On Sunday, Nov. 25, I returned to my dorm after a long weekend to find the bulletin boards on my floor, which were once empty, busy with many university announcements. I must express compassion for resident assistants everywhere who must deal with the burden of bulletin boards – the burden being drunken males who decide to rip down announcements in a “look how rebellious I am” sort of rebellion. It was nice to see the boards full of communication, events, and ideas. The Office of Jewish Affairs had many posters up displaying the various holidays that are sometimes unknown to people or drowned out by the Christian/Corporate Christmas hoopla. I took in the posters, each displaying and offering information on a different holiday that most young Americans haven’t heard of, from the Wiccan/Pagan Yule celebration, to the African Kwanzaa festivities. The posters were not “recruiting tactics” to sway young and impressionable college students to abandon their religions. They were not devaluing Christianity or even (gasp) America, but when I passed by the posters later on in the evening, someone had voiced their opinion, as Americans are wont to do, on a particular poster by the Office of Jewish Affairs displaying the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The poster had been spit on, and scrawled in pen were the words “sand niggers.” That, my friends, is a hate crime.

I know that some right-wing readers and other misinformed individuals are shouting “free speech!” at the idea of calling graffiti on a poster a hate crime. Well, for those of you who haven’t examined your freedom of speech, lets discuss it. In this country, you may say whatever you want; you may voice your opinion, no matter how foolish, narrow minded, inaccurate, or outdated it may be (The KKK, Aryan Nation, and the Christian Right are living proof of this). However, your freedom ends when you endanger the safety of someone else. For example, you cannot go into an airport and even joke about having a bomb in your carry on bag because of the past and present security breaches that have endangered civilians. You can not stand up in your biology lecture and threaten to kill someone because you are then endangering their safety, and you cannot use racial slurs, whether spoken or written, against someone of a different ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, because you endanger that person’s well being. Case closed.

I looked at the other posters, which were not altered in any way, and I suddenly had an idea of the motive behind this crime. Americans, as they haul out the 4th of July d