To the Editors:
Amie Sugarman's valiant attempt at debunking what she refers to as the "safety myth" (The Dartmouth, Feb. 23) suffered a major blow on Monday as I was reading her op-ed piece on a comfy couch at my fraternity around noon. Her rant was palpable, criticizing the school, the administration and the greater community for not taking the ubiquitious problem of theft more seriously, and she relayed two anecdotes of her belongings' being stolen -- stolen by the very students she communes with every day. As I scanned the room for a reason to live on this amoral campus of theives, liars and cheats, I noticed a red jacket on a couch across the room. I had noticed it before -- in fact, it had been there for at least four nights, and no one had touched it, but now it intrigued me. I picked it up, spun it around, and noticed "Amie" written on the inside. Of all the red North Face jackets in the world...
Living in a fraternity is an interesting social experiment in trust. People leave their belongings everywhere, refer to bedrooms as "coat rooms" and think that everyone's computer is a public blitz terminal. Things are bound to be lost or taken or peed on, but rather than proving this campus a place of maniacal deviance and social misconduct, Sugarman incites unfounded paranoia in her peers who in my four years have never taken anything from me. The icy idyll of Dartmouth life will not soon succumb to her trepidations or calls for "dialogue" to address a non-issue, but quite a different moral ought emerge: Try not to forget where you put things.
