Students must not be apathetic

Twenty of us gathered in front of the School of…

Students must not be apathetic

Twenty of us gathered in front of the School of Public Health Friday among the crowd of SEIU members. The situation is relatively simple: These people, real, flesh and blood human beings, clean our classrooms and bathrooms for wages below the poverty line while their health care costs – at one of the biggest health care universities in the country – are astronomically raised. There are men like Jack, who scrubs his building’s windows with brutal precision and fears his supervisors mightily. Then there’s Hugh, a poised and dedicated man who keeps our Union sparkling and free of garbage. These are men and women with families, children who need to go to the doctor, men and women who labor for us more decently, men and women who ask nothing more than the bottom line.

What happens when you’re out of luck, when your roots are showing because you can’t afford to dye them anymore, when your children are drinking watered-down milk because it’s cheaper? It’s time you stood up too.

Jazz is not enough. Books are not enough. No man or faith is enough. Passion is enough. It’s time you stood up too.

Join a struggle that moves you, that etches out meaning into the world, a fight that excites your passions. Make your lives meaningful. It’s time you stood up too.

Kate A.C. Zangrilli

CAS sophomore

War in Iraq is justified

I do not believe that President Bush is a great president, or a terrible one. I also am not personally convinced that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. We may never know for sure if they do or not. So let’s put that argument to rest. For me, their weapons are not enough to invoke invasion. That being said, I would like to offer a scenario to all those opposed:

You are walking down the street one day, minding your own business when out of corner of your eye you see a group of men beating a group of children, intent on killing them. What would you do? Perhaps you would just leave them alone to govern their own behavior? Or maybe you would arrange to meet with the adults at a time convenient for both of you, where you could talk things out and try to persuade them not to do that kind of thing anymore. Or, if you have any concept of what is right and wrong, you would get your friends and do everything within your power, including using force, to stop them. The Iraqi people have suffered long enough. It is very easy to protest a war when you are sitting in a country as great as this one, free to do as you please. I’m reminded of a quote from the movie “Boondock Saints”: “There is one evil, which we must fear even more than the acts of evil men. That is the indifference of good men.”

Brandon Stein

CAS sophomore

Editorial displayed shallow logic

Your editorial urging us to guard against sanitized thought (April 4, 2003) at the risk of martial law surprised me in the shallowness of its logic. Two of the three examples you use to support your argument – Madonna’s decision to eliminate anti-war images from her latest video and Warner Bros.’ decision to eliminate a peace sign from its movie posters – have nothing whatsoever to do with the threat of the “martial law” that is the premise of your editorial. These decisions were not required or urged by any governmental authority; rather, they were motivated by money. The fact is that a large majority of Americans support Operation Iraqi Freedom and neither Madonna nor Warner Bros. wanted to risk the criticism of their customers. I would suggest that you should want to protect their right to make these commercially motivated decisions as much as I think you (and I) want to protect the free speech rights of our fellow citizens to support or protest the war.

Stephen W. Johnson

School of Law (1984)