The Mr. Brightside Essays

sometimes i'm lonely. sometimes i'm sad. sometimes i'm not the person i should be. sometimes i'm a poor example of my faith. sometimes i'm overwhelmed. sometimes i'm underwhelming.

I vividly remember planting every single one. It's hard to forget digging a hundred two-foot holes in sticky clay. I warned my father countless times.

"They won't grow. The soil isn't good enough."

I was too young to know such a thing, but I didn't want to dig a hundred holes, so I did my best to convince him that I was right. My father didn't think so.

Cars honked as they drove by. I waved sometimes, but after several hours under the sun, I became increasingly ignorant of all that was around me. I would look behind me and count the shallow trenches I had dug. I forged on.

Five, ten, thirty-two, fifty-eight, ninety-three, and finally, one hundred. One hundred holes for one hundred pine trees.

I went inside, covered in sweat and grime. Miserable wreck that I was, I drug myself to the shower. Dad knocked on the bathroom door.

"We aren't done," he said, to my horror. "They won't plant themselves."

Trudging out of the bathroom, I shot him an angry look.

"We don't need trees there. You'll get transferred in five years, and then what did we do all this work for?"

He smiled at me.

"It's good for you. It builds character."

Character was boring. It was holding a stingingly prickly baby tree in a shallow grave and carefully covering it up with just the right amount of dirt. It was having my father look at the tree's I had planted, and telling me that some of them were crooked, and needed to be redone. It was wasting hours and weeks with a hose filling a wheelbarrow with water, pushing it from tree to tree, giving each one a certain amount of water.

"Don't flood it," he warned. "You'll only waste water. Water it just enough, wait for the water to soak in, and then do it again."

I groaned. A hundred trees, each getting three buckets of water, three times a week. The math burned a red tan into the back of my neck.

Some trees grew. Some thrived. Four died, and two were brutally cut down by my brother on a riding lawnmower. Dad told him that he shouldn't put off his chores until so late, but those words went unheeded, and my brother proceeded to "accidentally" mow several trees down in the twilight of his lawn mowing. But I was content with this fact, knowing that this could only mean less water to haul. My excitement was short-lived

We planted more. Then we planted some in the front yard. I complained. Excuses followed; friends, job, hobbies, second job.

"Character," my father smiled. "It builds character."

I angrily said that I had better things to do. Places I would rather be. Friends I could hang out with.

He smiled, but said nothing. I watered the trees in an angry state of mind, skipping a few here and there, where I could get away with it. When I finished, I took a shower, and went to bed.

The shower groaned on at 5 A.M., waking me up, as it sometimes would. Dad was getting ready for work. He left at 5:45, and arrived to his shift at 6:00 A.M. promptly. Manager of a retail store; poor hours, bad attitudes, repetitive work, constant problems, whining customers, and mounting paperwork.

I thought of this as I heard water creak through the pipes in the home my dad worked eighty hours a week to afford.

Character.

I went out that afternoon, and hundreds of afternoons following that, armed with a bucket, a wheelbarrow, and a hundred feet of hose. I watered trees thousands of times, although I knew my dad would get transferred someday. Sometimes it seemed futile. Perhaps it was. But so it goes. Hot days. Cold water. Too many trees. A rusty wheelbarrow with sagging tires. Hoses with tape-covered wounds. Sticky clay soil that was bad for growing anything.

We did move in five years, just like I'd predicted. But the trees had survived, and eventually started to thrive. And as we drove past those trees on the drive to our new home, I looked out past that eternal line of pine trees with a tinge of remorse of leaving them behind. I remembered planting every single one.

Character.

Maybe everything inspiring or uplifting has already been said. If it hasn't, when do we call enough enough? I saw a hundred acts of selflessness and kindness, community and loyalty. Do you really want to hear them? You probably have your own. Yes, the people of this community and it's surrounding area rose to the occasion in an undeniable amazing way.


Mayors and county officers spoke of how we overcame the catastrophe placed in our collective laps with flying colors. We won. What a testament to our community! What a testament to our colleges! What a testament to the next generations of Fargo, Moorhead, or anywhere else!


Is that really what we draw from this experience? I can't deny the strong alliance we formed when times were dire, but is that the yardstick by which we measure our community? The crest came and went, but so did our sense of brother and sisterhood.


Before the water could even reach moderately safe levels, life in our area attempted to get back to "normal," but to what end? After our flood stories are laid out on the table and everyone's been heard, won't we just go back to the way things were? To the sense of "community" that was here before the high waters hit?


As I drove to the just reopened dorms, a truck with tattered remnants of sandbags cut me off near the exit-ramp. I honked and swore, but then felt bad. As I came to a four-way stop nearer the university, a car full of teenagers, likely students, took my right of way as their own, nearly colliding with my car in the process. I did not honk or swear, but I wanted to.


This is not the uplifting or awe-inspiring tale of human bonding and overcoming anyone really wants to hear, but that doesn't change it's relevance. With the threat of disaster lowering comes the return of the attitudes, actions, and emotions we had prior to this event. People can now return to their pre-flood tantrums and arguments, because there was no permanent change of heart here. The flood has subsided, so we can all go back to arguing about politics, putting off schoolwork, complaining about workloads, and going through the motions.


I have already overheard the whisperings of angry students, sniveling about school holidays becoming academic days or an abundance of projects due to make up for lost time. Is the testament of the next generation I'm supposed to be so very proud of?


Every day cannot be a disaster. Every day cannot provide a stress-inducing act of God that forces us all to forget our petty differences and work together for the betterment of a whole. Perhaps our true sense of community should not come the high peaks or dark valleys, but rather, the lulls in between the times of great joy or sorrow. Maybe it is in those times of great normality that we can accurately judge one another's loyalty to their fellow citizens.


I could tell a hundred stories of community and faith. Perhaps you could too. But is that who we are?

Original Editorial in the MSUM Advocate

Title: Missing George

If this is the first time you’ve ever read one of my columns, let me get something out of the way. I am a liberal.

On fiscal issues, I tend to lean conservative. I favor smaller government. I think we should try to reduce government spending. Like many, I have reservations about the bailout and the
stimulus package.

However, when it comes to social issues, I take a sharp swing to the left.

Marriage, regardless of sex, is a civil right, period.

Every person should have access to reproductive and family-planning resources. This includes contraception and abortion.

Intelligent design is anything but. Evolution and the big bang happened. Get over it.

Suffice it to say, I have well-established liberal street cred. Before I bought the “hope” and “change” in November, I voted for Hillary in the primaries. I was a Democrat before it was cool.

So why then of all people do I miss former President George W. Bush? I don’t think that the two of us could find one thing we could agree on. The exception to this might be our great mutual love of Mexican food.

Simply put, he kept things interesting. He made the job easy for people like me, opinion writers.

Whether you were for or against the man, if you were writing an editorial he made your job simple.

If you were against him, all you had to do was counter his very polarizing opinions, actions or statements.

If you were for him, you had an ample body of media against the man to rail against. Thus, Fox News was born.

George W. Bush was listed as the 36th-worst president of the 42 who have completed their term by historians. In the principle of “Scrubs” character Dr. Bob Kelso, he united us all by giving us someone to hate

My Response

In Ryan Fliginger's opinion column "Missing George," he laments George Bush's absence from the public eye. Despite the authors obvious disagreement with most, if not all of George Bush's policies and "polarizing" statements, he comes to the conclusion that Bush made his job as opinion writer "easy."

Mr. Fliginger, may I personally apologize that there is nothing "easy" or simple for you to blather on about any longer. What a tough adjustment you've been forced to make. Never mind the excruciating pressures and exhausting decisions a president is forced to make every single day of his presidency; those are mere trifles in the face of your overwhelming task as school newspaper writer.

Perhaps you could steer away from the mammoth workload synonymous with opinion writing in favor of explaining how you, a student writing at the Advocate has somehow managed to figure out, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how life began on earth. You state in your brilliant thesis "Intelligent design is anything but. Evolution and the big bang happened. Get over it." I'm sure the academic masses are dying to know how you came to this cold, hard conclusion. Despite the fact that thousands of scientists far more intelligent than you or I have never been able to prove the evolutionary and/or big bang theories, I have full confidence in your collegiate-level wisdom.

Despite your advanced scientific knowledge, you state that Fox News was born as a result of people that supported Bush. While opinion writing may have been simpler when you didn't need to do anything but hate on Georgie, you should probably know that Fox News was actually started in 1996, four years before Bush took office.

To reiterate, I apologize greatly for how difficult your job has become. I'm so sorry that you can no longer churn out anti-Bush columns by stringing liberal keywords together. But there's a very good chance that you will have to move on. To borrow your own words, Mr. Fliginger, "get over it."

Well said.

According to IMDb, The Dark Knight is the fifth highest ranking movie of all time, getting a 9.0 out of 10 from fans. The next closest fan favorite would be Slumdog Millionaire, which ranks 34th.


And yet, no Best Picture or Best Director nods for The Dark Knight.


But let's say the viewers don't matter. What did the critics say in regards to the Best Picture nominees? (Scores via Rotten Tomatoes)


The Reader: 60% - Are you serious? How can a blatantly, Oscar baiting movie that only gets 60% positive reviews be up for Best Picture?


Slumdog Millionaire: 95% - Most likely a very good film...right? Sure. I'll let the use of the "Cracked" font on the poster slide (Although this font is to be strictly used for EL-E-VA-TION videos and nothing else)


The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: 72% - This movie got somewhat mixed reviews (although I really enjoyed it), and somehow it got 13 (yes, 13) nominations. While David Fincher deserves a Best Director nod, why is he getting it here, and not for Zodiac?


Milk: 92% - I'll put by personal hatred of Sean Penn aside for the 8 seconds it will take me to write this. Ok, done. I hate Sean Penn.


Frost/Nixon: 91% - Ron Howard really knows how to push himself doesn't he? I bet it was tough to take a stage play by Peter Morgan, have him write it for the screen, and then cast the exact same actors that were previously in the stage play. I can't imagine how he pushed them to get performances that they'd given fifty seven thousand times before. Really, that's quite an accomplishment.



And of course, there's The Dark Knight, which was horribly snubbed by the multitude of dimwits who make up the academy (which I'm not capitalizing because they don't deserve it.)



The Dark Knight: 94% - The only movie with better reviews (in the Best Picture/Best Director) category is Slumdog Millionaire. And yet no nomination. The Dark Knight made more money than all of the other Best Picture nominees...combined. People loved it, critics loved it, and yet, the academy decided that it was not worthy.


Thematically? Where was the competition? Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and The Reader? Hey, here's some stuff that happened that you may or may not be able to learn from. Good luck. Benjamin Button is the only one that competes from this aspect, and The Dark Knight blows it away.


You guys are terrible. I hope Russel Crowe shows up at the Oscars and punches all of you square in the face. You deserve it.