The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current, November 21, 2000, Page 4, Image 4
Opinion ZM/vNebraskan Since 1901 Editor. Sarah Baker Opinion Page Editor Samuel McKewon Managing Editor Bradley Davis Bit of gratitude Students have many things tobethankfulforatUNL We could’ve been sappy with our Thanksgiving editorial. We chose to be sincere. Main and simple, there are things we’re thankful for on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln cam pus in the new century. We are thankful for those administrators and faculty and staff members dedicated to helping students learn and grow at UNL. We are especially thankful for those people who have given more than a few years of their lives to students here. You do make a difference. We are thankful this university is striving to improve. We’ll even tolerate the decade-long construction site as long as administrators don’t forget who they are working for- the students. We’re thankful for the arts on campus. We enjoy seeing premiere theater at the lied Center for Performing Arts, which has done a good job of attracting big shows such as “Cats” last season and fresh shows such as Anthony Zerbe’s inter pretation of e.e. cummings' poetry. We're also lucky to have the Hixson-lied Fine and Performing Arts College, as well as a solid creative writing program in the English depart ment Most oi an, we re manKiui ior naving me Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, which always brings innovative art Whether it’s Conrad Bakker’s cul-de-sac art, the spacey, racy “JAM Portfolio" or the perma nent pieces of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, the Sheldon provides stunning pieces of art to admire. We’re hopeful the governor will not veto another attempt to provide more money for the museum. In the midst of the crossroads that is the Nebraska Union, we’re thankful for one quiet spot The Rotunda Gallery. It offers a bit of culture while we wolf down a Subway sandwich in between class, and it gives us a chance to contemplate more than our next paper, test or overdue assignment. We’re most thankful that it has continued to serve the pur pose it was built for. Once we leave the Nebraska Union, we’re thankful the art continues outside through the campus’ public sculpture. Scattered among the buildings meant for study is artwork we won’t encounter anywhere else in Lincoln and, in some cases, in Nebraska. We’re thankful for the Nebraska volleyball team, the real crown jewel of the NU Athletic Department that has forged an undefeated record and has a real shot at the national cham pionship. The NU Coliseum atmosphere, players and Coach John Cook - it’s worth a visit or two. We are thankful Maya Angelou could come to campus this semester. Her poems and wise words inspired us and encouraged us to not be passive learners or passive citizens and to spend our lives “composing." Hearing her deep, sultry voice recite the poems of Langston Hughes and William Henley reminded us of the intrinsic beauty of words. In what can sometimes seem like a sea of small minds and inequality, we're thankful for the people who are willing to speak out against what is wrong and unjust Showcased recently in the fight against Initiative 416, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, a number of University of Nebraska-Iincoln students have likely sacrificed school and per sonal time to fight for an unpopular cause. Disabled students, highlighted in a recent Daily Nebraskan story, showed courage in speaking against what they perceived as unfair treatment by the new director of the Office for Students with Disabilities. Editorial Board Sarah Baker, Bradley Davis, Josh Funk, Matthew Hansen, Samuel McKewon, Dane Stickney, Kimberly Sweet Letters Policy The Daly Nebraskan welcomes boats, letters to the editor and guest columns, but doee not gutr antee their pubfication.The Daly Nebraskan retains the ri(^« to edit or reject any materid submitted. Submitted mteeriai becomes property of the Daly Nabraakan and cannot be returned. Anonymous submissions w* not be pubiehed. Those who submit letters must identify themselves by name, vasr in school, maior anchor arouD affiliation, if anv. Submit material to: Daly Nebraskan, 20 Nebraska Union, 1400 R St Lincoln, NE 68588-0448. E matletteraOunlnfo.unl.edu. ^ Onlina t Editorial KOHcy Unsigned editorials are the opinions of the Fa* 2000 Daily Nebraskan. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nebraska-Lincoin, its employees, its student body or the Univeraty of Nebraska Board of Regents. A column is solely the opinion of its author a cartoon is solely the opinion of its artist The Board of Regents acts as publeher of the Daily Nebraskan; pot cy is set by the Oafly Nebraskan Edtorial Board. The UNL Pubflcabons Boarcl, established by the regents, atfoervteae the production of the paper. Aocordng to polcy set by the regents, reaponei b*y for the adRorial content of the newspaper lee solely in the hands of Its employees. * * * W k. /^ujEuTwea / -ruem NU BPSILON.’ \ l I’VE GOT OWE THING- J i A-^To yy To /XMAyTWefisrSHoTS \ / KT?eoPl£, but PTi&ST \ I-DON’T HIDE BBH/ND A J \VEiL of anonym ny/ / > wai *thfta nu efsiuN is a surbt mtjBonrt iwr occasionally rueusHFS a Neusienm i&r ^ckon tnm gkeek houses ANDT&tT1HSA FANTASY ofWMr AjJH-CNtSBlSVH- ANH& WflH «&. Web she communicates Four years ago, the Sheldon Art Gallery estab lished a Web site for die specific purpose of engaging and interacting with communities of educators and students through the gallery's significant permanent collection. What we have discovered is that our Web site is an important means by which we communicate visually our identity and our mission. It is from this perspective that I applaud UNL’s redesigned Web site Too many university sites func tion as static inventories of “basic information" and decorated with die requisite “campus” photograph of suitably “suburban, middle-class," sweatshirt-clad undergrads in an artificial “conversation." A university is not a collection of picturesque buildings on a tranquil campus. It is a dynamic com munity of teachers and learners, working together through dialogue and debate for the advancement and pursuit of knowledge. UNLfc new site actually visually and conceptually communicates die presence of a dynamic and diverse educational community. In fact, the new Web site now affirms rather than undermines UNLs strategic agen da and other recent institutional initiatives that are intended to place the university in the forefront of land-grant institutions. Indeed, the new Web site even makes much more accessible the very documents that lay out this agen da. Moreover, the new site also affirms the important role that die Sheldon Art Gallery and the other signifi cant museums on this campus play in the UNL com munity. The Sheldon’s Web site was easily accessible from the main site’s welcome page. This is not insignificant because most universities bury their museums so deeply into their Web site (if they are there at all) that access is extremely difficult and, if nothing else, communicates to the visitor that the museum plays litde role in its intellectual life. In fact, UNLsV\feb site goes a step further and inte grates details of important works of art from the Sheldon's collection throughout the site. If UNL is serious about its desire to be one of the finest land-grant universities in the nation, it has suc ceeded at least in visualizing a dynamic learning com munity, where teaching, research and service are at the foundation and the arts and humanities play a fundamental role. What remains to be seen is whether UNL can ful fill in reality what it communicates virtually. Daniel A. Siedell (Glass of’89) curator Sheldon Manorial Art Gallery Digesting the wrath of T I interrupt my self-aware discovery to spread cheer and thanks on this turkey-filled week Here in the eating disorder clinic, the idea of a Thanksgiving dinner has been mougntnmy planned, uur -1 superiors have correctly adju- petaluma dicated that the very onus of a Watson day solely centered on food would be too much for this gaggle of women, who have mirrored Thanksgiving's idea and used transference to apply it to every single day, all of that day, then its night, too. So we’re having T-day, as I like to call it a few days early. It keeps in step with the idea of girls like us wolf ing down before we get the main meal, which of course we’d daintily turn down when it came about Mommy Nadia was the professional at this act, deferring in restaurants to her suitor, who would inevitably pick up the notion that she wanted to eat small Men, occasionally, deserve more credit than we give them. Our T-day is not like your T-day if yours has the works that most assuredly includes: The T, otherwise known as turkey, is that large, steaming pile of juices that tastes so pangy against the back of throat drat you eat it once a year. Notice, too, that because of all other foods that go along with T-day, you never actually consume as much T as you initially think, and, oftentimes, you never consume all the T that was originally plopped on the plate. More often than not, the plated T never looks as tantalizing as the T yet left on the serving platter, which looks juicier and more finely curved than theT before you. Then, as you draw thatT closer, you recog nize it, in fact, is the same T that you have on your plate, and you immediately get dissatisfied with the Monet-like quality of all the baked T. So then, you turn to other foods like: Potatoes, which are steamed and mashed to the point that they become increasingly difficult to throw up. Or green beans, which are preferably in a Funyun casserole with onion water and cheap, clumpy cheese, so greasy and slimy that they make me think of worms in mud, sliming all over the grass that I’m about to pick up and tweeze in my mouth. Sometimes, the worms seem as though they are defecating all over the grass, even though I am not sure that worms actually defecate, or just run the dirt all the way through their system so that it comes out cleaner than it was before, under which case the dirt would be about as safe as it ever was going to be. Or stuffing, your mother's or grandmother’s col lection of bread and other food too inedible to eat by its lonesome so it arrives in the stuffing. I believe that it is entirely possible that supermarket folks put out the most intestinal sausage they can find, I mean the absolute ground-up snout of the pig (or of the cow, if one prefer to clog their heart with beef), near this hol iday so that it can be sold and simultaneously recog nized as the worst sausage, and therefore put into the stuffing as yum-yum filler meat Cranberry sauce, which I was taught at a young age exactly resembled the hardened blood extract of a giant South American spider. The live blood, for any one who may be interested, is most like tomato soup without the milk, which then hardens and darkens into cranberry sauce. The hardening process, I have been told, lends to die darkening, hence the coloring change. That tray of shit, with all die shit on it, which varies from family to family, and typically contains the most fattening-per-capita foods that the world has ever seen and will only see on T-day. Like those ground-up deviled eggs that could actually double as nuggets of certain pulmonary death if 20 are consumed. Or the food version of the bulbous vagina - the olive, which taunts with its ability to make feet explode. This shit tray is key, quite key really, because it serves as the alternative to the T, which has already dissatisfied you, and now serves to stare back at you in anger, because it is T-day, and you bought this hunk of T meat instead of a big roasting chicken. And now, frightful eater, you have been forced to eat it What the shit tray does is give an excuse, really, to keep lifting from it before and during the main meal, and thus turn the T away by using the excuse that the shit tray did you in. Parents enjoy scolding their chil dren for this, as my mother did to me, when, in fact we only learn from watching them as they are attempting to escape the wrath ofT on an empty. Then, of course, there is dessert, which for a girl like me, trumps all that has come before it by simply being called dessert and having a desserty item upon it like chocolate sauce. Like, say, you take a foul piece of potted meat. Douse this in chocolate sauce, and I am more excited about this supposed dessert than I was the T or the stuffing, which had foul ground-up snout in it anyway. I understand that for some un-petaluma reason, pumpkin has been included in the dessert items onT day and thus can only be saved by whipped cream. We blind ourselves to the reality of pumpkin, or PMP as I like to call it Has one after scooping out all the goop that is in the Halloween PMP considered eating that PMP? And yet toss some fake syrup into the mix and drudge it down into the powder, and one is ready to dive in. Much worse is the mince meat the foulest collec tion ofyucky nuts and fruits thrown in a conglomera tion. It’s worst than trail mix-it’s trail mix ground-up into semi-size chunks. Others attempt to save it with those giant chocolate chips. Why doesn’t one soul think of what I and Nads (and apparently jayme) used to in our T heydays? Pure chocolate. Like take chocolate chips, melt them and create a paste that you can drink out of the short glass. It comes up amazingly fast when it comes up, which is the essential goal of the entire process. Here in the clinic, T-day will include some health vitamins, fruits and for those who are truly brave and entirely cured, which is not possible, a small T basting in its juices on the yonder table. There will be no dessert as this might create a wave of binge and purge this world has not yet seea No stuffing, no PMP, no potatoes. No dried up blood. No games. No options. No obsessing. No con trol, no control whatsoever because you only get that when there seems to be no control. Here, we are not even presented with attacking the T-day foods and then succumbing to hypocrisy and devouring them. No viable alternatives. No fun. No eating disorder. I suppose, in my dark logic, that this is die point w V — After turkey, ignore your wallet's plea “America has more shopping malls than high schools -sign held by a protester on Buy Nothing Day, the day after Thanksgiving. KaiWI As I think Rmum back to my child- ^m hood, I remem ber - besides snakes eating my first brother, my father dressing like a woman (when he thought I was sleep ing) and my mom punching my 10“ birthday cake with her fist-going to the mall the day after Thanksgiving. This is, after all, the biggest shopping day of die year. Back to childhood. Not just any mall did I grace with my presence but the Scottsbluff mall 45 minutes and 16 beers away. I didn't go so much to spend qual ity time with my mother, which she was always pressuring me to do (It's like, go find some friends your own age, Ma.), but after she offered to buy my love, I went happily to accumulate stuff that I wanted, not needed. “Spend time with loved ones rather than money on them, was the message. Ultimately, security guards grew wise to the nature of these non-consumer activi ties and most BND (Buy Nothing Day) crews were asked to leave.” ~adbusters.org Of course, it’s so hard in this day and age to discern between “want” and “need” when that plastic thingy on your mantle breaks and it’s imperative to replace it ASAE The junk is there for your eyes to sift through, and you have enough money just burning a whole in your wallet, sooooo screw charity, I need my 20th pair of shoes. My CDs need a rack to put them in; I need a few more CDs to fill this new rack. I need a new bedspread because my Strawberry Shortcake and the Muffin Man one was so '94, and of course I need plastic bins of all sizes to fit all of my other crap at home into. When the crap is slovenly placed in the bins where it can’t be seen, I’ll have to buy more crap to put on top of them. And thus, the cycle continues. “Sensing the urgency of the moment, many have chosen to cast their vote against a ‘global economy’duds running us all out of our resources.” -adbusters.org Because Kimball is somewhat dry and boring, void of feeling and a theater, Mom and I would go to this Mecca known as Scottsbluff and bond. You know, covalent style. We shared everything on these jour neys - laughter, stories, beer (usually 16 as mentioned above) - and when we finally arrived in Scottsbluff we felt we could breathe once again, despite the overbearing odor of rotten eggs not because of the overabundance of excess gas the patrons of Scottsbluff produce but the sugar beet factory. Back on track, I remember looking around the mall, a tear running down my porcelain cheek in awe of the mil lions of glistening stores with plastic people looking at mannequins’ with the latest trends. “In America, Buy Nothing Day played out in some of the nation’s last remaining public spaces - its malls.” -adbusters.org Now in college, nothing has changed. I love shopping malls and all their wonderful scenes. Why just last week a sense of urgency (or was that my herpes) ran through my body, and I felt like my cheap, simple, white Hanes T-shirt was no longer good enough in the eyes of the expensive, simple, white Structure T-shirt that was mocking my hard-earned stains and holes, promising that this T-shirt would produce elite stains and holes. I bought it; my wallet screamed. Then, I looked at my newly pur chased high-class white T-shirt, and I wanted more. The virus was hitting me full force. I tried to tell myself that I don't need anything else, but “want" told “need” to shut its ugly face. As I looked down at my father’s jeans I was wearing (hand-me downs in high school), I thought I might need a new J.Crew pant suit, or an LLBean sweater. “A mere 20 percent of the earth’s pop ulation uses 80 percent of its natural resources. Our overconsumption is killing the planet" -adbusters.org I told myself to wait until this Friday when everyone who’s anyone will be at the mall fighting to get the last Sony PlayStation 2, and I’ll dodge into the Gap to get my very own sweatshop-made sweatshirt Since the holidays are for giving, I will sort out my old junk, making way for the new and give it to Goodwill After all, not everyone can afford to shop at the mall and consciously take part in the most wonderful day of the year. These people must either be poor or very un-American.