There is a severe lack of original content when it comes to what I see being posted by my compatriots on social media. And after seeing the same old thing 15 or so times about Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, I’m completely apathetic.
In writing this article I find myself in a unique position. It is due in to my editor before the election, will be edited during and published afterward.
The iPhone 5 has arrived. It is barely different from last year’s iPhone 4S, yet it still commanded the same level of fanaticism from Apple fans, who camped out in front of stores for hours just to get their hands on one.
But in the midst of Shirley’s call to Occupy, there was a spirit of something more active. Service is not the doings of a deep Firestone-dweller but of one who can “take this University by storm, make it uniquely your own, and leave it better than you found it.” Her words mark a push from diligent service to vigorous activism. This notion touches on a sore point for Princeton: our community is reputed to be antithetical to change and apathetic to activism.
Opinions are delicate creatures. Frequently asked for, seldom remembered, the opinion lives on its candor or provocativeness. Opinions lose themselves somewhere in the purgatory between conviction and statement and have the ability to create a martyr or destroy a statesmen.
Just a few days ago, The Daily Princetonian reported that new security guards have been placed at the Labyrinth Books entrance along with an electronic gate. In addition, just within this past month, we’ve seen our own University ID cards being used to gain access to not only certain buildings on campus but also to our own rooms with the addition of a pin code. The latter example proves that Public Safety and the University are successfully working together to reduce the hassle it takes to issue new keys and charge students.
While dropping the P-bomb might get us treated a bit differently sometimes, I find it necessary that we do everyone the favor of getting over ourselves. We are not some league of superhuman beings, and we do not need to protect others from our greatness.
Princeton should have more opportunities for underclassmen to design their own study abroad programs.
Whims. They have a fairly awful reputation. Capricious and sudden, unexpected and arbitrary, they are governed by fancy. To be whimsical is perhaps to be amusing, but usually passing, irrational and impulsive, too. Whims are bad.This is unfair.
In fact, I daresay this problem is the toughest I’ve yet to face in my 19 years
Some observant Catholics have come out against even the reformed version of Obama’s mandate. Various Catholic parties that were adverse to the mandate have come around. I will not claim to understand the objection of those who view the current mandate as contrary to their morals, but, as I stated before, morality is a difficult thing to debate. I do believe, however, that the compromise is comfortable for most. No piece of legislation or executive order will have the entire support of the people.
We know what this stereotyped Princetonian looks like: Sperrys, J. Crew shorts and white skin. It’s the look we all mock — some of us more ironically than others — twice a year at Lawnparties, which no one outside of Princeton seems to find as amusing as we do.
Occupy Princeton has done everything but allow for open political discourse.
I’m afraid of bad exam results and a poor GPA, and I want to lay the potential blame for such failings elsewhere. The more rational approach to this fear demands that we put our lives in perspective.
YouTube videos of chants might get media coverage, but it is a facade that works to assuage our guilt about Princeton student’s apathy. If we really want to make a difference, what ought to be on the forefront of everyone’s minds is the impending political race.
We would like to thank Morgan Jerkins ’14 for raising her concerns in her article “ ‘diStracted’ or dispirited?” The reaction that she experienced was obviously not the intention of the piece in question or of the diSiac show. As the choreographers of “Eyes Watching Unseeing,” we would like to offer some responses and explanations that may help readers understand where we were coming from.
Let us not be afraid to bring our interests, inclinations, feelings, whims, senses and impulses to the table of discussion, but let us also not fool ourselves into thinking that the pursuit of knowledge stops there.
Even if we believe that the bill does not affect us personally (which it could), we cannot allow these perpetrations to continue. Already, we allow citizens to be monitored under the Patriot Act. Already we allow torture to take place in secret prisons. Already, we have allowed military law to carry on outside of due process, and now we are allowing it to extend to our own fellow citizens.
