Opinion

Wednesday, Jul 01 2009 09:08 PM

CSUB graduation day was ruined by 'that one lady'

I am a recent graduate of CSUB. I see the paper has received many responses to Dolores Huerta's disrespectful and biased presentation. I'm not going to go into detail about what she said, but I will give a brief description of what we graduates felt while our ceremony was being massacred.

Going into the ceremony, we felt a sense of pride. It was our day, nobody else's. I saw people arm and arm, smiling faces, picture flashes and waves to the crowd; the typical stuff you would expect to see during a commencement. The event started off awesome until Dolores Huerta distastefully took the podium. As her speech progressed, I couldn't help but feel our sense of accomplishment quickly becoming overshadowed by biased political jargon.

Where I previously felt happy to share this moment with hundreds of fellow candidates, I soon experienced what can best be described as "division." We became separated as we all felt differently about her speech.

We will now be known as the class that had "that one lady" speak, the one who talked about socialism, job loss and racial issues, as well as other irrelevant topics. Is that how you think we deserve to be remembered?

As to the response Huerta gave The Californian about trying to open us up to new topics, don't worry, we are well aware of all of them -- we've heard about them on Limbaugh and read about them in The New York Times.

Our graduation was befouled because of Huerta.

GARY SIMMONS

Bakersfield

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