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opinion
KANSAN.COM | MONDAY, OCT. 3, 2016
Really need to stop waving at basketball player expecting them to know and recognize me. They don't know me.
The fact that I'm becoming good friends with the local Uber driver is pretty sad but also a little heartwarming.
Reading the NYTimes in Stauffer-Flint. Am I a journalist yet?
Friendly reminder that dying slowly and painfully of the flu is still better than getting a shot.
David Beaty is the beginning of an inspirational sports movie, but I'm not sure he's the middle or the end
Can't tell if I'm sick or if it's just my sleeping, eating and studying habits that make me feel like crap.
Thanks @OakMites for the free exfoliation! I've scratched off at least two layers of skin this week!
Issawi: Think of human cost in Syrian War
Early Christmas gift request: a new back/ neck/skeletal system
To the hungover guy riding his bike past me by the union: you're beautiful too
It's too early for people in my POLS class to be saying Trump won the damn debate
2am is the witching hour for frat bros.
If you have to open up your door to back into a parking spot then you probably shouldn't be backing into a parking spot.
Can Bill Self and Tech N9ne go on a date to Cheddar their together?
When you look up into the sky you're staring into an expanding universe that stretches on forever. Nothing is certain. Everything is abstract.
I need someone that knows how to play Yaniv in my life
Bill Self for President
hype
New phone, who dis?
Tech N9ne #hype
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▶ DANYA ISSAWI
@danyasawi
Illustration by Jacob Benson
My thumbs hovered over the keyboard on my phone screen. They were twitching slightly. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to my mother's text: "Uncle Aziz died in air-strike today. Call your father."
I wasn't crying. And I wouldn't cry. I felt shocked and, quite honestly, a little numb. I think I had forgotten how intertwined my identity was with the Syrian Revolution. My family had been displaced, yes, but all were safe. Yet suddenly I had become personally tied to the war.
He wasn't my biological uncle, but he had been a best friend to my father for the past 30 years. Uncle Aziz had shown him the ropes and what it meant to live like an American when my father immigrated to the United States at a mere 18 years old.
Years later, he helped raise me — he taught me to love kebabs and helped teach me how to swim and made me try tennis when we both knew I would never make it far in the sport. He was a doctor and he was short and he had red, thinning hair. He wore thick glasses and smoked out of a pipe and I loved to sit near him when he did because I liked the way it smelled. He had a raspy voice that carried and he used to live in a light pink house before he moved his practice back to Syria, the place he considered home. He had all of his mail in the United States forwarded to our house so he could pick it up next time he came around to visit.
I called my father.
When he picked up, I waited a moment to speak because I didn't know how to console the man who had spent his entire life consoling me.
He told me he would be okay. And he is okay. But I know he probably still winces, one year later, each time he comes across an envelope addressed to Mohammed Aziz Baghal and sets it aside in a basket on his desk, knowing it will never get picked up.
It was easier, before, to only see the numerical side of war — to watch the death toll rise but never have to assign a name to a number.
Our politicians spit rhetoric regarding Syrian refugees, equating them to a plague. Do we let them in? Do we send them back? Will they hurt us? How many should we let in?
mother or child.
I understand the wariness that comes with letting those from a broken home into our oasis of political stability. But the war has become a mere talking point to touch on in the circus we've come to know as our presidential election. Distance and separation make it easy to forget that each tick in the death toll was a father, brother, sister,
When you think of the war, think of my parents, Hanna and Ayman, and the country they both left behind. Think of their families and think of the missile that destroyed my mother's childhood home. Think of Uncle Aziz and think beyond the numbers - each one is a story in itself.
This is to serve as a reminder of the hospitals running off of minimal electricity, of the phosphorous bombs being dropped in Aleppo and of the White Helmets sifting through rubble and searching for survivors in what is left of the city.
It's heavy stuff to think about, but it isn't just a numbers game. It's a game of life, and each airstrike, each explosion and each chemical bomb drop signifies someone losing that game.
Danya Issawi is a junior from Kansas City, Kan. studying journalism.
- Edited by Chandler Boese
Doerr: Anthem protests show complex history
▶ JAKE DOERR
@No_Doerr
CW: Racism, Violence
In 1919, William Little was making a trek back to his hometown of Blakely, Ga., after serving in the first World War. It was the same trek that countless other black veterans were making back to their homes in the Jim Crow-era South. Not much else is known about Little, but we do know that
he was lynched by a white mob for refusing to remove his military uniform.
Little's story and the stories of countless other veterans of color contribute to a complicated history surrounding race, the concept of patriotism and how these two concepts interact. We see these interactions most clearly during the recent wave of anthem protests on football fields across the country.
Three hours to the north of our campus lies the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and its powerhouse football program. There are many similarities between our two states and institutions; KU and UNL are both large, public universities that are predominantly
The players, Michael Rose-Ivey, Mohamed Barry and DaiShon Neal, received racial slurs and threats to be lynched from fans on social media. Pete Ricketts, the governor of Nebraska, invoked the deaths of veterans to paint their protest as disrespectful. Their status as athletes in a cherished program such as Nebraska's could not protect them from the backlash.
white within states that are also predominantly white. On Sept. 24, three Nebraska players knelt and joined arms during the national anthem before a football game at Northwestern University.
For the Nebraska football players, it's much more complicated. Either stand
and receive immediate backlash, or do nothing and still face systemic violence. Darned if you do and darned if you don't.
What Governor Ricketts fails to understand is that African-American veterans had unique experiences fighting abroad, serving in segregated units until the Korean War, for those rights to be given equally to all people within the United States. It is one of America's saddest ironies that African-American veterans often had to use their military training in order to defend their communities and families from white mob violence once they returned home.
When athletes choose to kneel, then, it does not
do justice to our history to view it as a demonstration of disloyalty. It is a protest to draw attention to a broken promise: the failure of America's institutions ensure equality and safety to African-American men and people of all marginalized identities, past and present.
In order to do better, we must be honest about our complicated history and how different notions of patriotism and race are informed by this same history.
Jake Doerr is a graduate student from Shenandoah, Iowa, studying public administration.
— Edited by Chandler Boese
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