Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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THE GAMECOCK ♦ Friday, September 21, 2001 IN OUR OPINION Bush lives up to history In what was one of his most rousing and eloquent speeches to date, President Bush Thursday night keyed in on several important issues. Bush is to be commended for delivering a speech that was deeply needed to lift the spirit of America and console her people. He was powerful in a position in which he normally appears overwhelmed; he was confident when speaking in a medium that usually makes him appear uncomfortable; and he was eloquent where he often seems unprepared. One portion of the president’s address focused on the misplaced animosity toward all Muslims. He encouraged Americans to be respectful of Islam. He pointed out that the attacks against America were the deeds of a “radical fringe” instead of the actions of true followers of Allah. He reminded Americans that Islam is a peaceful faith and that “those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.” Bush also rallied for the support of countries across the world, but his choice of words concerns us. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” the president declared. As stirring as his speech was, Bush must be careful not to split the world into the harmful categories of “us” and “them.” The persident warned nations who harbor terrorists that they will suffer the same fate as the terrorists if they do not comply with Bush’s requests. We urge that he keep in mind the inherent struggles of developing nations and not kill innocent people in an attempt to exact justice for America’s dead. And the president urged Americans to keep their faith in the economy. It can only be helped by continued buying and selling - this is something everyone can do. We encourage the students, faculty and staff of the university to carry on with their spending habits and perhaps even increase their contributions to America’s financial strength. This will prevent the economy from tipping into recession and granting the terrorists a long-lived victory. President Bush walked into the U.S. Capitol last night with a task of historic proportions before him. By proving himself to be up to the task, the president showed the resolve that America will need to win the battle against terrorism, and he gave a nation the words it needed to make sense of the past week’s tragedies and prepare for the battle ahead. Bush is to be commended for delivering a speech that was deeply needed to lift the spirit of America. GAMECOCK CORRECTIONS If you see an error in today’s paper, we want to know. Write us at gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com. ABOUT THE GAMECOCK Martha Wright Editor in Chief Mary Hartney University Editor Ginny Thornton Asst. Univ. Editor Victoria Bennett The Mix Editor Justin Bajan Asst. The Mix Editor Chris Foy Sports Editor Preston Baines Asst. Sports Editor Elizabeth Swartz Online Editor Aaron Hark Photo Editor Greg Hambrick City Editor Alicia Balentine Asst. City Editor Brandon Larrabee Viewpoints Editor Page Designers Mackenzie Clements, Crystal Dukes, Katie Smith, David Stagg Copy Editors Crystal Boyles, Corey Garriott, Jason Harmon, Jill Martin, Carolyn Rowe TO PLACE AN AD The Gamecock . 1400 Greene Street Columbia, SC 29208 Advertising: 777-3888 Classified: 777-1184 Fax: 777-6482 STUDENT MEDIA Erik Collins, Faculty Adviser Ellen Parsons, Director of Student Media Susan King, Creative Director Carolyn Griffin, Business Manager Sarah Sims, Advertising Manager Sherry F. Holmes, Classified Manager Creative Services Todd Hooks, Martin Salisbury, Beju Shah Advertising Staff Betsy Baugh, Caryn Barowsky, Denise Levereaux, Jackie Rice, Stacey Todd Gamecock Community Affairs Betsy Baugh, Karen Yip CONTACT INFORMATION Offices on third floor of the Russell House. Editor in Chief: gamecockeditor@hotmail.com University Desk: gamecockudesk@hotmail.com City Desk: gamecockcitydesk@hotmail.com Viewpoints: gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com Spotlight: gamecockmixeditor@hotmail.com Sports: gamecocksports@hotmail.com Online: www.dailygamecock.com Newsroom: 777-7726 The Gamecock is the student newspaper of the University of South Carolina and is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the fall and spring semesters and nine times during the summer with the exception of university holidays and exam periods. Opinions expressed in The Gamecock are those of the editors or author and not those of the University of South Carolina. The Board of Student Publications and Communications is the publisher of The Gamecock. The Department of Student Media is the newspaper’s parent organization. The Gamecock is supported in part by student activities fees. One free copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for one dollar each from the Department of Student Media. BEELER'OZ "THE SWORD ONCE DRAWN, FULL JUSTICE MUST BE DONE.” -THOMAS JEFFERSON COLLEGE PRESS EXCHANGE Rushing to complete The Plan CLAYTON KALE MAILTOSOMEONE@AOL.COM USC’s parking strategy is putting your pants on before your underwear. Sometimes, when you’re rushing to complete a major project, too much planning can virtually kill it. Planning is important for any large-scale project, because it allows planners to identify problems before work begins. But sometimes, project managers can be so blinded by The Plan, they can’t see problems as they arise. On Oct. 29, the university will start pulling out parking spaces along Sumter Street next to the fraternity dorms and the Honeycombs. The destruction of the on-street parking places is part of a $4 million beautification project, which wouldn’t upset this writer under usual circumstances. This time, however, the university has gone and put its pants on before its underwear. Throughout my four years at USC, the university has talked about “perimeter parking” and an improved shuttle system. Unfortunately, the eve of the destruction of existing parking spaces isn’t also the eve of a new parking lot or shuttle routes. Students who use the Shuttlecock appreciate it, but they’re quick to admit one can’t plan one’s day according to the bus schedule. “Sometimes you wait so long, you’d have been better off walking,” says one student waiting for the Yellow Bus on Greene Street. The Shuttlecock captains aren’t to blame for the hit-and miss service; to have a good bus system, one needs many, many buses. To have a good bus system that will encourage students not to park in the central campus area, the university needs large parking lots on the outskirts of campus. The Bates House parking lot is no longer big enough to handle the number of commuting students who park there when added to the residents who live there. And the parking lots at the Coliseum are so solidly packed by the time classes start, only a fool with a lot of time (and a lot of patience) would dare roll through looking for a parking space. The university’s beautif ication plan is a good idea— more trees on campus means more shade, which is welcome during the summer — but USC has gone about it as if the university were reading its plans backward. The focus of the plan should be to give students a place to park on the outskirts of campus before taking away metered spots in the campus’ heart. Digging up the on-street parking first is destroying a campus resource that isn’t immediately being replaced. This will cause already disgruntled drivers to get angrier. Economics.shows that people faced with a scarcity of a resource will sometimes act irrationally to get that resource. This isn’t a call for road rage or any reactionary response; it’s a fact of life. University othcials should leave the trees in the nursery and keep the sod alive on the trucks for a while and focus on the real problem at hand (which is not our campus’s beauty). If digging up parking places is the plan, fine. But give the students a place to park and give us a reliable bus system so we can get from the perimeter of campus to our classes and the library first. I would look ridiculous if I went to class with my underwear on top of my pants. It’s equally stupid for the university to destroy prime parking spaces without first replacing them somewhere, even if it’s a bus ride away. To get bin Laden, bomb the innocent TAYLOR MARSHALL GREEN GAMECOCKVIEWPOINTS@HOTMAIL.COM Every true patriot needs a taste of hate-crime rib for the Fourth of July. “You must not—you shall not behold this!”said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to the seat. ” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” I look around and I like what I see. I like these flags. I think I saw a little 14-year-old girl down the block with a flag around her genitalia. It’s like a tickertape parade for the thousands lost in NYC. Flags, flags everywhere! Die bin Laden, die! That’s what’s needed. Let’s hit these muthas where it hurts. Let’s head down to the village of Kabul and spray tear gas in all the turbans. I mean, this WAR! WAR! WAR! rhetoric has my blood pumping. I want to be on the next plane and have one of those terrorists whip his plastic butter knife out on me. It’d be the end of him, I tell ya. The only way these people are going to learn their lesson is if we take all of our troops and stick Patriot missies up the noses of the innocent. Then tell bin Laden, “Come on out, Mutha! Nice and easy! NO quick moves with your elbows or hands! You wouldn’t want this black-veiled woman to lose her nasal cavity, would you?!” Or better yet, once we get our hands on bin Laden we (in the words of my girlfriend) “step on his toes” until he tells us where his family is. Then we take the bin Laden Family Reunion to ♦ BOMB, SEE PAGE 9 IN YOUR OPINION Green space is good; parking better You know, it really is nice to be a student at a university that takes pride in its appearance. Whether it’s last year’s rennovation of a few of the buildings on campus, or the new proposal for additional “green spaces” and beautification of the sidewalk areas, USC is working to make itself look good. Really, give yourself a hand and be proud, fellow students. Of course, now try looking at the situation from my point-of view. USC is a business and businesses want money; in this case that money comes from the new crops of freshman that are recruited each year. Has anyone tried to park on campus lately? It’s difficult. A semester or so ago, I wrote a letter that was printed in The Gamecock in which I complained about the lack of parking and the fact that USC doesn’t seem to care about commuter students and other students who have to drive to school. Well, nothing has changed. Remember how I was talking about how good a job the university is doing of beautifying the campus? Yeah — that’s because you don’t catch fish if the fish aren’t attracted to the lure. They want donors to donate, they want fresh bodies to pay tuition dollars. It helps to have a nice campus to attract all that money. Once they have us here, we have to fend for parking spaces like wild animals. What incentive does USC have to, say, build a parking garage where the Colliseum commuter lot is when they make so much money off of parking tickets? HA! Are you kidding?! Students can be late to class, feed meters and pay fines. They don’t care. As long as we continue letting the USC Parking Militia ticket us into oblivion because we couldn’t find a space and had to make one, the university isn’t going to do a damn thing about it. BERT MORRIS FOURTH-YEAR STUDENT, COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM & MASS COMMUNITCATIONS Columnist’s opinion about attacks wrong Among things that are horribly wrong with Ann Marie Miani’s column last Monday: 1) “It just didn’t seem right to be sitting in a classroom while there were thousands of people dying.” It’s unfortunate that Miani has failed every class in college so far, because she couldn’t have possibly fulfilled the attendance requirements, taking into account the violent nature of today’s world and the fact that many more than 10,000 people die each day. But then again, they aren’t Americans... 2) “Whether it is Osama bin Laden or some other terrorist bastard, they need to pay.” The inclusion of “some other terrorist bastard” indicates the typical American polarized view of the world. It’s always “us” versus “them,” isn’t it? Fortunately, ethnicity often nicely splits the world into good “us” and bad “them.” 3) “The US needs to find those responsible and kill them.” Oh my! First, this is a simplistic view of the problem. Many Americans think that the attacks were capricious or carried out by insular crazies. Of course, this is not the case and America has a sometimes regrettable history in that region (as it does with every other region of our world). Upon assuming that the attacks are related to bin Laden, I will rewrite what should be common knowledge by now—the US aided the Taliban; it is much less likely that the Taliban would have emerged victorious from the civil war (and it’s much less likely that there would have been a civil war) had the Soviets gained (vicarious) control of Afghanistan. The natural extension of my most previous point is that if bin Laden hadn’t destroyed this particular American symbol, someone else would have destroyed something else. I don’t condone the attacks (few have), but the attacks certainly were not inexplicable. There is definitely something wrong with the way America treats certain parts of the Muslim world, and this •v needs to change. And any change in foreign policy should be the product of distanced, cautious reflection, not testosterone. Moreover, how could America hope to put out any fires by turning bin Laden into a martyr? Plus, killing him will probably invoke unilateral military action against a country with a lower per capita GDP than Rwanda (and an * average life expectancy below 50 years)—or a refutation of a previous Presidential order : outlawing the assassination of foreign leaders. After reading over my comments, I realized that my letter lacked the passion of Miani’s “Viewpoint.” I owe the public two curse words (I included two while drawing ’ from her letter). Bastard. Bastard. NIRAV MEHTA THIRD-YEAR STUDENT, ECONOMICS AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES ♦ FOR MORE LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, SEE PAGE 9 Submission Policy Letters to the editor or guest columns are welcome from the Carolina community. Letters should be 250-300 words. Guest columns should be about 600 words. Both must include name, phone number, professional title or year and major, if a student. Deliver handwritten submissions to Russell House room 333, or send e-mail to gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com. The Gamecock reserves the right to edit for libel, style and space. Anonymous letters will not be published. Photos are required for guest columnists and can be provided by the submitter. Call 777-7726 for more information.