Issue date: 10/16/06 Section: Editorial/Opinion

How many of you out there consider yourselves good souls? How many of you, my readers, truly believe in your hearts the idea that when the time comes to do good deeds, you will, indeed, perform these good deeds? There's a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. and it whistles to the tune of, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." Oh, good ol' Martin Luther King Jr., the proud who digested your words firsthand are now very old. Almost too old to care.

Our fellow peers who are older than us include the generation of parents who directly chose to take action in the Civil Rights movement. They were the youth that chose to abolish the racism and judgment that our government and law enforcement so tightly held on to. And while, yes, there were many, many thousands who joined the Civil Rights movement, there were still hundreds of thousands more who could have chosen a side, and yet, chose to be mute. Our generation is facing similar apathy.

In this past month alone we've faced four new threats to our nation, both internal and external: bolstered nuclear threats from foreign nations, more possible terrorist threats, school shootings involving either the students themselves or some older person from the community, and of course, the ever elusive E. coli bacteria. So then what, as truly empowered citizens of this most industrious and intelligent nation, are we supposed to do?
Nothing.

New threats revealed by the mass media immediately coincide with a message of solace by our government that no harm will come to us. In one minute we get the ever-living scared out of us, that some awful threat is impending and it could happen at any moment, and the next minute we have Uncle Sam rubbing our backs, assuring us that we are taken care of and watched over. We are a generation that is bred by the marriage of mass media and the government to be constantly terrified and worriless at the same time.

Stop to think for a second after you read this question: What were you thinking when our government announced that we were going to war?

Be it that I am writing an editorial, I am entitled to state my opinions and assumptions and therefore am going to assume that any given person thought one of three things pertaining to war. One: Go get those terrorist tramps! Two: Wait, why are we going to war? Or three: sure, whatever.

Continued...

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