U.S. must remember history, act globally
As citizens of the United States, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, the fear of further terrorist attacks leaves us in a state of vulnerability. Therefore many are calling for a war that will end terrorism forever. On the other hand, our clear-minded consciousness questions whether a sustained war against an elusive threat will actually do anything but create more terror, more death. As we have seen in wars in Vietnam and Iraq in the past 30-some years, our nearsighted desires to alleviate fear have caused nothing but chaos, distrust, confusion and ultimately denial to the fact that these wars failed in their objectives. Are we to repeat the mistakes of the past, or can we learn from them?
Many people have been willing to put the U.S. government'led by President George W. Bush and the Department of Defense, remember'in the position of making potentially costly decisions for its citizens, with or without the consent of Congress. Due to fear, we have succumbed to nationalistic fervor and a craving for revenge.
We cannot ignore the tragedies that have delivered us to the door of prolonged war, but must we follow the same course that in the past has led us nowhere? Our conscience tells us that killing'and there will be killing of uninvolved, impoverished people'perpetuates a cycle of retaliation, violence and retaliation, to the point where no one is victorious and no one is safe. The only perceivable outcome of prolonged military campaigns will be a battlefield strewn with the innocent dead. Are we to sink to such moral lowground? Or are we able to choose a higher path?
Osama bin Laden may be the perpetrator of crimes against humanity, but to seek to 'end states' that support him is synonymous with terrorism against civilians, much like the people who lost their lives Sept. 11. Those attacks were a wake-up call. We, as U.S. citizens, must also be global citizens. We cannot isolate ourselves from a global reality faced with daily suffering due to U.S. sanctioned economic imperialism. If we choose not to question our motives, our government and ourselves, we fail as global citizens.
We should dig down deep in search of the roots of global suffering, both in our government's lack of foresight, and in ourselves, and seek to change the course of history for the better. If not, we choose to further ourselves towards a self-created, bleak destiny. And if that is the path we settle on, the war we're about to head into is already lost.
True meaning of free speech often overlooked
I thought political correctness had had its day in the '90s, only to find it still dragging its tired corpse around campus. As I read the bevy of letters on the actions of the sign-waving girls at Library Mall, it strikes me as time to remind people what 'freedom of speech' really means.
Freedom of speech means that the government may not interfere with the speech of its citizens. That means that the police were right not to remove the girls right away. (When the crowd turned mean, the police were well within their rights as peacekeepers to get rid of the girls.) But freedom of speech is the same for everybody. Nobody is required to respect anyone else's opinion, or even to hear it out. Thank God we live in a society where you are free to say any ridiculous thing you please, and I am free to tell you to shut up.
