Loquitur silence on student jumper deafening

Last week the editors and staff of the Loquitur committed one of the more deafening acts of silence I have witnessed in a very long time. On Sept. 24, 2002, one of our own students jumped out of a third-story window and was rushed by helicopter to Hahnemann University Hospital. The event was newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by the Philadelphia Inquirer, but the only indication in the Loquitur that anything disturbing had occurred was a brief announcement about National Depression Screening Day, an event that, among other topics, would help explain "what to do if a friend is suicidal." Not a single other word on the subject was printed.

While the jumper fortunately survived her fall with minimal injuries, I find the silence about this event almost as disturbing as the event itself. I know through informal conversations with the Loquitur staff that many of the editors were deeply concerned about the effect any printed story might have on the student and her family. Such concerns are both laudable and human, and there is precedent: in order to avoid putting the family through further pain, the Loquitur chose last year not to reveal that the death of a bright and popular student was due to a drug overdose. The rush to protect these privacy interests helps perpetuate a culture of ignorance that allows us to deny that serious problems exist here at Cabrini, just as they do on all college campuses. In silence, we can believe that our choices about individual behavior and the behavior we passively tolerate in others does not have serious consequences for our friends, our community, or ourselves.

The human capacity for selfdelusion is limitless: we routinely say, "It can't happen here" or "That won't happen to me" when the preachy factions of our society offer their tired warnings about depression, drug use, and the like. We often have to be forcibly slapped in the face by real events directly tied to our everyday lives to remind us that it can, in fact, happen here and to us. A good newspaper delivers that slap: it forces us to confront these kinds of problems in our communities in order to combat the willful ignorance that allows us to believe that we live in a consequence-free world, that we do not have to worry about our own behavior or the behavior of others. When a newspaper remains silent, no matter how benevolent the reason, it abdicates this responsibility and lets rumor have the day. Unfortunately, unchecked rumors inflict all of the pain a silent newspaper seeks to avoid without any of the potential healing because rumors, as titillating and thoughtprovoking as they may be, are almost always dismissible. While the negative impression they create may linger, they rarely support any lasting positive social change because, after all, they are only rumors.

The rumors surrounding this event abound: I've heard that the student in question repeatedly made suicidal gestures to friends; that she and these same friends were drinking quite heavily in response to a rather pronounced athletic defeat; that there was a