Relax, everyone. The threat has receded. You may now allow your apathy to return.

Monday’s edition of the Northern Star carried the headline “Threat Recedes; NIU resumes normal operation after December shooting threat” on the front page. Whew! Thank goodness for that. Now my classmates and I can go back to things being just as they were before. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

Not only was the headline patently false, it was a dangerous and naïve attempt at spin journalism. Apparently, your response to a hateful, disruptive and ignorant threat on your life should be to continue to ignore the blatant race divides on campus. The Northern Star has assured you that things are back to normal without offering any support, end of story. We told you how to feel about an issue and as dutiful readers it is your job to toe the line. Why should you have to deal with the source of the problem when treating its symptoms is so much easier?

We thankfully can all breathe a sigh of relief that the threat wasn’t acted upon, but it begs the question: Do people have to die before things change?

It’s easy to justify our individual anger with the pusillanimous offender. He, she or they, after all, has robbed our community of the justice we deserve. The anonymous nature of the threat has created an atmosphere of finger pointing and paranoia among entire groups of people.

The vandalism succeeded by damaging our school’s reputation. Rather than highlighting the achievements of many during last semester’s commencement ceremony, we displayed the ignorance of a few. What is even worse is that we did it on a national level.

It’s not my intention to be an alarmist, particularly when tensions are still lingering, but the writing on the wall was there long before it was literally the case. Since working at the Northern Star, I have followed every story on race with an attentive eye – there have been several, as I’m sure many of you have noticed. Admittedly, I have limited personal experience when it comes to coping with the frustration felt by victims of racism. At times, I felt the accusations of race bias seemed exaggerated. Other times, I believed them to be downright false. Last semester changed my perspective.

In the immediate aftermath of the threat we allowed ourselves to become a fractured campus. Rather than universally condemning the actions of a coward, we let the incident divide us along superficial lines. We neglected to treat the threat as one that affected us all, and in doing so, many of us washed our hands of culpability. That mentality cannot be allowed to prevail.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking the threat has receded. It hasn’t. The threats made against us last semester merely exposed a problem. To permit ourselves to ignore it any further is to invite disaster. Now, more than ever, we need to realize that if we don’t harshly condemn the mentality manifested by last semester’s senseless criminal act, then we condone it.