Schwarzenegger not as brave as his characters
Editor:
It appears that Arnold is not so big and brave in real life as the character Conan, which he played. Conan wouldn’t have been afraid of Pat Robertson putting a hit on him. Conan certainly wouldn’t be afraid of Phelps, Falwell or Bush, and he would have been happy to be fair and upright and put his signature on the same sex marriage bill. For you see, Conan wasn’t a girlie man, a gutless wonder, but Arnold is. Children everywhere, including the juveniles who voted for him and trusted him, will be disappointed. Now it’s time for the adults to vote. Bye, bye, girlie man.
Bill Perdue
Las Vegas
Readers respond to The Rip’s opinions of the Iraq War
Editor:
Regarding the Sept. 8 Opinion page of the Renegade Rip, which concerned the war in Iraq:
Once upon a time, in a place called Kent State, the U.S. National Guard was called to campus to suppress protesters of the war in Vietnam. My question to you now is, why has nothing of the sort happened now? By no means am I asking for students to purposely goad the National Guard to come shoot us down, but why has there been no roaring cry from the students of this nation, calling on government to bring the troops home from a land that does not need them.
To answer this question, we must look at the society in which we are now living. This is a society where an elementary school teacher is afraid to read the imaginative literature of J.R.R. Tolkein or C.S. Lewis to the children for fear that it might upset a parent. By no means is this the educator’s fault, but that of a government that does not encourage imagination in its children. In a society that lets the fine arts education rot, the government sits encouraging standardized testing only to exclude those children who might think outside the box of “normal” thinking all hidden away in a tidy package called No Child Left Behind.
Presently, thousands of Americans lie dead or dying in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico and only recently has the president of the United States brought military assistance. A government that had known about Hurricane Katrina and watched her grow for more than a week and takes nearly as long to send help to her victims would presume to tell people of cultures that share a heritage with Judaism that they have had politics wrong all this time? This government, run by the son of a president and husband to a former school teacher but can barely put a coherent sentence together in front of a crowd, would allow apathy to grow in the hearts of the people.
The present U.S. society barely has a culture of its own to speak of, as young as we are compared to some of the societies we are trying to “civilize.” We are a nation dedicated to freedom and yet everyone treads lightly to express their feelings toward the concepts of God (yes, I dared to say that name in school), homosexuality, the creation of the planet itself, or whether high schoolers may go to lunch at a restaurant across the street.
Basically, what I want to know is how much more will the educated masses put up with and how far will the government push everyone around us before they feel they might deserve another Sept. 11?
Monica Hernandez
Art major
Editor:
I am always deeply disturbed when I see people somehow make the connection between Iraq and the attack on the twin towers. What is even more disturbing is when I see them use this bogus information to help them justify the war in Iraq. It was Osama Bin Laden and his organization, Al-Qaida, which took responsibility for the attack on New York. To this day, there has been no direct evidence of a conspiracy linking Bin Laden and the former regime in Iraq led by Saddam Hussein.
Yet Michael Plaza, staff writer for the Rip, states in his article dated Sept. 8, “The war as started as a backlash against a regime that attacked innocent civilians unexpectedly on our own soil.” I have a suggestion for Mr. Plaza before he begins to write his next article for the Rip. Please try stretching your journalistic talents and do some research before writing your next article. Give the reader the facts of an issue, not what others have disguised as facts.
Andrew Samarin
BC student