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The Banner ■ March 2, 2000 Opinions - The Banner - Editorial When the levee breaks See no evil Are we, as UNCA students, a cohesive group? After a resident was attacked by a man hiding in her closet, public safety and housing are urging us to “be more protective of each other” and take our safety seriously. To further this cause, they are planning on ordering brass whistles for all the girls to carry around on their keychains. Let us trace the path this endeavor will inevitably fake. Key- chain whisdes will be handed out to everyone who wants them. One night, someone will blow the whisde just for fun, just to see what happens — sound like high school, anyone? Public safety will come running, chastise the offender for not taking this safety measure seriously, and retreat. It will happen again and again and again, until the whistle is as big of a joke as the fire alarms have become. When someone sounds a whistle in panic as someone attacks them in their room, will fellow students groan and roll over in their beds, hoping the racket will stop? We hope that it will not take the kind of catastrophe like the one that happened Jan. 19 at Seton Hall University, where three students died because they didn’t believe the fire alarm when it sounded. If safety warnings are ignored by students, can we expect dorm mates to come to our rescue when we scream or blow a whistle? Will it take serious injury of one of our peers for students to understand that safety is not a joke? It is as much our job to be each other’s watchdogs as it is public safety’s job to respond to our calls. There may be a time when a student can help more quickly than public safety, and may be the deciding factor in the outcome of an attempted attack. So, as students, we ask you to be conscious of your neighbors’ safety, as well as your own. Do not make a joke of the Governor’s Village incident, and hopefully as a student body we can prevent other attacks from happening. Farewell: You're a good man, Charlie Brown We pay tribute here to one of history’s greatest cartoonists — Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts. On Feb. 12, Schultz passed away from complications from colon cancer, hours before his last original Peanuts was to run on Sunday comics pages all over the world. He was 77. The most popular comic in history. Peanuts ran for amost 50 years, giving us characters like Lucy, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Schroeder, Pigpen, Snoopy and, of course, Charlie Brown. Schultz was often compared to Charlie Brown, the simple, insecure boy who captured the attention of newspaper readers for decades. And Charlie Brown was, indeed, modeled after his creator. The cartoon character suffered many of the insecurities Schultz himself faced all his life, such as depression, anxiety and shyness. “It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was,” said Schultz once. Unable to continue his busy drawing schedule, Schultz retired in January 2000. An one-frame obituary cartoon by Kevin Siers that ran in the Charlotte Observer the day after Schultz’s death pictured Charlie Brown, his head bent onto his arms, leaning on a plain brick wall. Like Schultz’s life, like his work, like his death — the end was quiet, simple, unassuming and utterly moving. “Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... how could I ever forget them...” said Schultz in his farewell cartoon. We will not, as we will not forget the man that brought them to life. Branching out In all the spring break hubbub, we at The Banner have found a few places where you’ll be assured low airline rates, cheap hotels and a... unique experience. Have a blast! Emma Jones; Siberia Meghan Cummings: Hershey Park, Pa. Jason Graham: Death Valley Sarah Wilkins: Ghost Town, Maggie Valley Krystel Lucas: Old Fort, N.C. Rebecca Cook: Dollywood Lauren Deal: Islip Garbage Barge, N.Y. Matt Hunt and Zach Dill: San Francisco, Calif Eric Porter: Durham, N.C. Mark West: Chernobyl How language shapes reality V\ Jaimie Park columnist With speech came the dominance inner states — feelings, preconcep- of our left brains over our tions, assumptions and delusions, rightbrains, which is pretty signifi- Wendell Johnson, in “Your Most cant since the right lobe is, in Enchanted Listener,” lamented, “i Shlain’s terms, the “elder sibling.” theworldsofwordsinsideourheads What happened when we invented we hold ourselves captive, ” There is speech and the written word was truth to his words, ironically this, according to Shlain: our sense enough. Within the context of the ofwholeness, brought about by our self, words are the implementations right brain, was cleaved by the left of thought; meaning that language controls what I have a warning for my fellow humans — do not make the mis take of accepting words for reality, for in doing so you will lose contact with the world. I’m serious. Do you ever think about how we Homo sapiens perceive reality and attempt to communicate our concept of it to others? Ever think about the effects that language, in particular the written word, have on how we understand our reality? Surgeon, professor and author Leonard Shlain has put forth a neu- roanatomical hypothesis that should wake most of you up from your comas of complacency in regards to the conflicting relationship of lan guage and the perception of reality. Shlain postulates in his book “The Alphabet and the Goddess,” “When a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline in the status of images...” First, the question of why and how we came to develop speech must be asked. The answer: (to keep it simple) it freed our hands, and we could do it in the dark. With the invention and utiliza tion of speech came hemispheric lateralization, or the splitting of our brains’ frontal lobes. “So what?” you ask. Well, the lateralization of the brain affects how we perceive, manipulate, symbolize and think about reality. Before speech and the written word, we cognated and communi cated on the level of images. Images are concrete — they approximate reality. The system of imagery pro motes a holistic, global perspective; it emphasizes the awareness of what Gregory Bateson coined “the pat tern that connects.” Images are cognated in the right cortical lobe, or right brain. Essen tially, the right brain is responsible for our experience of being, feeling- states, images, holism and music. Without it, we wouldn’t believe in our Gods, we would have no sense of humor, no aesthetic apprecia tion and no awareness of the syn thesis of reality. ing a duality that led hu manity to in vent a differ entiation be- in-here” and “world-out- there.” From speech came the ascen dancy of the left brain to suited in the birth of logic. The basic scheme of classification that is built into our language causes us to see with our catego ries. Listen to our words. Do they really reveal any thing about real ity? philosophy of a dualistic nature, I have taken ir think about and how, goes further in affecting what we see and how we see it, going what, how, and why we relate to things the way we dc So what be done? Good question, dancing the dance that most resembles stumbling fee bly about the dark. And account an obser- and obj{ ective science. vation of the Talmud, “Teaching Are you finally beginning to get without a system makes learning the big picture? You see how the difficult.” But are we here to “learn” adoption of words severed our abil- or to live? ity to comprehend the pattern that We shouldn’t despair, for the so- connects, and instead instituted a lution is inside our very own hard- construct and method of differen- ened skulls. We may have switched tiation, resulting in a fatal error of lobes, so to speak, but interpreting reality? The basic scheme of classification that is built into our language causes 5 with our categories. Listen irreversible. Language has provided us with a map of reality—a primitive, defec- s, but a map nonetheless. ~ CO our words. Do they really reveal realizing the limitations of language anything about reality? We evalu- and knowing that it is merely a map not describe. Therefore, i words are only expressions of o of reality, not reality itself, saWa- n will be achieved. What can be learned during a seven-hour airport layover Matthew Rossi columnist For seven hours one day, I stared into boredom’s maw while waiting in the abyss of the Raleigh airport. It was a return trip from a week end at home to see my mother remarry, and I was happy, having been the maid of honor (a story unto itself). The flight was nothing special — Philadelphia to Raleigh, and then a connecting flight to Asheville. Peanuts had been served. All so simple, until I arrived to see my connecting flight pull away and the malicious smirk of the man at the information desk telling me I had to wait for the evening flight. Airports always make me a little paranoid, and the more time I spend in them, the more frenetic my de meanor. I chalk this up to the fact that airports are nowhere places. They exist in this kind of interim netherworld all their own where none of the regular rules apply. There are bookstores, but noth ing good to read, bath shops but no baths. In their restaurants, cheap beer is expensive, expensive beer cheap. The denizens of the termi nal are inevitably stripped of all identity, reduced to numbers, walk ing around without ever looking you in the eye. (I am convinced the people who work in airports are part of some big sociological ex periment. Otherwise, how do they keep sane?) The worst part of all is that there are no clocks in airports. There is no method by which man can con nect to the real world, to the nor malized pace set in the hands of a chronometer, so the time passes without measure. Sailors back in the day knew all about this sort of thing. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic lies a place where no winds blow and boats would stop, mired in an eerie calm for months at a time. In these areas, known appropriately as the Doldrums, time would pass with nothing for the sailors to do, noth ing in any direction but grey skies and a baking sun. They would go mad in the heat and boredom. Mutinies arose. Men would start having halluci nations, say, of monkeys clawing on their heads; oftentimes, the sail ors would gnaw on each other’s limbs, simply so they could pass the time. (Columbus is known to have been missing an arm for this very reason.) If the ship spent too much time within the Doldrum, it would eventually kill them through starvation or fright at see ing their own scurvy-ravaged faces. And there I was, trapped in pre cisely the same place with the same threat of madness upon me. How to describe the torment of my no where condition? The thousands of seconds spent walking back and forth from gate to gate, places without names but designations like gridwork on a circuitry diagram. I stared endlessly onto the run way in the vain hopes that some where out there was a city I might see. I chewed apathetically on a pile of tortillas in congealed liq uid cheese, the only thing my worth less meal ticket could buy me. After three hours, I thought I could buy a Walkman, music that could pull my mind back into reality, but the man at the counter simply smiled congenially as he said they just sold the last one. I think a man in khaki pants smirked at this, hancing my belief that they were all there to torment me, blockade me. By hour five, my mind hurt. A baby began to wail like a muezzin and I thought, “How nice that would be, to scream loudly and rid myself of that horror.” In the seventh hour, a m£ next to me. He told me his name was Mohammed, and proceeded to explain the difference between Al exandria and Cairo. Cairo, he told me, has 12 million people during the day, and by night its population is only six million. As I thought about how odd that was, he went on to explain that Alexandria was a shining city on the coast, temperate and moist. I clung to Mohammed as my only provi dence from the condition I found myself in, until, in the end, he left on a plane for Chicago. After the seventh hour, I boarded my plane. I laid my head back in the seat and closed my eyes, griping to the man next to me that I had spend seven hours in that nothing “Seven hours?” he responded in credulously, “That’s nothing. I just got back from Africa —12 hour layovers are standard. But you get used to it. Eventually the mind finds ways to adjust.”
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