This is in response to last week’s letter to the editor in which Andrew Hamilton showed his irritation at the “excessive” publicity of Jared Stene’s death versus the death of Lee Wells.
Was this writer most likely just trying to gain some attention by taking an edgy, against-the-grain approach to the mourning of a fellow student? Instead, he was only able to collect a few paragraphs composed of ignorance and disrespect.
It is simply childish to complain about getting four e-mails notifying us of a student’s near-fatal illness and subsequent passing, considering we receive roughly 16 e-mails from Tech Support each time the internet goes out for ten minutes. The author also made it sound as if the university dropped everything it was doing to plan the week around remembering our former student president. His fellow friends and students, not the administration, organized the majority of the events that were referred to. While it is of course not the school’s responsibility to provide transportation to a student’s funeral, it was the right decision as students ended up streaming off the bus into the crammed memorial service to pay their respects. The primary reason for a bus was to prevent as many as possible from driving in the poor road conditions individually.
All of the “inappropriate” notifications were due to the fact that Stene was more widely known across campus because of his prominent positions serving the student body during the last four years.
This is not to say that Lee Wells, or Jenna Foellmi for that matter, were not tragic losses. Besides the inexplicable weeklong delay of announcing Wells’ death, I thought both he and Foellmi’s deaths were handled much the same as previous fatalities during my time at WSU.
Wells’ death was overshadowed or ignored because of Stene. It was handled normally but perhaps by comparison, seemed to be tossed aside because of the increased coverage Stene’s death got. It is the same reason CNN was covering a B-movie actor who took a few too many pills instead of a plane crash in Poland or a gas explosion in China, both of which had caused dozens of fatalities. It’s the way it always has been and how it always will be. Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s reality.