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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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Screw the Mickey Mouse theme song. The bell tower should play the "Game of Thrones" theme song.
I have less than four weeks to make it into the FFA. This is my last chance.
Editor, please help!
Only Mr. T can make an Old Navy commercial look badass.
You know you're ready to graduate when the booze in your backpack is the only reason you didn't just leave it at school overnight.
To Student Housing: Thank you for turning the heat back on. Sincerely, schol hall residents.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013
Legging are pajamas?! Who sleeps with pants on????
You're home. Kansas weather, go drunk.
Spring needs to reevaluate its decisions here...
I'm using today's terrible weather as an excuse to wear my Hogwarts uniform. Accio positive attitude.
I love when people talk about how they "only have a few summers left" reminding me that I've worked 50 hour weeks in the summer since I was 15. Enjoy the beach.
If you think leggings are pants, wear them. If you don't, then don't. People seriously get too worked up over the fashion choices of others.
Burrito King raised their prices. Can this semester get any worse?
Frat guys have made sunglasses just way too mainstream...
Weather, you aren't just drunk, you're blacked out. And you are making a damn fool out of yourself.
April sleet brings May heat?
Technically leggings are more like underwear for under skirts. But Pippa Middleton said they're pants, so pants they stay!
I make classy secretadmirer tweets.
I'm the creeper Lawrence deserves.
I bet the Great Gatsby was in a frat.
Taking pictures through cheez-it holes is my favorite form of procrastination.
There's something oddly liberating about eating an apple while walking to class on Jayhawk Boulevard.
The term "modesty" must not exist in Johnson County.
Dear Editor: you wouldn't have to feel bad about your decisions if you just focused on yourself and doing what you want (excluding murder, larceny, and theft).
420 here is definitely NOT the same as Fatty Patty's. A city full of crazy drunks is not equal to a city full of stoneers.
SOCIETY
To the kid with the Atari jacket, keep up the good work.
Talking about problems doesn't solve them
I usually just write about whatever's on my mind – that's how I end up with "political columns" about my parents moving, my girlfriend being awesome and Batman. But last week has been too much. I've started this column 10 times and every single one feels wrong because I have no idea what I'm supposed to feel. Let me walk you through it.
On Friday, I am in the hospital. I have not been in a hospital in exactly three years, when my immune system completely failed me and I couldn't function without a constant stream of powerful antibiotics. I had been doing much better since I started doing weekly IV treatments to maintain my blood count, but that's in the past now. This year, I've just been doing whatever the insurance company orders me to do, and today, they're sending me to a hospital.
I've held onto my hospital band from that stay three years ago; the word "stronger" is etched into it with a pen I found on my bedside table because I told
myself I'd never be back. I carry it with me on hard days, but I don't need it today because the lady at the front desk is giving me a new one. I fill out paperwork and answer a questionnaire about my illness so the doctor knows I'm not trying to steal drugs, and eventually start my treatment. I lie alone in my hospital bed for five hours and remember how I used to do this from home in only 90 minutes with my family around me.
I wake up at 8 a.m. the next morning and go to the Big Event. I love volunteering, but I'm beginning to feel the pain spread through my body as I carry tables up and down the stairs. I look at my arms and hands and notice that they're covered in brushes.
On Monday, I walk into my therapist's office and schedule an appointment. I haven't been all semester. I have dinner and watch footage from the Boston Marathon explosion. The news-caster announces the death of an 8-year-old boy. I lower my head to the table and lay there for a
couple minutes until I regain my composure. I notice a couple others watching the news report, but most are just eating and laughing about something that happened over the weekend.
On Wednesday, a fertilizer plant in Texas explodes while I'm trying to write my column. My arms are still bruised and tingling from my treatment. I delete my column and go to bed. Apparently, the gun bill didn't pass either.
I've watched the video of the bombs in Boston go off a few times, and I've noticed something pretty remarkable. There are three types of people shown: first are the people who were hit by the explosion; second are
the people who turned around and ran back to help the victims; third are the people who made it out of the explosion, and did what any sensible person would do – run past the finish line and thank God for sparing them. This week, I think we all felt like we were hit. We started out as regular Americans with our own sets of problems, but they were quickly buried under the weight of an entire nation's pain. And I wanted so bad to be one of those superior people who ran back to help everyone else, but I've always just been the guy who convinces himself that he already crossed the finish line and won the race
he reminded me and woke the face.
I went back to my therapist because I was mad that the world didn't stop for me while I was still trying to recover.
I realized that I haven't healed yet; I've just been telling myself I'm done with depression because it isn't kicking me in the teeth anymore. Out of sight, out of mind. Yeah, I always write about what's on my mind, but then I pretend like it's magically solved
because I took time to acknowledge it. But I wrote about health care back in September and now they've got me back in a hospital bed. I wrote about gun control back in January, but we can't pass a bill because a kid hasn't been shot in his spelling class this week. These problems aren't just solved by time, and we have to stay committed to them long after the media coverage fades away. I'm going to try and be the kind of American who doesn't just care about what's happening right this second, but the kind who runs back to help the others who never caught up from Katrina, the Iraq War, the Virginia Tech shooting and the countless other tragedies that happen every single day.
Webber is a freshman majoring in journalism and political science from Prairie Village. Follow him on Twitter @wmwebber
CULTURE
Public, media should focus on heroes not criminals
The Boston Marathon bombings reawakened America's fear of terror
1 bombings reawakened America's fear of terrorism and demonstrated the abominable hate that still exists in the world. Pressure cookers, black powder, nails and ball bearings, when used individually, act as necessary tools to aid in a variety of tasks, but after this week, these tools become grim symbols.
Symbols of vile hate, symbols of innocent lives lost, symbols that change is inevitable and necessary. I'm not concerned with what political party you most identify with – or about the conspiracy theories – because this isn't about politics. This is about loss and heroism, the victims and the people that ran towards the bomb, not knowing if there was another bomb, to aid the injured.
But people don't focus on the heroes or the victims. Instead, people focus on the perpetrator(s) and make abhorrent comments about humanity. "I have lost all respect for humanity, disgusting people we are," and "This is human nature and hatred is part of the world, sad truth."
The latter comment really pissed me off. It's an obtrusive comment that mocks the victims of these tragedies by saying hate is genetically inherited and that all humans have this "hate gene" encoded in our DNA. That
comment tells us to get over it, because it's natural human behavior. I don't believe this to be true.
The bigger picture here is simple: hate manifests hate.
If you find yourself blaming humanity for the tragedy that happened this week then know this, hate is hate, no matter the extreme.
Hate isn't limited to terrorism attacks or physical violence, hate is perpetuated by these things, but hate can be verbally expressed, too. To me, you're not any better of a person if you express your hate verbally than you would physically.
Now, before people berate me with comments of hate – ironic – because I label people who express disgust in humanity verbally and parallel them to people who express disgust physically, I hear your argument.
But our definition of hate is too narrow, only designed for extremist - people who epitomize hate - and I want to know
why? Why is it not hate until someone perfects the hate? I want to hate the person responsible for this heinous tragedy, but what does that solve? Nothing. What do you think would have happened if Martin Luther King Jr. used the same hate he received to project his message to the world? Do you think we would be here, with our first black president?
Let us refocus our attention on what actually matters: the heroes and victims, not the villains. Humanity isn't represented by al-Qaida and similar groups, or by Hitler and similar individuals. Humanity is represented by individuals that are greatly affected by tragedy and who empathize with the victims' families; these are the kind of individuals that run toward the bomb to rescue the injured. This is the spirit of humanity and it's not a negative one.
I think it's time we stop hating and learn to coexist.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, "We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not yet learned the simple art of living together as brothers and sisters."
Bierwirth is a senior majoring in journalism from Overland Park. Follow him on Twitter @BroeynnBrowrith
HUMOR
CAMPUS CHIRPS BACK
Writing disappearing from communication
It's bad enough that I spent countless hours of my life learning how to write curvise when I could have been outside in the late October sunlight enjoying an afternoon round of kickball with my friends, but who are we kidding? It's one thing to look back and think. "Man, that really was a waste of time!" But now we're about to reach the point of yet another cultural divide, and that's writing altogether.
Bear with me here and just think about it. If cursive, the most popular means of communication not even a hundred years ago, has all but died out as far as our generation is concerned, how long before we quit writing anything down at all? I don't take a notebook to class; I take my iPad or laptop. I don't hand write letters to my Mammie in Miami; I shoot that bag of bones an email. The last thing I signed was my bar tab and that's a given. We've reached the point where writing things down just seems kind of ,pointless.
Don't stop me now, I'm just getting started.
I'll take the environmental approach for a moment, if you will. Think of all the trees we will save when we start teaching kindergarteners how to use a tablet instead of a pen and paper? You can paint by numbers on your smartphone, so why worry about buying canvas to create art? Cutting down trees destroys the rainforest, which puts not only Toucan Sam out of a home but also Smokey Bear out of a job. If companies like Enron had made the move to company-wide emails and cloud-based storage solutions they would've never gone bankrupt in the first place. Think about it.
Not enough for you? Here, try these boots on for size:
Paper cuts. Remember the
last time you had one of those? Yeah, it hurt, didn't it? No one likes paper cuts, because they're awful. There's blood everywhere and then you have to get up from your desk and awkwardly walk up to the professor and ask if they know where you can get a Band-Aid, which of course he or she has no idea, which forces you to walk aimlessly up and down the halls before you find some secretary somewhere who happens to have one in her purse because her five year old son is a hemophiliac. Are you a hemophiliaac? No, you're just a dummy who had to take notes on paper.
Also, think about lead poisoning. I know we've only recently moved on to graphite-based pencils but how long before the FDA or the Surgeon General comes forth and lets us all in on the secret that graphite causes cancer? Everyone thought cigarettes were good for you in the 1950s and now look at them. Those of us who didn't get the memo are ruining my walk down Jayhawk Boulevard, blowing smoke deliberately in my face and humiliating me for being a non-smoker. I just want to fit in!
Don't fight the future here, guys. Let's all be forward thinking young adults and put our collective efforts behind a cause that really matters. Let's make 2014 the year that we quit writing. Right? Who's with me?
Crawford is a senior majoring in journalism from Olathe. Follow him on twitter @brett_cra
@BadBuddhist4
@UDK_Opinion Whatever.
neblowsalot
@audramooncoffee
@UDK_Opinion Unless he's here to announce a new education budget that will actually HELP students, there's enough trash on campus already.
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Hannah Wise, editor-in-chief editor@kansan.com
@Ashwenis
@UDK_Opinion I feel better about this godforsaken snow visiting campus.
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editor@kansan.edu
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THE EDITORIAL BOARD
9.
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Members of the Kansan Edition Board are Hannah Wise, Sarah McCabe, Naki Wentling, Dylan Lyen, Elise Frington and Jacobson