| Toss the Brick "Time's running out " The time to waste your money, that is. TCU's Advancement Office has launched its annual Senior Appreciation Program, complete with the brick-buying gimmick. For $50, TCU seniors can purchase a brick with their name and graduation year engraved on it. And, as a special bonus, they get to recognize three special mentors with a personalized certificate of recognition. Half of the $50 goes toward the painstaking process of purchasing and engraving a brick, which will be trampled on for decades to come. The other half of the money goes toward a scholarship fund for juniors. While the $25 that goes toward the junior scholarship fund is well-spent, we believe the remaining $25 could be put to more appropriate uses. Here are just some of our suggestions: - Sponsor a needy child. - Take your special mentors to lunch instead of providing them with more paper for their already-cluttered offices. - Combine your $25 with those of your 1,799 fellow senior classmates and raise an additional $45,000 in scholarship money. We are not opposed to wanting to be remembered, but we believe legacies do not need names written all over them. Memories are more valuable when they make a lasting contribution to the TCU community or society in general. Don't leave something that can be stepped on. Instead, leave something for those who follow in your footsteps. Leave a legacy of care for a needy child. Leave a legacy of friendship for your mentors. Leave a legacy of scholarship for other students. Because time really is running out.
Small help will save world from deadly disease Keep on reading even if it's difficult to stomach. That is what I kept telling myself as I skimmed an article in Newsweek featuring the gruesome specifics and scope of AIDS in Africa. Sandwiched between an advertisement for Viagra and an article detailing the "severe outbreak of the flu across America," the international report by Jeffrey Bartholet split open the haze of my ignorance to inform me about the "slim disease." Worldwide, 2.6 million people died from AIDS last year. Of those, 85 percent were in Africa. Of the 5.6 million people infected last year alone, most lived in Africa. OK, now stop just skimming over those neatly packaged, technologically acquired figures and think: That would mean everyone in Dallas, Denver and Los Angeles is infected with AIDS. Everyone. Most of them will die without seeing their children pass the potty-training age. So what happens to these children? What, historically, has happened to orphans during an outbreak of some sort? Nothing too pleasant. In many African nations, and, for a variety of reasons, women and children have borne the brunt of the pandemic. First, because of refugee migration and social unrest, women scavenging for jobs found little other means of support than prostitution. However, not just older women have fallen into this livelihood. Countless young girls have as well. Secondly, the unfortunate myth exists in certain sections of African society that the cure for a man with AIDS is to have sex with a virgin. As one can imagine, this belief helps perpetuate the disease throughout many young, female populations. How does one respond to these realities? I have heard of a phenomenon in modern culture called compassion fatigue, the overwhelmed feeling many individuals experience in our information-bombarded culture. That is OK, I think. It is a normal response to the enormity of human pain. But after finishing the article, I began to wonder where the line is drawn between compassion fatigue and apathy. Where along the line do we slip into that fuzzy, comfortably numb state, that almost arrogant and willful blindness to the state of things, where our interest to do something positive is subdued to a quiet lull in the back of our minds? I don't know when or how it happens to me. Sometimes I am whipped into frantic urgency when affronted by the sickening realities of mass death and suffering. The other day, I received an e-mail message with a link to a corporately sponsored Web site where one can donate free food to a starving individual in a foreign country. My first click on the "donate free food" button resulted in a window that popped up and exclaimed, "Thank you for your donation!" Suddenly, I was rooted to my cushioned seat, and my index finger was super-glued to the left mouse button. I kept clicking. "Donate free food Thank you for your donation! Donate free food Thank you for your donation!" Is this for real, I wondered. Could this actually be helping some frail, malnourished person get some food? How amazing, I thought. I could just sit here for five hours straight, clicking on this button and donating food to needy countries around the world! Gradually, a weird feeling came over me: a feeling that this was probably another one of those ploys by Web advertisers to get traffic and reel in people like me to do it. Whether the Web site was authentic or not, an uncomfortable insight into our culture remains: We want to reduce our efforts to help others into a simple click on the left mouse button. We want to hear as little as possible, think as little as possible and do as little as possible to help alleviate the sickening mass of global human pain. Of course, this is not just an American thing or Web surfer thing. Last year at the 11th National Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Zambia, no African heads of state attended. Even worse, a woman who publicly revealed her HIV-positive status was beaten to death by neighbors for her announcement. On the other hand, many different groups have taken huge measures. Bill Gates, for one, donated $2.8 million toward AIDS prevention and vaccine research. In Uganda, the nation with the highest orphan rate due to AIDS, President Yoweri Museveni implemented such measures as public education, condom distribution, voluntary testing and counseling for AIDS victims. While we as students may not be able to donate large sums of money or conduct research, there are ways we can contribute to the cause even now. We can volunteer in our community to educate others about STD prevention or slip on some jogging shorts and join the April 16 AIDS walk. While many students participated in AIDS Awareness Day in the Student Center last semester, many also turned their faces away in discomfort. It is time to stomach the reality. It is time to turn our energies outward. It is time to see that it will take more than clicking on the good ol' mouse to affect a meaningful change.
Anita Boeninger is a junior social work major from Colorado Springs, Colo. She can be reached at (atboeninger@delta.is.tcu.edu). Babies are humans, get used to it I have a cousin who is eight months pregnant (this is her first). When the family got together for the holidays, her baby happened to be kicking quite a bit. She asked if I wanted to feel the baby's kick. Never before having felt a baby's kick, I accepted her offer. She had to position my hand two or three times on her belly before she could determine where the baby was kicking the most. Finally, she found the spot and pressed my hand onto her belly. Sure enough, I felt about three little taps. Apparently tired of putting on a show for us, the baby stopped kicking after that. I recalled those pictures in biology class of a baby in the womb and how still and unmoving they were. Well, of course they were still and unmoving, because it was a drawing in a book! (Duh!) Even so, the idea of an active, kicking baby never really occurred to me until I felt my cousin's belly. It's hard to describe the feelings I felt as the baby kicked. It made me think, "Wow! It's alive! It's active and moving!" My cousin told me of how sometimes the baby will kick so much that it is annoying. Yet, by the glow she has had ever since telling us of her pregnancy, I can tell she is enjoying every minute of it, even the kicking. I will never know the experiences she is going though. However, I can still be in awe of the miracle in progress because that is what the whole pregnancy experience is: a miracle in progress. I'm about to dart in a different direction here, but trust me, I will tie it all together. Probably the only free, uncensored and unedited platform of free speech left is an Internet chat room. My current favorite chat room concerns the abortion debate, where pro-lifers (such as yours truly) and pro-choicers butt heads with no holds barred. It is here that I have heard many references to the unborn individual in a woman's womb that all but state what it is: an unborn human. Some descriptions are so awful as to be almost laughable - if the topic were not so serious. Among the more common terms I have heard for the unborn human in the womb is fetal tissue, production of conception, parasite and uterine contents. The most common, however, is fetus, which pro-choicers claim refers to an unfinished stage of development and, thus, not yet human. That is the craziest thing I have heard this side of the Dred Scott decision. I respond by saying that if the fetus isn't human before birth, it won't be human after birth. I can also say this: When I felt my cousin's belly, I did not feel fetal tissue kicking. It was not a product of conception moving around. It was not uterine contents that occasionally are so active that my cousin becomes annoyed. It is a baby doing that, and calling it anything less is to deny a truth that will show itself to all after nine months. Jan. 22 (the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision) represents 27 years that we have been lying to ourselves about what is in a pregnant woman's womb, and until we can admit that, we will come no closer to resolving the problem pregnancies that the Roe vs. Wade decision was created to help.
John P. Araujo is an MLA graduate student from Fort Worth. He can be reached at (j.araujo@tcu.edu). Proclaiming pride in pranks, pleasant puerility and
Captain Morgan Recently, I made a list of bothersome types of people. Given my saintly patience and tolerance, the list was only six pages long. My top five bothersome types of people were hoverers, literally minded folk, children, mouth-breathers and those who revel in their own maturity. You know this type of person. They're always rolling their eyes. They don't play video games. They have no appreciation for the absurd, nor do they see the aesthetic value of monster trucks, Mexican wrestling or anything else that appears on SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY! These people never really bothered me until I received an e-mail message condemning my juvenile topics, uninformed opinions and penchant for "concocting puerile drivel." I guess it's good that he gave me enough credit to know what "puerile" meant ("drivel" I had to look up). His point: to illustrate his infinite maturity relative to my juvenile take on life. Guess what, Super Mature Guy? I can afford to be juvenile. I don't graduate until May. Not only that, my demographic is expected to live life to the tune of frivolity (which sounds like a Motley Crüe song). Twenty-one year old males are expected to carouse, unless of course they have enlisted in the Navy, in which case they are expected to travel and carouse. And another thing: If mature responsibility made the world go round, war might have never existed, nor television, nor America. Yeah, you heard me. America was founded on a disregard for established norms. Vikings, who are not historically known for mature behavior, discovered America. Some time after that, a bunch of guys put on Indian feathers and dumped tea into Boston Harbor. Oh sure, they had a "point," but try to tell me they didn't enjoy a minute of it. Not you, though. You would have rolled your eyes and apologized for their childish behavior. When I think of why juvenile behavior is good, I think of pranks. Pranks are good because they force people to step back and take themselves a little less seriously. For instance, one time, the United States gave Fidel Castro an exploding cigar. He had a good laugh and played a counterprank on us by aiming missiles at Florida. Another time, the CIA put LSD on his scuba regulator. We thought we really got him, but then we noticed that some of the Cuban exiles trickling into Miami were actually convicts. Man, did he get even with us! Because of these little pranks, America and Castro have learned that the other is not so bad after all. And now, we're the best of friends. But let me discuss briefly another Caribbean prankster whose juvenile nature allowed him to do great things. His name was Captain Henry Morgan, and in addition to serving as governor of Jamaica, he also invented rum. In 1668, he thought it would be funny to attack a city called Porto Bello and steal all its treasure. What was really funny was when he captured some nuns and priests and used them as human shields as he and his "scurvy dogs" scaled the city's walls. The residents of Porto Bello were so amused that they gave him 250,000 doubloons and 300 slaves. Now he takes the wind out of serious sails by painting red mustaches on fashion models in magazines. So you see, Mr. Maturity, the world doesn't have to be so serious. Today, I hope that if I didn't make you laugh, at least I made you think. While you expected 17 column inches of infantile crap, I gave you a couple history lessons instead. Why not wipe that sour horizontal line from where your smile should be? And while you're at it, have a cigar.
Steve Steward is a senior political science major from Lodi, Calif. He can be reached at (haoledubstyle@hotmail.com). Thanks & Spanks Thanks: To the football team for defying the odds and defeating No. 19 East Carolina in the Mobile Alabama Bowl. Unfortunately, no one else appeared to be watching the game. The 41,000-seat Ladd-Peebles Stadium wasn't filled to capacity, nor did any AP voters seem to notice the Horned Frogs' accomplishments. They still managed to finish 52 votes behind East Carolina in the final AP poll of the season. Just wanted to let Fran and the Gang know that you got our attention. Spanks: To the TCU Bookstore for once again overcharging on textbooks. If that were our only beef, they might not have gotten spanked. But buying our books back for, oh ... one-tenth of the original cost is akin to highway robbery. Well, maybe we're being too harsh. TCU isn't that close to a highway. We have four words for the bookstore: Varsity-Books-Dot-Com.
Thanks: To Mother Nature for finally giving Texans a reason for investing in winter clothing. Spanks: To Mother Nature for finally giving Texans a reason for investing in winter clothing.
Thanks: To Tom Sullivan, the new director of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs, who is currently completing work on his master's degree at Texas A&M. Sullivan will be driving back and forth from College Station during the week. Maybe the administration can reach into TCU's vast endowment and toss you some gas money. Spanks: To the jerk who vandalized seven vehicles parked between the Leo Potishman Tennis Center and the Tom Brown/Pete Wright Residential Community Saturday night. It's people like that who remind us why America spends more money on prison construction than college construction.
Thanks: To the administration's ongoing efforts to improve campus facilities. Next year, first tier in the U.S. News and World Report rankings? Spanks: To the people who continue to ask pointless questions to the professor after he or she says: "If there are no more questions, I will dismiss the class."
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