TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2013
PAGE 4
Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351 or at kansan.com
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
Benefits of super late night studying:
no one is awake to hear you belt out
your favorite song... or fart.
I'm ready for Halloween...
Just heard someone refer to the campanile as "the bell tower." Uhhh, who are you and where did you come from?
PSA: In light of Obama's arrival, please remember to spay and neuter your loved ones!
Warning; couples holding hands on campus will be assumed to be participating in a game of red rover.
K-State is not our rival.
The next FFA column should be a compilation of the best "bitch" moments by jesse Pinkman.
When I'm driving, the main way I can tell the difference between KU students and pedestrians is that pedestrians actually look when crossing the street.
I just want my Chinese food at the Underground back...
To whoever unlocks classroom doors,
please remember the top floor of
Bricker!
well, it is time to wake up the singer of Green Day again...
My favorite thing about Watson is that no one will talk to me there.
Hopefully the government shutting down doesn't stop the FFA
Yeah sorry I gotta be that guy whose stomach grumbles loudly in class, I swear I ate breakfast /
I went out of my way to walk through budig just so i could pick up people with my 3DS 'StreetPass.
It's senior day meaning the union is full of unharmed livers and dignity.
Thank the bus driver, for goodness sakes.
When you walk into the bathroom after a cute girl killed it...
Drunk me has an urge to text the FFA naughty things. We should take a moment of appreciation for escaping the weekend without any incidents.
Only during an anatomy class whilst studying muscles of the hand is it ok to flick off your professor.
WORKING TOGETHER
The key to happiness is buying slippers that look like regular shoes. I'm comfortable everywhere.
I've realized that I end up drunk and covered in paint regardless of whether or not the Chiefs win.
Men, women should combat gender conflicts
Recently, I have become aware that genders are locked in an eternal struggle about who has it the worst. We must not forget that some of the struggles that different genders deal with are not mutually exclusive. Instead of finding ourselves divided along blurred lines, we should do our best to look at things without bias and address them honestly, together.
One thing I have to get off my chest, since we are talking honestly, is that I think the oft-supported, female stance that men are the sole perpetrators of sexual assault is unfair, unwarranted, unjust and a bit hurtful. I suppose men have collectively brought it on themselves, and I don't want to make excuses for anyone. Sexual assault is life-altering. It's awful. One's attempts to forget only bring the memory back in even more vivid, agonizing detail. No amount of therapy, pills or drugs can ever return the innocence of before. The saddest part is that we
will wander the rest of our lives wondering what's so wrong with us, because of them.
Sexual assault against males goes notoriously underreported.
Here's how I imagine it going: "You had sex. Cool dude." Imagine the reaction if a guy told a room full of other guys that he was taken advantage of. That guy would be laughed at. There would be loud guffaws and cheers all around. Meanwhile the "reporter" swallows it back down and lets it seethe. After reaching out to people only to have them laugh in your face, why go through that again by reporting it? "It must not have been a big deal, or else they wouldn't have laughed."
This is more of a double stand and there are many cases that are parallel, but for whatever reason are assumed to only be experienced by one gender or another.
The media isn't just attacking the female body image. We can be united by our feelings of inadequacy! I've spent my life chasing a
dream, too. Seeing Brad Pitt with his shirt off in "Fight Club" made me realize that I was woefully inadequate.
Men's insecurities are so extensive because there's so much expected of us. Don't cry. Don't talk. Don't be gay. Don't try out for theater (refer to item three. You aren't big enough. You aren't "big" enough. You haven't had sex with enough people. You can't drink fast enough. You have to pay. You can't afford to pay? You aren't good enough for my daughter, etc. Even with this whole school thing, we only struggle through it to make us more desirable.
Men are beginning to realize that if we don't live up to certain expectations, then we are easily replaced. In fact, we are outshone by conveniently formed pieces of silicone, glass or rubber in many statistical categories. No wonder Viagra is now more heavily prescribed than Prozac. Men are expected to perform.
And why wouldn't performance be coveted? Look at who we look up to. Millions of Americans can't tell you who the Secretary of State is, but they will tell you who quarterbacks the Broncos or wearers number 6 for the Heat. Athletes are the yardsticks of masculinity, which easily explains how performance enhancers found their way out of sports and into the hands of the common folk. Steroids were created for men to be better at being men. In many cases the drugs are used not for the sake of being better athletically, but to help attain the body that men think women want them to have. We do stupid stuff to impress women.
It all comes down to acceptance. I can't speak for all guys, but I would like to apologize for seeking that acceptance in the wrong way sometimes. My only defense is that the world is a lonely place when you feel like you are the only one living in it.
I hope I don't come across as saying guys have it worse than anybody. I just want to point out that all of us, regardless of labels, aren't so different. I have never presumed that I know anything about anything, but I think that the world could be a much better place if people would appreciate each other's differences, and also acknowledge that we as humans have some common struggles, and we can take them on together.
Nick Jackson is a junior majoring in chemical engineering from Lawrence.
Hip-hop offers valuable lessons below rough exterior
Time and time again, I've witnessed angry people bash hip-hop for the corruption of young people. "It's too violent! It's so vulgar! It promotes drug use!"
Does it? Yes. Is that all it does?
No. Not even close.
Hip-hop is more than just guns, sex and drugs. What we hear on the radio in no way represents the core message of hip-hop. It can actually be incredibly beneficial and educational.
After all, it's made me who I am.
From some of my earliest years, and even today, I have always been a very solitary individual. I relied on two things: myself and hip-hop. The most challenging thing growing up was learning how to become a man. Being so isolated, my largest source of information regarding manhood was from rap music. I could connect to the lives of many rappers who grew up without fathers. My father wasn't so dramatically absent, but I was his sixth child over 20 years. He was older by common standards, and was tired from years of hard work and raising children. Mostly by my own accord, I was left to raising myself.
Through music and personal experience, I learned that the world was not a friendly place that was easy to survive in, even for someone as fortunate as myself. Hip-hop instructed me to be strong in the face of peril, levelheaded under pressure and eternally loyal to those I love. On the surface, it didn't make
On the surface, it didn't make
sense for my iTunes library to be nearly all rap. After all, hip-hop has always been a predominantly black movement, and my high school was over 80 percent white. I lived in the suburbs of a city on the fringe of the Midwest rap scene. I went for late night walks in my hyper-safe neighborhood while listening to stories of brutal murder and fiendish addiction. I'm thin, I'm not aggressive and I have no rhythm.
Yet from the flowers, concrete would grow.
necause of my isolation, I was plagued with depression and insecurity. I understood what these men were saying, speaking about trying to succeed and adapt in a world that didn't accept them. I understood because pain is a universal language. I knew I would have to work ferociously hard to achieve my dreams.
Every free moment was spent listening and learning. Instead of chatting with people between classes, I would wade in the sea of students, listening to "Man on The Moon," "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" and classics from the golden age. I did schoolwork while listening to Nas. Played video games with
J. Cole. Fell asleep to Mac Lethal. Living with hip-hop helped sharpen my worldview, as I was constantly being exposed to lifetimes of wisdom and knowledge. That's why it's more than just music to me, it's a culture that runs through every fiber of my being. I was lucky enough to be able to see rap for the intricate and intimate cultural experience it can be.
Parents aren't wrong to be concerned with what their children are listening to. Hip-hop can be severely detrimental to the youth. It has a very heavy tone and attitude that can have serious consequences if perceived in the wrong light. I've seen the side effects first hand while assistant teaching a documentary class at a summer program designed to help liberate inner city teens.
The kids I worked with are exactly why hip-hop gets such a bad rap. Their fathers aren't there to guide them. Their education "systems" are failing. No one is there to tell them the difference between fact and fiction. Rap is one of the few things that can tell them how to live as they're lost and alone in a world that keeps putting them down.
This needs to change. I want people to see hip-hop for the good it can do. The hip-hop community needs to be promoting truth in the mainstream and educating its young listeners on how to responsibly consume media.
Dalton Boehm is a sophomore majoring in journalism from Prairie
EDUCATION
Participation trophies hamper good work ethic
I've always been a competitor at heart. Bringing home the "hardware" after a hard-fought competition was always my goal, whether in debate, model U.N. or the once-in-a blue-moon Chinese speech competition. But even the most competitive will find themselves in a contest where their hard work has been cheapened and the tournament itself trivialized. This occurs when we give out trophies to everyone, even those who didn't perform well. That disturbs me. Underlying the practice is one tacit endorsement of mediocrity: you're a winner even if you lose.
But you aren't. Anyone who sacrifices hours of sleep and endures hours of stress-induced starvation for the sake of a competition knows that. To those kinds of people, a loss is heartbreaking. To some, however, it isn't. Lately our society has significantly lowered the bar for 'success' by giving out trophies and awards for those who don't really deserve it. This is a problem, and I'll explain why.
Firstly, it cheapens the value of hard work. If your strategy is to put in as little effort as possible just to get a freebie trophy. I really wonder why you do it at all. Giving away awards for last place suggests that tournament organizers are too afraid to break someone's heart with a "yes, you really did lose, sorry." That teaches people that their underperformance is acceptable. They have robbed competitors of any sense of responsibility for their performance and bestowed upon them an undeserved sense of prestige.
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I'm not suggesting that people should be ridiculed or belittled for not bringing home a trophy. The logic goes both ways. If we don't want to destroy our
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LETTER GUIDELINES
I suggest a return to the old way of competition, because I don't think it was broken in the first place. Sports, academic competitions and the like are all designed so that true competitors have the opportunity to stand out in the job market or on college applications with evidence to back it up. But if everyone's a winner, no one is. I think it is a great understatement of our grit as a species to say that we cannot handle the emotional heartbreak of defeat. We are not all winners, not by default, anyway, and we ought to recognize that from the very beginning in order to make ourselves into better people.
children's egos by expecting a trophy, we shouldn't spuriously inflate them by bequeathing an undeserved award. The argument behind it is simple: if we praise children for mediocrity, they will associate success with unimpressive work, build a pattern and then do it again. But in a more realistic, high stakes competition, top performers are rewarded. For the worst performers, the pangs of defeat offer motivation to do better and build tenacity. But motivation and improvement is removed from the equation when we rush to the scene of a defeated competitor and award them with a trophy.
Mollie Pointer, business manager
mpointer@kansan.com
Dylan Lysen, managing editor
dlysen@kansan.com
Sean Powers, sales manager spowers@kansan.com
Will Ashley is a sophomore majoring in global and international studies and Chinese from Topeka.
THE
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@KansanOpinion only two weeks till the walking dead so im good!
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THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Members of the Kansan Editorial Board are Trevor Graff, Allison Kohn, Dyla Lysen, Will Webber, Mollie Pointer and Sean Powers.