The Claw has become a large part of our newspaper staff’s lives. We publish it once a quarter and spend an ample amount of time on it.

But for what? Why do we even bother to put forth the effort anymore? Our issues are ridiculed to the death every quarter. They’re torn up, skewed about classroom floors and thrown in bathroom trash cans. All of which diminish our efforts to inform the student body about different student activities, sports and pop culture taking place in both our school and the world.

The biggest issue facing The Claw is the views section. Some of our peers don’t agree with our staff’s political views, but that doesn’t mean that they are stupid or invalid. I also don’t agree with all of the views pieces we publish; however, I can acknowledge that they are well-written and grounded in facts from reliable sources.

Some of these students take to Twitter and Snapchat to bash our hard work. Hiding behind their screens, they scoff at our efforts and make assumptions about who we are as people based off of our publication.

Stupid backlash like this makes me not want to write political pieces for The Claw. And frankly, some of these students would probably prefer to read about one of my more conservative viewpoints than even read the headline of a liberal story.

In our March issue, two political views pieces, one about the fear behind the word “socialism” and the other on whether President Trump should be impeached or not, destroyed the rest of our newsmagazine. The criticism we received from those pieces was immense.

When we asked students who openly bashed those pieces whether they read them or not, some of them said no. How are you going to let two stories demolish the whole issue if you haven’t read them?

As someone who wrote two stories in the March issue, neither of which were views pieces, this is irritating. There are 12 people involved in writing and designing the entire paper. And letting two pieces that you don’t agree with ruin the whole paper is disrespectful to the other writers.

Our student body doesn’t see all of the hard work that goes into making an issue. We write, copy edit, rewrite, design, proofread, redesign, publish and distribute all in about two weeks, and these two weeks are some of the most stressful days of the quarter.

So again, why do we bother?

We do it to withhold the standards of journalistic integrity. We do it to inform our peers. We do it to have a physical symbol of our dedication and work. We do it because we love it.