My Hero and a Rant

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to meet my hero, although I am a recent convert.

Meredith, one of my other heroes, called me early yesterday and let me know that she had received an email from Bob Jones University letting students know that Dr. Ron Paul would be speaking and answering some questions on campus that day. Obviously, I jumped at the opportunity to go see him.

UPDATE: I snapped this photo just before losing my spot in the room. I was probably about 15 feet from the front. I did get one other picture, but just as the flash went off, some jackass got in the way. Bummer.

He was scheduled to begin at 5:00pm, so Meredith got there at 4:00 so that we could have a good seat. I arrived at 4:30 and joined her.

And here’s where the rant begins. I’ve been familiar with BJU for quite some time now. I’ve known them to be a school that is deeply committed to excellence in all they do, but especially in how they appear to the community around them. Yesterday was the first exception I had ever witnessed to that end.

As I mentioned earlier, Meredith arrived a full hour before Dr. Paul was scheduled to speak. She was one of the first to get there. Here’s my first complaint … BJU severely misjudged the popularity of the Ron Paul movement. They evidently offered him a classroom hardly any bigger than one of my high school classrooms. Not only that, but the classroom they gave him was being used by a class immediately before Dr. Paul was scheduled to speak (the classroom wasn’t emptied out until 4:50).

Now, I’m CONVINCED that has this been Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, they would have offered him no less than a lecture hall, or even as much as an auditorium. Not so with Ron Paul.

The hallway outside the classroom was packed. When the class let out, we waited patiently to enter, and got a good place close to the front, although we had to stand because the seats quickly filled up.

And here’s my second rant.

As the classroom filled, and it filled quickly (there were easily 500 people waiting to see Ron Paul speak), the coordinator for the event, a BJU staff woman, got the go ahead from a man, another BJU staff person, to move to a larger room. She got on the microphone, told us where we would be going, and asked us to wait for Dr. Paul to get there first. She also asked that we wait on her as well, as she was the staff coordinator for this event.

After we saw her leave, we quickly left the room and made our way to the building that we were told to meet.

This lecture hall was indeed significantly larger than the room we had originally been assigned to, but even then, it quickly filled up to standing room only. As the room filled up, I suspected that we might need an even larger room to seat all the people interested in seeing Dr. Paul speak. I also noticed that Dr. Paul wasn’t in the room. So when another man asked for our attention, I assumed that we would be moving yet again to accommodate the large numbers.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. The man, another BJU staff member, told us that we had been misinformed by the Ron Paul campaign (a lie … it was a BJU staffer that told us to come to this room), and that we needed to go room 110. A member of the audience told him that we were just in that room and that it was too small. The man responded by saying he had just come from 110, and that’s where Dr. Paul was and we needed to go there if we wanted to see him because that lecture hall wasn’t available. He insisted that the Ron Paul campaign got it wrong when they told us to come there (again, a lie).

Obviously, there was no room in the inadequate classroom, and we stood in the hallway with about 200 other people waiting to maybe slip in as room became available. Needless to say, most of us never got the chance to do that.

I saw one older lady, an obvious Ron Paul fan, with tears in her eyes as she was forced to wait outside in the hallway. In fact, Meredith told me that the lady arrived on campus even before she did. She had been waiting hours to see Dr. Paul, and due to poor planning and communication, she had simply wasted her time.

Again, this would have never happened if this had been Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee.

Thankfully, in the end, Dr. Paul shook hands and took pictures with us outside. Out of respect for his time, I only shook his hand and held back on getting my picture with him.

That moment made up for a good deal of the crap that BJU dealt us that day, but I’m still rather upset at the way things were handled.

One rewarding thing I took away from the experience was the chance to overhear some of the most ridiculous conversations in my life. I’ll write a follow up post to talk about those overheard conversation later. You don’t want to miss that

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