North Dakota State University devoid of anti-war activity

This was a column I ran across -

I spend much time on the North Dakota State University campus. I am continually amazed at the total lack of an anti-war movement. No organizations, demonstrations, posters, fliers, nothing. I am repeatedly told this is due to a lack of a military draft. This is difficult to accept. Young Americans have no idealism whatsoever? They are here to get an education, a step into a six-digit income, nothing more.

NDSU devoid of anti-war activity

Michael Ross
Hawley, Minn.
Opinion - 10/13/2007

I spend much time on the North Dakota State University campus. I am continually amazed at the total lack of an anti-war movement. No organizations, demonstrations, posters, fliers, nothing. I am repeatedly told this is due to a lack of a military draft. This is difficult to accept. Young Americans have no idealism whatsoever? They are here to get an education, a step into a six-digit income, nothing more.

Driving by First Lutheran Church last Saturday night, I came upon 200 high school students sleeping out in cardboard boxes. This was to raise money and collect food for homeless shelters and raise awareness of homelessness in America.

Are these two a microcosm of the paradox that is America? We consider ourselves a virtuous people but show callous indifference to the indescribable suffering we have inflicted on defenseless Iraqis. A few stats and some simple math illustrate my point:

There are an estimated 2 million homeless in America (about half of 1 percent). We have spent $460 billion on the Iraq war thus far. This could have built a $200,000 home for each homeless individual. And what is the return on these billions? Since this is about homelessness, not mass-murder, we will leave aside the 1.2 million dead Iraqis the latest study estimates. The Iraq war has displaced (made homeless) 4 million (16 percent) Iraqi civilians. It has left Iraq’s power grid in shambles and destroyed waste and water treatment facilities. A cholera epidemic has started in the north and threatens to engulf the entire country. The transportation infrastructure is also in ruins, making it difficult to get medical supplies where they are needed. Making matters worse, many Iraqi doctors and nurses have fled the country.

Our young people cannot speak to these issues for fear of not “supporting the troops.” How many must die or become homeless and hungry so our troops feel “supported”? Perhaps we can support the troops by letting them come home and get on with their lives and become productive and not destructive. And perhaps our clergy and educators can teach genuine compassion and not politically correct exercises in futility.

Fargo Politics Forum

Colbert's serious joke

What happened
Political satirist Stephen Colbert has scored 13 percent in a Rasmussen Reports poll shortly after announcing he was running for president. But the host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report has named snack food maker Doritos as a sponsor for his campaign, a clear violation of Federal Election Commission campaign finance rules. Also, if the FEC decides that Colbert isn’t joking, they may not allow the TV show host to use the airwaves to promote his own campaign.

What the commentators said
This whole thing is kind of sad, said the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Politics is serious business. “It involves understanding things like compromise, unintended consequences of well-intentioned law as well as serving the best needs to the most people with the least negative impact on others’ lives.” It’s fine for comedians to joke about politics, but it’s unsettling that voters are “responding to a comedian more than others who have spent their lives in public service.”

Don’t worry, said Juliet Lapidos in Slate. Colbert may not be in this for long. “Chances are the government won’t commence legal proceedings unless someone files an official complaint.” But if that does happen, Colbert and Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, could be slapped with huge penalties. Colbert’s “only safe option, therefore, is to spoil the joke by dropping out before someone complains.”

“The absurdities of our nation’s campaign-finance laws have rarely, if ever, been thrown into sharper relief,” said The New York Sun in an editorial. On one hand, “one has to think the FEC would be embarrassed to interfere in what is so clearly a joke.” But on the other, if it doesn't get involved it is “conceding quite a bit as to the foolishness of the laws.” What Colbert’s run for President is really showing “is that money and in-kind contributions are overregulated in America and that a government agency is in no position to judge what’s satire and what’s not.”