Dear Editorial Staff,

I wanted to respond to your editorial “ATO plays homeless”. I also am one of the original member to start this endeavor nearly a decade ago. I found your article to be hateful & sophomoric. Not sure if you have been caught up in the divisive election cycle or you just didn’t like to see guys in backwards hats, flip-flops and khakis not fit your stereotype and preconceived notions. I would like to address your concerns you raised in your article in first the history, goals and critics.

History:

If you faired to look in the archives of the Parthenon papers, you may have noticed that this event was once held during the week prior to Thanksgiving. Members in fact did sleep in cold temperatures. After several years of the event with each time growing in size, our national headquarters suggested, that we switch to the beginning of the semester, to capitalize on when students and the community have had some extra spending money from mom & dad and before people think of presents and gifts for family members during winter break. To our surprise, even with more events and competition our event grew. Eventually the idea has spread to chapters across the nation.

Goals:

The goals of ATO with this project are simple; first to raise as much money for a local charity, since again this is a problem we have seen, and which Huntington gets a bad wrap. Second, to have us and our peers think. As we are privileged, privileged to go on to higher-education, privileged to walk on the beautiful campus that is Huntington-Main, when people half-a-mile away struggle. We hope that we may start to begin awareness, discussion and thought provoking within the campus. Third, promote teamwork, leadership, civics, and philanthropy among our members.

Critics:

First , your article starts off with some small facts about the project then goes straight for the backwards compliment about our good intentions  as you firmly stated “rooted in the exploitation of homelessness” . You failed to mention nor respond to the already stated fact that 100% of the donations go to the Huntington Mission.

Your second critic is that we are basically not “hardcore, extreme, or authentic” because many of our members have other responsibilities, clubs, jobs, class, studying to complete. Our members in interviews have stated they feel lucky and privileged to come back to their dorm or house. I would ask the staff to check their own privilege. Did you write this critic in one of our new dorms with all the bells and whistles for our freshman and sophomores? The glorious Drinko library. Or where you typing this up at Starbucks? You “play” as if you can read the souls, intentions, and life-experience of all our members, which in-itself is pretentious. You could have interviewed these members to make your point but again a missed opportunity. Instead of looking at the hut as some street art hoping to get people to think about who those faces may be or imagen if they saw someone they knew.

Third your “Red-Cross” critic is a thinly-vailed shot at Huntington City Mission, because in your mind and others, this is not a well-deserving non-profit in your eyes. Whether it is because its origins as a non-denominational Christian organization, which you equate to discrimination. However, if you wanted to include any interviews with your numerous homeless sources or contacted the City Mission about their policy then we could make a decision as a whole.

Fourth, your complaint about mandatory community service. Yes, we expect our members to contribute to our events. The question you should have asked is how many of these gentlemen exceeded this requirement, which is more of a way to say to our members what the expectations for our groups and our members.

Fifth, your real complaint is that trying to pick on a soft target like a fraternity is easy and even part of pop-culture. We get it and we expect it, you assume to know our lives and try to convince readers that our motives are malice. Instead of focusing on the negative or even given the fraternity a valid critic, you failed to offer any suggestions, while condemning your fellow students for trying to make a  small difference. You could have made your point by stating that the first 10 years are great but hope the next 10 years are even better, but you choose not to be apart of the solution, instead of offering sarcastic remarks such as a more orthodox bake sale. Not even my ma-maws’ brownies got three articles, so please let the focus being on donations and the homeless.  Your article only furthers to take away from the true purpose, which is We are Marshall, We are Huntington, We are One.

Michael Alonso

Marshall Undergraduate-08          Marshall Graduate-11