9 minute read
Letter from the Editor
The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan over the past month and the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks have once again led the American public to re-examine its relationship with war, our military, our veterans and in many ways, with peace.
There is nothing black-and-white about any of these subjects. They are complicated and must be viewed and reflected upon with this in mind. The perspectives, experiences, emotions and opinions of them are varied and sometimes conflicting.
Advertisement
For the first time in nearly 20 years, our country will not have a large mass of armed forces actively engaging in combat and there are no, at least apparently, immediate foreseeable reasons to send large numbers of armed forces to fight abroad.
This has been met with both great praise and great criticism.
In the third edition of The Sundial, we will explore these topics and their complexities by approaching through different perspectives, such as through our own lens here at CSUN, where we follow a veteran and student who is adjusting to college life after a career in the military.
We also examine the history of benefits and aid given to veterans since World War l and how veterans assistance often still falls short of giving them the aid they need at both federal and local levels.
In our “Too Close for Comfort” series, we get an inside look of an airman’s mindset when they first decide to enlist, the hardships faced by this decision and the rationale of why we need a military from one of our own reporters who served in the U.S. Air Force.
In contrast, we also deliver a scathing opinion on why the U.S. Army shouldn’t recruit on CSUN’s campus.
Although our newspaper publication has transitioned online, we have shifted the role of our print publication to a bi-monthly magazine focusing on the communities of CSUN and the issues we face as a society, such as the ones we cover in this issue.
Trevor Morgan
THE SUNDIAL
Chris Torres Editor-in-Chief
Ryanne Mena Managing Editor
Michaella Huck Print Editor
Angel Peña
Lead Designer
Shannon Carter
News Editor
Trevor Morgan Online Editor
Blake Williams Opinion Editor
Kaitlyn Lavo Photo Editor
Carolyn Burt Social Media Editor
Andres Soto Sports Editor
Samantha Bravo Culture Editor
Munina Lam Copy Chief
Sandra Tan Business Manager
Arvli Ward
Publisher
Jody Holcomb
General Manager
Dwayne Johnson Danny Solano Taylor Arthur Carina Cardenas Mercedes Cannon Contributors
Published by the Department of Journalism, California State University, Northridge Manzanita Hall 140 18111 Nordhoff St. Northridge, CA 91330-8258
Editorial hello@sundial.csun.edu • (818) 677-2915
Advertising ads@csun.edu • (818) 677-2998
Because of high production costs, members of the CSUN community are permi ed one copy per issue. Where available, additional copies may be purchased with prior approval for 50 cents each by contacting the Daily Sundial. Newspaper the is a crime. Those who violate the single copy rule may be subject to civil and criminal prosecution and/or subject to university discipline.
From newsaper to magazine
By Michaella Huck
In an age where digital technology has taken over the world, journalism is no exception. When daily newspaper printing was at its peak, we were finding out the news that happened yesterday when the paper hit the stands the following morning. People want to find out the news as it happens or directly after. Digital publishing allows us to provide this.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sundial stopped printing for the first time in history. This forced us to do something we didn’t do much before — publishing daily news online. This was a step in the right direction on a road to us keeping up with what I like to call “new school journalism.”
While we would love to take all the credit, my team and I are not responsible for creating a Sundial news magazine. The 2019-2020 school year’s editor-in-chief, Madison Parsley, took the Sundial from a daily print newspaper to a weekly news magazine. Her staff, which I was a part of, printed weekly themed issues on communities that make up our campus.
As time goes on, it’s important to refine ideas. After much planning, the Sundial is finally back on stands in a different format.
When looking at a magazine in general, it’s important that everything has a niche. The editorial team and I decided that the magazine will cover issues we face as a generation in addition to covering communities to highlight the voices on our campus that are seldom heard.
We also changed the size of the magazine to an 8.5x11 glossy cover as opposed to a traditional magazine format. Newspapers are something many publications are trying to break away from due to the fact that they can be a bit outdated and not as necessary in the digital age.
We don’t want to see our hard work go to waste. We don’t want our audience to read it and toss it into a trash can. Our work takes hours of the team’s time and many trees died for the news to end up on the laps of our audience. We wanted to treat it as such.
The glossy cover allows the audience to preserve it as a keepsake. Traditional newspaper’s shelf life is not long and we wanted to create something evergreen with a longer lasting impact.
The final change we made is the frequency of our print schedule. You might think, “Wow they went from daily to weekly to semi-monthly in a span of three years?” I know it’s a big change, however, it’s for a valid reason.
All of our editors and reporters’ energies went to working on the stories that would not go on stands until the next Wednesday when the copy is printed weekly. This is not feasible. Coming into my position as print editor, I want our reporting content to be amazing in every facet.
The three-week slate we now have to publish the next issue allows the Sundial to publish better content on our website. It gives editors time to work on multimedia projects and it allows for what we put on stands to be thorough and accurate.
I know the change may be large and uncomfortable for some who have followed the Sundial for years. Sometimes change can be good. We are trying to adapt and navigate the digital era while keeping print alive for our audience!
Too Close for Comfort is a section where our audience and editors give first hand accounts of issues that relate to them. If you have a story about navigating through pandemic thats too close for comfort please email us at toocloseforcomfort.sundial@gmail.com.
By Trevor Morgan Illustration by Carolyn Burt
It’s an exciting experience for any new or returning student to step on to campus and see the booths set up to recruit them into the many clubs, groups, organizations, sororities and fraternities our community has to offer.
Almost identical in strategy and appearance is the U.S. Army’s recruitment booth at CSUN.
You may have seen them already, near areas of high foot traffic such as Matador Square. Maybe you’ve even seen their ads, such as the one published in this very magazine, featuring a young Black woman sporting a U.S. Army backpack — ironically placed in our first issue next to a story about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the Black community.
There are several reasons why the Army shouldn’t recruit on college campuses and there are some good ones for why they shouldn’t recruit at CSUN specifically.
They prey on the working class with the promise of social mobility (at the cost of your morality).
It would be nice to say that the Army doesn’t have the right to recruit from campuses that are mostly first-generation students (such as CSUN), or colleges in general, but they actually do. In 2006, the United States Supreme Court upheld a law that allowed the federal government to withhold funds to any college that did not allow military recruiters on campus. Thus, pretty much requiring colleges to allow this.. This was a huge win for the Department of Defence, because now they could target our country’s brightest.
It can take years to train and prepare someone to design, maintain or remotely pilot an unmanned drone to deliver death from the sky on what is believed to be armed terrorists, but turn out to be seven children — like what happened in Kabul on Aug. 29. Why not just get a CSUN graduate with an engineering degree to do it?
The Army’s tactics differ slightly when they try to recruit us. Instead of the old “guns and grit” technique, they offer fulltuition scholarships to a generation increasingly burdened by student debt. They’ll promise high-tech jobs that are usually marketed as “non-combat” (You know, so you won’t have to directly kill people). They’ll also offer the opportunity to become an officer after graduation. Those without a college degree sometimes take years to be promoted to this level, if ever at all.
The Army targets the working class, seen statistically as transfer students, first-generation students, and grant or loan dependent students, with the promise of alleviating their debt or promising them a job that would put them in a class that is “better” than what they came from.
They do this because they know our statistics and our demographics, and they recruit with the same type of strategy, intelligence and propaganda that they would use in a war.
The futility of war
What the Army isn’t telling you is that even if you get a “non-combat” role, you’re still participating in a war machine that exists because it generates profits to some of the world’s wealthiest arms manufacturers and their investors, which means that you help people profit from war.
Although you may gain some social mobility (that you’ll probably achieve even if you don’t join the Army, according to CSUN statistics) it comes at the cost of those who truly suffer — the people of the countries we invade, whom the Army deems as “collateral damage.”
The number of innocent people that were killed or wounded at the hands of the U.S. military, or its allies, during the Iraq War alone is somewhere between 184,000 and 207,000, according to Brown University. The exact number is unknown.
According to the same source, the number of innocent people killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001 is approximately 71,000.
For perspective, if we combine the conservative estimate from the Iraq war and the approximate number from Afghanistan and Pakistan, it adds up to roughly 85 times the amount of people that died as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Revenge really is a fool’s errand, isn’t it?
It’s safe to say that these numbers exclude a lot of things. They don’t include the lives that were upended or destroyed because our military killed a family member. They don’t include the amount of insurgents, extremists, or terrorists we have created because of these actions. They don’t include the haunting images of dead children killed in a NATO airstrike. They don’t even include their names.
The people whose lives we destroy are just numbers on a page to the Army, especially to those who have never seen combat. So even if you take a “non-combat” role or just because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are “over,” it doesn’t mean that our military won’t continue to kill innocent people abroad.
Every aspect of a student’s morality, ethics, critical thinking, rhetoric, empathy and compassion that they’ve learned as a CSUN student will be challenged and ultimately broken by the Army’s boot camp and training system.
That’s what they don’t tell you at their booth near Matador Square, and that’s why they shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. Sound familiar?
