I love opening The Sun in the morning and finding the editorial page filled with letters from the Cornell community — it reassures me that some still read this newspaper and care enough about what’s written to respond in kind. My own mailbag’s contents are fairly diverse. Many of the letters I get are well-written. Some are idiotic. And every once in a while, I get one that’s well-written and idiotic. Witness the following paragraph of a letter printed on Friday, from a Cornell sophomore I’ll call “Neville:”

Re: Mr. Ahmadinejad Goes to Columbia, Opinion, Sept. 25

Why am I so angry about this, I wondered, my heart palpitating as I poured through the accounts of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech yesterday at Columbia. It was over-— the Iranian president would soon be on a plane back to Tehran — and yet somehow it still wasn’t over for me. Grow up, I told myself. So what, Columbia hosted a world leader who denies the Holocaust, supports Israel’s destruction, seeks nukes, believes the End is nigh, oppresses women and executes gays (though apparently they “have [none] in Iran“) … It was all in the spirit of academic inquiry — why was I getting so worked up? And then it hit me: I was asking the wrong question. I had plenty of reasons to be outraged; what I couldn’t figure out was why so many others weren’t.