MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2013
PAGE 4A
opinion
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Cheez-its + Orange Juice = A Bad Idea.
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
Has anyone else noticed Alien Fieldhouse's love affair with Kanye West's music?
UDK told me to start the Rock Chalk chant at 2:00 I'm starting at the 2:00 with a 30 point lead.
I'm just a Nike guy trapped on an Adidas campus.
The entire computer network is shut down in the engineering buildings. I now know what apocalyptic looks like.
I have a sandwich bag full of salad dressing in my pocket.
Group of people behind me in the underground are discussing cannibalism and who would be the most delicious. Help!
I don't want to alarm you, but I'm told its excessively cute when my worky puppie and I nap together.
I really hope the guy across from my lab station asks his lab partner out before the end of the semester. They're so cute!
Fun Fact: The Wabash Cannonball used to be a KU fight song until KSU's music library burned down and we donated a bunch of fight songs to them because we had too many.
Apparently not EVERYONE appreciates the hot chocolate swimming pool we're in building in Budig 110.
Guys, I finished a 2.5 lb jar of peanut butter in a week... Is there a peanut butter addicts anonymous around here? Editor's note: We meet on Tuesdays at 5 p.m.
Boyfriend? Haha. My biggest love interest right now is Candy Crush.
Anyone else up for installing a zip line in budig 120?
KU should do a singles mixer, because I'm so single and SO sad.
I'm making my roommate listen to the 10 hour loop of the diamond sword song because I can. Does this make me a bad roommate considering I'm not in the room?
Can we all just take a minute to laugh about how much Iowa State hates us? I'm jumping from campus bus to campus hauling a big black treasure chest. I feel like a pirate.
You guys forgot the Wii U in your "next generation of gaming console technology arrives." Stop counting out Nintendo! They're the ORIGINAL console
It's Pranksgiving and none of you are safe.
IMMIGRATION
Use of 'illegal' terminology dehumanizes immigrants
Earlier this week, as you might have heard, some University of Texas at Austin students put up a Facebook event for a game of "Catch an Illegaligrant"—otherwise known as "Catch a Racist in the Act of Being Really, Really Racist." The media has rightfully decried the bigotry of the Young Conservatives of Texas, the student group that was organizing the event originally. And the students of UT Austin themselves by and large were disgusted (thankfully) at the actions of some of their peers—so much that they actually managed to put on a counter-protest pro-immigration rally that drew over 500 participants. This is rad, because racist actions need to be shut down thoroughly and succinctly. And I'm glad to learn that the public pressure not only halted this dehumanizing "game" in its tracks, but that the undocumented students of UT Austin
had a legion of folks standing up for their dignity. Warms the cold cockles of my feminist heart, really.
But, as I saw people on my newsfeed talking about the original event—"Catch an illegal immigrant"—and the counter-protest that sprang up—alternately, as I saw from some friends who go to UT Austin, referred to as "I Am: Undocumented"—I realized that many people I know are not aware of the importance of using "undocumented" rather than "illegal" when talking about immigrants. Which means probably a lot of yall are uneducated as well. Luckily, it's a pretty simple lesson.
No human being is ever illegal. That's it. Point blank, no contestation, no argument, no Rush Limbaugh demagoguery making my ears bleed out slowly—a human being cannot be "illegal" just by nature of existing. A person might do an act, yes, that
By Katherine Gwynn
kgwynn@kansan.com
might transgress the law. But that doesn't transform the entirety of that person – their very personhood – as something not allowed within the bounds of the law. But the differentiation between "undocumented" and "illegal" is about more than just pure semantics—the latter is a term that tries to make us consider people as not, well, people.
As tons of activists (like undocumented folks themselves) have been saying for years, the term "illegal immigrant" strips an undocumented individual of their voice, human dignity and basic
human rights, for Pete's sake. It inculcates into our minds the notion that undocumented individuals' bodies are, in their sheer presence, some sort of violent crime upon the United States, upon citizenship, upon Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty, and a whole bunch of other bull. But that's what the term says.
It doesn't just say "you don't belong here." It says "you don't deserve to be, at all."
Thankfully, more and more news outlets, such as the AP News, are using "undocumented" and not "illegal," when referring to migrants without documentation. But "illegal immigrant" as a term (and slur) still persists. Which is why you can make a huge difference in the civil rights conversation for a whole slew of folks, just by changing the way you speak and correcting others. By saying "undocumented", and never "illegal."
It's such a simple change, and yet one with a tremendous impact. One that restores a sense of humanity to a conversation and persecution that harms so many. Let me borrow some words of wisdom from the eternally glorious, brilliant, Latina feminist (who maybe I am a slight fangirl of) Gloria Anzaldua: "Caminante, no al hay puentes, se hace puentes an andar. Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks."
So take those necessary steps of extending humanity to your fellow humans, beginning with the language you use towards said fellow humans and start building those bridges already.
Katherine Gwynn is a junior studying English and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies.
Study shows animals remember treatment, deserve kindness
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!' / Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore'. Edgar Allen Poe may have written about a raven rather than a crow in his eerie poem "The Raven", but both birds have proven their ability to send a chill down your spine.
Recently, John Marzluff has received attention for his most recent work with crows. Marzluff is a faculty member at the University of Washington and his current project is the "Neuroecology of American Crow Recognition of People." This project is described in detail on the University of Washington's website, stating that, "research has demonstrated that American Crows recognize individual humans who have wronged them in the past and that they retain this information for over five years. They demonstrate individual learning of this information and their social learning by observation can also be inferred."
Marzluff designed an experiment using masks to test the birds aptitude toward revenge. As the New York Times reports, "To test the birds' recognition of faces separately from that of clothing, gait and other individual human characteristics, Dr. Marzluff and two students wore rubber masks. He designated a caveman mask as 'dangerous' and, in a deliberate gesture of civic generosity, a Dick Cheney mask as 'neutral.' Researchers
in the dangerous mask then trapped and banded seven crows on the university's campus in Seattle."
After this initial stage of the experiment, in the following months, the researchers wore the same masks on campus but this time did not interfere with the crowds.
The crows, however, interfered with them. The New York Times summarizes the results by stating the crows "scolded people in the dangerous mask significantly more than they did before they were trapped, even when the mask was disguised with a hat or worn upside down. The neutral mask provoked little reaction. The effect has not only persisted, but also multiplied over the past two years."
If the effect has multiplied over the past two years, the effect cannot be limited to just a couple of scorned crowds. "The researchers hypothesize that crows learn to recognize threatening humans from both parents and others in their flock," reported the New York Times.
Although, I am far removed from Marzluff's research team.
One Saturday, a previous volunteer, who had been out of the country for a couple of years, walked in and asked if she could see Edgar. She assured us that she had spent plenty of time with him and that they were on good terms. I assumed that Edgar would have forgotten his connection with her over this long gap. To my surprise, she walked into the cage and Edgar stood on her hand and genuinely seemed to enjoy her company.
Lawrence has its very own scorned crow. Prairie Park Nature Center houses a crow aptly named "Edgar". As a volunteer at the nature center, I've learned that Edgar is fond of very few people. I originally assumed that this was just part of his personality and that all were equal in Edgar's mind, a source of food and nothing more.
While I don't have the research to prove that crows remember kindness as well as they do cruelty, I think that animals remember how we treat them much like humans do. And also like humans, Marzluff's research reminds us that reputations can be spread throughout families and social groups, especially bad reputations.
When interacting with anyone animal or human, remember that kindness and respect go a long way.
Jenny Stern is a sophomore majoring in Biology from Lawrence.
LIFESTYLE
CAMPUS CHIRPS BACK
November activism is no excuse for laziness
FFA OF THE DAY
A few weeks ago, in a Michigan middle school, a handful of students
were prevented from honoring a classmate who they lost to leukemia. In the name of protecting the other children from grief, the administrators banned t-shirts with her name. It backfired spectacularly.
As a pre-teen, I ran with a small pack of other neighborhood hoodlums around a set of ponds that ran through all our backyards. In a slimy, scrap metal-filled corner, we made our "base" in a sewage drainage pipe. Every day we could, wed climb through an obstacle course of thorns, muddy hills and huge slabs of unstable rocks to reach it. We came out with cuts, bruises and a genuine sense of adventure. While other kids played Nintendo 64 until their eyes bled, we fought off geese while scooping up frogs with our bare hands.
No tiger will ever enter Allen Fieldhouse and walk away with their dignity intact.
This little oasis of the unknown—a small, 100-square foot block of swamp—gave us stories to tell about wildlife, nasty pieces of algae we dared each other to lick and a perfect platform to play "Vietnam" in the mud.
If you so much as mention that sort of place to some parents these days, you'd get slapped. These sorts of "dangerous places" are harder and harder to find. And if you do find one, there's not a kid in sight. Their parents have trapped them inside eating apple slices and playing cheap video games that teach arithmetic and vocabulary. If they ever emerge from their cave, pale and emaciated, they hide from the sun like Gollum.
Why is "Calvin and Hobbes" so wildly popular? It's the antithesis of that style of parenting. Everyone in retrospect wishes they'd built a tree house and raced
wagons down their street after reading a healthy dose of Bill Watterson.
It's easy to cast aspersions on parents from afar. These are all people doing the hardest job of their lives and improvising most of the time. It's true that times are changing. Schools are now battlegrounds. Food is filled with lead and toys with mercury. Paranoia is becoming standard.
About a month ago, I watched my mom pull out her cell phone and puff up like a blowfish. "She's cussing again!" she declared to the car. She'd installed an app that let her remotely monitor my sister's text messaging like Big Brother went 4G. It wasn't just the creepiness of the spying that confused me, it was the indignity and disbelief that her child was cursing. Here's a woman that congratulated me when I caught a bucket full of tadpoles and named them all Chuck.
And that's what I'm really worried about: that maybe the second I'm responsible for another human life, I'll grow a Castro beard and start banning comic books. I'm terrified that this new social landscape has redefined parenting to a totalitarian dictatorship.
These scrapes, broken bones and fights in the schoolyard build character. The cuts heal into scars that eventually fade. But the sense of independence and confidence never leaves you. Without my sewage-pipe fort, I'd be half who I am today.
With that in mind, all I ask is that once you find yourself taking care of a tiny human, you take your kid out of his cage, put him on the leash and take him for a walk every once in a while. And refill his water-bowl; the water gets funky after a day or so.
Anrenee Reason is a junior majoring in Political Science from Leawood.
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