Well, dear reader, today is the day we have been insurmountably hoping would never come — Inauguration Day.
A lot of knowledge can be packed into the tiny text boxes of Twitter — this sentence alone is less than 140 characters from start to finish.
When I was a kid, listening to music was an escape from the mundane. There was nothing I loved more than sitting in the back seat for a long drive with my headphones on. I found myself moved by catchy melodies and guitars. I loved rock ‘n’ roll so much, I wanted to play the guitar myself. My dad bought me a small, no-name nylon-string acoustic at the guitar shop where I signed up to take weekly lessons. The first time I picked up that cheap instrument, I was disappointed to learn that playing the guitar wasn’t something I could do naturally. I didn’t understand how the thing worked. Once I started taking lessons, I found that practicing was boring and painful.
Like fish that don’t know they’re in water, we don’t often think about how the structure of our world shapes our behavior. This week I’d like to take a look at how capitalism affects the way we measure value. To do that, we’ll first travel to the art world.
Students of UF and Gainesville residents: I have something to reveal to you. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time refl ecting on, and it’s something I’ve only spoken of to a few close friends. It’s rather personal, so I hope I don’t make you too uncomfortable when I come clean. I made a realization over Winter Break; people who cared about me confronted me and made clear that I needed to look within myself if I was ever going to be content. I need to be open about this. I am an automaton. I’m not quite a robot in the traditional sense, but I’m far from a golem. The word robot usually implies advanced machinery or complicated electronics. In reality, I’m steam-powered, and there are fewer ones and zeros and more levers and gears. That’s not to say I’m not relatable. I’m just like any other student, despite my leadfi lled veins and spring-loaded spinal cord. I love taking walks around campus. I love Century Tower; there’s one bell in particu
Martin Luther King Jr., the 1963 March on Washington, “I have a dream”: We’re all familiar with the story. Every third Monday in January, we observe and honor the man who fought racism and paved the way for civil rights — at least, this is what most can say about him. It’s not a bad description, by any means. It’s quite beautiful, actually. The thing is, that tweet-length description of King’s legacy is incomplete. Grossly incomplete. King wasn’t simply this saintly fi gure we’ve come to martyrize: the “Santa Claus-ifi cation” of King, as renowned social-justice activist Cornel West describes. Close your eyes for a minute and conjure your image of King. You’ll likely imagine that August day when King stood before hundreds of thousands of people and told the world about his dream: one of the greatest moments in our country’s history,
Being a new columnist, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to tell all you readers about me — and I don’t plan on it. There is some pleasure to the cognitive dissecting of another person’s psyche through their writing, and to those of you who read daily, I hope you’re able to discern who I am as a person by my writing. However, I’m going to completely contradict my beliefs by telling you of two things I love: sports and politics.
Late in the evening of Nov. 8 of last year, a wildly entertaining electoral battle was fought before all Americans. But what was just as entertaining was reading and hearing the massive outpour of emotions and intense reactions from our country’s entertainers and artists. Think about your favorite actor or musical artist for a moment. Then, check their Twitter feed. There is a very high probability if you scroll down to early November, you’ll see some sort of election reaction, which was almost unanimously negative.
The wafting stench of cigarettes and sounds of jazz greeted me as I stepped off the plane and into the airport terminal in Kenner, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans.
What does it mean to be “smart?” When someone recalls obscure facts or demonstrates a remarkable feat of calculation, we say that person is smart. If someone demonstrates an unusual perspective, drawing from many sources to reach a conclusion, we may wonder how they are able to perform such mental gymnastics.
Truth is an elusive and abstract concept. Maybe Pontius Pilate understood it best when he looked at Jesus and asked, “What is truth?” This past year has been an echo of that question. Last year was a time of ineffable emotion, like that of a disgruntled spouse who has bottled up her marital frustration for years. It was only natural that democratic decisions — Brexit, Trump — would be made in order to spite the political establishment. It was the year that statistics, journalism and facts were cast down from their thrones. The populace no longer looks to news in search of truth. Rather, we understand every news outlet to have a predisposed bias or slant, so we abandon the notion of finding objective truths.
There is a lot to be said about the choice to remain blissfully ignorant, especially in regard to things we cannot change — like genetics. Having watched the science fiction film “Gattaca” on a slow day in my high school biology class with its depictions of a futuristic society driven by genetic discrimination, I am all too aware of the dangers of knowing too much about your genetic profile. So when my parents bought me the 23andMe ‘Health + Ancestry’ kit to find out more about our family’s ancestral background, I felt an unsettling mixture of anticipation and apprehension as I shipped my test tube of spit off to a California lab.
With Inauguration Day just around the corner, I feel appropriate in bringing up the harsh reality of the most recent election — a reality the losers love to force into our ears, and the winners wish we’d all forget: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2 million votes. If Clinton won by such a large number, then how did President-elect Donald Trump secure the most desired seat in American politics? You already know the answer: the Electoral College. The Electoral College is like the ice cream machine at McDonald’s: Everyone knows it’s broken, but no one can tell you why or how to fix it, so we all just roll with it. I’m so tired of rolling with something that is confusing, ancient and ruining our country by disproportionately making some votes count less than others. Before you get heated and throw the Opinions section to the ground, just hear me out. Unlike McDonald’s, we can’t take our business to a real restaurant, keeping this presidential to keep it simple), and it’s the fate of our country. Why was the Electoral College first created? Well, two reasons: The first, because our Founding Fathers feared a presidential candidate could get tyrannical by swaying public opinion — which ironically enough is what the presidential campaign has become: a battle between people, not policy. Electors were created to select someone fit for the presidency because the Founding Fathers didn’t believe the population could ever make the right choice. The second, more important reason is because the Founding Fathers didn’t want campaigners to focus solely on the more populous states. They dictated that regardless of population, all states were given three electoral votes to begin with. To understand this, you need to know what’s going on with electoral votes in the first place — please read slowly; it’s about to get wild. The Electoral College is given electoral votes by the total number of representatives in Congress. This is summated from the 100 seats in the Senate — an unchanging number — and the currently held 435 seats in the House of Representatives — which is based on population. That gives us 535 total electoral votes. These votes are then supposedly distributed evenly among the population of the entire U.S. (approximately 324,118,787/ 535 = 605,829) meaning a single electoral vote is given per 605,829 people in the state. If you remember from earlier, the Founding Fathers dictated each state must receive three electoral votes out of the total 535 before considering their population. This means that people who vote in smaller states have an unfair vote compared to those who vote in larger states, like Florida, which has four fewer electoral votes than it should. This is eerily Orwellian for the U.S.: All votes are equal, but some votes are more equal than others. The Electoral College doesn’t even do the most important job it was designed to do. The smaller states always fall in favor of Republicans, so they’re rarely given attention by Democrats. California almost always votes Democrat, so Republicans rarely campaign there. You get the point. Campaigners typically push for four paramount swing states: Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and they just skip the small states or go there once to smile and wave. This wouldn’t be a problem if our system wasn’t also winner-take-all: If you win the slightest majority of 50.1 percent, then you get all the electoral votes of a state, excluding Maine and Nebraska. If you do the math, a candidate can win all the small states by 50.1 percent, win the electoral vote by 50.19 percent and lose the popular vote with only 22 percent secured. We should not have a system that allows for the possibility of anyone winning the presidency by only securing 22 percent of all the people who vote. And that is why the Electoral College is wack.
Happy New Year, and happy Monday! Welcome back, everybody. I’m sure you all have read plenty of pieces discussing New Year’s resolutions and their pros and cons. Most people seem to either love or hate the idea of these goals many of us set for ourselves. Some of us make a note on our phone and a sign for our bulletin board detailing our plan to better ourselves. Others claim that if we wanted to change ourselves, we would have started when we conceived the idea, rather than waiting until midnight on a specifi c day to start living our lives a certain way. Both of those opinions are valid, I think. Obviously, we don’t have to wait, but Jan. 1 seems as good a day as any to start living our lives the way we want. I’m not going to tell you that you should feel one way or the other, because, truth
Repealing the Affordable Care Act could be disastrous, especially for those who make up most of Donald Trump’s supporters. Coal miners, many of whom voted for President-elect Trump, benefited from black lung benefits that were written into the ACA, also known as Obamacare. Similarly, there were subsidies for helping people afford plans. While not perfect, the health care law did solve many problems of the old system, such as cumbersome insurance applications and rejections for pre-existing conditions. U.S. adults often skip care and are sicker than adults in 11 other countries that were surveyed, according to the Commonwealth Fund. While Republicans are fans of American exceptionalism, they have yet to find a better plan than Obamacare or a single-payer system. Instead of working on a plan that could be an alternative to Obamacare, Republicans simply opposed it and called for a repeal, as if the health care system was perfect to begin with until Barack Obama messed it up.
During my time on campus thus far, I have come across very few individuals who have no desire to ever leave Florida. About 97 percent of UF students come from Florida, and many of the other 3 percent have lived in Florida in the past or have close family in-state, according to Study Point, a college-admissions website. As the premier university in this wonderful state, UF’s reputation dominates all markets up and down the peninsula. However, many students entertain the thought of starting their careers elsewhere. This is completely normal, as it is natural for young people to desire new landscapes, people and environments, but the level of longing for new sights and sounds seems to vary greatly among individuals.
Like every great work of academic literature, I’ll begin with the superfluous introduction to what lies ahead.
I was going to write a year in review. I was going to write about how crazy 2016 was with all of the atrocities that plagued our world, from our nation’s deadliest mass shooting in Orlando to everything that has been happening in war-torn Aleppo. I was going to write about how we lost popular-culture icons every month, from David Bowie in January to Debbie Reynolds at the tail end of December, and then we had an orange one elected to be president of the U.S. in between. I could have written all about every single bad thing that happened last year. I was going to, but then I realized that by doing that, I would be focusing on only the negative things that happened.
I’ll be the first to admit it. I tend to think New Year’s resolutions are a bunch of malarkey — and thank you, Joe Biden, for popularizing that expressive phrase. By Jan. 10, I’ve forgotten half the goals I’ve set for myself, and then I begin to hate the other half of the vague intentions I’ve set. (e.g. “Really, Mia? You wanted to ‘worry less’ this year? And how are you going to accomplish that?”)
Solutions by The State News
