The Tribune

I thought I knew who I was before I came to university. I thought, for instance, that I wasn’t a racist. But when I told two girls tabling against Israel that the State had a right to exist, they cleared that up for me. Which was lucky, because after a year of educating my Jewish youth group on the dangers of Islamophobia, I might have gone my whole life not knowing how much I hated people different from me.

I went to class on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not proud of it. Society decided that this particular day would be the one where we say “the hell with it” and go AWOL – and I spat in its face. I crossed the picket line of our collective alcoholic breakdown. But then, sometimes we all have to make tough decisions.

I’m in love with popular culture. Professing my love for the things that everybody else likes makes me completely uninteresting, yet also remarkably controversial. But then again, love is love. It’s a fickle fancy. There are legitimate gripes with popular culture, such as it’s intense corporatization and rampant materialism.

In last Thursday’s McGill Daily, Sana Saeed wrote a General Assembly follow-up column in which she boiled down the cause of passions over the Middle East conflict to identity politics, and claimed that clampdowns on campus debate amount to a second front of the conflict here at McGill.

There are few parts of the legislative process as controversial as the “rider.” Riders are unrelated provisos typically attached to bills that are politically impossible to veto or postpone, usually in order to pass unpopular legislation that would not get approval by itself.

I know a lot of things. Not that I’m trying to be immodest. I mean, I am immodest: I spend most of my Facebook hours stalking myself and am the star of most of my favourite conversations. But in this case, I’m really not being self-indulgent. After two and a half years of university education and campus media, not to mention a lifetime of reading the news, I know a ton of facts.