It’s now well past the halfway mark of this term and soon we’ll move into December. Life here on campus will slowly wind down to the eventual release of winter break. Well, “slowly wind down” is a relative expression, as I know myself and many others will be frantically working to get all our work done as a result of a week’s worth of procrastination.
Because we’re nearing the end, it would be nice to take some time to see where we’ve been, and maybe where we are going.
The war on terrorism continues, even as some of the talking heads in the media are lamenting the fact that there haven’t been any significant gains and the United States is losing momentum in this new war. Yet our “allies” in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, apparently took the key city of Mazar-e-Sharif, so that’s encouraging. I’m not exactly sure if these radicals are any better than the radicals we’re fighting, and it gets even more confusing when we realize that our other allies, the Pakistanis, hate the alliance fighters and vice versa. I say it’s about time for us give up on the local boys and send in the Marines and Rangers to win this war properly on the ground.
In other national news, New York has suffered another jetliner crash, which just lays catastrophe upon catastrophe. It’s shocking and utterly disgusting how things just keep getting worse.
Here in Oregon, people are screaming about assisted suicide and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who many folks see as the devil incarnate. This issue puts me in a awkward position as a conservative, and I can see both sides of the fence. I don’t like a bloated federal government imposing its will on states, but I think giving people this assisted suicide
option could open a dangerous door that could lead to “mercy” killings where there’s more killing than actual mercy. However, in the final analysis, we have to understand that federal law is the law of the land, and no state is above that — no matter how morally justified Oregonians may feel.
Ken Kesey died. While I’m a big fan of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (like millions of other college students), I’m not a big fan of a counterculture movement that “further” instilled a lasting legacy of disrespect toward the United States government and society. Let’s hope that Kesey will be remembered for his literary brilliance and not drug use.
On campus, some allegations have found their way into print about dubious use of student fee money and a termination of an ASUO employee on highly questionable, if not downright illegitimate, grounds. I’ll give 2-1 odds that most readers don’t have a clue what I’m writing about because they don’t care at all about their student government. It’s downright pathetic that student government has so little affect on the people it represents that even scandals can’t cut through the dense fog of apathy surrounding the ASUO.
There’re a whole bunch of other stuff out there that irks, annoys and sometimes even encourages me, but I think I’ll just save all that for another column.