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(04/30/07 4:00am)
What sets AU apart from other top liberal arts universities around the country? I'm not talking about our academic programs, our professors, our extracurricular offerings or even our status as a national arboretum. As important as those traits may be, the meat and potatoes of one's experience here rests on the composition of the student body. I'd wager that sharing in the varying lifestyles and experiences of our peers, we grow more and learn more than any lecturer could relate or any textbook could reveal. In terms of our peers and their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic status, how diverse are we? How varied are the experiences that we bring with us and what effect will these experiences have on our developing outlook on the world and that of others?
(04/19/07 4:00am)
Given the weight of the tragedy at Virginia Tech that is upon us, as well as the fact that this will be my final article for this newspaper, I am at a loss for words. All of the talking heads, the pundits and the commentators have left me without much to say because they are talking all of our heads off dissecting this situation. We've spent the past few days and will spend the next few weeks discussing how lonely and deranged Cho Seung-Hui apparently was, how security officials might have been able to respond faster and how the warning signs for tragedies like this should have been more apparent. We will parse, catalogue and indict the feelings of a troubled dead man whose true sentiments we'll never really know. We will honor those who gave their lives to protect other students and those who continue to provide comfort to the victims. We will think twice about the nature of campus security and counseling services at our colleges. All of this, rightfully so.
(04/05/07 4:00am)
There are certain issues and stances on which we look back and wonder, "How the hell could people have ever felt this way?" From the big, scary phenomena such as slavery and genocide, on down to lesser concepts such as the denial of suffrage for women and African Americans and Prohibition, we wonder how society, as a collective, could have ever deemed such practices to be feasible and just. Yet they are an integral part of who we are today because they are a part of who we have been. Our past beliefs show us how we arrived at our present state.
(03/22/07 4:00am)
I am falling out of love with hip-hop. The music that colored my childhood, informed an element of my surroundings and socialized me to a great deal has now come to represent a force too destructive for my collaboration. I can no longer co-sign on its bottom line.
(03/01/07 5:00am)
Now I know a little bit about how John Kerry might feel. The near victor in 2004, swift-boated and flip-flopped out of the few thousand votes necessary to win the presidency, seemed almost resurgent and among one of the leading contenders for 2008 until "the joke." He said something along the lines of how students who do not study will end up getting stuck in Iraq, initially refused to apologize, then did so and gracelessly bowed out of campaigning for candidates in the '06 midterms and any second chance bid for the White House.
(02/15/07 5:00am)
Has anyone else noticed how the fortunes of the Dixie Chicks and the Democrats seem to have been strangely intertwined?
(02/01/07 5:00am)
In my class American Political Thought, Professor Sykes mentioned that a poll was taken about American political discourse to survey which political words we, as a people, tend to shy away from and just avoid utilizing. The top ranked phrase was "the state." We tend not to think of ourselves as so separate from our government, in that whole We The People kind of way.
(01/18/07 5:00am)
I had the privilege this past summer of taking a trip out to the Left Coast. My journey to Vancouver put me back in touch with a Canadian friend who studies political theory at the University of Victoria. She's on track to become a world-renowned professor and theorist, so I take her opinion with much more than a grain of salt. During our reunion, we had a number of fruitful discussions about something near and dear to both of our hearts: politics, of course. But one conversation that we had, one that provoked a great deal of debate and disagreement between us, has stuck with me to this day.
(11/30/06 5:00am)
The American dream is a bitter lie for thousands of students across our country today. Since 2000, the average cost of attending four-year public college has increased over 40 percent. Yet earlier this year, Congress cut $12 billion in student aid (enough to send 230,000 students to college for four years), allowed student loan rates to spike and refused to raise Pell Grants. Four out of every 10 American college students and more than half of African American and Hispanic borrowers are burdened with an unmanageable level of debt. What is "unmanageable," you ask? Financial experts define it is as a salary-to-debt threshold at which an individual is only able to repay his loans with significant economic hardship.
(11/09/06 5:00am)
Tuesday night was a resounding rebuke for the Bush administration, the former Republican majority in Congress and their disastrous policies at home and abroad. Democrats should remember, though, that their victory was both a delicate and negative one.
(10/26/06 4:00am)
Election Day is rapidly approaching. The punditry is shouting about a seemingly imminent Democratic takeover in Congress. The politicians are spending to the last drop to snatch up every last voter on what may ultimately be a referendum on the Republican Party and their mismanagement of the so-called war on terrorism, the war in Iraq and a litany of domestic issues here on the home front. What people are not railing about is the need for a democratic (with a small "d") takeover of our broken voting rights system.
(10/12/06 4:00am)
A 15-year-old boy in Wisconsin shoots and kills his principal. A deranged gunman steps into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and kills six young girls (handcuffed, execution style) and himself, critically wounding a number of others. A 13-year-old boy in Missouri brings an AK-47 to school and fires one shot before the gun jams as he takes aim at his classmates. Another lone gunman holds a classroom hostage in Colorado before killing himself and a 16-year-old girl. Ladies and gentlemen, the Second Amendment is killing us.
(09/28/06 4:00am)
First things first, the people of New Orleans deserve a little something to celebrate. Given their rich history of Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras and The Big Easy, this otherwise festive city has now been licking its wounds from Hurricane Katrina for the past year. On Monday night, the New Orleans Saints trounced their regional rivals the Atlanta Falcons in a glorious return to the now-infamous Superdome and gave the recuperating residents of their hometown something to cheer about.
(09/14/06 4:00am)
Monday felt like an appropriately dreary day here in D.C. Perhaps the same was true throughout the Northeast and around the country. It was the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and I found myself feeling pretty uninspired by the political discourse taking place in our country. I have a sinking suspicion that I am not the only one feeling this angst. Meanwhile, the president was doing his best on this somber anniversary to rouse a skeptical public that grows more and more weary of this misguided war with every passing day.
(04/24/06 4:00am)
I am utterly disgusted by the fact that I live in a country that still sees fit to practice capital punishment. I firmly believe that the death penalty is just one of those things that, given the moral clarity of hindsight, when its abolition becomes a reality years from now, we will look back on this barbaric practice and say to ourselves, "What were we thinking?" The same has proven true for such travesties of American history as the denial of women's suffrage, slavery, and the Japanese internment during World War II.
(04/14/05 4:00am)
Every Tuesday and Friday afternoon I drive by the White House, the U.S. Capitol, opulent embassies and sprawling, grand residences in order to make my way to a low-income housing development in Southeast D.C. The tragic irony of the location's vantage point is that it provides some of the best views of the city from within the city. The Barry Farms Housing Development is what many of you might call a "ghetto," overlooking our most cherished city on a hill. For Donte, the 12-year-old youth I have spent the past two years tutoring every week, he calls it "home."
(03/31/05 5:00am)
There is a place in this country in which more citizens died of gun violence in a single week than did American soldiers on the battlefields of Iraq. Given such an analysis, one could argue that statistically speaking, this American venue was, over the course of this particular week, more dangerous and violent than Kabul or Baghdad. Had this type of violence been occurring Oh, say 225 years ago, beloved founding fathers such as Jefferson, Franklin and Washington might have been victim to its consequences. The nation would have cried out over the loss of these pioneers and patriots as if a part of our collective national being would seem to have been ripped away prematurely due to senseless and preventable violence. Though the victims of this scourge are not great leaders but often young, African-American men, I still feel as if their deaths have left a stain on the character of America.
(03/17/05 5:00am)
I knew I was in for the long haul when she wiped her snot on my hand. "Kleenex! Kleenex!" I told her. None were readily available, so she grabbed the closest thing within sight. My hand. Her nose began to run again. At one point there was a direct route of snot from her nose to her upper lip and then into her mouth. She rather happily facilitated this transfer by maneuvering her lower lip over her upper lip when necessary and smiling gleefully after each successful transmission. I know, I know...EWWW. But such are the hazards of children and cross-cultural communication.
(03/03/05 5:00am)
A friend of mine, who calls himself a moderate Democrat, commented to me the other day that he finds amusement in the fact that liberals often style themselves as "progressives" and that, in his assessment, they are doing so because "it sounds better." This friend has a point in that politics is often a matter of definition and perspective. Other than that, any person with a firm grasp on semantics, or a dictionary for that matter, can come to the conclusion that neither word, progressive nor liberal, is a dirty one.
(01/13/05 5:00am)
Rolling Stone magazine: "Why did the Democrats lose [in the 2004 elections]?"