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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (April 18, 1995)
Commentary Tuesday, April 18, 1995 Page 5 Right, wrong still our choice Our country is falling apart and it’s all because a whole bunch of us are moral degenerates, or so says the leaders and prophets who are waging war to help us destitute individuals become better Ameri cans. Aaaahhh! Isn’t that so thoughtful of them? This idea or newfound cause of curing our nation’s moral ills might possibly be one of the worst arguments to come out. Stop me if I’m wrong, but I thought that moral issues would be and should be determined by the individuals themselves, and not by outside influences. Good ol’ Webster even states that morals are “relating to, dealing with or capable of making the distinction between right and wrong in conduct.” More or less, our morals are the choices between what we feel we should do and what we don’t want to do. In fact, our own moral beliefs might be the one true extension of our individuality. What else is more sacred than the choices we make between what is right and wrong? But lo and behold, a new group of people have decided that we citizens can’t make these decisions for ourselves; thus, these people have set up their own moral code of what they believe, and if we disagree, we’re wrong. If morals are the decisions of what we believe is right and wrong, how can they say we’re morally wrong when we have made the distinction that we’re right? Nothing will ever get solved because somebody will always disagree with another person’s morals. Who is right and who is Robb Goff wrong, then? Regardless, the choice and the ability to choose is all important. This is the United States of America, the greatest country in all the world, the same one that was built on the principles of freedom of speech, the press, religion, and all those other neat little freedoms that few countries have. Sure, there are those moral wrongs that few condone. Things such as murder, theft, rape and greenspace are universally disliked and thus should not be included in this argument. But it is a general truth that beliefs like abortion, animal rights, gun control and capital punishment have two separate sides, with each believing il is correct. These are some of the problems that bring up this so-called moral decay. But who is right and who is wrong? Nobody knows and nobody should tell the other side it is morally wrong, because that’s an individual’s choice. So, those of you who want to create this moral code that all people should follow and live under why don’t you go set up your own country and eat marshmallows and graham crackers while Big Brother watches your every move to make sure you don’t commit any moral crimes? Quite frankly, I’m happy with the way our country is, because we have the right to choose our own morals and live the life we want to live. So if I decide to strap on my Colt .45 and walk down the middle of O street wearing a fur coat, smoking a cigarette and wishing Bjorklund and Joubert a fun trip aboard Ole Sparky at the penitentiary, then I can do that. Why? Because this is the United States, and I have that choice to do so. And I don’t want anybody telling me I can’t. Individuals should have the last word on what they believe in, not some lobbyist, presidential candi date, right-wing activist or tree hugging environmentalist. If a person wishes to support a cause, then great; but if not, don’t label him or her as being morally wrong. People need to wake up and join the ’90s — the 1990’s — and live with the fact that times and attitudes change, and Ward and June Cleaver are only TV charac ters. So please stop with the “people didn’t act this way when I was growing up” routine. If you lived in that era, congrats, and let me welcome you to the ’90s and Generation X, a group of in-debt twentysomethings who are about to change the way people look at things as a whole, and who cherish the idea of making up their own minds on moral decisions. And for those of you who still believe you are God and want to dictate our thoughts and values, give it up. Frankly, you’re not very good at it, and anyway, the job is already taken. Goff is a senior secondary education major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist. Your brain: Use it or lose it harlier this semester, I went in to renew my driver’s license. It was painless enough, I guess. All I had to do was wait in line for an hour or so, take my eye test, pay my money and twitch my nose when the picture was taken. It was, to use a popular phrase, a “no-brainer.” When I finished with all that stuff, I was asked if I planned to be an organ donor. I figured, “What the hell?” and signed the card. Again, a no-brainer. Later, I felt kind of bad about it, because actually, in the event of a catastrophic accident (as opposed to a pleasant, warm, fuzzy accident, I guess), the boys at the lab aren’t going to find much good stuff in me. Lungs: questionable. Heart: who knows? Liver? forget it. Maybe my pancreas will be in good, working order, but I haven’t heard about a horrible nationwide pancreas shortage lately, so maybe I should have saved them the trouble and just left the card blank. But it was done, and life (knock on wood) goes on. Last week, I heard some things that brought the organ-donation issue out of the dark recesses of my memory. I heard that Jeffrey Dahmer’s brain was being kept in a jar in some lab for future scientific tests, and that his body was being preserved in a refrigerator until after the trial of the man who allegedly killed him. What they’ll do with it after that remains a mystery to me (a cookout, maybe?). It seemed like poetic justice. But I digress. Just the other night, I heard a CNN report on the shortage of brains donated to science. Scientists have been unlocking the secrets of the human mind rather successfully Doug Rotors in recent years, the report said, but their efforts were being hampered by the dreaded brain shortage. Tragic, what with all those perfectly good brains out there that aren’t being used. Anyway, it got me thinking: If only medical science could just borrow brains, all our problems would be solved. Say, for ex ample, I was getting ready for my summer job of watching paint dry for $1.93 an hour. Before I went in, I could drop off my brain at the lab and collect a nice fat rental check. A true no-brainer. Meanwhile, I could still work my summer job and, in the evening, I could still enjoy and comprehend almost all cable programming. Ah, yes, ignorance is bliss. The possibilities of the detach able brain are spectacular. The members of both houses of Congress, for example, could easily give up their brains before sessions begin, and science could benefit— with no distinguishable loss in the quality of government. A trace could be put on calls to radio and TV talk shows, and the callers could then be contacted about the possibility of brain donation. That would work well: Most of the callers to those shows haven’t used their brains in a long time. A brain-donation system could be set up like jury duty or the National Guard or something. For a week or two out of the year, each citizen could yank out his or her brain and take it in to be poked, prodded and analyzed. We could establish a national brain-donation day, the “Great American Brainout.” I mean, really, who’d miss ‘em? That’s pretty much what it comes down to. Most of the things we do in our everyday lives, sadly, require only a rudimentary nervous system. You know the game: stimulus, response, stimulus, response. Hit the feeder bar when the light comes on and drool like a fiend at the sound of the tuning fork. Even when we are forced to use our brains — I mean really use them —we can tap into only a tiny percentage of their actual capacities. A lifetime of no-brainers. Looking at it that way, it seems a shame to waste such a wonderful piece of machinery on a species of hairless (relatively) apes that just recently came down from the trees. So I have decided to donate my brain to science (after I die, that is). I hope lots of other people do, too. If scientists can study donated brains and figure out how to unlock the full potential of the human mind, perhaps we will have a chance to pull our world out of the tailspin of violence, destruction, hate and all around stupidity in which we now find it. Perhaps all of that can be done simply by using our brains. In the meantime, however, they make nifty doorstops. Peters Is a eradiate stadeat aad Daily Nebraskaa coiaauist Color lines trouble for New Americans He arrived at the Masters Tournament with all sorts of monikers, statistics and expecta tions attached to his name. Eldrick Woods was Tiger, the golf “phenom,” the prodigy, the amateur champion playing for his first time with the pros. The 19-year-old from Stanford University was also, the sports writers all calculated, the fourth black to play the white-bread golf event in 20 years, the first black in seven years. He was compared to Jackie Robinson, to Willie Mays, to Michael Jordan. But before Tiger Woods had left Augusta, Ga., in time to make a 9 a.m. Monday history class, he had firmly and repeatedly parsed his identity in his own way. He was not the designated black hope of a white sport. “My mother is from Thailand,” he said. “My father is part black, Chinese and American Indian. So I’m all of those. It’s an injustice to all my heritages to single me out as black.” These were not the words of a young man trying to “pass,” to deny his heritage, to reject the shade of melanin that would have categorized him as “Negro” under not-so-ancient race laws. This was a voice from a new genera tion of Americans who resist the cultural pressure to make one choice, who say I am the sum and the son of many parts. For too long, slavery and racism have left a legacy in America that author Shirlee Taylor Haizlip calls either “an anxiety about authenticity or a paranoia about purity.” We look at the diffuse range of skin tones, hair types, eyes, noses, lips and try to force them into a handful of allotted races. More often than not we ask some of some subtle shading, some “exotic” feature: “What is he?” “What is she?” Not who, mind you, but what. Today our country may be more of a genetic melting pot than at any time in history. Yet we are often and oppositely as obsessed with ethnic and racial categories as any 19th century census taker counting “octoroons” for his country. Racism has been the natural enemy of a multiracial reality. It insisted that one drop of “African blood” made a white man black, although a drop of “white blood” didn’t make him white. To this day, there are blacks as well as whites as well as Asians as well as Hispanics who uphold this code, insisting that college freshman “choose” which lunch table they will sit at, which sorority they will join. Children of diverse backgrounds are asked Ellen Goodman to choose sides as if race were a team. Multiracial children can be caught in a kind of cultural cross fire. But increasingly, they are also the ones helping to create a demilitarized zone. Finally, we’ve begun to hear the stories. In “Life on the Color Line,” Gregory Williams has written a memoir of his child hood, “the true story of a white boy who discovered he was black.” In “The Sweeter the Juice,” Shirlee Haizlip has written about her search for and discov ery of kin who “passed” into the white world, disappearing, leaving her own mother bewil dered and abandoned. Such stories reflect the pain created in American lives by color lines. But they also call into question the meaning and meaningless of race as a concept. As Haizlip writes after her own search, “Genes and chromo somes from Africa, Europe and a pristine America commingled and created me.... I am an American anomaly. I am an American ideal. I am the American nightmare. I am the Martin Luther King dream. I am the new America.” The voices of these new Americans include many of the age of Haizlip’s children who have increasingly turned from pain to pride, less torn by racial heritages and more comfortable in two or three or four worlds. It’s the Irish-Italian-Russian-Ameri can. It’s the African-Asian European-American. For their own sake, they struggle against the pressure to pick one of the mothers, fathers, grandparents on their family trees. And in that struggle they become a natural force against the divisions of race. One of these new Americans is 19-year-old Tiger Woods, who says matter-of-factly, “All I can do is be myself.” One-quarter black, one-quarter Thai, one quarter Chinese, one-eighth American Indian and one-eigjhth white, his greatest natural asset is still the astounding ability to hit a golf ball 340 yards. © 1995 The Boston Globe Newspaper Company (Hite luftjth niMOafliniitiw .Ttonkstoyou its working .. Mike Luckovlch