THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
OPINIONS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2005 · PAGE 15
Running in front of an avalanche GUEST COLUMN BY WILL PASLEY You run and you run to try to get away but the avalanche is always just behind you, growing. That is the best description for the way schoolwork feels. And I am not alone. Feeling overworked and a little frustrated is common. I have heard the phrase, “I can’t wait for this semester to be over” on numerous occasions. High levels of stress and anxiety are easily observed throughout campus. There are workshops to help people deal with stress. I have even seen an advertisement for a computer program promising to help you avoid insanity by organizing your time better. The stress and anxiety felt by students over their work can also lead to depression and in extreme cases suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 10 percent of all college students have been diagnosed with depression, although some statistics claim as high as 20 percent, especially in more demanding institutions. That is one in five! Disability support services, on the psychological disorders part of their Web site, refers to depression as “common.” It amazes me that this is assumed to be the natural, logical life of a student. Many would blame the individuals for their stress, declaring them “lazy, not smart enough” or “bad time managers.” But the students here at Brown are among the smartest and hardest working people I have ever seen. I also don’t think the majority of stressed students are poor time managers. We may have difficulty staying ahead of the avalanche but we run as best we can. Here is the question I would pose to the Brown community: What can be done to reduce anxiety and stress on campus, to improve the mental health of the students and to simply improve our lives? Psychological services already does an outstanding job helping students deal with stress and anxiety — according to their Web site, 1,300 students have appointments each year, and another 2,000 went to workshops and training sessions. However, they cannot fix the root of the problem, they can only try to help people deal with the symptoms. My instinct tells me that the core issue is the design of the school system. Something is wrong when the drop out rate for high school remains above ten percent Something is wrong when millions of young adults are not attending high school and have not earned a diploma. Something is wrong when students dread school and despise their work. Getting to the root of the problem would require Brown to look into the very core of the education system it embraces. There must be a type of educational system that doesn’t cause such negative side effects on the students it is supposed to help. Major institutional changes would be required, and a new vision of the way the University is designed and how students interact with it is needed. As one of the best schools in the world, we should be able to devise a system where the students don’t feel like they are running in front of an avalanche. Will Pasley ’08 wears snow shoes.
JOEL SILBERMAN
Team huddle Whether we like it or not, modern American politics has become something of a team sport. I consider myself a liberal and a Democrat, so I’ve come up with three relatively simple guidelines that I think my team should start thinking about to make ourselves more effective. 1. Engage with conservatives, in person and in print. I’ve heard a lot of liberal students in my classes blow off conservatives by saying “I just don’t understand where these people are coming from.” That’s unacceptable. For liberals to truly be informed, we must occasionally put down our copies of the Nation and the New York Times’ opinions page and pick up the National Review or the American Spectator. Their Web sites are overflowing with information (or disinformation, as the case may be), and Fox News is only a click away on your remote control. It’s easy to get information about what the other side is thinking, to actually wrestle with their points of view. We absolutely must do so. Also, we should be jumping at every opportunity to have open and respectful debate with our conservative friends. If you don’t have conservative friends, make them. Seriously, they won’t shoot you in the face or anything. Don’t blow off their points of view as racist, dumb, neo-imperialist, etc. Figure out where their argument is coming from and what it’s based on. If we don’t understand their perspective, we can’t confront it. And we’ll get our asses kicked. 2. Pick and choose your battles. There are some in the Democratic Party (including former President Bill Clinton) who believed during the last election cycle that the Democrats should have turned their
back on the gay community even more than they did. Clinton even suggested that John Kerry back some of the state initiatives against gay marriage. To his credit, Kerry refused. Backing those initiatives might have helped him (though I personally don’t think so), but some things are worth fighting over. Now let’s jump to February 2005, when Jada Pinkett Smith visited Harvard and declared, “Women, you can have it all — a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career.” Admittedly, her comments were, as the Harvard BGLTSA put it, “heteronormative.” But the decision of the
poverty. Conservatives highlighted his stances on cultural issues. And that debate made me wonder whether the late Pope would have chosen to be a Democrat or Republican if he were resitering to vote in the United States. I’m still not sure what the answer to that quandry would be, but I know what it should be: Democrat. We need to be willing to embrace people who hold our basic beliefs in peace, equality and opportunity, even if they differ from us on specific issues. Those at the top of our party are starting to recognize this reality, as was evident in the selection of anti-choice Democrat Harry Reid for Senate Minority Leader. Still, we on the grassroots level are too quick to reject someone based on individual policy views. I often find us clinging to issues that divide liberals rather than those around which we can rally together. Can you imagine an anti-choice leader for the Brown Democrats? Or one who supported school vouchers? I myself am pro-choice and uneasy about vouchers, but I wouldn’t want to unnecessarily blow off potential allies just because I disagree with them on one issue. In short, I don’t believe that Democrats need to be “more liberal” or “more conservative,” as many talking heads would argue on CNN. I think we need to make it easier to join our team. And as that team starts growing (and it will grow!), we need to remember to choose our battles wisely and learn what our oponents have to say. If we start there, we might just end up winning.
If you don’t have conservative friends, make them BGLTSA to turn it into a national issue is absurd and self-defeating. Most people can understand that Pinkett was trying to be empowering and encouraging. By deriding her for such basically harmless comments, liberals alienate communities that might otherwise be willing to budge on more important queer rights issues. Kerry understood which battle was important to fight; the Harvard BGLTSA did not. The contrast betrays flaws in liberal politics on both a national and grass-roots level: Nationally, Dems tend not to do what Kerry did and take a stand on an important issue. From the grass-roots perspective, liberals tend to want to take a stand on everything, when we might be better served to focus on a few, weightier battles. 3. Open up our team. After the recent death of Pope John Paul II, liberals and conservatives both tried to claim a piece of his legacy. Liberals pointed out his opposition to the Iraq war, diplomatic multilateralism and hard line against
Joel Silberman ’05 plans to be the Washington Redskins’ first ever 120-pound linebacker.
Rethinking arming: safety or protection GUEST COLUMN BY VANESSA HUANG I once asked Sgt. Stephen St. Jean how he knew that the man rushing towards him in a virtual reality weapons training for Brown police was coming to “kill” him. “What, do you think he was coming to play a game of Parcheesi?” was his response. While I hear that Brown’s Department of Public Safety is working hard to build trust with the campus community in anticipation of having an armed police force, my interaction with St. Jean a month or so ago incited much more anxiety than comfort. I had just sat down to dinner with my partner when St. Jean asked if he might join us. After 20 minutes of uncomfortable silence and awkward conversation, I finally asked him what was on my mind: What was going on with the arming of the Brown police? He told me that DPS will be armed by September at the latest — “just in time for school to start” — and that weapons trainings are well underway. I cringed. It was one thing to hear the administration’s decision last year, but another to be confronted with the reality of a timeline. St. Jean delighted in sharing virtual reality scenarios from the weapons trainings. In one scenario, a man holding a baby rushed at him with a knife to “kill” him. Hold up. How did he know the man was coming to “kill” him? Upon further probing, I found that St. Jean had seen only two options in this scenario: either die or shoot. So, many of his scenarios ended with him shooting the “killer.” I probably should not have been surprised. Brown contracted the Rhode Island State Police to provide all weapons-related trainings for DPS, I learned from St. Jean; of the six state police agencies included in a 1991 Department of Justice report on police
brutality, Rhode Island’s was cited with the highest number of complaints for excessive force, according to Human Rights Watch. When I asked St. Jean my next logical question, “What trainings are you receiving from the Office of Institutional Diversity?” he was slow to speak. “You know, diversity stuff,” he replied. No mention of how black people tend to magnetize cops’ bullets. Something he did recall enough to articulate was his surprise at learning that foreign students are often shocked to see uniformed campus police, because campus police abroad frequently are not uniformed. DPS’s response — that international students need to work on that — seemed odd, yet highly reflective of U.S. culture. We would rather convince foreign students to be more com-
Maintaining long-term visions is difficult, particularly given the restraints that often arise from our funding sources — for the U.S. Congress, multinational corporations; for mainstream anti-violence groups, a lack of state funding; for Brown, the Corporation. Yes, it’s easier to bomb Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s easier to build more prisons. It’s easier to arm campus police. But none of these responses to a need for safety make any sense. As with the world outside of Brown, it seems that legitimate safety concerns have been used to perpetuate racialized fears driving our increasingly militarized communities. This can have deadly consequences, and more likely than not, these consequences will disproportionately harm black and brown students and black and brown local community members. As a campus community, we should be seriously engaging the differences between safety and protection, and encouraging campus administrators to do the same. Rather than buying weapons and training Brown cops to use them, we might instead expand the SafeWalk program and seriously examine — and rectify — Brown’s relationship with local communities Why not invest in true safety for all students — including students of color and female, trans and queer students — and develop genuine accountability processes when we are targeted by hate crimes, sexual assault, or by campus and local policing? Protection — war, weapons, prisons, police — can harm and kill us. True safety will not.
Many of the scenarios ended with him shooting the “killer.” fortable with militarized campuses than take the opportunity to seriously reflect on their surprise, and what it might illuminate about the way we do things in the U.S. In particular, how we think about safety: The media and politicians often tell us that weapons, police, prisons and the war on terror will keep us safe from scary people and “criminals” (read: black and brown people). Yet these measures seem less about safety than about protection. They are dependent on harmful power relations, building barriers and isolation. Creating true safety means building healthy relationships based in trust and mutual accountability, by examining likely root causes for things like Sept. 11 (U.S. imperialism), domestic and sexual violence (rape culture) and poor people mugging Brown students (Brown’s relationship with local communities).
Vanessa Huang ‘06 can imagine a safer world without policing and prisons.