Friday, April 07, 2006
Stretch those mental wings
Hami Ramani has a curious imagination, in that it is both narrow-sighted and extremely fantastic.
The complaint has to do with some death penalty debate that didn't have a good turnout. Ramani comes up with three reasons for why people didn't show, and dismisses them.
The first is Spring Break. But Ramani "could not fathom the prospect of such a large number of people catching their flight to Cancun or Maui as warranting such a desertion of campus." That's the extent of his argument. He lacks the imagination to figure out why people might be more interested in their immediate personal future than the fate of a bunch of murderers.
The second is a lack of publicity, and he includes the great line "the ASUC publicized this as if the campus is full of telepaths," which could be true of a lot of things. For instance, I'm still trying to find out the language of the referenda on the ballot, but this is impossible to make public whole weeks before an election. But Ramani says that since it went to a couple e-mail lists, it should've brought huge numbers of people. I guess.
The third is that it's not a topic of importance to us. Ramani says that, since some people had death penalty issues recently, it should've been a topic of importance to us. Just like Barry Bonds's steroid use is a topic of importance to everyone. Right? Right?
Yeah. Ramani concludes by saying that people need to be proactive to reclaim "the old ways" of being free thinkers or something. Apparently, by showing up to a debate on a death penalty that impacts almost no one, we can be proactive and revive that spirit.
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