I know, I’ve been on hiatus for a while. I greatly apologize.
In November, I was assigned the religion story for the school yearbook. When I told my adviser and editors that I was going to focus on celebrating the diversity in our school, they were fine with it. I did interviews, took pictures, did research on faiths I didn’t know much about. But when we put it on the spread, I needed to lengthen it. More fluff, more interviews, more pictures.
Then, the dominant picture, which I had staged depicting all my interviewees sitting at a library table with their holy books open and having an in-depth conversation about their faiths, “didn’t represent what’s going on in the story,” according to my adviser. Which I knew was utter bullshit, but since I want him to convince our principal to allow my three years on the staff to count for my technology credit– which I can’t graduate without and is the only reason I joined the staff– I decided not to stir up shit. But their idea was the Bible study group, who worships between our large and small theaters twice a week– a group that wasn’t even represented in the story. Which led to another problem– I had to represent them, because they’re the majority. And I normally wouldn’t have had any problem with that, except that they all knew I wanted to focus on minor religions instead.
Bigoted problems such as this continued to arise, up until Wednesday. I opened up my spread, and there had been a lot changed graphically– which didn’t make sense, because it’s my spread that I made from plain white space. They also normally don’t edit anything I do, because they know that the work is good enough to send straight to the plant. I changed back all the unattractive graphic errors and zoomed in on the text, when my attention was drawn to the ending sentence of my introductory paragraph– which was worded almost to say that the people I had interviewed were the only people in the school practiced those religions. Thus, I changed it to essentially say that while many students were Christian, there were also many who were not. Saving my changes, I shut off my computer and went to my next class.
On Friday, I noticed that the spread was no longer in its proper folder, but in the “sent” section of the server. Knowing that it was probably too late to make any more changes, I opened it to find that all the graphics had been changed back, the photo had been changed to the exact same group, from the exact same angle– but the lighting was different, and my adviser had taken it. Zooming in to the text boxes, I found that my words in the last sentence had been edited– the same words, but arranged in such a way that it sounded as though I were trying to attack the majority, which has never been my intention.
When I asked the editor that seems to like me more about it (the other, who I suspect made the changes, was sick), she said that she had no idea how that had happened, and that she would tell our adviser when the representative from the plant left. Which didn’t happen during the class period, but still.
It’s also magically my fault that the page hasn’t been sent until now, when it was ready to go two weeks after it was assigned.
