Dear Loquitor Editors,
The letter printed in last weeks issue titled “Loquitor Silence on Student Jumper Deafening” saddened and disheartened me as a member of what I affectionately call the “Cabrini Family.” It’s easy for the student body, the faculty, and anyone visiting Cabrini to see our school more as a family then an ordinary college because of its size and the relationships formed here. As a privately-run Christian college, we stand apart from other state schools; we have a mission and a call from Christ, and the highest level of that call is to love one another. I won’t pretend that some students miss that message, maybe some faculty are missing it too, and choose not to love a distressed member of our family by choosing to spread hurtful rumors. But I was incredibly happy to see that the Loquitor, the symbol of our school’s media and press outlet, got the message loud and clear. Our newspaper staff realized that sometimes our Christian values which make up the heart and soul of this institution, this family, trump the obligation to report the news. Sometimes integrity tells us respecting a member of our community is more important than respecting the facts or the news.
Additionally, it should be noted that this incident occurred late on a Tuesday night, and the Loquitor deadline for print is Wednesday afternoon. What kind of “carefully researched” story was expected to be written in the wee hours of the morning while interviewing traumatized witnesses only moments after it happened? This was not the falling of the World Trade Center. If the Loquitor had chosen to write any response to the incident in that issue the following day, it would have been so lacking it would have fostered rumors instead of redressing them. Additionally, if it were to be covered the following week, it would have brought back up the trauma that many had by this point recovered from in order to continue functioning. Having this trauma in the fore-front of our minds prevents us as students from concentrating; so we have no choice but to recover and “move-on.” The world isn’t going to stop to let us breathe and grieve. Rumors are going to circulate no matter what the Loquitor does; it’s not the paper’s responsibility to stop those. It’s our primary responsibility as students, Christians, and members of the Cabrini family to love and respect the other members of our family, especially those who need us the most. If she had received that love and respect previously, maybe she wouldn’t have been pushed to act as she did. If we’re wondering what our community could have done for her, maybe this is where we should have started. Christ is our true “founder,” and he taught love of each other takes priority over everything, including “journalistic integrity.”
Joshua Dzielak
Junior/ RA
