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Friday,
April 23, 2004 |
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Evaluate
all sides of issues
Jason
Ratigan, freshman history major
I wish
to respond to Ezra Hood’s column that ran earlier
this week by defending the truth and morality and by being
100 percent biased . . . I mean honest.
First, the failed economy under our commander in chief
equals 1,800,000 job losses. Pretty big number isn’t
it? But don’t worry, we created somewhere around
700,000 new jobs. We’ll my math is fuzzy, but I’m
not quite sure that’s growth. Let’s see, 1.8
million jobs lost, less than three-fourths of a million
jobs regained. Here’s a quick lesson in U.S. government
and the economy. More taxes means that the government
has more money. Pretty simple concept to grab hold of,
right? That money goes to job creation, helping the poor
and homeless and paying of a debt that increases by the
second more than many make in a year.
Laissez faire you say? I don’t think so! You see
laissez faire is a tried and failed policy. Remember September
1929? When the stock market and the whole economy thing
went down a bit — underestimation . . . yeah. So
if you like laissez faire, I guess you don’t mind
Microsoft having a monopoly on the operating system “industry.”
There’s no such thing as laissez faire anymore, the
government is in everything economic you can think of,
and that’s a good thing, people. Yeah, good idea
Ezra lets kick the government out of education so that
Texas can sink lower and lower with respect to other states
— 23rd in 2004, as opposed to 14th in 2002.
Part two, capital punishment. This one’s fun, especially
in Texas. In 2002, Texas executed 33 people, you know
who was the second closest? Oklahoma with seven. I’ll
let that sink in for a second . . . 26 more people were
killed in Texas by the government than the second highest
in Oklahoma. Of 3,557 people under sentence of death in
2002, 51 were women. All these minor statistics are from
the Bureau of Justice, by the way.
But as this was supposed to be a direct attack on Ezra,
I’ll try to keep it that way. I believe a main point
was the “activist judges.” He said that a lot,
the “activist judges” are “writing laws”
and “that’s what we have legislatures for.”
Kinda like those “activist judges” who said
that a small group of black kids could go to school in
Little Rock because it was their constitutional right.
These judges are interpreting the law, not making new
ones. When there are landmark cases, they are supplements
to the Constitution itself. Just because something isn’t
quite as convenient as we’d like it, doesn’t
mean we have to throw it out, and that is why the Constitution
is in place — to make sure that what we want is right
as well as popular.
Bottom line is this: Be true to your beliefs, don’t
hide from having a view, just don’t say you’re
being fair and equal when you have no intention of doing
so. Think about issues, don’t run away from them,
right or wrong. I know it’s in you all, if I can
get my roommate to listen to Al Franken, by God, anything
is possible. |
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