Why cross picket lines?
After reading today’s article (“Grocery workers may strike,” ODE, Nov. 18) I would like to put forth some information and a challenge. First, in the very first sentence, the reporter writes, “Grocery shopping may require the crossing of picket lines this holiday season.” Why?
Why not support the workers who are trying to hold on to a living-wage job with benefits? Wal-Mart’s slave-labor wages certainly won’t support working families. Second, Safeway cashier and University junior Grant Leffler has it wrong. A strike is a last effort by employees, not a first choice to “show its power.”
As a union worker here at the University, I challenge Leffler to find out more about unions, because there are three here representing employees of the University. They are the people who teach him (GTFF); help with his financial aid, clean the rooms he studies in, and provide him with course materials (SEIU), to name just a few; and print the materials he reads and learns from (GCIU). SEIU will be bargaining soon, and we need the University community’s support, especially from students such as Mr. Leffler. So, my challenge to the reader — support all local area workers, because someday they may support you. Isn’t that what community is all about?

Cheri Smith

undergraduate coordinator

computer and information science

Change the world,

not just the station
With due respect to Ben Lacy’s letter regarding KUGN, “turning the dial” and ignoring the problem is equal to choosing hate and a violent future, which infringes on everyone’s existence. There are 1,200 radio stations; it’s a monopoly of digital hate, providing spewpoints, not viewpoints.
America and the world turned the dial and the Holocaust evolved. We turned the dial in Rwanda, Vietnam, Korea and throughout the 20th century. We turn the dial for the women in Afghanistan who die in childbirth every twenty minutes because we broke our promise to rebuild after bombing them in search of a man we never found. We turn the dial every moment we allow violence to be part of our way of life, and we simply will not survive the century if we continue to do so.
This is not about freedom of speech. It’s about institutes of higher learning — with their grand and celebrated mission statements of diversity — supporting extremism and the spread of hatred in exchange for money. In short, it’s about perpetuating the kind of hypocrisy we routinely study in many of our classes.
Think ahead. Resist all concepts that threaten future generations. Choose an intelligent future.

Brian Bogart

first-year graduate student

peace studies