable definition. It's almost as if saying it was "bad" language broke some secret code or crossed the church-state line. As if terming language as "bad" therefore made it immoral, which would clearly make the rating-people not politically correct. Which in itself seems somewhat not PC.

Which brings me to my other opinion. Church, church friends, and the Steubenville cult. At dinner the other night with a large group of church friends and two FUS students, (not including me, the ex-FUS-er,) we began discussing one of the teens in the youth group. She had applied to Franciscan and was, lets say, not seemingly cut out for the life on the Hill, which for her, begins this fall. The rumor was that she had designated Ashland as her transfer school for winter semester, believing things wouldn't go as planned at FU. Now, granted, while I pretty much can guarantee that things will not go as planned, I do believe in giving it a month before you choose a transfer school. Which was the general opinion of the table. This young lady, by bringing a car first semester and choosing a second school pre-FUS was already handing in her transfer application. I thought that I would add colorfully to the conversation, considering I had done what she was thinking to do.

Until I became speechless. Quite hard for someone like myself to be rendered silent.

One of the gentlemen at the table, a student at FUS currently, well, Bryan, decided to open his mouth and say that "only the strong survive at Franciscan. The weak leave, the weak don't survive."

Before I knew it, everyone at the table was shaking their heads in agreement and adding their similar opinion.

I don't remember much after that. I believe my glare brought about a "oh, no offense," which always seems to mean that they know they are being offensive and don't have much respect to apologize properly.

What's worse is that no one defended me. No one called me strong, or even through out a flimsy excuse like "FUS isn't for everyone." Nothing.

Perhaps I should have voiced my opinion. That perhaps it wasn't strong to stay in on the Hill, where all the challenges are within the bubble parameters. Perhaps you can be strong by going to a college where everyone is NOT Catholic. Where you can make friends with an atheist, explain your religion to a Baptist, and perhaps fall in love with a Christian.

There could be two kinds of strong in this world. There could be just one. Whichever the case, I refuse to be called weak.

May the strong survive, and the weak, be made to apologize.