By now it is a story known the world over: Dr. Brian L. Friedrich, President of Concordia University, decided to remind his students that they live in the most boring city on earth with a salute to Washington, D.C. on President’s Day. 2200 lives would be changed forever; the official death toll from students who have given up their lives due to inactivity has unfortunately increased once again.
The world’s attention turned back to Seward this morning as five more bodies were recovered from the Concordia campus. A law enforcement representative stated that the victims appeared to have died of boredom after they returned from a winter break trip to Omaha, taken against the advice of school officials. The bodies were too far degraded by the time spent in such a mind-numbingly drab environment for easy identification to be possible.
Though most of the roughly two thousand students enrolled at Concordia manage to slog through each humdrum day without slitting their wrists, Friedrich’s ill-planned reference to a real city resulted in the first large-scale monotony-related deaths since the mass suicides of 1500 students at Chadron State College on April 15, 1912.
President Friedrich, who is under house arrest while an investigation into his conduct occurs, told a reporter for the Seward County Independent he “had gone that route [in planning President’s Day celebrations] before” with no ill effects.
Friedrich also denied reports that he abandoned the campus for Lincoln as soon as the approaching disaster became apparent. Cell phone transcripts have surfaced, however, in which his 94 year-old diabetic mother Arabella Friedrich angrily insists he “get back on the damn campus.”
She goes on to declare, “You may have saved yourself from Seward, but I’m going to make you pay… I’m going to make your life miserable.”
Mrs. Friedrich, a retired school teacher living in Broken Bow, declined to comment further for this article, though survivors of the Concordia tragedy say she is a hero.
“When it was pointed out that I live in a horrifically boring town with nothing other than an annual 4th of July parade to stave off perpetual despair, my whole world just tilted,” sophomore gerontology major Emma Svoboda told reporters from a friend’s house in Lincoln. “I felt like I was knocked into the ocean with no lifeboat or something. But at least I got out. I survived. Some of my friends weren’t so lucky.”
Salvage workers are attempting to clear Concordia of academic supplies, though bad weather and a pervasive sense of worthlessness in the area have made the work difficult. Once completed, the campus buildings will be transported to a place that is actually worth living in for renovations.
