HEY! Why don’t we all calm down a little, huh? I’ve seen an awful lot of hostility on this campus since I’ve been back, and it’s not healthy.

We all spent the summer off on our own, doing our own thing. But now we have all been thrown back on campus together, and with 25,000 plus people working and playing in such a confined space, people are inevitably going to get on each other’s nerves.

If you fly off the handle every time someone invades your space, it’s going to be a very long year.

I first noticed this hostility in letters to the editor concerning the column by my colleague Tim Davis in which he was critical of Jack Kemp and Bob Dole. Some of you didn’t agree, and that’s fine. A few of you chose to write to Tim and let him know that you didn’t agree, and that’s great.

The newspaper is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, and your opinions are just as important as ours.

But someone had to be snotty about it. In a letter printed this Tuesday, an observant reader pointed out that Tim made a grammatical error when he wrote that Dole’s selection of Kemp was, in effect, blowing smoke “up the collective asses of the American people.”

Obviously, the writer was correct. The sentence should have read that Dole was blowing smoke “up the collective assi of the American people,” “assi” being the correct plural form of “ass.”

The writer went on to say that proper grammar should be a goal of every writer, “even a Daily columnist.” As someone who has been a Daily columnist for three years, I must say that I don’t like no comments like that one there.

The writer could have pointed out the mistake without implying that Tim was stupid. I know he is not. I have known Tim since we were in the same English class as freshman and had to do our homework by firelight on the back of coal shovels.

People, men in particular, always have to try to prove that they are more clever, nastier, stronger and generally better than others.

You see the same thing in social situations. Go to a bar or a party (GO! NOW!) and observe. If two guys bump into each other, spill beer on each other, hit on the same girl, breathe the same air, etc., it becomes grounds for a brawl, or at least a lot of posturing and threats.

Here’s an example: I was at a local bar last spring when a guy approached me. He obviously recognized me from the picture that accompanies my column, because he stood inches away from my face and said, “Everything in the Daily sucks.”

I concluded that he was either:

A) A concerned reader who wanted to offer some ideas about how to improve the paper. Or,

B) A drunk who wanted to beat the crap out of someone, preferably a hippy newspaper columnist.

I decided I didn’t want to be involved in either of those two options, so I smiled and nodded and walked away. I could have let him provoke me into a fight, but it would have been pointless.

Plus, and I cannot overemphasize the importance of this, he probably would have killed me. I’m not a small man by any means, but this guy looked like a Mack truck with a goatee.

But even if he had been smaller than me, I still would have walked away. If I fought with everyone who didn’t like my column or the Daily, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

Why are men like that? (My God, I sound like a Cosmopolitan article) Why do they always have to be the strongest, smartest, coolest guy in the room? I believe in the theory that this hostility, and hostility all over the world, stems from the basic principle of penis size.

Men try to compensate for their lack of endowment by lashing out at others, picking fights, making threats, driving fast, etc.

The point is that sooner or later, and probably very often, someone is going to irritate you. They will say something that offends you, spill beer on you, cut you off in traffic.

Let it go.

You don’t have to get along with everyone, but you don’t have to be violent and hostile, either. We would all get along better if we had thicker skin and longer fuses (I’m talking about having a better temper here, not that other thing).

That having been said, let me conclude by saying the next time I’m on the sidewalk and some skinny, shirtless, one-earring-wearing, sideburn-sporting moron goes flying past me on Rollerblades like he was A.J. Foyt, I’m going to stomp a mud-hole in his collective assi.

Thank you.

Steven Martens is a senior in journalism mass communication from Cedar Rapids.