Indiana Daily Student
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OPINION
Monday, Dec. 11, 2017 idsnews.com
Editors Maggie Eickhoff and Dylan Moore opinion@idsnews.com
EDITORIAL BOARD
ILLUSTRATION BY MADELYN POWERS | IDS
The ‘War On Christmas’ is fake news President Trump ushers in another holiday season accusing the left of destroying Christmas
T
he biggest threat to Christmas is not any politically correct liberal agenda or secularized coffee cup, but the rampant consumerism exemplified by President Trump himself. Trump has been promising to bring the phrase “Merry Christmas” back into the White House since he was on the campaign trail, but failed to realize an important fact: those two words never left. The Obama family used the phrase frequently during their White House residency, indicating to the Editorial Board that President Trump’s promise is nothing but empty pandering to his conservative Christian supporters. Historically, most attacks on Christmas have came from different sects of Christianity itself, such
as when Puritans in Boston banned traditional Christmas foods and forced children to still go to school on Dec. 25, 1647, fearing that the pagan influence of Saturnalia, the Roman festival many Christmas traditions originate from, was corrupting their holy day. Another anonymous poem, written circa 1624, references the post-Reformation Protestant ban of Christmas festivities as it laments how “Christmas bread and beef is turned into stones and silken rags.” If Christmas could survive the last 400 years of this so-called war, it should take no issue with a plain red coffee cup. There are two Christmases being celebrated around the world each year: the consumerist Christmas dependent on storefront advertisements in mid-November and $1 tril-
lion of U.S. holiday spending, or the holiday celebrating, as Pope Francis said in his 2016 Christmas message, “not the power of this world, based on might and wealth,” but “the power of love.” In a world plagued by Trumpbrand steaks, golf courses, hotels, casinos, TV shows, beauty pageants, and suits, it seems apparent which holiday President Trump speaks of when he wishes the nation “Merry Christmas.” According to a 2013 study from the Pew Research Center, the holiday is still celebrated by nearly 90 percent of the nation, even among those who do not consider themselves religious. If Christmas is in any real jeopardy, the danger comes only from the money-impacted bowels of Trump’s own White House, now home to arti-
ficial trees garnished with garish $45 Trump cap tree ornaments and filled with Melania’s spooky decorations that seem to forebode the arrival of Krampus or the White Witch more so than any elf or present-toting Kris Kringle. The threat comes from the disastrous tax overhaul incidentally designed to overflow the coffers of the already rich and the growing wave of support for an alleged pedophile’s Senate campaign. It comes from the repealed environmental legislation that will yield snowfall laden with pollutants and carcinogens. It comes from the upheld travel ban and proposed border wall that will keep families from celebrating with their loved ones. The biggest danger to the holiday is President Trump himself.
EVERYDAY ABSURDITY
Follow up on the #MeToo movement, hold the President accountable Carmen Carigan is a junior in law and public policy.
In mid-October, #MeToo, a hashtag empowering sexual assault victims to speak out, went viral on Facebook and Twitter. At that time, I wrote a column commenting on how this hashtag would be different than other social media movements and how it had the potential to lead to actual offline change. About a month and a half later, I can say with confidence that in a lot of ways, this hashtag has helped spark an adjustment in U.S. culture toward taking sexual assault seriously.
The public admonishment, and in many cases, firing of powerful men such Harvey Weinstein, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, Louis C.K., Matt Lauer, and Rep. John Conyers Jr., DMichigan, is proof of this. Companies such as Massage Envy are promising to look at business practices and punishment systems to decrease the chances of sexual assault. In many ways, #MeToo did open up the conversation about sexual assault and empower victims to speak out regarding their oppressor without fear of not being taken seriously or being chastised for doing so.
But there is still a long, long way to go. Yes, there have been celebrity cases in which those perpetrating sexual assault have been fired or chastised. However, there are an infinite amount of sexual assault cases that have had no light or justice shed on them. One out of six women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. From a legislative and judicial standpoint, ensuring that those accused of sexual assault have due process and are not subject to libel in the media, but are still prosecuted appropriately
for the severity of the crime is critical. For example, Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer convicted for sexually assaulting a woman in March 2016, is appealing his conviction. In cases where sexual assault is so obvious and there are primary witnesses, punishing those found guilty severely and properly is necessary moving forward. And lastly, the fact that I even have to mention this person is exhausting, but I would be remised if I did not bring up our current commander-in-chief. The current culture in our nation is to take away power
A HOFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE
All that was necessary to restore Vincent Thomas’ vision was a simple 20-minute cataract surgery, during which the clouded lenses of his eyes were removed and replaced with artificial ones under local anesthesia. Days later, Julie Rosenthal reported for NPR, Thomas was able to drive himself and see the faces of family members he had been blind to for years. But what would normally be an everyday success of modern medicine produced controversy instead, controversy that is representative of our nation’s tepid relationship with dignified end-of-life care. Thomas was in hospice care after fighting a losing battle against multiple myeloma and died a few weeks after his cataract surgery. Some, including Thomas’ own anesthesiologist, opposed performing the surgery on someone dying
from cancer, viewing it as a waste of medical resources or an unnecessary burden upon taxpayers. But the goal of empathetic health care should be to improve the quality of life, not just its quantity. Realizing the inevitability of death can allow the medical industry to devote its resources toward palliative care that makes the final months of a patient’s life less painful and more fulfilling. Instead, doctors often play a costly game of diminishing returns, sacrificing the comfort of their patient for another week, day or hour of life. Physicians, nearly 90 percent of whom don’t want aggressive end-of-life care for themselves, are often unable to convince the families of their patients to forgo it, despite the fact that alternatives, such as early referral to hospice care, actually improve life expectancy. Dr. Atul Gawande in his New Yorker essay on ars moriendi — the art of dying — writes, “when we
imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do — our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register.” Medicare spends up to 27 percent of its funds for patients in their last year of life. During the last month of life, patients are spending far too much time on operating tables or in intensive care units instead of with their loved ones. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of this spending isn’t being allocated to provide health care that improves the life of the dying patient by focusing on symptom control and the emotional and psychological needs of the patient, such as the cataract surgery that allowed Thomas to see his family one last time. Instead, patients continue to die after unnecessary invasive procedures, CPR that breaks ribs, side
So why should our President, who meets the criteria of having multiple victims speak out and has been caught on an audio recording speaking about sexually assaultive behaviors, be exempt from all of this? The President of the United States is historically held in regard of being a moral backbone of the nation. I believe that honest legislative, judicial and executive change surrounding sexual assault cannot begin until the most powerful man in this country is chastised appropriately for his actions. ccarigan@indiana.edu @carmesanchicken
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
End-of-life care should focus on patient dignity Josh Hoffer is a junior in biology.
and influence from those that have been accused by multiple people of sexual assault, which is a positive adjustment. This is especially true if there is video, audio or written evidence of sexual assault culture surrounding the accused. This new open conversation about sexual assault has completely discredited one of the nation’s most beloved morning hosts, one of Hollywood’s biggest influences and various members of the legislative branch of our government. Society is holding men of power in various different career fields to this standard of human decency.
effect-laden chemotherapies that keep them in a fog of chemical delirium, intubations that prevent their last words from being anything but a ventilator’s mechanical wheeze. Yes, these things are all incredible medical advancements that can greatly prolong life when used correctly, but they are used far too often on patients with little chance for recovery. Physicians need to be more communicative with these patients and their families and should at the very least consider layering current treatments with some form of palliative care, which the majority of patients say they want, but few actually receive. Death will forever be a frightening thing, but it need not be a painful one. When my time comes, I know I would rather appreciate the beauty of that last sunset than to be one of the ones who rage against the dying of the light. jhoffer@indiana.edu @jhoffer17
Citizens should stand up to save net neutrality Although many of us are busy preparing for finals, there is an extremely important battle happening right now that has direct ramifications for all of us. On Dec.14, right as we are taking our final exams, the Federal Communications Commission is going to vote to dismantle net neutrality. Net neutrality is what keeps internet service providers like Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T from charging extra fees, censoring online content or changing what we can see and do on the Internet via throttling websites, apps and online services. Let me provide an illustration. Imagine that this was about physical mail. Mail carriers could open your mail and charge you different amounts according to what they found inside. They could choose to remove something or not to send it at all. Perhaps they would charge an extra fee if your recipient doesn’t use that mail carrier very often. Or they could refuse to deliver any package that didn’t come from one of their partner
companies. That would be completely absurd and intolerable. Some of these things are punishable by law. Should we fail to successfully defend net neutrality, however, all these practices and more will be fair game for internet service providers. Despite today’s turbulent political climate, I urge you to not let politics get in the way. In fact, net neutrality should not be a partisan issue at all. Ever since the internet’s inception, it has been a fundamental principle that it provides open access to information and provides a platform for business, freedom of expression and the wide variety of applications we see today. So, the time to act is now. It may not be convenient, but the future of the internet is at stake. Let your voice be heard; soon it will be too late. Text “RESIST” to 50409 to get started defending freedom of expression on the Internet. Zoe Railing Class of 2019