Quick, grab your peace
signs. Meet me on the steps of Old Main.

Be ready to sing and sway together and light candles. Write up speeches calling for peace, and deliver them with all the passion you can find inside (but remember the valuable lessons you learned in Speech Comm).

All of this is necessary, oh noble Americans, because a certain group is being unfairly targeted. No longer can we sit idly by and allow this atrocity to continue.

Yes, we must protect the referees. The officials, those men in stripes, are in danger like never before.

Something must be done. It is only our duty as activists and concerned college students that we start the revolution.

Think of how your parents talk about the life in the 1960s, if they remember it. Peace and love, man. And more than that, fighting for the things they believed in.

Truly, today we must believe that officials do not deserve all the scrutiny and chastising they've received in recent months.

Let's start with our very own saint of a football coach, Joe Paterno. A few months back, he chased down the head official after his team lost to Iowa in overtime. Mr. Paterno, by yanking forcefully on the back of the official's shirt, politely showed his displeasure with certain calls made during the game.

But there was more to come. Mr. Paterno did not stop his assault on the referees. Along came the Michigan game, which turned out to be a beautiful and thrilling and exhilarating contest, but Mr. Paterno didn't enjoy himself very much because one call, made late in the game, was controversial (well, okay, wrong).

But Paterno just would not let it go. He questioned the integrity of those officials because some of them were from Michigan.

This from a man who, during Penn State's days as an independent, saw his team benefit from call after call made by refs from Pennsylvania.

Tim Curley, Penn State's athletic director, parlayed the coach's public furor into a very direct and pointed request for a "comprehensive review of Big Ten football officiating."

Still it did not stop. One day, a stuffed doll representing those officials hung in effigy on the unassuming Paterno home in State College. Mr. Paterno so uncharacteristically would not let it die.

Is there a more respected and revered figure in coaching than Joe Paterno? If the quintessential old-school, full-of-respect, play-the-game-right coach can bully the refs verbally and physically, what will the youngins get away with?

Indeed, Paterno is not the sole culprit of this great campaign against the officials.

Fellow Big Ten coach Mike Davis, the coach who took over Indiana basketball from the famously volatile Bob Knight, charged onto the court early this season to protest a call late in a close game.

Curiously, the Big Ten, which did not discipline Paterno, recommended a six-game suspension for Davis. Ridiculously, the conference accepted, the Hoosiers' decision to suspend Davis for a single game.

A month ago, the NFL admitted publicly that a last-second call in the Giants-49ers first-round playoff game was wrong, and commissioner Paul Tagliabue decided to make midweek officiating changes right in the middle of the playoffs. This gave NFL players the chance to rail on the zebras, which in turn caused an anonymous official to say that the league was hanging them out to dry.

Just two nights ago Utah Jazz head coach Jerry Sloan shoved an official in the chest because he said an official had made a poor call on a routine play in the first quarter of a regular-season NBA game.

Here's what we need: a strict code of conduct concerning treatment of officials. Each league needs to set down some rules, and stick by its employees.

But if you really still want to protest, maybe you should think about that War everyone is talking about.