Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Another Black Tuesday


Today just sucked: Alito was confirmed for the Supreme Court in a too close for comfort 58-42 vote and Coretta Scott King, MLK's widow, died. So much for social justice. It's bad enough that a man is replacing a woman on the Supreme Court (especially after the whole Hariet Miers debacle), but to replace O'Connor with a white, anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action man just adds insult to injury.

I don't have an adequate response to the status quo. Instead, I have a few questions:

1. What should we do now to make sure our so-called "rights" are not even more curtailed in the upcoming years?

2. Does anyone else find it ironic that a "liberal" university such as Yale could have produced not only George W. Bush, but also Sammy Alito?

I ask the latter question with a tinge of sarcasm. I'm actually not that surprised that Yale has produced some of the more conservative world leaders. Think about it: how many of you (and/or how many people do you know) carry liberal, progressive sentiments at this school and plan on engaging the world on a preferably micro-social level? Most of us see bad schools, bad healthcare, bad foreign policies, etc and we want to go straight to the top to fix it. OR we're so overwhelmed by all the issues that need to be tackled that we'd rather forget it by working 80 hour weeks, owning a bmw, making huge financial contributions to charity and then making sure our kids have the same liberal arts education we had.

I say all of this more about myself than anyone else at this school. I'm just trying to figure out what happens to one's drive to make the world better and when exactly it is that individual's stop questioning the system and instead resolve to accept it. I'm as guilty as anyone. Traveling for a year after college might make I-banking look like Mother Teresa's line of work. Forgive the rant. As I said, it's been a rough Tuesday.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

this is a fine post, but i'm more interested in a post about the absolutely reprehensible faceboo-related events that occurred recently.

if you condone those actions, which i feel you will (though I'm terribly sorry if you don't), your opinions hold absolutely no weight and deserve to be taken seriously by no one.

sabrina said...

Of course we are going to write about that, as soon as we can. For now, let me say this: in my book, to write an anonymous post with insinuations and judgements (instead of a reasoned argument with concrete facts) is analogous to the actions you find "absolutely reprehensible."