Spring
Week Six
4. May. 09
The Outsiders Grace the COA Campus...Inside OTW Editors
Portland-based band The Outsiders gave a half-hearty performance for COA and the larger community on Friday night. The band, a fast-paced group that describes itself as “punkabilly,” has been making the circuits of the state’s rock ’n’ roll scene. Punkabilly? The band defines it as “a genre of music somewhere between Elvis, Punk Rock, and a whole lotta beer.” And it was definately a “whole lotta beer” that was keeping some students around for the performance. “If I weren’t piss drunk right now I would have left a long time ago” said an anonymous student. The general concensus was that their style was far from “punk” and more like old rock. First year student Miguel Valencia, “I have been here for about five minutes and, yeah, they’re punk. They really should be more pissed off though. They are having a good time which is good I guess, but it’s not the mood I am in. Yeah, they need to just be more fucking pissed off...that’s punk.” At this point some of you may be asking yourselves “why is my student activities fee getting spent on sub-par performances?” The Student Activities Committee meets at 10 A.M. on Wednesdays in TAB. If you are interested in voicing your opinion on performers who come to campus, please take part in SAC meetings. If you have other questions regarding the student governance at COA, shoot an email to Jamie McKown or Sarah Luke; they would be happy to address any of your qualms.
Sections A. Inside the Bubble B. Outside of the Bubble C. Op-Ed D. Events E. Wellness Corner F. Essays G. Arts & Literature H. The Docket
Inside the Bubble
A1
COA Presents “Working Hands” at Blum Stevens was raised in the region known as the North
Country of New York State. It is an area filled with craftspeople, among them Stevens’ mother, who makes Exhibit features weavings of seven fibers, photos of paper and books. Having spent a lot of time at COA studying photography, Stevens decided to make her fithe hands of ten artisans nal project a tribute to the artists and craftspeople of her region. Her show focuses on the hands and their work. -Donna Gold
“It’s a rich community to study people’s hands with a camera,” she says. Her exhibit features 30 photographs of ten individuals. Besides her mother, the artists include a calligrapher, printer, boat builder, knitter, beader, blacksmith and two silversmiths, one of whom weaves strands of silver echoing Native American basketry.
COA’s spring series of senior work continues with “Working Hands,” an exhibit focusing on the artistry of the hand. The exhibit, from Monday, May 11 through Friday, May 15 at the Ethel H. Blum Gallery, combines the efforts of Becky Wartell of Portland, ME and Hannah Stevens of Canton, NY. Wartell is a weaver and all-around craftsperson. Stevens is a photographer who has spent the term photographing craftspeople in the highly artistic region in northern New York where she was raised, known as The North Country. There will be a closing reception for the exhibit on Friday, May 15 from 4 to 6 p.m. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wartell’s project involves seven different items each woven with one of seven different fibers: animal fibers of wool and silk; plant fibers of cotton, linen and hemp; and two cellulose fibers (plant fibers that require heavy processing): bamboo and tencel. Her exhibit includes the graduation dress she made from silk she wove, a bamboo skirt, a woolen blanket and some cotton plaid fabric. At the reception, the runner on the food table will be made of linen woven by Wartell. Also part of the exhibit will be a loom on which gallery visitors can experience weaving. The resulting communal piece of fabric will be turned into a purse that will be sold to raise money for a weaving-related cause. Crafts have captivated Wartell since she was a child, when, she says, “I was obsessed with potholder looms.” She has since gotten much more sophisticated, using techniques such as double weave and designing her own overshot patterns. These are also colorful offerings; most fibers Wartell bought in colors, one piece was hand painted with fabric paints. “My biggest inspiration in my work is colors and how they interact with one another,” she says.
Students Recieve Davis Project for Peace -Donna Gold
Congratulations Zimmerman Cardona, Andrew Louw and Neil Oculi on receiving a Davis Project for Peace. Come June, the trio will be headed to the island of St. Lucia, where they will be following through on their proposal: Riparian Stabilization in St. Lucia’s Fond D’Or Watershed, a project of protecting the watershed from runoff by planting trees between a river and plantations - all the while educating people in the region through conversation, assistance and a video about the need for stabilizing soil erosion. Some 11 communities depend upon this region for food, water and employment. Meanwhile, deforestation caused by riverbank erosion continues to threaten their livelihoods. This effort, say the three, “will create change by empowering communities to be stewards of their land and transferring the skills to preserve it.”
Inside the Bubble
A2
FANDANGO -Donna Gold
Show of music, dance, humor and international talent to raise funds for children in Guatemala
The Fandango: Yes, it’s also a great Spanish dance. At College of the Atlantic, however, it’s a lot more: many dances from many locales, music and humor-a whole evening of COA’s best talent and fun. The Fandango, COA’s night of international entertainment happens at Gates Community Center at 8 p.m. on Friday, May 8. The music ranges from classical to jazz to world percussion to folk. The dance includes a vigorous salsa from South America, a rhythm-stomping gumboot dance from South Africa, modern dance - even a belly dance from Western Sahara. There’s also slam poetry, what is known as a “true Bollywood item,” improvisation, an international fashion show and more. All in a fast-paced, two-hour, unforgettable night. This annual performance is being presented by Pangea, COA’s international student group. It is always a fundraiser. This year, funds will go to Safe Passage, (www.safepassage.org), a Guatemalan organization with Maine roots. Safe Passage provides food, assistance and funds so that children of families living off of Guatemala City’s garbage dumps can attend school.
Gumb oot Dance
Along with the entertainment, there will be a silent auction, food for sale and a raffle of items donated by the COA community and local businesses. There is a sliding scale donation of $5 to $10 for community members and $3 for students and children. All proceeds will go to Save Passage.
News in Brief -Sasha Paris COA will feature in “The Goode Family,” which premieres May 27 on ABC. The college administrators are keeping this a secret until they decide whether to be angry or ashamed. A piñata in the shape of a “swine flu” virus was constructed and then demolished by enthusiastic and mightyfisted students. Numerous local schoolchildren have begun believing they are sea creatures, crawling on the bottom of the YMCA pool and, in extreme cases, sprouting tentacles or antennae. This affliction has been traced to recent teacher-led visits to the Dorr Museum touch tank.
Outside the Bubble
B1
7 Degrees Of Separation -John Anderson
I am sitting on the front porch of Tirimbina Biological Station, drinking my fourth cup of doubtlessly Non-Sustainable Coffee. A Toucan has just flown into a tree in front of me. It really DOES look like the guy on the Fruit-Loops box. I am enormously happy. I have wanted to come to Costa Rica for at least thirty one years, and here at last I am, and it really IS everything I had hoped it to be. My fascination with the tropics dates back to childhood books of bold explorers, dense jungles, and deadly adventure. I became interested in Conservation Biology when I read my first Dan Janzen paper on the impact of the Pleistocene extinctions on tropical fruit trees. Janzen had made an observation that doubtless thousands of other people had seen before him: many tropical trees produce large, energetically expensive fleshy fruits that grow, ripen, and fall and rot beneath their parent tree. The fruits are just the sort of thing that a large mammal would love to snack on, and the seeds within seem well protected to pass through even the most tortuous gut, but the fruits fall uneaten and the numbers of trees dwindles with each passing year because there are no large mammals to devour the fruit and carry the seeds off to be deposited in a nice bed of warm dung away from the leaf shadow of the adult. I have never met Dan Janzen, but I imagine him as a sort of Ur-Naturalist- someone who really pays attention. Janzen saw the trees and the fallen fruit, and the lack of seed dispersers, but he also saw back in time, to the period when the new World was as rich as Africa in large mammals, giant sloths, camels, miniature elephants, giant armadillos… a great army of dispersers that had only been gone for what, in evolutionary terms, is a blink of an eye. Janzen realized that the fruit of the trees (and the thorns and spines) were in a sense “vestigial traits” of a much more diverse mammalian fauna. The trees were still dealing with the Pleistocene, while we were thinking of five hundred years as “a long time ago.” If we wanted to save the forest, we were going to have to bring in large mammalian seed dispersers, and to a degree we had done just that: some of the trees that were dying out “in the wild” were doing just fine where horses and cattle were introduced. Like Huxley on his first encounter with Darwin’s Natural Selection, I remember thinking “How terribly stupid not to have thought of THAT first”.
I confess that I am scared – at least until I see the enormous happy grin on Steve Ressel’s face – the same grin that I get from him at each lizard, each snake, each poison dart frog. I hope I look at least as happy when I see my first Motmot. The jungle is hot and humid, dark and green, an absolutely overwhelming range and variety of life everywhere. I walk on, thinking of the young Darwin in Brazil talking of “twiners entwining twiners.” Yes indeed. If one ever needed confirmation, one needs but go to the tropics to see the enormous power and persistence of Life made manifest. There are dark sides to our experiences. Even the “shade grown” coffee plantations seem bare and empty after the riot of the jungle, and we pass thousands of acres given over to monocultures of palm oil production. In San Jose even the smallest houses seem to be embedded in chains of razor-wire, with every window barred to keep out drug crime. The jungle seems so much cleaner, so appealing (Steve encounters a Fer de Lance in mid trail the next day). In the tropics the dawn really does ‘come up like thunder.” I got used to rising at 4:45, slipping quietly into my clothes, and setting off in the dark to be ready to go birding. The light comes on as if with a switch at 5:15, and there is a magical hour of cool when the whole jungle is awake and I have it all to myself: manikins courting in the dense brush. Social flycatchers flitting on the end of branches. Red Rumped tanagers flashing their butts from tree to tree. The song of the cicadas rises to a roar, and as the light sharpens the heat sweeps over you, and before you know it, it is time to go back to the station for fresh fruit, rice and beans.
We are going to go back. As soon as we were there Steve and I realized that we simply had to bring COA students here so that they can see and hear and sweat The tropics are not without their terrors also. Later, and wonder at the glory of it all and rededicate themI am walking along a forest trail with 28 high school selves to the grandeur and beauty of the world. Next kids. Twenty seven step onto and over a short stump spring, if all goes well, we will make our plans, read in the trail. The twenty eighth pays attention and calls as many papers as our brains can hold, pack our out “John, what is THIS?” “This” is a small pit vi- bags, and once again take up station on that front per, perfectly camouflaged against the rotting wood, its porch. Perhaps there will be a toucan for you too. diamond head cocked back, fangs ready to do damage.
Op-Ed
C1
A Story to be Lived -Amelia Eshlemen
Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges that cast you toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books. - Italo Calvino In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all tests the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. - Italo Calvino I love reading. I am sure that this comes as no surprise to anyone considering I almost always have my nose in one book or another. I recently finished If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino and was troubled to consider the idea that a book can only end in two ways. For me books are a defense, a dream, and a bridge among other things. Frankly I am not prepared to accept that these could only end with love or death. Books present a truth. It may not be my truth, or your truth, but it is someone’s. They tell a story of life, however incomplete that life may be. If a book can only end with love or death does that mean then that all we are ever doing is searching for love or waiting to die? That the only things that matter in life are love and death?
If I may be blunt: that is bullshit. I get put off by the whole notion of finding one’s true love; it means that we are not fulfilled unless we have another. I am not speaking of love in terms of friendship, but love. I do not think I or anyone else should need another to be happy and fulfilled. I do not think that life is a quest for the “other half,” I do not think it is fair to ask someone to be everything I am not, nor do I want them to be. And I do not want to be anyone’s everything. (That is quite a bit of pressure). Cynical? Maybe, but at the same time I will be the first to admit that involvement with another can be nice, even a source of growth. The real question is, Do I think my life will be anything less without it? No. It perturbs me to consider that books which occupy so much of my life could only end with death or love. I want to read a book that defies this. I want to read a book in which the hero or heroine lives happily ever after alone, satisfied with self-love and friendship. If you have this book could you please lend it to me? Despite the claim that books refer only to the continuity of life and the inevitability of death I would highly recommend Italo Calvino’s book to anyone looking for a defense, a dream or a bridge.
Events
Tuesday May 5, 2009 at 4:00 PM in McCormick Lecture Hall Talk on the Antarctic Station. Alumni Luci Pandolfi ’98 and Luke Wagner ’99 speak about their work with at the South Pole with the National Science Foundation for the Human Ecology Forum Thursday May 7, 2009 at 4:00 PM The Rise of Religious Intellectuals in the Middle East, a talk by Bahman Baktiari, director of the University of Maine Orono’s International Affairs Program. Friday, May 8 at 8 p.m. Fandango, a multi-national student show with music, dance, stories and more. Sliding scale donation of $5-$10 for adults; $3 for students and children. All proceeds go to Save Passage. Gates Community Center Monday, May 11 through Friday, May 15. Working hands, an exhibit of functional weaving by Becky Wartell and photographs of artists’ hands by Hannah Stevens runs in College of the Atlantic’s Ethel H. Blum Gallery. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m Monday May 11, 2009 at 4 PM The Great Disruption: Climate Change, Policy Paralysis, and the Coming Economic/Environmental Decline, a talk by Pete Liotta, director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. McCormick Lecture Hall Tuesday May 12, 2009 at 4:00 PM in the McCormick Lecture Hall Gandhi and Contemporary Politics with philosopher Doug Allen of the University of Maine for the Human Ecology Forum
D1
Wellness Corner LET’S GET DIRTY
E1 Swine Flu
It’s difficult to put your finger on the cause for a good With influenza A (H1N1) - previously referred to as mood. When we’re feeling good, we’re not likely to per- swine flu - spreading around the country and the world, severate on why. We’re in it, riding it for as long as it lasts. we wanted to reassure you: there are currently no confirmed cases of the disease here on Mount Desert Island. This past winter was particularly hard for everyone I know. And now that we are safely on the other side of We are working closely with the Pandemic Response winter, it feels so good to enjoy the spring. Life has be- Team for MDI to be prepared should a case emerge. come a bit more effortless, if for no other reason than the We are also working closely with the Maine Center fact that we can walk out the door without being swathed for Disease Control and Prevention, and will have a in a million layers of long underwear and flannel and conference call with all Maine colleges and state ofwool and fleece, and, as we walk, we’re not bracing our- ficials at noon today to coordinate our response selves to avoid skidding, slipping and falling on the ice. and keep everyone informed of plans and preparedness. It’s been common knowledge for some time that being outside in the fresh air makes you feel good. Nothing boosts me more than spending a good long day outdoors. And for the folks who’ve gardened, farmed or landscaped over the years, you’ve probably experienced a mood boost after a few hours of digging in the dirt. Researchers have recently discovered why.
It is very important to maintain perspective on this and blend caution with common sense as we respond. While we recognize that the potential for pandemic is real, so far the U.S. cases of this virus have been mild and treatable. We are watching the situation and responding thoughtfully and purposefully.
I will continue to keep you informed of any material It turns out that a soil microbe, called Mycobacterium developments. vaccae, increases serotonin production in the brain. Serotonin is implicated in a broad range of physi- David Hales, President ological behaviors, including mood. An inquiry into the neurochemical etiology of depression indicates a serotonin deficiency. Some speculate that the effects of these microbes rival that of antidepressants. But you don’t have to suffer from depression in order to experience the benefits of an increase in serotonin levels. So get outside and get dirty.
Ways to dig in the dirt on campus: --Help Jo Cosgrove with her Senior Project. She’s creating a garden for pollinators on the North Lawn. Join the friendly work crew every Sunday morning, from 10 am onwards (weather permitting). --Dakota & Tim are refurbishing the Sunken Garden in front of Turrets as their Senior Project. Ask them if they need a hand. --Talk to Suzanne Morse about helping out in the gardens if you plan on being on the island through the summer. Or, you can head into Acadia and climb a mountain, and roll around in the woods a bit while you’re out there. Just remember: Rangers frown on nudity, and children are scared by it. If none of the aforementioned options work for you, maybe it’s time to try some mud wrestling.
Essays
F1
A Short Digression on Epistemological-based Scientific Theory Formation, and Louis Agassiz: The Man Who Tried to Disprove Darwin -Michelle Klein
Inspired by the novel: Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, by David Dobbs Few questions in 19th-century science aroused more controversy than the origin of coral reefs. Charles Darwin posited that the corals grew upon sinking land forms, a theory widely accepted despite its lack of empirical evidence. Enter Alexander Agassiz (1835– 1910), son of the renowned naturalist Louis Agassiz, whose earlier dispute with Darwin over evolution tarnished his reputation as a scientist. A meticulous researcher, Alexander disapproved of Darwin’s “intuitive leaps”; he believed that proper science must work “through eyes-on observation and the tireless accumulation of reliable information.” To this end, he spent the last 25 years of his life visiting every major reef formation on the planet. But although he gathered a wealth of evidence that seemed to refute Darwin, he never published his findings. –From Publisher’s Weekly By the 1950s, when technology enabled researchers to drill for deep coral samples, data proved that Darwin had guessed right after all. Dobbs clearly sides with Agassiz in this story of clashing intellects and egos, arguing that Alexander’s aversion to confrontation and his emphasis on methodology sprang from the embarrassment caused by his father’s stubborn creationism, as well as from annoyance at Darwin’s stoking of his own reputation. That Alexander’s failure shows Darwin’s theory to be all the more brilliant may be an unintended irony of this engrossing chapter in the history of modern science. Charles Darwin’s first scientific splash, a theory on the formation of coral atolls, is now accepted; but it had a rival in a theory advanced by naturalist Alexander Agassiz. Dobbs approaches this chapter in scientific history from a number of perspectives, including Alexander’s personality as formed in the shadow of his father, Louis, one of the most famous naturalists of the Victorian era. On a more abstract level, Dobbs discusses the balance between induction and deduction in scientific reasoning. The biography is inherently more interesting, and Dobbs highlights the contrast between Alexander’s introspection and his father’s charisma and self-centeredness. By the 1870s, Louis Agassiz rigidly resisted Darwinism; Alexander accepted evolution but when he learned of data collected on the maiden expedition of the Challenger, hd did not accept Darwin’s idea about atolls. Darwin contended they formed around subsiding mountains; Alexander maintained the coral accreted upward, on top of already existing mounds or ridges that already reached within a few hundred fathoms of the surface. * * * So how is it that we come to prescribe to a theory? We believe the theory because the theory expresses our beliefs. But these idealist theories pose a great threat to empiricism that forms the heart of Western science, for they make reality a concept rather than something that
can be reliably observed, measured, and known. Inductivist reasoners like Alex’s father, Louis, tried to create a method that could reflect how nature actually works rather than how we think it should work, and pushed an idealist conception of a non idealist theory generation. Louis’s idealist logic and Darwin’s empirical method clashed as violently as did their creationist and mechanistic conclusions about how life was formed. For scientists of that era, the argument about method mattered as much as whether we arose from God or monkey (or a banana… Humans share 50% of their with bananas according to Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College, London). And it was this methodological debate that Louis so decisively lost, and that Alex had to grow up in the shadow of. Darwin, who subscribed to the practice of no-nonsense empiricism, first articulated by their countryman John Locke a century before and elaborated in the early to mid-1800s by the British philosopherscientists William Whewell and John Stuart Mill. Mill who was more popularly known for his social contract theory and utilitarian beliefs – that private individuals or law making governments should always seek to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people -- deeply influenced Darwin’s scientific methodology and practice of using reason to try to grasp the truth, and determining the legitimate functions of institutions will optimize human flourishing for the individual and society both in respect to its material and spiritual welfare. Dobbs also brings Karl Popper’s scientific approach into light. Popper, who advocated falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically to falsify a theory, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomalous with respect to them. A prime example of this can be drawn between Darwin and Agassiz’s conflicting theories on coral reef generation. Despite Alexander Agassiz’s seemingly insurmountable pile of evidence to displace Darwin’s prevailing theory, Darwin’s theory took center stage because of the contacts he had in the scientific community, and most notably the fact that Agassiz never actually published his thesis. He died before he could do so, and left no manuscripts of it behind. Charles Darwin’s theory on.the formation of coral reef ended up being correct in the end anyway. Popper believed that science should progress through constantly testing theories for weakness and revising
Cont. on F2
Essays
F2
and possibly replacing them as necessary (as advocated by Thomas Kuhn i.e. paradigm shifts), and that challenge, negation and succession is science’s proper course. Karl Popper, through the use of his “hypothetico-deductive theory” as it was termed, explored brilliantly how individuals wielded this method and how science or society tested the resulting theories (or failed to). And it was Agassiz who would engage himself in one of the first ambitious and rigorous applications of the hypothetico-deductive method on Darwin’s coral reef theory (despite his failure to replace the Darwinian paradigm with one of his own).
The Rise of Culture --Aspen Reese
Petri was a small, awkward pterodactyl from my youth, but the man who named the dishes must have preceded the cartoon who sang songs and saved a prehistoric world with his troupe of dinosaur friends, because I could not imagine why a type of shallow plastic lab equipment would be named for my winged friend. Along the edge of the lab table, I lined up my set of dishes. Each precisely touching the lip and their neighbor at only one point to make straight lines of round objects, like a string of pearls pulled taunt. The clean lines seemed appropriate in the sterile room. Sterile table, sterile dishes, sterile bread, sterile mold combined to produce Learning. But I wondered how you could you use that many astringent cleaning products without making the womb sterile too? Inside each dish went one piece of bread, awkwardly torn to produce an approximate oval about the size of a golden dollar. They were like school girls in uniform. Your eyes are first drawn to the similarities, from rolled socks to starched collars, but the first oddity noticed leads only to more. Freckles and sesame seeds of uniqueness could not be ignored. Atop each hunk of bread I spread a small culture of mold. A dab of butter plopped in the middle that made the bread less appetizing rather than more. Down the lines and around the room the process was repeated forty-seven more times. Twelve students with four dishes, forty-eight pieces of bread with uncountable mold individuals: one result. The dishes were stacked and lidded. They fit neatly into one another to form an economical tower which we could then place in the incubation chamber to form a well organized city of equally sized skyscrapers and plans for a public transportation system. All that was left to do was wait. I kept my mind occupied with class and
meals and sleep, but what I was truly doing was waiting. We returned the next day, tore down the city, and dissected the towers to find no recognizable chunks in the identical dishes, only fluffy green school girls. The patrician nose of bread chunk #2 and the deep pores of #4 were no longer identifiable. Overnight they had been overcome by the force I had brought to them. Dropped on them from fighter jets and deployed from submarines with the intention of watching the inevitable slaughter, rather the intention of coming back only to count the dead. No dish came out exactly the same. Even death, especially death, was inexact. We were supposed to have learned how quickly mold reproduces, about its sexual adaptations. I did learn that, I answered the question correctly on the test, but what I actually thought about was the word culture. Culture needs time to pass, generations to pass it on, in order to truly exist. So the remarkable night that brought about the mold’s victory was not really just a night. It was generations of mold fighting valiantly to conquer their harsh environment, to build their civilization, and live happily, obliviously, until Peak Bread came and the time of hardship began. The experiment was no more remarkable on their time scale than looking at the rise of the Roman Empire in geological time. It was all relative. If it had a language, the mold in dish #3 would have named its world Earth. Or perhaps Petri, after the God of Knowledge.
Arts & Literature
G1
Self Portrait -Meg Barry
Roses....
--Elizabeth Fisher-Bruns violets are blue roses are red I am happiest when fed
roses are red violets are blue when your nose is runny grab a tissue
roses are red violets are blue when i am bored there’s nothing to do
Roses are red violets are blue some songs go like... doo be doo, doo be doo
violets are blue roses are red when biking protect your head
roses are red violets are blue you could draw a picture if you want to
roses are red violets are blue spring is awesome and you are too
violets are blue roses are red baking is great especially bread
Haiku’s for Me and You
-Co-compiled by Alice Anderson, Amelia Eshlemen, Aspen Reese and Lucy Atkins Dinosaur lover you were born much much too late extinction’s a bitch Teddy Roosevelt both napiform and mustached-a man of high class compact flourescent something to light up my life eco-friendly style the threat of swine flu is much worse then racism get the name right please A deipnosophist: meet me in TAB for dinner ready for cous-cous?
The Docket
H1
Report From the Forum on the First 100 days -Stephen Wagner
This past Thursday night the Student Democrats organized the second forum on the current status of the political atmosphere in the country. This well-attended discussion focused on Obama’s first 100 days, a concept Aspen Reese promptly reminded us originated from the very successful first 100 days of the FDR administration. The topics ranged from the many pieces of legislation passed, to the role of the youth, to debates of the dualistic nature of pragmatism, and idealism in the Obama administration. Finally, around 9:30, to the relief of some and the dismay of many, David from Greenpeace suggested we call it a night and get some rest. Overall, the two and a half hours proved very illuminating and constructive. In fact, the Student Dems would like to release the following official summation, arising from unanimous agreement amongst the group. We feel that Barack Obama’s administration is a gift from the Gods and that the country is heading in the most divine of directions on all the issues we as residents of the United States ever need to worry about. In fact, we should just stop worrying at all! What about the environment, you ask? No longer an issue! Well over-three quarters of Americans in a recent Gallup Poll believe Obama will do a good job dealing with the environment. Couple this with the significant drop in the environment on a poll of important issues, the conclusion is self evident and irrefutable: Obama will take care of it all, no worries man! Torture you say? Nah, Obama says there is no need to formally investigate - so quit your bitching Juan Soriano! Everyone quit your bitching, Obama is going to take care of it all. We should all just smoke the green and chill out on the beach with an ice cold Corona-- Damn that sound nice. The Student Democrats will be collecting all protest signs, megaphones, pamphlets, petitions, etc and have a giant bonfire as their final farewell activity. There is no need to question or express our opinion any longer. Chill the fuck out! This dude has it covered!
END.....Except not! Hopefully, the above statement was as obvious a satire, as Spector’s move to the Democrats was a strategic ass saving (not an ideological shift or benefit to the Democratic Party). To best illustrate the point I am trying to drill into your mind, I refer to a story told during our discussion. In the beginning of his presidency, FDR met with several Labor organizers, who explained to the President their values and the direction they wanted to see the labor reform move in. The President replied, “I agree with you, now go out and make me do it.” This likely romanticized and probably inaccurate historical anecdote speaks to the true revolutionary nature of the Obama campaign. The campaign was not about Obama at all, but the organization of people, particularly the youth and other previously under-represented demographics, sending a direct and loud message. The message was one of change and one that seeks to put our relationship with people and the earth in a more perfect union. The attendees of the forum Thursday night highlighted the unique ability of Obama to walk a moderate line and listen to all sides and at the very least think when making decisions. The lesson to take home is that this is not going to be and never should be a top-down government. We live in a country with a government that serves the people. We, the people, must be in a constant dialogue and make our voices heard. It is paramount we avoid the pitfalls of complacency, as it is the greatest menace to an effective democracy. So get the fuck up and make Obama do what needs to be done! The Student Democrats invite everyone, regardless of your political affiliation or agenda, to meet with us Wednesdays at 12:30 in TAB to discuss current issues and legislation and how you can participate in the political process.
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