Randy Hoffmeister

I posted this as a Facebook note and what is affective once may as well be reused...

This is in response to the uproar on campus in the last week due to the publishing of the word "kike" by one of the school's papers.
All that has really been accomplished is people are upset about this (including me), and rightfully so.

All of the craziness reminded me of another incident:
DISCLAIMER: I don't think it's right to compare the incident I'm describing with what happened at SBU, on most levels. Though I do think the way we should respond/what our responses could cause can be compared, and I think that the generalizations I make can be applied to countless situations.

When I was in eleventh grade, I had a Xanga. This was mostly because I thought it was the cool thing to do, and all of my friends had Xangas. It was really lame. I think my most exciting post was about the time I saw some kid steal a CD at the mall and get chased by a policeman (the kid won).

I never wrote anything about religion on my Xanga from what I can recall. In fact I didn't know anything about religion so I don't know what I could have possibly written. But it was a small town and I generally went to the Reform temple in town on Friday nights.

One day somebody named "Randy Hoffmeister" wrote a nasty comment on my blog. It had something to do with the fact that he thought all Jews can be hanged. I clicked on his blog because I had no clue who he was. The last three posts of his included
a) A picture of me he had apparently gotten off my Xanga (oops)
b) A nasty anti-semitic picture, usually from Nazi Germany, with a comment that I looked like the Jew in the picture and was probably [insert negative stereotypes here]
c) Pictures of morbidly obese naked women

When I saw Randy Hoffemeister's blog, formerly located at www.xanga.com/randyhoffmeister , I started crying. This was for two reasons. First of all, I was offended and hurt. Second of all the pictures of the naked women were really sick and I was traumatized. Who wants to see THAT?

Immediately about fifteen of my friends started attacking Randy Hoffemeister. They called him all sorts of nasty names and threatened him and all sorts of stuff. Then he would publish another article with my picture in it. And the would yell at him. And then it would happen again.

Finally I respectfully asked my friends to not comment on the next blog about me, no matter how bad it was. After a few days, he stopped.

I soon found out that Randy Hoffmeister was actually a kid at my school who I didn't even know . His name is NOT Randy, and to this day I don't think he knows that I know.

What did "Randy" want from all of this? He wanted to hurt my feelings. He wanted to piss me off. He wanted attention. So I pretended like I wasn't hurt or pissed off, and he was ignored. And he stopped.

I learned a few things from this whole Randy Hoffmeister experience.

-Due to freedom of the press, there is nothing I could do about what "Randy" was writing, although his Xanga did get shut down. Even though the article was mean, anybody that wants to can say that word in the paper or on a blog or even on TV and the most that can happen is they get fired.

- He wasn't accomplishing anything but hurting me, so once I started ignoring him, he realized he was wasting his time. These people want attention!

-The best thing you can do, as sad as it is, with these sort of things is ignore it. That's the last thing inflammatory writers want. I know this is easier said than done because although it is logical, how can we really ignore something like this?

-Don't publish pictures on the internet unless you want people to take them!

-There will always be anti-semitism, there will always be racism, there will always be white supremacists and black supremacists and Asian supremacists and everything else... if you think that is going away you are blind. All we can do is stick together, those of us who DON'T hate.

-On that same note, the majority of people are actually good (just quiet sometimes). Seeing all of my friends bashing this Randy dude also made me cry!

-People who publish under pseudonyms are probably embarrassed by what they have to say. This may be why Randy Hoffmeister never confronted me. By the way Sarah Marshall is my real name and I stick by everything I say.

-I don't know if these things come from hate. Surely anyone that writes these things is hateful, right? I honestly don't know. I think they are just bored or ignorant or insensitive or a combination. Either way I feel bad for them. Maybe Randy grew up in a house full of hate and never saw anything to change his mind. For those of us who have been bashed by ethnic slurs, stereotypes, all sorts of disgusting things... show them that they are wrong. "Randy" never met a Jew! People like Bernie Madoff are the only Jews he has heard of. Don't get me wrong, this kid was a loser and I'm not trying to excuse him. But people like him exist all over the world and always have and always will, and the biggest thing we can do to stop them is prove them wrong through actions.