People should spend less on sports hype
Picture a Eugene where the masses donate $10 each toward scholarly needs at the University and forgo their usual purchase of gimmicky polyester Duck flags on their cars. Less trinkets and plastic crap and more mindpower should be the University’s New Year’s resolution.
Canceling expensive sports-hype billboards around the country could keep tuition costs down. Diversity, culture and mindfulness are not a priority at the University — in-your-face jockism reigns. Preventing students from burning down their neighborhood is teaching them to be smart, not overspending on rock-video-style sports-hype TV commercials.
Zachary Vishanoff
Eugene
There’s plenty to forgive
Forgive: 1. To excuse for a fault or offense: pardon. 2. To renounce anger or resentment against. 3. To absolve from payment of (e.g., a debt) -vi. To accord forgiveness.
While I agree that shouting forgiveness from the mountaintops will do little to curb terrorism, I think that there is more to what Sill had to say in “Forgiveness may prove more successful than war” (ODE, Jan. 8). My interpretation is that perhaps Sill thinks that America should accept the Muslim majority’s apology for what some illegitimate radicals have done in their name. We could forgive and not take on a narrow view of Islam and discard vague stereotypes like “those countries that preach hate and murder against the United States on a daily basis.”
Or maybe America could take a more responsible approach to eliminating passive support for such atrocities by not attacking everyone except those terrorists who have America in their crosshairs.
We missed bin Laden, so Hussein is next. And then, Kim Jong Il? We could “forgive” the debts that we have somehow transferred out of al-Qaeda accounts and into Iraq’s.
Instead, we’ve externalized the effects of our actions and driven the accounts of the peoples of these dark, hateful places further into the red. Maybe we should ask for forgiveness from the very people that have quite conveniently been kept from achieving the very things that we, the great blue-eyed beacon of democracy, have prescribed for them.
Surely, with the way things are going
now there will be plenty of forgiveness to
go around.
Chris Holman
senior
geography/international studies