A few days ago, I sat with a fairly large number of volunteers for the kickoff of the fall MSU Community Charitable Campaign, or MSUCCC, a campaign that raises almost $600,000 each year for primarily local charities and civic groups close to MSU’s campus.
In announcing his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” comedian Jon Stewart said some curious things. He lamented that most normal Americans are too busy for today’s political discourse, overrun as it is by radical ideologues “on the Left and the Right.”
The recent worldwide controversy about Quran burnings, as well as concerns about cultural integration and assimilation, made me think about Western Europe and the situation it finds itself in during these times.
The fear of government encroachment on personal rights and privacy is as old as this great nation. Since a constitution has existed, people have suspected that the government would transgress upon it. The current climate in the U.S. echoes those age-old fears.
This semester, the “Letters” section of the opinion page started out with a bang. First, there was the letter from an MSU alumnus castigating the greek community for paying lip service to what the author felt was a serious problem. A week later, the vice president of the fraternity in question responded in another letter.
In December 2009 I had a chance to cover an East Lansing City Council meeting where councilmembers rezoned sections of the Whitehills Neighborhood/Rudgate area North of Saginaw Street, south of Lake Lansing Road and west of Hagadorn Road to a R-O-1 designation, prohibiting all new rental licenses within the designated district.
According to a recent study by MSU researcher Jeff Grabill, texting is the No. 1 form of writing among college students. Grabill, the co-director of MSU’s Writing in Digital Environments Research Center, performed a study lasting from April to June about the writing behaviors of more than 1,300 first-year college students across the nation. He concluded, “The day of traditional college writing instruction are nearly over.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear Matt Lauer proclaim he was “shocked” on NBC’s “Today” show when he talked to Shirley Sherrod about her resignation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in July over alleged racist comments. He could not believe the “garbage” said about her would lead both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, and the White House to demand her resignation without any confirmation.
Everyone in the nation, especially residents of Michigan, can appreciate the idea of repairs and upgrades to roads and other forms of transportation. Ill-kept roads have become a common sight to many, and to see the infrastructure of the U.S. transportation system in such a state can be worrisome.
I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of The Rev. Terry Jones “International Burn-a-Quran Day.” The event — by all indications more local than international — is scheduled for this Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In high school, I remember health class teaching sex education with a specific set of phrases such as, “Say no,” “You could die before the age of 25” and “Children are forever.” Safe sex was promoted to cover all the bases, but abstinence was the main push in a classroom full of hormonal teenagers who recently discovered themselves.
For as long as I can remember, the MSU spirit has been ingrained in my system. Both of my parents graduated from MSU, and I’ve spent most of my life living very close to campus. I’ve always cheered for the Spartans during college football games. However, now that I’m starting classes as a freshman, I’m realizing MSU has so much more to offer.
The first days of classes are a blur for everyone. One of the major reasons for this is the disastrous combination of speeds ranging from “Fast and Furious” to “Driving Miss Daisy” on campus and Grand River Avenue.
It’s the beginning of the semester, so that must mean I’m writing a column about becoming a guest columnist for The State News. The gist is simple — so simple, in fact, I am going to paraphrase it from the column I wrote in the summer.
While listening to a program about the overturning of California’s Proposition 8 on National Public Radio the other day, a caller brought up a point that has been on my mind for some time, and perhaps is the most important part of the whole debate over gay marriage.
This is the imperceptive radicalism fueling our nation right now. Gingrich and Sarah Palin with her ever-so subtle and yet so inane pleads of Islam adherents compassion toward American jingoism only are a few of the people to be named in the campaign to mystify the distinction between terrorism and community cultural centers.
At the end of spring semester, I told myself I was going to take a step back and learn to relax for a little while. During the summer I had planned to do yoga, read lots of books, enroll myself in an anger management course, look at graduate schools and just breathe.
What has been dubbed quite incorrectly by conservatives across the U.S. as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” finally has, amid protests, been approved. As soon as those three words are combined, they create an immediate inflammatory reaction in the average American.
Oh man, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional a few weeks ago. I wasn’t surprised. A few months ago, I read that conservative lawyer Theodore Olson would take up the banner for gay marriage and immediately thought, “So, this is a done deal, right?”
Wow! The summer of 2010 is just about in the history books as a done deal. What have we accomplished? I always ask this question as a new school year approaches. I seem to forget that for some of us, the previous school year never ended. If one came back to campus to take summer classes, much of what others considered “summer break” was little more than business as usual.