Newspapers / University of North Carolina … / Sept. 23, 1999, edition 1 / Page 2
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ve2 The Banner September 23, 1999 Opinions - The Banner - Editorial Check your head Take a gamble Before figuring out how to lure ripe high school graduates into our liberal arts abode, perhaps we should store back a little dinero to persuade these young geniuses. In order to remain competitive, our school needs more scholar ship money, according to Philip Weast, assistant vice chancellor for enrollment services. A statewide lottery would certainly provide a little extra spend ing money for our UNC-system educational woes. It is difficult to believe that a state lottery with money allocated for education has yet to be passed and implemented in North Carolina, considering the unmet educational needs. Rather than ignore the benefits of a state lottery our southern neighbor, Georgia, has enjoyed, we should snatch their success ful ideas and apply them to our own money problems. We lack scholarship money at our institution, so instead of more taxes or more fees, let’s embrace the wonders of our culture: we like to compete and take chances with our money. If the Cherokee Reservation can bring in the big bucks, why don’t we tap the same source—those who like to gamble and have a little fun while making some scholarship money, or at least money for educational equipment? ^ Both the rich and the poor would benefit from investing more money in public education. Lest we trust state efficiency in spending, this money should be appropriated separately and not thrown into the bottomless pit of the general state education fund. And those who think gambling is wrong and irresponsible can relax, and think of a lottery-ticket purchase as a donation to education that might render them personal benefits. When we have some bucks to prop up our image, maybe then we can finance our broad marketing scheme, and buy ourselves some diversity. Reputation We hate to say there’s a trend developing, but the addition of four new full-time professors and adjunct pay increases is the latest sunny development following the cloud known as Patsy Reed’s administration that passed by last spring. True, our new Chancellor James Mullen is untested, but his visibility around campus and vision for our university are slowly piercing the veil of cynicism that students and faculty here at UNCA have maintained for years. Stroll through the caf, and Mullen may be two tables over gathering feedback from students on what UNCA needs. Attend a ballgame here, and he might be alongside Bulldog faithfuls, cheering our school’s athletes on to victory. However, this refreshing change in governing UNCA into the next century must not blind us to the problems that have dogged our school in the past. Sure, there are mundane concerns that have been harped on to death, but no issue of pertinence has risen to the forefront of discussion on campus more frequently than funding, or the lack ofitatUNCA. Until last year, whether it was the proposed renovations to the Highsmith Center or the debate over UNCA’s status as a Division I athletics program, money allotted to certain areas of campus had been centered around numbers and inanimate objects. However, last year it was about losing some of UNCA’s brightest individuals when our pockets weren’t deep enough to keep adjunct professors. Not every adjunct who picked up their last paycheck was perfect, but most possessed a level of expertise in a certain area. The loss of these adjuncts resulted in full-time faculty taking on a heavier course load and teaching outside of their specialty in a given major. Let’s hope that the spare change we came up with this year will be exactly that a few years down the road when Mullen has our fundraising efforts in full-swing. Reel time As the chilly weather sets in, and students are forced to go somewhere other than the quad for entertainment. The Banner editorial board offers up some selected fall flicks (to be watched in conjunction with Fall Fling if you like). The following selections don’t include echoing bongos, sunbathing, random musicians, stray dogs, or frisbee and football entertainment, but they should suffice to get students through winter hibernation. Travis Barker: “Run, Lola Run” Amelia Burnette: “Dancin’ Outlaws” Andrew Pearson: “Hoosiers” Meghan Cummings: “The Princess Bride” Emma Jones: “Evil Dead 11” Krystel Lucas: “Killer Clowns from Outer Space” Rebecca Cook: “The Sixth Sense” . Matt Hunt and Zach Dill: “Deliverance” Mark West: “Spice World” Doomsday in the real world 7 David Marshall columnist In a recurring dream, I am look ing up and the night sky rips apart without a sound, revealing a dark ness of eternal profundity. It is an archetypal dream; every culture and religion possesses some form of it, like Ragnarok in Norse mythology or Armageddon, the Christian apocalypse. Similarly to the watery myths of our coming into existence, the fan tastic imaginings of cataclysmic destruction captivate us. Our most powerful myths, leg ends, and religious writings reflect this voice inside us. We feel its reverberations amplifying our dark- Less ephemeral than the din of dreams, reason and logic assure us that we plod on the path of certain annihilation. More people were killed in the last 100 years than have existed from the dawn of humanity up to the last century. The word genocide was not coined in 1946 by accident. As a species, we have achieved the capacity to eradicate ourselves and destroy all life on this planet. Our rapacity has taken its toll. We possess an impressive vo cabulary of the different kinds of pollution we produce—a testa ment to our technological failures: Air pollution, including carbon dioxide, exhaust, nitrogen oxide, ozone, photochemical, sulfur di oxide, smog, and indoor air pollu tion; heavy metal pollution, in cluding cadmium, lead, and mer cury pollution; hydrocarbon pol lution in the form of oil spills; pesticide pollution; radioactive pollution; soil pollution; volatile organic compound pollution; and water pollution. We have polluted our rivers, for ests, and skies. We have poisoned our earth beyond her ability to In one generation, we went from drinking water out of a faucet to drinking it out of a bottle. Fifteen lyears ago the trees were fine on top of Mount Mitchell. - Now they are all dying. The evi- '^ence is overwhelming. We are kill ing ourselves. The other day I spoke with a fellow Christian about this. She agreed that we certainly seem to be headed to ward collective suicide. But not to fear, she said, God would not allow Realty? Is this the basis for Christian stew ardship? Is that our plan? If I put a gun to my head and pull the trigger, will God intervene because it is not in His plan for me to die? We want to believe in some cosmic safety net. If you notice, we are constantly reassuring ourselves that things will be aH right. Going to church no longer seems a celebration ot God, as it does a con stant reaffirmation that our church is the right church, that our truth is the right truth, that our dogmas are the right dogmas, and so on and so forth. Modern man is a walking bundle of neurotic insecurities. He is Humphrey Bogart on the outside, but Woody Allen in the inside. We are drunken men, holding on to each other, spontaneously bursting out with “I love you, man.” Well, I love you, too, man, but things are not all right. We are ill. Symptoms of our devolution in clude a growing apathy, malice, moral ambiguity, resignation, cal lousness, and cynicism. And here’s the fine point: symptoms are merely secondary attributes. Follow the pathology of our disease to its source, and you will find a com mon cause: we have lost our sense of posterity and tradition. Posterity and tradition are abstract action verbs dressed as nouns mean ing “I love my family, my country, my society, my world, my earth so much, that I am willing to sacrifice of myself and ensure that I leave them the best that I am and have.” Corny, smarmy? Perhaps, but I am willing to take the risk that some might be tired of the ironic. Writers, social critics, and phi losophers go to incredible lengths to avoid using love in a prescriptive sense. It is an impossible genre, convoluted by a world’s lifetime of misapplication. Love belongs to the romantic poet, the novelist, the psychologist, the biologist, the pious, and the pimple faced teenager. Love, in the form of posterity and tradition, has been boxed out of existence. We are left oi't in the cold. Pay attention to the normative voice; we must cultivate a sense of posterity and tradition. Love is not the kind act; it is the necessary one. Forget everything you read about the innate evil of man. Every one of us longs for a better world. Joseph Campbell said, “Myths are the dreams of the world.” Break through the doomsday dreams of a fevered world. Dream new myths for posterity sake. Product of a social experiment Yes, they are free now, free to pursue neighborhood schooling at will, per Judge Robert Potter’s dic tate to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. Sure, literally hundreds of school systems have decided that busing students to other school districts was no longer necessary, but Potter’s overturning of Swann v. Mecklenburg resounds much louder, for the decision was origi nally handed down to the Mecklenburg County Schools, circa 1969, and served as a national blue print for busing success. Potter’s ruling, handed down barely two weeks ago, will end all race-based policies in the Charlotte schools, starting with the 2000-01 school year. No longer will schools have to aim for certain racial quotas in order to get certain funding, and there will be no more lottery for magnet school entry. Potter’s decision stated that the school system was in essence deseg regated, and that seems to be good enough for the conservative activist justice. The question ofwhether we should use busing to maintain desegregated and diverse schools is not a new one by any means. The fact that the question hasn’t gone away makes us realize how divisive and polar this issue is for individuals in differ ent circumstances. Some claim that busing was a hor rible, failed social experiment, while others hail it as a necessity to teach students about the social dynamics This concept, that people of simi lar racial and cultural backgrounds seem to flock together in neighbor hoods, is also nothing new; it is merely the cafeteria self-segregation theory at a much larger scale. However, there have been too many complaints about that par ticular phenomenon in the past, and I don’t intend to exhume it again. The point is, if humanity lived in diverse neighborhoods, there would not be an issue. Unfortunately, there are too many individuals who would view having to live next door to someone of a different culture as increasingly diverse global another apocalypse in itself Such individuals likely would have benefited from being bused and learning something about diversity. The social lessons gained in such an environment, the social lessons that I gained in such an environment, are too numerous to list here, though I will give some examples for your reading (and educational) pleasure, some of which will more than likely get me in trouble. Most importandy, this is not solely a white people’s world. I have dis covered that the mountains of North Carolina are not a particularly good example of such diversity, but I promisey’all, it does exist. The things that people of other cultures can teach us about living to gether in peace are remarkable. As a corollary to that, white people aren’t the only ones who are racist. Any group that is in a racial majority can ly with it by the Andrew Thomasson columnist economy. As a product of this called failed social experiment in Charlotte, I felt a need to speak a piece in favor of the now outdated system. First, I must address those who view busing as being akin to World War III or the Apocalypse in the grand scheme of horrors. I do in deed realize that on the surface, or even in a bit of depth, sending your child to a school 30 minutes when there is another quite suitable school whose play ground borders on your back yard. And in deed, as a par ent, it is hard to justify the move, but I honesdy believe that the advan tages of going to diverse schools outweigh the minor inconve niences pre- A side note: If people want to avoid being bused or avoid having their children be bused, then they should move into diverse neighborhoods. However, there are not enough such neighborhoods to make diverse neighborhood schools a feasible al- Unfortunately, there are too many individuals who would view having to live next door to someone of a different culture as another apocalypse in itself. be racist and get power of popular consensus. Since people of Anglo-Saxon descent make up the majority of the U. S. popula tion, I will admit that they are in the position to be more discriminatory than people of other races, but re verse discrimination does exist. This phenomenon doesn’t always take the form of “white people suck. ” In high school, I was asked to be a member of the gospel choir. For a brief moment, I was proud that a fellow student had acknowl edged my talent and flair for sing ing, until she commented, with a hint of sarcasm, “We need more Caucasians in the group,” which promptly put me back in my place. I was not physically, mentally, emo tionally, or spiritually scarred by this encounter, but it proved to me that such an attitude existed. There’s a big difference between Spanish people and Hispanic This is one of my favorites, one that I was called out on very quickly by a Nicaraguan girl who became one of my best friends. In a nutshell, the only people that are Spanish are the ones who at one time had resi dence in the European nation itself, or have recent descendants that claim that particular heritage. On the other hand, individuals who hail from Central or South American nations are Hispanics by heritage. Though they generally prefer to be identified with their country of origin, they take great offense to being called Spanish, in much the same way I would if someone called me English in reference to the lan guage I normally speak. I am Ameri can, more specifically, Southern, and English makes me think of an individual from the United King dom, which I am not. In any event, the point I am com ing to with this nostalgia trip is that I had a cultural, hands-on, trial-by- fire educational experience—^which is a great deal better than reading about models of social revolutions in AP Psychology or Sociology 101, in my considered opinion—and I would not trade it for anything. Furthermore, when arid if I have children, I want them to have the same type of experience, that I have come to believe played an essential role in my educational process. Even if they have to be bused to different schools.
University of North Carolina at Asheville Student Newspaper
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