A grammar lesson
My name is Catherine and I’m crazy nuts about correct grammar and spelling. I don’t understand how something like ‘lawLaw enforcement’ can make it through a spell check. I graduated from USM as an English major and find this sort of thing in my school’s paper a little embarrassing. Do you guys need proofreaders?
Catherine Johnson, USM Graduate
Have you seen my country?
I am a college student living in a lost country. I live in a country whose foreign policy is based on combatting enemies rather than maintaining international stability. Since the Cold War has ended, we are no longer clear on who those enemies are – we think they are probably brown, that they live in caves, and that they ride airplanes. We go bombing in search of these enemies, but so far, we have yet to find them – we have killed Afghani children by dropping crates of food on their heads, we have leveled ancient cities and looted entire cultural histories, but we still have not discovered the ever-elusive “threat to national security.” We are a nation wandering in the desert searching for new meaning to an out-dated mode of “diplomacy,” (and I use that word in the loosest sense,) when in fact we should be searching for a new way to co-exist in an increasingly integrated world.
We are not lost because of a lack of leadership, we are lost because our leaders operate under an old and crumbling vision of what it means to be a world power. Our generation is poised to inherit a country that is only prepared to fight shadows, and has no capacity to fight AIDS or genocide. A threat only becomes a threat when we treat it as such – perhaps it is time for us to identify the real threats to global stability. As another member of my generation has said, you can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace.
Julia Davidson, Junior
Hidden gem
I was just noticing the Guide to Campus Hotspots in the Free Press seems to have inadvertently left the Sullivan Complex off the Portland Campus as a hotspot. If we aren’t a hotspot we’d certainly like to be.
Skip Cadigan, Fitness Center Manager