OPINIONS
October 15-28, 2009 • The Journal
Page 5 • www.webujournal.com
Gorlok Gauge
ANTEBELLUM Jesus W. Christ
What do you think about President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? I don’t think he really did anything, so I don’t think he should have gotten it.
I was excited about it but there are probably more deserving candidates out there. Kim Jacobs
Mimi Angarita
Sergio Guzman
Senior, Business administration and marketing
Sophomore, Web site design
It was exciting. It makes us look good so why not? Yay America!
I think they’re giving him the prize so he continues promoting hope and promoting peace. Freshman, Business administration
Patty Senft
Brittney French, a senior journalism major, is a staff reporter for The Journal.
Contact the writer: editor@webujournal.com
Contact the writer: editor@webujournal.com
KENDRA HENRY/The Journal
An estimated 200,000 people attended the National Equality March held in Washington D.C. Oct. 10 and 11.
weighed down by the complications of living two lives. I came out to my mom first. I remember coming into her room on Mother’s Day and telling her I had something I needed to say. As I sat on the bed crying and telling her I had feelings for women, she sat motionless. When I was finished, she put her arm around me, turned to me and said, “I prepared myself for what I would do if one of my kids was gay, and I will always love you. No matter what.” That touched me in a profound way, but the words she said next surprised me the most. “Now quit crying and change your clothes,” she said. “Let’s go out for lunch.” My mom has never been one
to dwell on things. Her nonchalant reaction toward my sexuality helped me realize that being gay was just another facet of my life, not a definition of my being. With a renewed sense of courage, I moved to the next step — telling my dad. This was perhaps one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. My dad is a gun-totin’, NASCAR-lovin’, self-professed hillbilly. I was terrified he would disown me. Deep down, he has a big heart, but he can be pretty insensitive when it comes to identifying with people from different walks of life. I called him up and asked if he had time for me to come over and talk with him. During the 10 minute drive to his house, I con-
Sick and tired students
There is not enough time in the day for me to do all I have to do and still be sane. If Webster University is trying to prepare me for life outside academia, I don’t want anything to with it. I am overworked, underpaid and ANYA plain tired. ORZEL just I suppose in a roundabout way, college teaches you real life skills and dedication to your field, but there are very few professions that assign homework to their employees the way teachers do to students. If we were to break it down, each class would be like a separate job. By that standard then, I have five jobs, not including my work-study job and my job at Best Buy. I am not complaining about having to do the work required for my chosen profession, but I would never willingly take on seven jobs. If I worked for a newspaper, magazine or for an online publication, that would be my sole responsibility and I could easily organize my time to fulfill my obligations to my employers. All of my classes demand time. I find time to set up interviews between classes and work. I find time to type up the papers, keep up with my correspondence and write stories. I find time to learn how to create sound bites, video clips, blogs, tweets and shoot at least two rolls of film a week. I do all this and still manage to find time for sleep. This was just my past week. When added all together, I am putting in about 20 hours a day, not including sleeping or eating. It averages to about 100 to 140 hours a week. It’s ridiculous. I work 12 hours a week for work-study and 10 to 15 hours at Best Buy. Depending on the day, I am in class anywhere between one and a half to seven hours, three to four hours on homework and then an hour-long drive round trip from school
to home. It doesn’t allow a lot of free time for me to plan my wedding coming up in April. But I could be wrong. Some of us have chosen a major and are just taking classes that have to do with our profession. I am one of those. But with my graduation looming in December 2010, I am wondering if it is really worth all this work. I want to be a photojournalist. I love to write and take photographs so it seems like the perfect match. But I can’t shake this feeling that I might have bitten off more than I can chew. All I am asking from the faculty is to cut some of the workload down just a little bit. Some of us are trying to work our way through school. What I find even more depressing is I am 26 years old and I make less than $12,000 a year, which puts me below the poverty level, and now school is demanding I give up sleep. I find it very hard to comply. With the H1N1 flu running rampant, doubling and tripling the number of those infected, why in the world would teachers want to remove one of the biggest defenses the human body has? Sleeping allows the human body to recover, recharge and strengthen the immune system. But here I am getting four hours or less a night with homework and my other jobs. I just recently was able to clean my apartment, something that hasn’t been done since school started. I have been so involved in school and trying to earn the money to pay for the necessities of life that my living conditions had to suffer. I rarely have time to clean, or do anything else for that matter. If this is my preparation for the real world, well, I don’t know if I want any of it. Anya Orzel, a senior photojournalism major, is a staff reporter for The Journal.
Contact the writer: editor@webujournal.com
Too far left, too far right? Let us know or write your own commentary. WUJournal @Gmail.com
sidered turning the car around several times. But, I knew I had to tell him in order to truly be free. We sat down in the living room and I cut right to the chase. I told him that my best friend was really my girlfriend. Surprisingly, he said he already suspected something was going on. He said he was uncomfortable with the idea of my affection towards another girl, but he would try to accept it. He told me he loved me and, after a couple hugs, I was on my way. Just like that, I had come out to the two most important people in my life. Though I was still uncertain how the cards would play out with my family, I felt liberated. The secret that I feared would hold me back or ruin my life actu-
ally empowered me. From that day forward, I never felt I had to hide anything again. My first girlfriend, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so lucky. When she came out to her deeply religious parents, they said she had to move out of the house if she chose to be a lesbian, so she moved to Illinois to live with me. I always find it interesting that people think it’s a choice to be gay. It’s not like we wake up one morning and say to ourselves, “Man, I haven’t experienced enough pain in my life. I think I’d like to give up my rights and try being gay for a while.” The only choice inherent in sexuality is whether to accept who you really are or deny it. Gay people don’t choose to be gay anymore than straight people choose to be straight. I have been asked on more than one occasion how I know I’m gay. My response to those people is to ask them how they know they are not. “I just know,” they would say. I was gay, I just knew it. I suspect many gay people out there will tell you the same thing. To those of you struggling with coming out, I can tell you the choice to be honest with yourself might not be easy but, for me, accepting who I am was the best decision I ever made. Don’t let fear hold you hostage. Stand up and be counted. I’ll take the first step. My name is Kendra Henry, and I am gay. Kendra Henry, a senior journalism major, is a staff reporter for The Journal.
Contact the writer: editor@webujournal.com
Team assignments:
not as much fun as Rock Band Everyone has heard the old saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I don’t know about some people, but I hear it a lot. My parents, coworkers and friends all say it. But out of everyBRITTNEY one, my teachers seem to it most, especially FRENCH preach when they hear students gripe and moan after assigning a group assignment. Since I’ve been in college, group work seems to be gaining more popularity among professors and is often required in some courses because they’re designed to prepare us for the “real world.” I understand why teachers say group assignments can be beneficial for students, but I don’t necessarily agree. Each semester, it seems like students are blasted with at least one annoying request of working on a group assignment. As soon as I hear the words “group” and “work” used in the same sentence and my teacher’s request sinks in, I’m immediately reminded of past group work nightmares. I constantly hear people talking about how they’ve worked on a group assignment that turned out really badly. I can relate. During my first semester of college, I was working on a PowerPoint presentation with four other people for a media communications class and each person in the group had their own, individual assignment. To make a long story short, my partner, who was in charge of putting the actual PowerPoint presentation together, decided to drop the course the day our presentation was due. Needless to say, he didn’t inform the group and we didn’t have an assignment to turn in, which reflected negatively on our final grade. Obviously, the major issue with group work is communication. If students are allowed to work on group projects during class time, then it’s a completely different story. But from my experience, that never happens and students are left to work on their assignment outside of class. Finding time to meet up, call and send e-mails (that usually never get answered) to group members is an actual assignment in itself. Conveniently, everyone seems to have conflicting schedules making it nearly impossible for everyone to meet and work together.
Managing Editor
The religious right has always had a tenuous relationship with reality, but one area of which they were unflinchingly certain, was the absolute infallibility of god’s words. Biblical literalism, the cornerstone of the American Christian right’s beliefs, has served as a convenient foil against social equality and economic justice. The prophet of the moral majority, Jerry Falwell, regularly hosted segregationist politicians on his “Old -Time Gospel Hour” radio show, in the midst of the civil rights movement. Bible firmly in hand, he blamed feminists, gays, lesbians and secularists for the attacks on 9/11. In between apocryphal predictions of the end of the world, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez and prayed for the “removal” of three Supreme Court justices. Luckily, Jesus only gave him two. While teen pregnancy rates swell, realistic sex education is scrapped for faith-based, abstinence-only policies in denial to every study into the efficacy of such programs. Seven scriptural passages have been wielded as the chief justification for the denial of equal rights to homosexuals. Fundamentalists seek to toss aside the modern age’s best scientific hypotheses, instead desiring Bronze Age texts proffering a 6,000-year-old world where Adam and Eve walked side by side with T-Rex. Clearly, anachronous biblical assertions have continually trumped enlightened reason and pragmatism, but to the nation’s conservative Christians, even old J.C. is looking a little limp-wristed these days. Conservapedia, founded by Andy Schlafly, is the right’s answer to Wikipedia and it’s “liberal bias.” Barack Obama’s page on Conservapedia contains some striking examples of this new breed of conservative revisionism. A short caveat behind the president’s name reads “aka Barry Soetoro, allegedly born in Honolulu Aug. 4, 1961.” The site hosts the Conservative Bible Project, revamping the wimpy Jewish carpenter into something a bit more palatable to today’s conservative sensibilities. Forget god when they can worship the Gipper. The most revered text of Western civilization rests in the hands of an anonymous syndicate of Americentric neocons. Jesus preached relentless self-sacrifice for others and the lord. He decried worldly possessions and challenged one skeptical follower to give all he owned to the destitute. In Mark 10:25, Jesus proclaims, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” I wonder what he would say about televangelists Joyce Meyer’s $23,000 solid gold commode? Conservapedia has the answer. Their translation frees the Meyers of the world to discard their excrement as elaborately as they see fit. The new, free-marketfriendly version reads, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a man who cares only for money to enter into the kingdom of God.” In Conservapedia’s view, this is a “very nice improvement on the imprecise term ‘rich.’” Clearly, Meyer and her ilk aren’t concerned only with money; they simply like to crap in style. Jesus, the consummate peacemaker, embraced nonviolence, preferring persecution to pugnacity. Tragically, that vintage philosophy lays anathema to the righteous crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Matthew 5:21, Jesus proclaims, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment.” No problem, with a little twisted tinkering, Conservapedia shifts the meaning to something more accepting of depleted uranium bullets and F-22 Raptors: “You have heard that it was said in ancient times, You shall not commit murder, and anyone guilty of committing murder would be liable for trial.” Ta-da! Don’t worry about it, collateral damage is totally cool with conservative Jesus. After all, it’s not murder, just a muff -up. The words of god have already wrought enough strife in their unadulterated form. In the manipulative hands of ultraconservative disciples, they could wreak more havoc than anything Osama Bin Laden’s cooking up in his hidden lair.
Sophomore, Business administration and public relations
Free yourself from a life in the closet On Oct. 11, I had the chance to be part of the National Equality March in Washington, D.C. Thousands of LGBTQ people — includthe Show KENDRA ing Me No Hate HENRY group from St. Louis — marched through the streets of our nation’s capital. The St. Louis group included a mother and son from Kansas, several local LGBTQ people, straight allies and eight students from Webster University. To call the march inspiring would be an understatement. Sharing a familial bond with those walking by my side, and knowing we have endured the same struggles, gave me a sense of peace. The event served as a call to action for LGBTQ people and a reminder to the legislators of this country that we are here, still queer and not going anywhere. One of the most popular chants was “out of the closets and into the streets” because the march coincided with National Coming Out Day — an event that encouraged people to tell those in their lives about their sexuality. Coming out to friends, family and coworkers can be one of the scariest parts of life for gay people. During the march, I reflected on my own coming out experience 10 years ago. For me, the decision to come out was difficult. The dark, uncertain water of my parents’ thoughts on homosexuality were a frightening place to dive. But I couldn’t bear the thought of carrying the secret of my sexuality for the rest of my life. I had seen too many of my friends
BY MATT BLICKENSTAFF
There is a huge difference between taking on a project at work and doing so at school. At a job, everyone who is working together on a project spends eight or nine hours a day within the same proximity of each other. At school the classroom is typically the only place where everyone will meet together, and only for a couple of hours at best. When people work on projects at their job, they have no problem getting in touch with other group members. If they want to see or ask somebody a question, their office or desk is just a few feet away. With school projects, people seem to live all over the place and it’s hard to contact your partners, as everyone has other obligations and engagements. For those of us who are extremely independent and enjoy working on things by ourselves, finding the time to meet with other people could be spent completing the actual assignment. In my experience, working with a group of people has only slowed my progress. It can be frustrating and time-consuming relying and depending on others to finish their share of the work, especially when there is someone who doesn’t want to work in the first place. Here is an entire issue in itself — you have to spend more time away from the assignment, trying to motivate your unproductive group member while someone else will end up having to pull the weight. It’s even more frustrating when the group receives the same grade for the assignment, but the work wasn’t distributed evenly. I’ve had to slap a “team member’s” name on the completed assignment, so they get credit just for showing up. If this were a job, not everyone who worked on the same project would get a raise. Only the people who worked the hardest and put in the most effort would be rewarded. Why is it fair that all group members receive the same grade if some people didn’t contribute as much? But overwhelmingly, group assignments are more of an annoying task that hasn’t prepared me for the “real world” in the least.