Dear College Republicans,

La LUCHA would like to foremost thank you for fearless feedback regarding our Immigration Week flier. Your criticism showed passion, which we respect, but more importantly, it was the perfect example of selective learning — the very conviction that plagues most of our country.

You see, in your endeavor to denounce the man that Che Guevara was, your criticism ironically made your argument as flawed as it can be. For lack of a better term, you shot yourself in the leg for the entire Internet to see.

According to psychologists, selective learning is the ability to select items from which to learn from while ignoring all others.

You literally nitpicked a person in history, and removed all characteristics except the ones that support your opinion. In your letter to the editor you mention, “Che Guevara was an international terrorist and mass murderer.”

But my friends, the same can be said for Christopher Columbus, yet I see no support from your organization to remove Columbus Day as a national holiday.

If we wanted to display the same selective learning, as you so perfectly did, “terrorist and mass murderer” could describe most of the 44 U.S. presidents, or mostly any president, anywhere.

Perhaps, if you’d like, we could paint Albert Einstein a terrorist as well for helping create the atomic bomb.
Would you mind if we also made Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy as infamous adulterers? Steve Jobs a college dropout?

La LUCHA, in no way, condones or supports violence. Nevertheless, in your criticism, you not only took away from the actual events that we were promoting, but you actually distorted history to your liking.

That is not only an example of true ignorance, but it’s a disservice to yourselves to simply not know or address the multiple facets of any history lesson. La LUCHA’s purpose is not to defend Che Guevara’s crimes, which we acknowledge he had many.

Rather, La LUCHA’s motivation is to educate individuals like yourselves of the history that was lost thanks to colonization, slavery, segregation, classism, poor public education systems and popular media.

We promise to more cleverly select the figures that we quote only if you promise to judge those individuals from less biased point of views. We should collaborate on an event sometime in the future.

“Above all, I would teach him to tell the truth. Truth-telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship.” — J. Edgar Hoover, beloved founder of the FBI, known racist and avid cross-dresser. (See, it’s not nice).

La LUCHA
Syracuse University

Published on November 18, 2013 at 1:33 am