It’s a lovely, overcast afternoon in Gainesville. The sun beats away fruitlessly at the clouds that shield the Earth from a tropical inferno. Floridian humidity fogs your glasses as you step off the bus. You stroll toward the heart of campus with a textbook cradled in one arm and your Instagram feed clutched in the opposite hand. You, shining monument to the millennial spirit, are the Statue of Liberty of twenty-somethings everywhere — the shining beacon of social media savvy. You float along the sidewalk still glistening from this morning’s rain. Headed to Library West, you pass through Turlington Plaza. A ghostly, pale figure stands stock-still in the center of the otherwise empty, red-bricked patio. He raises his arm towards you as you approach; in his outstretched hand is a small pamphlet. On its face, written in wispy white letters, a headline reads:
Darts and Laurels
Happy Friday, everyone. It is our distinct pleasure to provide you with some entertainment on your morning bus ride, or wherever or however you consume our news. Let’s talk about the serious matters first, and end on something uplifting. Today marks the 345th day since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. The death toll, measuring number of people that died as a result of the hurricane, has been recently updated. It now sits officially at 2,975. We wish we could award some large, cosmic dart to weather, hurricanes, and natural disasters. But we can’t. What we can command is our response to crises. We can control how much money we allocate to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We could have controlled how much aid was sent to Puerto Rico after the hurricane. We could have taken it more seriously. We could have done more to obviate the need for this long list of “could haves.” A laurel is bestowed to those who did everything they could to help Puerto Rico when it needed help most, whether you were hands-on or donated money.
Words fail to express how many darts are aimed at those who brushed off Puerto Rico’s struggles — especially those who failed to act when the power to intervene was at their fingertips. Their inaction resulted in needless deaths.
In other news, Andrew Gillum is now the Democratic nominee for the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election. His campaign was unorthodox. He spent money on highway billboards instead of TV advertisements. He had a far smaller political war chest than his opponents and never had the same access to donors. For his resourcefulness, a laurel.
Remember that TV commercial where Ron DeSantis (Gillum’s Republican opponent) tried to get his infant daughter to say “make America great again”? Yeah. Dart.
We reserve the right to award further darts and laurels in this race, as one candidate or another is sure to put his foot squarely in his mouth. We’re just going to keep these in our back pocket. Already, DeSantis has already made comments that some called “dog whistle racism,” saying that a Gillum governorship would “monkey things up.”
The Justice Department made a statement of interest in a case between Asian American students and Harvard University, claiming racially driven admissions practices are harmful.
A dart to the Justice Department for trying to say that colleges do not have a right to weigh admissions decisions with race. Affirmative action is vital to ensuring a student body is representative of the country’s or state’s population.
But this suit is inspiring for the mere fact that racial topics are being discussed productively in court. While it would be easy to feel discouraged, to feel that racism or bigotry is an unsolvable problem, the discussions we’re having about it now suggest we can resolve these issues fairly. Everyone can go home with a laurel for that.
