On your walks through campus in recent weeks, you may have noticed several little green stickers advocating that the Bush administration step down.

These stickers have been hard to miss, considering that they have been plastered all over campus on trash bins, official university signs and Arizona Daily Wildcat distribution bins.

While the Wildcat certainly supports the right of everyone in our community to exercise free speech, the students who put up these stickers and the organization that distributes them, The World Can’t Wait, deserve scorn and resentment for their blatant disregard for public property.

The group distributed the stickers in order to protest the Bush administration’s policies around the time of the president’s State of the Union speech.

However, they apparently did not feel it necessary to discourage those taking the stickers from defacing public property with them.

Several individuals have since exhibited egregious disrespect for community property by affixing the stickers to any object that people are sure to notice.

Upon drawing criticism for distributing materials that have been used to deface campus, members of The World Can’t Wait unapologetically replied that the action was a form of protest and that they are unable to control what people do with the materials they hand out.

But such an attitude demonstrates both irresponsibility and a general lack of class. To claim that a group cannot be held at least partially responsible for the way that materials it has provided free of charge are used shows an abstention from accountability and an intense lack of respect for public property.

Furthermore, the eyesore that the stickers have brought to our campus will only serve to cut down the respect that members of the UA community might afford the political positions of The World Can’t Wait.

At a time when outrage over offensive materials in print has called the merits and necessity of free speech into question, we strenuously reaffirm our commitment to the rights of individuals to advocate their own beliefs. Yet that right does not exist in a vacuum.

While angry students are entitled to promote their political agendas through stickers placed on their notebooks, their clothing or even on their bodies, members of the UA community don’t deserve to be visually accosted by such sentiments on every trash bin or university sign they pass while walking through campus.

OPINIONS BOARD
Opinions are determined by the Wildcat opinions board and written by one of its members. They are Lori Foley, Caitlin Hall, Michael Huston, Ryan Johnson, Aaron Mackey, and Tim Runestad.