We have a purpose.

"when you punish a person for dreaming his dream,
don't expect him to thank or forgive you."
The Mountain Goats, "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton"

On December 10th, 2008, the Student Media department at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas pulled the plug on a 47 year-old tradition. KTXT was unceremoniously and without warning, ripped from the airwaves. A radio station that was one of the most powerful in the country was just ended. Without warning. Without discussion. Without any input from the students who listened and operated it.

For many of us, the station was the entire reason we came to Tech. Radio broadcast and media is our passion. We love playing music for the people that came to us. We wanted something more than the dross found on mainstream radio channels, and we wanted to give back to the body that first birthed in us an appreciation for things outside the norm. Things special to us, that were ours in a way that only completely heartless bastards could take away from us. This was not an act of economy or policy or failure, but an act of violence. Whole vital bits were cut out of hundreds of people. Pasts and futures were negated in one sharp swoop by people completely uninvested in this action's outcome.
Lubbock is not a glamorous or exciting place to live. There is drinking and church and school and herpes. And then there was KTXT, which occasionally incorporated these elements, but stood outside and above them all. If you felt disenfranchised or alone, or lost, or simply wanted more, we were there. For some of us, it has been an incubation stage, wherein we might find ourselves and hone our souls to better bite into life and meet the world outside. For some, it was a small comfort, a distant radiant beacon between our dusty conclave and a shimmering horizon we would, for whatever reason, never venture past.
There is no reason for taking this from us that is not petty. That is not small and hateful and awful. For us, without this, there is no reason to remain here, to continue to give Lubbock and Texas Tech our time, our love, our worth and energy and sweat and tuition dollars and voice and mind and heart and sorrow and pain and Goddamnit!

We will rebuild. We can persevere. We can take what we've learned, under your tutelage and through your cruelty. But we'd rather not. We'd rather the fields we cultivated, in soil made fertile from this city's history, be returned to us to tend and and seed and return the harvest to those who granted it us to us. It isn't ours and it isn't yours. It came to us from those who tilled it before, and we'd hoped to sow the favor forward. For the love of those who came before us, and the hopes of the ones who will come after, we ask this small thing. And we will strain hard to reclaim it. If we didn't, then what was it for? We are young and fecund and angry and we will rise from this and never thank you for it. And you will never even feel the weight of the innumerable future joys you have murdered. But I suppose they were never for you anyway.