After looking up the definition of the word arsonist in my handy Webster, I found it necessary to share my findings with you the general public. According to my my man Webster an arsonist is an individual who sets maliciously sets fire to the property of another or burns one’s own property for an improper purpose, as to collect insurance.
Now, after hearing this definition of what an arsonist is why would anyone who considers themselves to be a member of the Grambling State University family have the nerve to set fire to any building on campus. After hearing of not the first and even second but the third fire that had been set in Pinchback I have come to the conclusion that Grambling State University has it’s very own arsonist.
In my opinion, whomever is starting these fires is a amoral, selfish, ignorant person that has no consideration of others and things that do not belong to them. I am sure that most of you out there will agree that this person has to be very stupid to set fire to a building where hundreds of their peers live and put everyone’s lives at risk by doing so.
Recently GSU police chief Jefferson Walker was quoted as saying that the campus was dealing with a pyromaniac and the fires could possibly continue to keep being started if said pyromaniac was not stopped. For the police chief to have made a statement like that lets me know that GSU has indeed made its way into a realm that no black college should ever arrive at. When you think of arsonists and pyromaniacs you think of white America not African Americans at an HBCU. When I heard about the Alabama church fires I knew that whomever was setting these fires had to be white because no black person would just go around burning church after church for no apparent reason.
I do realize that sometimes being in Grambling can be very boring but I have been bored out of my mind here and I can’t think of a single time when I had the urge to going around campus setting fires. People have got to wake up and realize that this is our university, no matter how much the administration is trying to mess that up for us, and we should do everything in our power to ensure that it stays that way for many years to come.
Starting fires around campus solves nothing no matter how pissed you are at whatever it may be that you are pissed at, so please find another way to vent your anger in the future please. My mother once told me that if you destroy the little things that you have been given, people will be less willing to entrust you with the luxuries in life.
For those of you out there who don’t understand what this gem means then maybe you need to stop and take a minute to reflect on your own home-training and try to remember what it was like to be a responsible, respectable person.
Wendell Graves is a graduate student from Shreveport.