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4A the university daily kansan
opinion
thursday, october 30, 2003
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Free forAll
Call 864-0500
Anyone who uses the term bomb diggity has issues.
Free for All callers have 20 seconds to speak about any topic they wish. Kansas editors reserve the right to omit comments. Slanderous and obscene statements will not be printed. Phone numbers of all incoming calls are recorded.
Whoever changed the open-sections Web site is a loser.
For more comments, go to www.kansan.com
Ha, ha, ha. You have night class
Stop playing with your dingy.
I will tell you who ate them sandwiches. It was that damn Sasquatch.
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To the scruffy hot guy with the eyebrow ring on the seventh floor of Hash: We want to have your babies.
To the bus driver who almost ran me over and told me to get out of the way: I hope you enjoyed my finger.
If someone fascinated me, I would give them my phone number.
My roommate looks like a e walrus tooth and smells like walrus grass.
What is the plural of wlrus? Waltri.
This is to whoever pulled the fire alarm
at McColm at 2 a.m. Thanks lots, ass.
I am driving across campus during the day and I can't help thinking: So many pedestrians, so little time.
Is a fire alarm at two o'clock in the morning an excuse not to go to class? I think it is.
meigs' view
Connor Meigs for The University Daily Kansan
Protesting war now misguided
perspective
Last Saturday, anti-war groups across the nation led what were expected, by organizers at least, to be the "largest demonstrations since after the start of war in Iraq."
What a waste of a Saturday. Anti-war demonstrators are fond of parroting overused wartime clichés in the belief that they are being enlightening and clever. In actuality, they are simply being irritating and foolish.
COMMENTARY
To be fair, Americans have legitimate reasons to question the war in Iraq, and blind allegiance to everything one's country does is unwise. However, it is hard to take anti-war activists seriously because they seem more interested in expressing their contempt for the Bush administration than listening to reasoned, fact-based arguments.
I visited the Web site of one of the groups sponsoring the demonstrations, United for Peace and Justice. It was little more than a circus of anti-Bush propaganda, smattered with announcements for hokey seminars such as "practical peacemaking." Participants are invited to "look at the roots of violence in yourself" and "create a pledge of nonviolence." Perhaps seminar coordinators could invite Osama bin Laden to attend in order to examine the roots of violence in himself and assist him in creating a pledge of nonviolence.
I remember attending a candlelight vigil at the Campanile after the attacks on Sept. 11. It was inspiring to be one of many hundreds of voices singing the John Lennon song Imagine. Though, personally, I would have preferred a song conveying malice and rage to the fuzzy sentiments of John Lennon.
Arrah Nielsen
opinion@kansan.com
However, singing winsome folksongs will not thwart terrorists.
Nor will "giving peace a chance," to borrow a popular anti-war slogan. As pundit Jonah Goldberg points out, that was precisely what we were doing — right up until 8:48 a.m. on Sept. 11. Oh sure, the "give-peace-achance," approach was working swell. Unless you count the attacks perpetrated by fundamentalist Muslim terrorists on the USS Cole, Pan Am Flight 103, our embassies in Kenya, Tanzania, Lebanon and Iran, our Marine barracks in Lebanon, military housing complexes in Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the Sept. 11 attack.
The heartfelt, if silly, demonstrations of misguided anti-war activists are unlikely to deter terrorists determined to murder innocent people. Death will. What a reasonable person might view as a gesture of diplomacy or compassion, a terrorist views as weakness. It is sheer nonsense to think that it is possible to negotiate with barbaric despots who refer to America as the "Great Satan" and use passenger planes as missiles.
They insist that "violence never solves anything,"but if that is true,why do those deployed on peacekeeping missions tote weapons and ride around in tanks? And why do police carry guns?
Anti-war demonstrators insist that
"war is not the answer." But if war is not the answer, what is? Love? Aromatherapy? Organic farming?
If "violence only begets more violence," why did the Japanese surrender and become loyal allies after the U.S. dropped a pair of nukes on them? Perhaps we didn't need to use nuclear weapons at all, but merely a rousing rendition of All We Need is Love.
No one, with the possible exception of a handful of militant kooks living in Montana military communes, is arguing that war is always the solution or that it should be taken lightly. Military action used appropriately and in the right context is the most effective strategy for protecting Americans.
It's debatable whether we should have invaded Iraq. The fact that we did is not. If anti-war demonstrators care as much about the Iraqi people as they claim, they should focus their efforts on rebuilding Iraq and assisting in reconstruction.
Abandoning Iraq now, as demonstrators are arguing we should, would leave the Iraqis in a state of poverty and chaos. Rebuilding Japan and Germany, as we did in World War II, wasn't quick and simple. Rebuilding Iraq won't be either. But it is a necessary task.
Nielsen is an Andover senior in anthropology.
editorial board
Extrapolating tuition raise chancellor
On Oct. 20, the board wrote an editorial entitled "Know where your tuition money goes." The purpose of this editorial was to motivate students to investigate the disbursement of their tuition dollars and to become informed about the sources of different expenditures made by University administration.
There seems to be some misunderstanding about the first line of the editorial, which mentioned the chancellor's raise and recent building projects. The board's intention was to identify some of the topics that students have been discussing concerning recent tuition increases. When Chancellor Robert Hemenway got a raise, some students wondered, "Why is our tuition going up if the Chancellor can afford to give himself a raise?"
The answer is simple: The funds for Hemenway's raise came from a private donation to the University, which is unaffiliated with tuition dollars—as it should be. Neither was the new engineering building paid for with funds from tuition increases. Some interpreted the first line of the editorial as equating these financial issues with how our tuition dollars are being spent. This was not our intention.
This misunderstanding further underscores the importance of knowing where your money goes. Don't take the board's word for it; don't take your friend's word for it. Take your questions to the administrators and find out how we're benefiting from an increase in the price of an education at the University of Kansas.
Patrick Ross for the editorial board
letter to the editor
Column skews pledge issue
I would briefly like to rebut the opinions of Matthew Pirotte in yesterday's edition of The University Daily Kansan in the column "Under God" phrase protected by U.S. Constitution."
First, the case is not whether this man's daughter should be forced to recite the "under God" portion of the Pledge; she is already protected by a Supreme Court decision from having to recite the Pledge in school. The case is whether she should be exposed to any mention of God in a public school. This may seem antithetical to a rebuttal, I only mention it to illustrate the kind of ignorance that pervades the article and explains how your columnist arrived at such specious conclusions.
Second, Pirotte's interpretation of the Constitution is far too limited. Constitutional law involves a careful analysis of not just the literal words in the Constitution but also what is explicitly implied by those words and their ramifications, called the penumbra. For example, the protection of privacy given under the Fourth Amendment is derived implicitly from "no unlawful search or seizure." The same goes for the First Amendment: Exposing children to the idea of a monotheistic god is tantamount to the promotion or establishment of religion, and is thus unconstitutional.
Third, this case is not trying to ban religion in public places, it only seeks to remove the traces of religion from government funded and run schools. Fourth, "God" is a monotheistic reference which excludes Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists and polytheists. Pirotte would be wiser to research Constitutional law before he writes about it.
Kevin Hess Sophomore, Undecided
perspective
Organize flash mobs for peaceful protests
One person stood in front of a dark green dinosaur late last summer as it craned its head and bellowed from the ceiling of FAO Schwartz in Times Square, New York. Moments later, another person appeared, also staring blankly at the animatronic beast. Within minutes, a crowd gathered, milling in front of the dinosaur. Slowly they began bowing, as though worshiping the lizard. Television cameras caught them and broadcast the scene across the nation. The prank worked.
Weeks later, a group of Lawrence artists and art lovers gathered in a parking lot with a bulbous patch of red balloons. They stood and blew them up to publicize a project they called "The Red Balloon To-do," which organized Lawrence's creative elite in a city-wide art exhibition.
Patrick Cady opinion@kansan.com
COMMENTARY
These random happenings are but two of a rising trend in America and Europe known as "Flash Mobs." No, they aren't roving packs of girls during Mardi Gras, but a literal flash-flood of people organized through e-mail or phone lines, especially
mobile phones.
Their penchant for surreal fun makes them a given for performance art, but their guerilla nature and the reactions they inspire could make them the perfect instrument for acts of protest and social change.
Take the continuing war protests, for instance. In the case of the last war in Iraq, Lawrence's streets have been filled by trains of people weekend after weekend last spring who let their voices be heard. That method, tried and true, garnered a fair amount of press coverage and united the citizenry. If a few strategically placed flash
mobs were mixed in, however, the sociopolitical message could have had the same impact as a flash bulb exploding before your eyes.
Off in the distance, near Strong Hall, a drum beat echoes. As the crowd nears, they see a giant white balloon with the phrase GONE D floating in the air attached to a string. Now, all the people in sheets gather in front of Wescoe, sit down in the lotus position and start chanting a haunting om. A line of people dressed in all black, in turn, surrounds them.
It could have gone like this. It's a sunny day and a light breeze ruffles through the trees. The campus is alive with people. They're everywhere — lounging, walking to class or talking to their friends. Slowly, people wearing white sheets begin to filter through the crowd, all heading toward the center of campus. Cell phones ring, and more people break off, seemingly following the crowd.
The drum sounds again. They all stand up, surrounded by curious onlookers. A television crew hovers to the side. A
leader holds up a sign that reads, "War is wrong. Follow the way of Gone D." The string is cut, and they walk off in a line following the balloon. Under them, surrounding the sidewalk, are anti-war quotes from Mohondas the Mahatma Ghandi.
This flash mob would carry across the message with no harm done, apart from the bad pun. It would draw media attention and help set a resounding position on the issue. Technology makes this possible. Flash mobs can be one of the first true new art forms of the 21st century. They transcend the world of pranks and offer a utility to the baby bib-clad wild frenzy of performance art.
It is important, though, that if the flash mob is included as part of a 21st-century protest arsenal, that it be used non-violently. The flash mob is an instrument of the mind, of the show and of wicked humor and not one of damage. As always, responsibility is the key.
Cady is a Shawnee senior in journalism