Thoughts On Poizner Gate

Got your attention yet?



For those who care nothing about Mt. Pleasant High School’s (my high school) recent controversy involving GOP Governor Candidate Steve Poizner, then I sincerely sincerely apologize. You will not find sports, you will not find jokes, you will only find my thoughts on the situation. For that I am sorry. And if any of you decide to start a flame war, god help me, I will murder you. Thanks!

I think it’s extremely unfortunate that people are being reactional in this way. I've been hearing a lot of different things about him lately, and most of it is biased information.

Some people have been saying he taught an honors class. This is not true, he taught a normal American Gov't class and sat in Mr. Torres's class (which was an honors class) to observe Torres. People also say that he's only saying these things to generate controversy and to profit from the sales of his book. He's a billionaire, and I can tell you from personal experience I've had so far trying to publish a novel that even best selling books like Twilight only go up to the tens of millions. That's chump change for Poizner, and I hardly think he expects his book to sell like Twilight or Harry Potter. Poizner has been very generous to the MP community, and I believe most of the proceeds of the book are going to MP and East Side schools in general. It’s hard to know what is truth and what isn’t with all these different facts floating around.

I think people have a tendency to jump into a frenzy when its created, especially in this case where a bunch of people decided to criticize and picket Poizer without reading his book first. They're basing all their opinions on a few sound bites and three or four quotes off his book. Are the quotes bad? Do they attack the MP community? Sure. Are they completely off base and fictional, that's a matter of judgment, but I wouldn't say its not true, albeit a little exaggerated. Sure, it's bad to generalize a community, but I'm sure there are other parts of his novel that applaud some of the students at MP. Why didn't anyone bring those quotes up in all this hub bub? The only person that did was Poizner himself, but the cynical person would say it’s just flowery stuff to make him look good. In the case of both good and bad, things need to be taken with a grain of salt and people should face criticism with an open mind. We are so focused on taking down an 'enemy' that he wasn't even given a fair opinion. And all these good stories about him, like where he donated to our school's Cardinal Quill when requested, wasn't even brought up. I'm sure that was just one example of many. One of our own teachers, Todd Richards, had good things to say about him. It's a shame that people are so focused with their emotions.

That being said, I ordered a copy of his book too and I'm going to read it before I make any judgments. If I'm done with it and get the perception that he's an ass, then ok, he's an ass. But from what I remember when he sat in our class at Mr. Torres's, he was a very nice man and seemed to really care about the people around him. He would talk to us like a normal person before class started and if I didn't know it before hand, I would've not known he was the 'rich, white, republican' douchebag that everyone is making him out to be. Sorry this is so long, but I just wanted to finally share my thoughts with you guys on this without the worry of being lambasted by my peers on some facebook thread.

And to fit the theme of this blog, what kind of hits does Tim Lincecum like the most? A high line drive. Wakka wakka wakka, dick joke. F all dem haterz.

The end.