Nobody just picks up the Me Issue. I know because, for nearly two hours today in the Xerox WOW! Center, I watched Imagine RIT attendees rifle through stack upon stack of magazines. Some were searching for themselves, some for their friends, but few picked up a random magazine, and then, only hesitantly. The intentness of the hunt, and the tendency to leave empty-handed if the quarry wasn’t found, was striking.
There was the RIT alumni who kept coming back to search the stacks. The middle-aged woman who wouldn’t take any of the covers on the table, but happily took one of a Reporter staffer who chatted briefly with her. The orange-shirted RIT staff member visibly upset that he couldn’t find his. And student after student setting aside their friends. The neat stacks quickly became a fanned and disordered melange of portraiture. People seemed genuinely unwilling to take a strange cover home.
To a degree, this seems reasonable. Of course people want themselves on a magazine, or the consolation prize of recognition for having retrieved a friend’s likeness. Still, this peculiarly animated fixation left me wondering. I’m by no means immune, I have two six copies of me and set aside several of my friends. But for me the experience of picking up a magazine feels different, too. I don’t feel like I’m just picking up a stapled sheaf of paper, or something polished and remote. It feels immediate and intimate.
So, Puzzler stumped you. It’s okay, it stumped a lot of people. A lot of people besides the group from Computer Science House, who won $300 after solving the meta-puzzle 35 hours after the issue hit the stands. Here’s how they did it.
(If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I suggest you click here.)
First thing’s first: If you want a better understanding of what the single-digit answers are you have to remember the famous pangram depicted on the cover. A pangram, for those too lazy to pick up a dictionary, is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, such as the famous “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” It’s not a perfect pangram, though, so you have to remove the repeating letters to get “A quick brown fx jmps ve th lzy dg”. When you write this out over the blank phone number and GPS coordinates, you now know where to place your answers to the 26 puzles (A-Z). Nifty, huh?
(AQU) - ICK - BROW
NF XJ’ MP.SV” N
ET HL’ ZY.DG” W
A) I bet you didn’t even know that you knew the ancient Mayan numeral system. Dots are ones, bars are fives, football shapes are zeroes. The GPS coordinates land you right on top of the Pentagon, (use Google Earth) for an answer of five.
B) You might have to search online for the rules to a Battleship puzzle, but this rather easy one can be solved by determining the location of the small boats and figuring out what letters correspond to them in the margins. Unscramble to get 4.
C) The hands fingerspell colors that represent bands on a resistor. Calculate and get 7.
D) This one’s just a word search from hell. The only word to be found (excepting any coincidental two or three-letter words) is “shift back one”, which is backwards and diagonal. Once you do this, the only word that can be found is “again”. After rewriting yourself a new grid once again, you can finally find all the words, which reveal the GPS coordinates of London Bridge, giving you “London Bridge is _______ ____” for the meta-sentence. A trip down nursery rhyme lane reveals “falling down”. Convert the letters to numbers, add the numbers from each word and subtract the “value” of each word from one another to get 5.
E) Follow the chess game expressed by the abbreviations. The illegal move is the answer (7).
F) As simple as it states: follow the lines to complete the equation. 2 and 3 connect, 1 and 6 connect, and 0 and 4 connect. Three is the answer.
G) Novice puzzlers determined that “Horace homophone” referred to Egyptian god Horus, but only puzzle masters realized that Egyptians represented fractions using shapes from the classic Egyptian eye symbol. Each shape represents one over two to the nth power. This particular shape (the stem-shape under the eye) happens to represent 1/64, making the answer 6.
H) Put your 10-color Rubik’s cubes away. This puzzle is just a sudoku in disguise. Push the squares together, disregard the inclusion of a tenth color in the key to the left, assign each color an arbitrary value, and solve to get 4.
I) Look up a bit of euchre vocabulary to figure out that the bowers are jacks of the trump suit and the suit of the same color, push your 2s through 8s to the side and just throw down the cards when they are revealed. Use the key to get six.
J) Saran
Satan
Sat on
Baton
Baron
Boron, which has an atomic number of 5.
K) You needed to check our website to see what you were solving for, but once you did it was just a matter of remembering genetics from high school biology. The answer is 2.
L) Unfortunately, the fictitious text The Cacti Ether Henry has no ISBN number., but if you stared at the hint long enough, the letters might just rearrange themselves to say “anagram puzzle.” The Cacti Ether Henry is The Catcher in the Rye, by reclusive author Slander Jig, errr, J. D. Salinger. The digit from the ISBN is 0.
M) Because Denninger dismisses someone every time he figures something out, you have to determine the suspects’ answers by assuming that the answers that are given have to be the ones that give a unique solution that Denninger can use for dismissals. Our Banjo thief is student C, making the answer 0.
N) You could’ve solved this mojito problem drunk by tripling the lime juice in the recipe and subtracting the original dosage to get 4. Don’t get cocky, though. As far as the GPS coordinates in the meta-puzzle are concerned, this only tells you that the path to the prize is somewhere between 40 and 49 degrees North, which refers to a pretty big chunk of populated land mass.
O) A puzzle in Puzzler? Should be easy, right? Not when you see the picture, which to the average human looked like a stack of three sheets of paper with six horizontal lines on the top sheet. A computer, typeface geek, or Puzzle Master saw something different: the number 4 typed out in wingdings.
P) A guitar tab for Matchbox 20’s song, 3 a.m. At least we didn’t try to express it in Guitar Hero tabs.
Q) Guess you had to hit our website archives up to fill in this sudoku with the 8 in question.
R) Just dividing 19 by the ill-fated student’s net gain of two yards a day puts you one day off, since the student has no need to slide back three yards once he’s home free on day 8.
S) A grueling logic puzzle. I hope you checked the website to see that you had to alter your final answer to get 7 before plugging it into the meta-puzzle.
T) A few people were curious how a mere maze could reveal a number, until they completed it and saw the number 7 drawn before them.
U) As Biblical as it looks, the quote is from Alan Turing’s 1950 essay where he postulates the rules for the Turing test.
V) You’ve solved enough of these puzzles at a computer. Get some exercise and discover that a door on the first floor of the stairwell has a misleading white 2 painted on it. Because it’s on the first floor, the answer is 1.
W) Once you get past the binary, it’s a simple math problem whose answer is 0.
X) A coin flip is a coin flip is a coin flip, no matter how grave the consequences or foolish the logic. Your odds? 0.500. Your answer? 0.
Y) If you don’t know what an acrostic is, look at the first letter of each line to get 9.
Z) Ask a friendly cashier to scan it and void the purchase (or look it up on the internet if you’re not interested in making new friends) to discover that what you’re looking at is the UPC from a can of Arizona Arnold Palmer. You might have to look up the man’s birthday on wikipedia, though, instead of asking him. I guess you can’t make too many friends in the course of a single puzzle.
So, now you have everything you need. Plug in the answers to get the phone number:
(585) - 672 - 4840, which just happens to be the number of RIT Rings. Calling it only gives you the standard “Leave your ring after the tone” line. How about we look at the GPS coordinates?
43 05′ 03.71″ N
77 40′ 29.56″ W
No, you don’t just need to call RIT Rings and tell us that the answer is “The Eastman Building” or go stand near the Eastman Building and call from your cell phone and demand cash prizes delivered to you at 3:30 in the morning like a pizza. You have to go to the exact coordinates to discover a dinosaur from years past: a pay phone. Scrounge up 50 cents in pocket change, blow the dust off the receiver and call RIT Rings (which is set up using Grand Central) to receive a personalized congratulatory message and $300.
And, if you couldn’t solve it quickly or “accureatley” enough we might just try this again next year, when you might have better luck. But if we do, I promise that we’ll hold you off for at least 48 hours instead of the 12 hours it took to solve the first and the 35 hours it took to solve this one.
In Rome, at the Spanish Steps, everything seemed normal as a few men and women went up and down, going wherever they happened to be going. It was a grey, overcast day set against the grim stone of the steps and the fountain at their base. That was until thousands of plastic multi-color play pen balls were dumped from the tops of the steps. First, a cascade of red bounced down the right side, followed seconds later by a blend of green and yellow from the left. It sounded like a hollow rain storm as 500,000 plastic balls tumbled down what have been referred to as “the longest and widest staircase in all Europe.” Some pedestrians ran in fear, others stared in awe as the tide flowed harmlessly by them. The video documenting the event shows an old man reach down, pick up two handfuls of red playpen balls and throw them up into the air like confetti, a look of pure joy on his wrinkled face as he played in the world’s largest ball pit.
Guerilla artist Graziano Cecchini, who dished out nearly $30,000 for the feat, was promptly arrested, stating that he did it to raise awareness for the plight of the Karen and Burmese people and that the balls represented the lies of politicians.
Cecchini bought enough balls to fill 11 unfurnished RIT dorm rooms up to five feet in multicolored fascination. He also spent enough money to pay tuition for a year.
Upon first glimpse, it looked like fun. It was more of a light-hearted prank than a political statement. Granted, many people were outraged at the stunt. Feedback on news sites ranging from tirades about the waste of money to workers who were late for work due to road blocks in light of the stunt, to en masse littering concerns.
If you ask me, there are much worse things Cecchini could have rolled down those stairs (last June a man drove a Toyota Celica down the same steps, terrorizing pedestrians and damaging several of the landmark steps). It’s just hard to get angry about playpen balls. Especially in light of his attribution of their meaning to the plight in Burma, there is certainly a “love not war” connotation to the stunt.
There’s such a peaceful, almost Buddhist, thing about ball pits. They just repel anger, it seems. Out of curiosity, I’ve been looking into xkcd-inspired ball pits, almost as a vacation from current events. Yes, we have been in Iraq for five years. Yes, Obama is still black. Yes, Spitzer paid (too much) for a call girl. Most stirring to me, however, is what little news is escaping Tibet.
I’ve had a complex relationship with China over the past year or so. Every vilifying thing that escapes from their politicians’ mouths concerning the Dalai Lama offends me greatly. Having witnessed Tenzin Gyatso at the University of Buffalo in Fall 2006 for a Reporter assignment, it was clear that the man couldn’t harm a fly, let alone convince another human to harm a fly.
In the Dalai Lama’s current position I would breathe fire and break chains and scream until my lungs collapsed. But all that negativity doesn’t help the Tibetan plight or even progress their culture in any way. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama remains peaceful and calm. My disgust at the situation converts to internal unrest in light of my hypocrisy. I don’t know how to hide my anger as I watch China destroy a culture and create policy that may cause Tenzin Gyatso to be the last of the Dalai Lamas. (Bear with me, we’re getting back to ball pits. I promise.)
I have gone so far as to try and sympathize with China by putting myself in their shoes, but their strongest and (only argument) for maintaining sovereignty over Tibet is that “Tibet is part of China.” I have nowhere to look for corroboration but the American Civil War. After all, before slavery was thrown to the forefront of our history books, the Union’s best argument was “The South is part of the United States”. But the South wasn’t exactly peaceful in their dissent. Few parallels can be drawn.
It wasn’t until I came back to the video of Cecchini’s stunt several times that I found a way to balance out the forces pulling on me. Instead of imagining Chinese politicians literally and violently choking on their words, and successful-yet-violent uprisings and other un-Tibetan actions I have come to this conclusion. If I had the means, I would fly over China with fleets of airplanes and bury Shanghai and Beijing in millions upon millions of plastic play pen balls.
I have a saying for when I discover appalling things on the world wide web: “God’s gonna be pissed when he finds the internet.” I also like to say that youtube comments are a step below bathroom graffiti. Every time I talk a stroll through the darker neighborhoods of Web 2.0 I wonder who these people are, and how their lackadaisical manners have monopolized certain markets of the internet. After all, my experience with mankind has been, on the whole, quite positive. Although I tend to disagree with many and am less than fond of even more, there’s a chocolaty Anne Frank candy center to my hard cynical candy shell. The rotten eggs are about five standard deviations out from the status quo, and most of the people in between, no matter how intolerable, are at least harmless. Either there is a mass underground network of off-the-grid assholes accounting for all the atrocities of the internet, or the minority of jerk-offs on the surface of the planet are efficiency gurus, stockpiling the internet with poor grammar and homophobic sentiments in ALL CAPS at an alarming rate. I’d hate to think that I go about shaking the filthy hands of cyber bigots on a daily business, brushing palms with the very fingers that type blasphemies.
One such occasion happened just a couple months ago. Standing outside the Student Alumni Union, hiding a fire extinguisher under my jacket while my girlfriend lit things on fire in a microwave to the amusement of a few hundred passersby (perhaps you read the article in the November 9 issue of Reporter) I shook hands with a student who said he had lots of experience putting things in microwaves and over-heating other objects for the amusement of himself and others during his tenure as a camp counselor. He was kind, polite, and charismatic. Up to a point, I rather enjoyed talking with him. After watching some LEDs flicker in the microwave, my girlfriend started to informally interview him, asking the first thing he ever put in a microwave to disastrous results, what happened when he threw the bug spray in the camp fire, and so forth. Eventually, she asked what the most extreme thing he had ever microwaved was. “A cat,” I thought I heard him reply.
“What was that?” I asked, a little too politely.
“We microwaved a cat.”
My girlfriend asked, “Was it dead?”
“Well, not when we put it in there.”
Now, I have few regrets in life. I’ve done things I’m not proud of (none as atrocious as microwaving a living creature) but few I go so far as to regret. Refraining from verbally lashing this student with a cat o’ nine tongues is one of them. But in an awkward moment as such, the mind does terrible things to get out of that awkward moment. Terrible things like not publicly condemning someone for torturing an animal. In true Reporter fashion, we continued with the interview as if it were a microwave dinner and not a distant relation of my parents’ cat, Fluffy. We unintentionally condoned the unforgivable.
When it came time to part ways, his information was written down. By the time we wrapped up our experiment and returned to the office, the editor in chief had received an e-mail from the student in question, stating ambiguously that he “Hadn’t put a cat in a microwave. It would be more accurate to say that I bore witness to a cat being placed in a microwave.” He was referring to his fellow camp counselors, who had a relatively safe knack for pyromania that tragically escalated into the grotesque act described above. After insisting that we hadn’t done as much, and that the student was referring to a previous incident, I started to believe that the student was being absolutely truthful in saying that he only witnessed the event.
Individual people do not allow terrible things to happen. If you walk into a kitchen to discover a lone person trying to force a cat into the microwave, rest assured you will stop them. If you witness a stranger choking, and no one else is around, you save them. The equation changes when someone starts choking on free breadsticks at the Olive Garden at a table of 15. At the Olive Garden, 15 people bear witness to a person choking to death. The boyfriend of the victim sits in awe, not knowing the Heimlich maneuver. The Doctor cousin at the other end knows it, but assumes that the 13 people closer to the victim will come to the rescue. The friend to the other side remembers being taught the Heimlich maneuver, but knows there’s a doctor at the table. The people who don’t know the victim well assume that someone who knows her better should take responsibility. Psychologists have tested this by studying groups of varying numbers while pretending to study something else. An actor in the group starts pretending to die, and the psychologist times how long it takes someone to attend to the victim. The more people in a group, the longer it takes for one of them to take responsibility. None of those people want the person to choke, of course, but none of them feel qualified to save their life.
This is the phenomena I’m interested in: our ability to take human relationships—the things that allegedly makes us so civilized—and inadvertently use them to cast ourselves as outsiders in order to avoid moral responsibility. The Nuremburg defense is only one version of this: the readiness of an inferior to assume that their superior is precisely that. I believe this is what happened to our microwaving friend: he thought the event was grotesque, but silently deferred responsibility to senior camp counselors who had been on the scene longer. The senior counselors did the same to their most respected members, and if interviewed, none of them could probably name the person that actually committed the crime. I’m convinced that our feline victim was a distant relation to Schrödinger’s cat, caught in his own hard-to-grasp paradox.
There’s not a person on this planet you can’t sit down with for a good hour or two and come to the conclusion that, in their own way, they mean well. These are the same individuals that, when part of an angry mob, will rip you limb from limb. Web 2.0 isn’t so much about the individual as it is bringing individuals together. To that digital cesspool I described I apply the same concept: mob mentality is the root of all evil. Thanks to the internet individualism has become a group activity, and the line between the two is starting to blur.
While the rest of the world continues to salivate over Obama’s latest speech concerning race and religion (full text here) the unfortunate truth is that the speech is deeply troubling in a number of ways. While Obama, throughout his speech, calls for America to become a “more perfect Union”–addressing the issue of race in America–it is unclear, exactly, what Obama believes this “perfected Union” would look like. Indeed, Obama’s vision as a leader concerning race is truncated an ambiguous at best.
While Obama could have clearly come out against the divisive remarks of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and articulated his own vision of a perfected Union that had appropriately dealt with the issue of race, Obama, instead, offered nothing in the way of a concrete prescription and only called for the popular but nebulous “dialogue.” Here, Obama demonstrated not his strong vision for change, but a political hedging and calculus designed to settle nothing and, more importantly, offend none. This, of course, is by design and not necessity. While other leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King have articulated to the public a compelling vision of a future where “on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” where “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” Obama desires only “dialogue.”
The reasons for this are clear. For one, we can be certain that King’s vision is not Wright’s vision, the vision Obama has effectively embraced through his twenty year relationship with Wright. While King presented a message of inclusion and brotherhood, Wright’s message is one of exclusion and separation–of an exclusively black church embracing exclusively black values in the “U. S. of KKK A.” For Obama to present a solid vision of inclusion, of black and white reconciling and coming together, would be to disown and reject everything Wright has preached and stood for. Obama’s hedging is not limited to his lack of a clearly vision, however, but unmistakably woven into his rhetoric as well.
There is no question that Obama is a gifted speaker and a gifted writer. To be sure, Obama resembles in many ways Abraham Lincoln in his incisive legal mind and careful rhetoric. Consider, however, the following portion of Obama’s speech where he distinguishes between the “black experience” and “immigrant experience” in America:
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future…
…Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch.
“As far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch.” As far as they’re concerned… A subtle and important qualifier, and one lacking from Obama’s discussion of the black experience in America throughout his speech. Here, again, Obama indirectly does not reject the viewpoint of Wright and many others in the black community, but leaves open the question of the legitimacy of the narrative of the immigrant experience. He does not say that no one has handed white Americans anything, or that they justly deserve their success. Rather, he only goes so far as to acknowledge that they perceive to have earned it.
It is clear then why Obama’s speech is both disappointing and not what it seems. While Obama has positioned himself as a leader able of healing racial issues in the United States, his rhetoric and vague vision for “dialogue” raise legitimate concern and seem to indicate, in my opinion, not substantive discourse but political hedging–interested in communicating progress and inclusivity to white Americans while not alienating or offending blacks. One thing is for certain: where Obama could have settled questions and put to rest concerns over his relationship with Wright, instead, only more questions remain.
Although Spirit Week is upon us, it is two weeks late, given the cataclysm of Dr. Destler’s orange-haired stunt during halftime of the Tiger’s men’s basketball game. As commendable as it may have been for RIT’s president to don the hairdo of true tiger spirituality in exchange for filled stands, it still isn’t the particular event that made me feel that RIT has the capacity to be spirited. Despite Dr. Destler’s efforts, the crowd cared only for his stunt, and while our student organizations dipped deep into their shallow pockets, into our own activity fees, and pulled out a myriad of free t-shirts and orange wigs, students stopped caring rather quickly.
Attending a women’s hockey game the following weekend, an event where students were encouraged to wear the orange shirts handed out at the basketball game, I noticed that attendance was still poor, despite the free barbeque provided by the Student Athletic Advisory Committee, and any increase in attendance was mostly due to the food as opposed to a genuine interest in the women’s hockey team.
Perhaps RIT was never meant to be an overly-enthusiastic school. My own senior cynicism has long since left me languid, hoping for the worst. I laughed maniacally when the men’s basketball team was robbed in the final seconds of their game, proving my theory that all the cheering idiots in the world can’t sway a game. Now Spirit Week is here (if you even noticed), and reactions are at an all time low. A few trees have been mummified in orange streamers, and students are supposed to wear camouflage next week for some vague, arbitrary reason that my mind can’t fully grasp. Still, I don’t believe that the subject of spirit is entirely lost on this campus.
The night before the famed basketball game where Dr. Destler dyed half his pale, snowy peak of hair orange, an auditorium on this campus was crammed beyond capacity, to standing room only, without promise of any cheap trickery or bribes of administrative humiliation. There was no free food or apparel. A few textbooks were available for free at the door, and the only promise made was the prospect of an old-school intellectual debate. The RIT Skeptics against the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. The venue packed Webb auditorium, and left many a customer satisfied, free of charge. For much less than a box of free don’t-shoot-me-I’m-hunting orange shirts with tigers printed on them, the debate event could be repeated ten-fold, yet our governance insists that sports are the only way to express school spirit.
Students can’t be bribed into passion, but they can only be accommodated into passion. You don’t meet a sexy siren of a woman (or man) and think “Damn, I could work hard to make us to appear to be an acceptable couple”. You meet a sexy siren of an individual with a brain and personality worth preserving in a vat of formaldehyde, and there really isn’t much effort involved for you to appreciate one another. Provide venues that students actually want to attend, and they will go. Adding poorly conceived gimmicks to the mix only empties tired pockets.
There is spirit on this campus, though, and there’s a reason I cite the weekend before last as the weekend of “spirit”. I had to direct a segment of the men’s hockey game for RIT Sports Zone. Granted, I am not a sports fan by any stretch of imagination, but I was there, trying to peer between the negative space of thousands of fans clogging the seats, aisles, and walkways while directing cameramen to get the shots we needed amongst screaming fans.
At the end of the second period I had to shoot an intro shot with our talent, and I decided to throw her in the midst of the Corner Crew (our rowdiest crowd of fans, let by a man known as “Big Goon”). As an aside, consider that over 300 of these people go on Facebook the night before a hockey game and poke the opposing team’s goalie, just to freak him out. They also photoshop pictures of opposing goalies to make them appear decapitated.
Big Goon agreed to help me make the shot work, and got the crowd riled up for me for the first take. I was concentrating on the announcer, listening from the headphones to make sure she sounded natural. At the end of her intro, I raised my arms, and Big Goon gave a cue and the whole crowd erupted, screaming “Good luck, Tigers!” but my announcer flubbed a line, and I needed a few more takes.
Big Goon left, and I did take two. At the appropriated moment, I raised my arms in the air, as if conducting a band, and this raunchy crowd of overexcitable fans just stared at me with blank faces. I tried to explain that I needed them to scream again. A few said they didn’t understand something. A few others seemed irate with me. Others just seemed bored with the prospect of being on TV. Then, one of my crew members said to me, “I think they want you to flip them off.” Incredulous, I ask what he meant. He explained that that’s what Big Goon had been doing. So, to test it out, I turned to the crowd of hundreds, raised my hands in the air, and extended both of my middle fingers, cautiously. Like a sudden tide of sound crashing against me with all its fury, the hundred or so people roared to life, cheering on our hockey team. “Okay! Okay! Perfect! Roll camera, let’s get this!” I exclaimed.
The announcer nailed the intro, and I confidently flipped off every member of that crowd, young and old, man and woman, father and mother and son and daughter, and without repercussion every one screamed their heart out, praising our team. And, while that uproarious cheer filled the stadium, it was our team. I didn’t have to give them shirts or free food or anything. Even without the cameras, they do it every home game. All I had to do was exclusively point my middle fingers to the heavens and let them unleash hell. That’s what spirit is, and I refuse to accept any half-baked imitations that have the nerve to waste student activity fees.
Online social-networking giant Facebook sent shockwaves through cyberspace this past Wednesday, December 13, when, in a move no one had predicted, they removed the required “is” from users’ status feeds. Shortly after the change, college students across the globe experienced what can only be described as an existential crisis, unsure of whether to retain the “is” or experiment with heretofore-unheard-of possibilities, including the use of the existentially-questionable past-tense “was.”
“Ever since Facebook was created we were operating within the rationalist Cartesian narrative of ‘I think, therefore I am,’” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained. “In light of today’s changing social climate, however, we decided it was time to jettison Descarte’s cognito and to allow users to explore and create their own definitions of being, redefining and reconstituting themselves day after day.”
As expected, the change produced increased levels of Sartrean anxiety, despair, existential uncertainty, and forlornness among the online users. One RIT student, Kayla Talkington, displayed “Kayla is …” in her feed. Another student, Ira “Ike” Smith of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, changed his status to “Ike was.” The changes led to increased confusion over what, exactly, constitutes being and who, specifically, is responsible for defining that being.
“How do I know that I exist?” one RIT student asked. “You know what I mean? How do I know that I exist? Yesterday, I had the assurance from Facebook that ‘Steve is,’ today… I mean who knows, today it’s only ‘Steve.’ This is the biggest thing since the Matrix. It’s really depressing.”
Others, however, found the change a cause for great optimism. “No longer are we subject to the oppressive control of Facebook over who we are,” one RIT student proclaimed. “Today is a day of great liberation. A day of freedom. Today I am whoever, whatever, I want to be.”
While many were pleased with the change made by Facebook, others, particularly those users who had labeled themselves “very liberal,” said the site didn’t go far enough. “This is a step, but it’s only a small step,” one student complained. “Facebook still forces us to conform to archaic socially created labels.” Among the chief complaints was the fact that Facebook still offers only “male” and “female” as the options for gender and, similarly, limits who one can be “interested in,” again offering only male or female as options. “What if I’m not interested in male or females?” one student defiantly asked. Among the additions in “interested in” students wanted to see included were a variety of animals, aliens, and, particularly among older male users, children/minors.
Regarding future changes, Zuckerberg had little to say, cryptically responding, “I don’t want to say what could happen and what couldn’t happen. The sky is the limit. These are post-modern times.”
As the Iowa Caucus draws near, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is under fire. As his popularity has skyrocketed nationally and, more importantly, in Iowa, so too have the number of attacks out to convince America that Mike just isn’t fit to govern. Of note, most of these attacks actually have very little to do with his ability to govern—in 2005 TIME named Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, one of America’s top 5 governors. No, the attacks don’t claim that Huckabee can’t do the job, but rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with Huckabee and that he shouldn’t be able, shouldn’t be eligible, to take our nation’s top office.
Chief among the charges is the fact that Huckabee is an ordained Southern Baptist minister and that he, in fact, pastored three separate churches in Arkadelphia, Texarkana, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas before turning to politics. This, some say, violates a very important separation of church and state—“It’s unconstitutional! A president shouldn’t be a pastor!”
That’s an interesting idea—that someone isn’t fit for public office because of their profession. Andrew Jackson was a lawyer. Herbert Hoover was a mining engineer. Harry Truman was a farmer. Of course, most would find it preposterous to say that someone can’t be president simply because of his or her job. But for some reason this idea flies when we’re talking about a pastor. It is even more ironic, of course, when it is atheists that are making this charge, because for them Huckabee’s former job should be only that—a job—no spirits or God about it.
The attacks become even more strange when you sit down for a minute and think about what Huckabee actually used to do “at the office.” Every Sunday he’d sit down with American citizens and he’d encourage them to “love their neighbors as themselves.” He’d tells those listening to him speak not to lie, cheat, or steal. He’d tell them that “blessed are the peacemakers.” He’d instruct children to “honor their father and mother.” He preached forgiveness and reconciliation instead of hate and revenge. He even likely saved a few marriages through counseling and encouraged people to work through their problems instead of running toward divorce. Surely, then, this man’s job must necessarily bar him from being President of the United States.
The truth is, of course, that there are only three qualifications a potential President must have: First, he or she must be a natural born U.S. citizen. Second, the candidate must be at least 35 years old. Finally, the candidate must have lived in the United States for at least 14 years. Fortunately (or unfortunately, for some) professional occupation really doesn’t have anything to do with it and, more than that, the “separation of church and state” doesn’t come into play here at all.
In fact, the Constitution has only one thing to say on religion and public office, found in Article VI, Section 3: “…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Simply put, you don’t need to be a member of a particular religion to run for office—as it should be.
In 2004, after John Kerry began to fall in polls for his perceived lack of religious fervor, columnists rushed to his aid reminding Americans that there is “no religious test!” and that it was “in the constitution!” It was safe to vote for Kerry, even if he didn’t believe what he claimed on the stump. What those same columnists are doing now, however, is applying a reverse religious test to Huckabee. “This man can’t run for President! He’s a pastor! He doesn’t only believe in something—he preaches it!” Unfortunately for them, Americans are both fair and tolerant, and don’t discriminate on people because of the color of their skin, gender, beliefs, or even occupation. It’s safe to vote for Huckabee, even if he believes what he claims on the stump.
