Student renters

need to take action
A housing code functions to define standards of safety, sanitation and livability within a city. Currently, the city of Eugene lacks the presence of a code that not only holds renters and landlords accountable for the condition of their buildings, but also provides a tool for solving disputes over housing issues. The lack of housing standards affects University students and community members alike, and students need to advocate around housing standards in Eugene in order to protect their rights as renters and ensure proper living conditions within their community.
ASUO is running a student awareness campaign to bring this issue to the attention of the students and city councilors of Eugene. Running through Thursday, ASUO will be putting on a week of action encouraging students to voice their own complaints about the conditions of their housing situations. During the week, a table will be set up outside the EMU for students to drop by and share their grievances, which will then be shown to visitors from the city council during the final day.
Through the week of action, students can educate themselves about the issue of a city housing code, as well as voice their own opinions of complaints to be heard by the city council and other students.

Ian Henri

junior

English

Think before acting
Whether as groups, nations or individuals, we humans are capable of atrocious acts. The rationale for these typically boils down to “you don’t think or behave like I/ we think you should.” True-believer fanaticism underlies our species’ abhorrent, murderous history. As beings who usually do know what love and caring and safety feel like, what can we possibly be thinking when we permit ourselves — en masse as a nation, or solo as an individual — to perpetrate suffering?
I submit that in “thinking” lies the answer to this question: How many of us have ever really stopped and watched our “own” thought process? Even doing this for a few moments, the watcher may discover that thoughts are “thinking themselves” — that thoughts arise and leave constantly, and none of it is “me.” To then believe — much less commit war and murder on the basis of — those thought forms, those little voices inside our heads, is a genuinely psychotic act.
Yet it happens all the time, given holy sanction in fact by mullahs, priests and rabbis (not to mention presidents and prime ministers) who all believe their “own” internal voices. The remedy isn’t just to “think good thoughts,” as the bumper sticker advises; it is to question the relative usefulness and lovingness of one’s thoughts, before acting on them. A truly compassionate and peace-loving culture will teach its members to still themselves, check the unreality of thoughts and beliefs, and then act with awareness.

Vip Short

Eugene