THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 2012
PAGE 5
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
opinion
FREE FOR ALL
Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351
Does parking really need all that money?
The "Call Me Maybe" song makes me feel like I'm in a Lizzie McGuire movie.
To students that care enough about something to take the time to write a letter to the editor. I salute you.
Butterflies keep landing on me. It's either good luck or a death omen.
Heard some really loud booms in Wescoe during class and found myself secretly hoping that the War of the Worlds had finally started.
Professor says, "scratching skin will cause inflammation." Class response: everyone scratches skin.
The awkward moment when I realized that half the guys on campus have better style than me.
Tour guides really ought to explain that, unlike in high school, there actually is nap time in college.
Sometimes I like to super glue my thumbs to my nipples and pretend I'm a T-Rex.
Hey, Towers: I put thousands of dollars into this relationship. The least you could do is put out. Hot water, that is.
Just called my roommate "mom." Is there something wrong with that?
I can explain toast in one word: science.
Every library computer should have a Microsoft Word shortcut. Simple things va know?
Khakis. Who decided that leg-colored pants were a good idea?
Just saw a container of cheese balls in the tree outside of Fraser. Looks like the squirrels like cheese balls too.
My professor just let a leech attach to his finger during class! What!
Oh boy, the religious nuts are out. How can I make them really uncomfortable?
It's not even summer yet and I have already seen way too many butt cheeks hanging out of shorts.
Anyone else creeped out by the way Dan the bus driver looks at the girls getting on the bus?
Dear couple blocking the doors to Fraser, no one wants to watch you kissing and sharing lollipops.
Why is there an influx of swim trunks? I mean there is no pool open yet.
I wake up in the morning feeling like Wolverine.
The end is near when you stop camping at Allen Fieldhouse and start doing so at Anschutz.
I only have a 45 minute window to get to all five Lawrence Jimmy Johns locations for $1 sandwiches. Challenge accepted.
If you are just now finding out about the crane by the engineering buildings, I have some bad news for you.
TECHNOLOGY
Cochlear implants raise questions
My parents are deaf. I grew up in a household where American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English were used alongside one another. I also went to school with the same 90 kids from kindergarten until 8th grade, until I was shuffled off to high school, with over half of those 90 kids going with me. Because of this, I've spent most of my life surrounded by people who already knew about my parents being deaf.
Every so often, a personal detail would slip that would confuse someone who was not 'in the know,' and I'd give the abbreviated version: "Oh yeah, my parents are deaf—no, they don't lip-read, yes, I know my siblings and I aren't deaf, yes, I know sign language, yeah, it is pretty cool."
I'm used to these types of questions, and my responses are automatic. A few years ago,
however, a new question started to be asked — a question that forces me to recognize the divide that I straddle, that breach between my hearing world and my parents' Deaf one.
"What do you think about cochlear implants?"
Cochlear implants are surgically implanted electronic devices that allow a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. Doctors and scientists alike have tried to develop what is sometimes referred to as "bionic ears" for decades, but it was only in 2005 that the first cochlear implants were successful came about. Cochlear implants are now being heralded as an advancement to help the Deaf Community and praise lauded upon the medical community for finding a 'cure'.
Cochlear implant surgeries are now being performed in half of all children who are
born deaf, and why not? Hearing parents want their children to be able to hear music, birds singing on a summer's day, the bark of a pet dog — or even throwing out terribly romanticized notions: parents want their children to be able to go to the doctor without an interpreter, to visit a restaurant and not have to scrabble for a slip of paper and pen for a means of communication, to be able to hear the tornado sirens blaring through the streets and not remain oblivious (as I spent one panicked afternoon a few years ago, my mother having just left for the store, her phone left
behind).
Hearing parents don't want their children's lives to be hard. No parent does. For that is what being Deaf is, isn't it? A disability, a misfortune whether its cause is by genetics, disease, or accident. Why wouldn't the Deaf Community be overjoyed to join the hearing world, the whole world, to in fact become whole rather than defective?
These are the thoughts that I see buzzing around in the heads of those who ask me, "what do you think of cochlear implants?" This is not an easy question, and there is not an easy answer, and quite a lot of the Deaf Community is not overjoyed about cochlear implants.
It's not just the fact that cochlear implants require an intensive and risk-filled surgery, or that this surgical process is being pushed on children younger and younger, often on infants now. It's not just that hearing
parents are often being encouraged by doctors to get cochlear implants rather than considering looking into sign language, or trying to look for options within the Deaf Community. It's not just that the technology is less than ten years old and hasn't had the chance to test for long-term side effects. These factor in massively, of course, but they all transpire from one root issue at the cause of this debate about cochlear implants: the Deaf Community is outside the norm of society, and therefore, the Deaf must find a way to fit the mold, to join the Hearing world. The problem with the question "what do you think about cochlear implants?" is that no one is prefacing that question with one that is both vital and never asked: "What does it mean to be Deaf?"
Gwynn is a freshman in English from Olathe.
MOVIES
LLUSTRATED BY RYAN BENEDICK
Know the Titanic's history before you watch the movie
When I was 14 years old, I remember going on a field
going on a field trip to the Titanic Museum in Branson, Mo. I remember the stewardesses with British and Irish accents, the replica of Titanic's Grand Staircase, the black and white photos of a nearly finished ship and the gorgeous red dress that Kate Winslet wore in the movie "Titanic."
But more than any of those images, I remember the view from a fictitious deck where Captain Edward John Smith stood the night the RMS Titanic sank.
From there, I walked into a room with the names of passengers on the wall. I opened the passport I'd received as I
entered the museum. The alphabetized names would tell me if my character had lived or died. I lived while so many died.
My character wasn't a character at all; she was a human being.
That's when it hit
"Titanic" won the hearts of viewers with the unlikely love story between two passengers. It depicted the grandness of the newly finished ocean liner that couldn't sink. In the end, the movie even illustrated the reality that so many lives were lost and left floating in the freezing water.
I won't lie, as I realized this, I cried. The value of the lives lost on the Titanic was even more powerful than the movie directed by James Cameron.
me; this wasn't fictional. Out of more than 2,200 passengers, only 706 survived.
"The value of the lives lost on the Titanic was even more powerful than the movie directed by James Cameron."
As time has gone on since the tragedy, Americans have become more and more
detached from the tragedy.
We like to joke that Leonardo DiCaprio didn't really die at the end; he just sunk in that movie to reappear in
"Inception." Sometimes it's easier not to think about the other people on the ship, instead we focus on Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (DiCaprio) and ignore the enormous tragedy the Titanic was.
Today, we don't think twice about the Titanic. It's a movie more than anything else. That movie was just released to theaters in 3D on April 5.
It will undoubtedly draw viewers who saw the movie when it first came out as well as viewers seeing it for the first time.
The next time you see the movie, be it in 3D or not, I implore you to keep the reality in mind. More than 1,500 people died on the Titanic, including its captain. Although the Carpathia rescued any of the survivors she could, more than 75 percent of the crew and 75 percent of the third class passengers perished.
Titanic dominated the news for weeks as the New York Times covered, not only the initial sinking of the ship, but also the arrival of Carpathia and the bodies of the deceased to New York.
TITLES
I doubt the Titanic will ever lose interest for American audiences. The stories, artifacts, and discoveries surrounding the Titanic each bring something new to the table.
Before you re-watch "Titanic," take some time to learn more about the actual RMS Titanic. The movie will mean so much more and the journey will seem so much more powerful. Never forget that this tragedy of 100 years ago affected more lives than that of a fictional Rose Dawson. It really happened.
Hawkins is a sophomore in journalism from Scranton.
Real filmmaking is in the purpose
Film majors, we used to create amateurish illusions. Today we're all living in one. We don't know what we are. We don't know what we're doing. We don't know why we fell in love with film in the first place. We don't even know what it is. We're guilty of voluntary ignorance. Independents of all ages have surrendered the integrity of their hard work for the hopes of financial stability. We sacrifice dignity for a bank account that is slightly less vacant than if we had taken the plunge and become real filmmakers. We've sacrificed our brains to pretend that's not true. So we call the videos we shoot films and we call ourselves filmmakers, because it's a title too sexy to drop. It's a pretentious lie.
Calling yourself something better than you are is a sign of shame, ignorance or apathy. The apathy and ignorance are tools used by directors to achieve notoriety with a clear conscience. Their crews, actors and writers now put the same amount of work into making something that is so much less than it could have been so that the directors can achieve instant fame, which was never promised to their heroes and frankly will not happen. The greatest personal success new independents can find is a spot on iTunes. When everyone and their cousins no longer have the required discipline or foolishness to make a film, and when the distributors became responsible for nothing but data, the abyss of iTunes is of course what came of it. Now, not even the special movies will be seen on a venue bigger than a television. In the days of celluloid, the small movies
had just as much worth as the big ones. Everyone, the hacks and the geniuses rich or poor were working with the same beautiful format and there was only one place for their films to go. Everyone working on those films, by the way, was a filmmaker. Everyone contributed to that gorgeous print.
Today, we've invented a lower class for ourselves, and anyone born after us. The opportunity to escape it is getting further and further away. Soon, because of the corners we're cutting, not even those who are willing to be filmmakers will have the ability. Film will be gone. The demand for celluloid is waning because we're demanding something different now. We're seriously demanding our format, our canvas, to serve us. It never could and it never needed to until now. So we have opted for the shinier, easier, safer, cheaper inferior format. It's cheapening our hardest work and it's dulling our dreams.
We affect the survival of our medium. Financiers, distributors and audiences affect our paychecks, but we are the only ones who can affect what they see. What they see, what appears on screen is all that matters. Throw everything else out. Money, audience, acclaim, story, theory, taste, style, all are superfluous when you understand that as a filmmaker your entire purpose, your whole distinguished identity, is based on shooting film, because it's beautiful. When properly manipulated and projected, the resolution, depth and physicality of traditional photography will lend your subjects inimitable resonance. It's been with us since the invention of movies. In fact, it is the invention. If enough young men and women are willing to dedicate themselves to their medium, then it may survive. Then their movies can be called films. Then we can call ourselves filmmakers.
Coy is a sophomore in film and media studies from Lenexa.
New Feature!
Get your photo here:
Take a picture of you and your friends around campus and send us an email at kansanopdesk@gmail.com to appear in next week's opinion page!
Please include your name(s), year in school and hometown in your email.
HOW TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
LETTER GENERATOR
Send letters to kansanopdesk@gmail.com.
Write LETTER TO THE EDITOR in the e-mail subject line.
Length: 300 words
The submission should include the author's name, grade and hometown Find our full letter to the editor policy online at kansan. com/letters.
LETTER GUIDELINES
lan Cummings, editor
864-4810 or manage@kanan.com
Lisa Curran, managing editor
864-4810 or lcurran@kanan.com
Jon Samp, opinion editor
864-4924 or manage@kanan.com
Garrett Lentt, business manager
843-6588 or belan@kansan.com
Korland Earb, sales manager
843-6477 or belan@kansan.com
CONTACT US
**nicolom Gibson, general manager and news adviser**
864-7667 or mgibson@kansan.com
**Jon Schittt, sales and marketing adviser**
864-7666 or jschittt@kansan.com
V
THE EDITORIAL BOARD Members of the Nexan Editorial Board are Ian Cummings, Lisa Curran, Jon Samp, Angela Hawkins and Ryan Schlesner.