I confess that I am dumbstruck by Dickinson’s infallible ability to ruin a good thing. Dickinson Confessions being forced offline last week provoked this confession. I believed that this page was a great opportunity to get a few laughs and help create a cross-campus sense of being a “Dickinsonian.”

A confession is an admission to an act that a person is ashamed of or feels guilty about doing. This is someone letting you into his or her most intimate secrets; what that does is give us a glimpse of what it means to be truly human. I have often wondered about how other people think and what they think about. Are the people I see the saints they so desperately try to portray themselves to be or are they just great actors? Do they have the same fears, desires, ambitions, shames, secrets and hungers that I do? The death of Dickinson Confessions is a step back in sharing what it means to be you as a human, and this stunts our shared growth. For example, a confession about getting bad news on Testing Tuesday may not be humorous in and of itself. What I do know is that sexually active people sometimes have fears about their sexual health and the fact that only Dickinson (that I know of) has Testing Tuesday makes this both relatable and funny.

In the description of why the Facebook page went offline, the individual who created it made a reasonable argument as to why he or she could no longer keep the site up. So many of the submissions were personal attacks and people had threatened to report the page because they did not like what was being said. I believe there are two huge red flags in this explanation.

The first is, what the hell is wrong with Dickinson that there is so much negativity within us? I understand that anonymity on the Internet can cause people to reveal the worst they have to offer, and from the tone of the Facebook author’s resignation letter it was clear that there were some abhorrent submissions. The saddest part about this is that the author said that he or she had an inbox full of submissions. What this means is that there is a desperate need on this campus to express this negativity and also that these submissions are not just a few isolated incidents. This festering hate needs to be lanced for Dickinson’s culture to ever heal. We as a community need to find a way to resolve this.

The other problem is that people felt the need to threaten to report both the author and the confessors. This need to censor people because you do not agree with what they have to say is deplorable. The reason I say this is that I am positive that those same people who threatened to report the page probably also preach freedom and liberty in many other aspects of life. This was meant to be a confession. This is not Dickinson Compliments. This was supposed to be a glimpse into the unspeakable part of a Dickinsonian’s mind, and when that individual didn’t like what was back there you wanted it closed for all of us.

This is not to say that everything and anything should be posted. The post about the Italians on campus was directly insulting to individual people. I don’t believe that is appropriate, but just because there was one inappropriate post does not mean that the concept itself does not have merit. Even with that post it was distinctively Dickinsonian. I doubt many campuses across the globe are as small, and yet feel the global touch of the world as much as our limestone walls do. In few other places does an influx of a few international students have such an impact upon the community that someone actually used the word “despise” to describe their feelings for them. On such a small campus, it is also true that everyone knows the people they are describing. Kudos to the Italian students for taking it so well.

Dickinson Confessions was an opportunity missed by the Dickinson Community. It could have been a fun and lighthearted way to share both our “Distinctively Dickinsonian” experiences and also the inner self that hides behind our socially conditioned mask. Instead we had the two sides of the coin that comprise the negatives with the Dickinson community take this opportunity away from us: insensitivity to a group people and the “politically correct” police who preach freedom until they don’t like it. We can do better.