| Home Crowd Riff-Ram, bah humbug. The TCU Horned Frog football team will face San Jose State at 2:05 p.m. Saturday at the Amon Carter Stadium. This is only the second home game of the season, and it's during Fall Break, a weekend during which a large percentage of the student body will be out of town. "Wait a minute," you think. "It's only one game." But the game against Southern Methodist University - which is perhaps our biggest rival - is scheduled for Nov. 26, the day after Thanksgiving. How many students will really skip out on grandma's turkey and dressing to stay in town for a TCU football game? Six of the last seven Horned Frog football games have been played away from home. But "away from home" doesn't just mean "a short drive down the interstate." Instead, it means to us "a short drive down the interstate ... to the airport, then a three-hour flight to Nameless University." Here we are, halfway through the semester with only one rainy home game this season. Freshmen haven't had much of a chance to support their college football team. How are we supposed to strengthen our school spirit when we can't make it to our own football games? Head coach Dennis Franchione schedules non-conference games. In other words, he scheduled the first three games of this season. There's nothing we can do about most of the WAC scheduling process. But TCU agreed to help rearrange the SMU game during Thanksgiving to comply with Fox Southwest's wishes that the game be shown on television. TCU should do everything in its power to promote school spirit and student attendance at home football games - even if that means rescheduling Fall Break. "Wait a minute," you think again. "It's only one game." But we want to go to that game.
America the Ambiguous America the Beautiful, I say you are stupid and scared, always fretting over what we misguided prophets preach with pen and never learning from our intellectual fallacies. You're too proud to admit error, too ambitious to recognize progress, too paranoid to love your opposites, too ignorant to embrace argument, too impotent to resist influence and too quick to rush into conflict. Have you been spoiled with so much independence that you take it for granted? America, you're slowly overdosing on freedom. America, you are the beautiful and the damned. You are the Religious Right and the bleeding-heart liberals. You are no compassionate conservative. You are "The Jerry Springer Show" and The National Inquirer. You are Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. You are the example and the hypocrite, the Bible and "Hustler," Allen Ginsberg and Tipper Gore, television and "Cliff's Notes." And why? Because one minute you seek sanctuary in the First Amendment, in your drunken stupor, burning flags and calling cops 'pigs,' and the next you swing this sweet doctrine as an evil Excalibur, felling dissension and diversity. America the Beautiful, I love you. You are me, as I am he, as we are all together. We are the best damn country any expatriate ever once called home. But we're strangling ourselves with our misinterpretation of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech applies to us all, not the selected worthy. Every dog has its day, and every stooge shall have his say. The wrong has the right, just as the right can be wrong - or even left. The freedom of speech is a giant loophole in our civilization - but it has to be to accommodate everyone. Our democracy was founded to protect the voice of the average and abnormal, for better or worse. If just one meek, minor voice is snuffed out or if one obscene, mindless rant is bleeped out, then we've planted the first seeds of fascism. And this is one weed no American is willing to harvest. The freedom of speech is infected with the most dangerous viruses that have ever existed: ideas. If you doubt their power, open the newspaper or thumb through your unilateral history. The simple truth is America cannot handle new ideas. We've proven time and time again that there's nothing scarier or more hypnotic than free thought. Maybe it's because Americans are emotionally incapable or under-trained to interpret these powerful catalysts for themselves, free from undue influence. There's too much blind submission to ideologies, too much misquotation to support our prejudices and too little meditation over ideas we don't understand. And because we don't have a universal code of morals (we have a right not to, after all), we can't protect common decency or the common good. We can only hope that those with the most "mass-mediated" voices can practice a little restraint and the occasional self-censorship. And we can only hope the impressionable dedicate their lives to good. America the Beautiful, you don't think before you react. You don't agree to disagree. You're not secure enough to accept the validity of what you don't understand. You don't change your mind or re-design with the times. America, your children's children's generation is going to absolutely destroy your bowel control, for new ideas are only going to further defecate that which you now hold sacred. America the Beautiful, you don't have the mind to decide for yourself. Most of us claim to but we all subscribe to philosophies not generated within our unique selves. You are a society that blames its own society for individual dysfunctionalism and insanity. What causes insanity? Why, the inability of weak minds to handle new ideas. America, a final lament: Do ideas kill people or do people kill people? Or are we simply too stupid to refrain from killing ourselves, our America the Beautiful?
Michael Kruse is a senior advertising/public relations major from Overland Park, Kan. He can be reached at (mckruse420@hotmail.com). Take a shot at freedom A public school, this morning: "Today we continue our discussion on civil liberties. To review, why were civil liberties important to the Founding Fathers?" A hand raises. "Yes?" "They wanted to protect the American people from the tyranny that they had suffered while under British colonial rule." "Very good. Now, let's" The bell rings. Our principal speaks over the public-address system. "All students to their lockers, please." So, we go. It is a commonplace routine now in our school. I look down the corridor. We are all dressed in the school uniform: gray pants and white shirts. First is the random breathalyzer test. The scratching sound of the drug-sniffing dogs on the tiled floor moves down the hallway. It takes them 40 minutes to go from the metal detector at the school entrance to the last locker in the hall. Next is the random locker search. Today, every eighth locker is checked. One hour later, we take our seats. Our backpacks have been searched while we were in the hallway. "Now," my teacher says, "where were we? Oh, yes, civil liberties." This excerpt from a student essay that recently appeared in Humanist magazine expresses a serious issue currently plaguing the public school system. Bloody tragedies, especially the one that occurred April 20 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., have made backpack searches, increased use of drug tests and stricter dress codes routine. And although school administrators think they are protecting their students, they are actually violating these young people's constitutional rights. I don't belittle the problem of school violence. My heart broke just as much as anyone else's would have when I saw 15 wooden crosses, two of which were painted black, standing on a hill in Littleton. And I appreciate the fact that schools are taking an active role in helping to solve these problems. What I don't appreciate, however, is providing protection for the sake of freedom. We would all acknowledge that violating students' rights may provide a little bit of security. In fact, if police officers had rummaged through Larry Ashbrook's house - simply because it was the eighth one on Marshall Street - the shooting at Wedgwood Baptist Church may have been prevented. But we don't live in that kind of society. In fact, we live in a nation that fought a revolution in order to place freedom over security. And we tend to pride ourselves on that fact until we start discussing students. What school officials fail to understand is that people do not gain rights as soon as they graduate from high school. Instead, we are all born with constitutional rights. The Supreme Court ruled in a 1969 case called Tinker et al. v. Des Moines Independent Community School District et al. - in which three students were suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the government's policy in Vietnam - that those rights do not stop at the schoolhouse door. Now let's consider one of the duties of any one of these schoolhouses: to raise public citizens. But what kind of citizens are we raising? Frank Colosi, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union's Texas legal panel and a Fort Worth attorney, said, "If we teach students to urinate on demand, to open their lockers on demand or to wear whatever someone else tells them to wear, in the future, they will not protect others' privacy. If no one protects theirs, why should they protect others'?" School violence is a problem, no question. But violating students' rights to prevent violent acts is a Band-Aid solution to a gushing wound. Instead of requiring school uniforms, drug tests and random locker searches, let's seriously confront and discuss issues of racism and cultural conflict. Let's establish more clubs and extracurricular activities and programs to help students find part-time jobs. Let's teach conflict resolution techniques and get every parent involved in the education of his or her child. But most importantly, let's stop putting security over freedom, for Benjamin Franklin said as he was helping to found this nation on freedom, "Anybody who would give up a little freedom for a little security deserves neither."
Campus Editor Kristen Naquin is a senior news-editorial journalism major from Pensacola, Fla. She can be reached at (knaquin1@aol.com). Community lacks honesty
The novelist Richard Wright wrote in his book "American Hunger," "I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worth of being called human." As we find ourselves in the midst of the President's Initiative For One America, a week-long conversation on diversity, there are many ideas that need addressing. The time is long overdue for TCU to recognize that diversity is not only essential to a liberal arts education, but a right of those students who receive one. Columnist Bob Ray Sanders and Advisor to the Chancellor on Diversity Cornell Thomas spoke Tuesday night in Clark Hall about the diversity issues that affect TCU. As I listened intently to their presentations and the beginnings of conversation I began to notice a theme. Everyone was there to talk about diversity, but nobody was honestly expressing themselves. The emotions seemed to run too deep and the history of tension seemed hard at work to keep opposing viewpoints and true intellectual conversation silent. The longer I sat there, the more frustrated I became. I couldn't wait any longer. As I said my name to the crowd I felt my hands and feet shaking. Talking honestly about race and particularly racism in a personal manner is one of the hardest things to do. As I went on about how I felt the silent tensions in The Main and began to unearth my own stereotypes, I could feel my heart pounding. I was scared and the group was scared. Students, professors and community leaders all felt the same heaviness of the issue as it began to unfold in conversation. Words came easily though from people's emotions and real experiences. The conversation was a raw expression of fear, alienation and honesty. Although action is a very important step in understanding our differences and eventually celebrating them, true conversation is an act of incredible courage. For students sincerely interested in a complete liberal arts education, diversity issues must be faced. Even if words fall like knives, we must force ourselves to hear them. Our other responsibility as students is to explore our own prejudices. It is a stout task, asking people to admit their racism. Especially those white intellectuals of us who have never admittedly thought a racist thing but laugh at racist jokes and avert our eyes when we walk past a crowd of blacks. It is always easier to believe that if we are intellectually clean, our souls are clean. This is simply not true. Understanding cannot come through books, clothes or MTV, it has to be confronted, personally and in the community. Do we have the ability to work things out intellectually and emotionally, and do we have the plain guts to be honest? I hope that we do. I also hope that this week is the start of something TCU can carry for a long time. Let the current of ideas flow and let the body of all races be seen as human through understanding.
Matthew S. Colglazier is a freshman news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth. He can be reached at (mscolglazier@delta.is.tcu.edu). |
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