Opinion

Thoughts from the Georgetown community.



Editorials

DPS, spread your wings

The D.C. City Council is scheduled to vote next week on a bill that would allow extended cooperation between campus police and the Washington Metropolitan Police force. The bill would potentially allow the Department of Public Safety to extend its patrol to areas outside of campus that are heavily populated by students, such as Burleith and West Georgetown.

Editorials

Unfriendly borders

Exactly one year after the attacks of Sept. 11, the federal government has inaugurated a new, more stringent system for screening immigrants at some ports of entry to the United States. Immigration agents must now fingerprint and photograph foreigners who fit certain criteria for potential terrorist activity, criteria that the Justice Department refuses to disclose.

Voices

Letter to the Editor

Last week’s editorial on the upcoming World Bank/IMF protests, (“Wanted: Police protection,” Sept. 5), while supporting the easily defendable sentiment that safety is important and that everyone should feel secure, nevertheless completely misses the essential issues, relying upon the faulty premise that spending more money to provide more police officers and more riot gear is the best way to ensure safety and security for the city.

Voices

GUSA’s flawed tribute

If you walked around campus yesterday, you would have undoubtedly noticed many commemorations in remembrance of the tragedy of Sept. 11. In all, 3,025 people were murdered on that day, representing 82 countries. What you would have missed while walking through Red Square, however, were the flags of 68 nations who lost citizens.

Voices

The benefits of a full-on homestay

I was supposed to leave for England later this month in order to begin a year abroad at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. Yes, I was mere weeks away from gowns, tea, cake, cloudy weather and all of the other attendant debauchery of the U.K. experience when I made my decision to cast it all aside in favor of other pursuits, the first of which is a few weeks abroad at a little place called my parents’ house in Denver.

Editorials

Where are we GOing?

The promise of the Georgetown One Card was enough to make all Georgetown students salivate. Finally, there would no longer be a need to carry a separate laundry card, printing card and ID card, to get a stick-on barcode to check out books from the library, and to use a University ID number, which happened to be most people’s social security number, for Munch Money purchases.

Editorials

Wanted: police protection

On Sept. 25, thousands of protesters are expected to flock to the District to protest the latest round of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings. In the past the city has responded admirably, providing enough police officers to create a safe environment without being threatening or constricting.

Editorials

This joke is played out

Poverty and homelessness are a major problem in the District. According to the D.C.-area non-profit group Help the Homeless, as of 1999 almost one-fifth of the city’s population lived in poverty. Nearly one-quarter of the city’s renters could not afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Voices

Oh my god! We’re seniors!

Oh my god you guys, I can’t BELIEVE we’re seniors! This is going to be the best year of our lives, I swear. You’re all, like, my best friends, and there’s seriously no one I’d rather have fun with. And there’s so much fun to be had! I mean, senior disorientation is coming up.

Voices

Letter to the Editor

Ben’s Chili Bowl: A Taste of the Real Washington?

Upon reading your year-opening spread on leisure in D.C. (“New in Town?” Aug. 22), I became a bit disenchanted. Although eye-opening and consistent in format, many of the paragraphs written about local venues were written from an angle often less taken.

Voices

She works hard for the money

Have you ever had a real job? I mean, an honest-to-goodness clock-in-clock-out here’s-your-company-polo-shirt job? I don’t think you have. I’m disappointed in you. I was hard-pressed to put my finger on it at first. We all look pretty similar. Yet still, I found some subtle difference between myself and most of the people I knew back in the day?high school?and my new companions.

Voices

Requiem for The Madness

The infectious strain of Nicely Nicely Johnson’s solo from Guys and Dolls wafts haphazardly about the dusty attic of my addled thoughts. Driving nine hours straight. I cough uncontrollably for 15 seconds, gasping for breath and frantically searching my pockets for my inhaler.

Editorials

A poor first impression

It’s 7 p.m. You’re meeting your friends for dinner and you need cash for a cab. You go to Leavey to use the Georgetown University Alumni and Student Federal Credit Union’s Automated Teller Machine, but it is down. You run to New South, but that ATM is not working either.

Editorials

Deputizing the media

At the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, a bomb exploded, killing one and injuring more than 100. A hero was quickly made?a security guard who quickly led people away from the suspicious backpack containing the bomb, preventing further injury and death, was hailed and interviewed on several television networks.

Editorials

Did you get that memo?

Twenty-four Metro police officers have been suspended as part of an ongoing internal investigation into a slew of offensive e-mails sent between squad car computers in 1999 and 2000. Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer was quoted in The Washington Post as saying that the messages included comments such as ”’Let’s go punch this person,’ or, ‘Let’s go stop this person’ based on their race or gender or sexual orientation,” and that many others included vulgar or sexual banter.

Voices

Letter from the Editor

It is a classic trap that we all fall into: Working hard on day-to-day tasks, with our vision steered toward the future, we forget why we are doing what we are doing. We remember the past only casually, having noted our successes and our failures, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Voices

Holly: Best in show

Sometime before my brother and I were born, my parents made a pact that our family would never have a pet. They were too much trouble, my parents reasoned, and kids never took care of them even if they promised that they would. It always seemed so out of the question that I never pushed the issue.

Voices

A healthy portion of denial … on the side

As much as I would like to think that I’m not a fan of sappy movies, I am. Granted, my dad usually finds in me a willing movie-buddy when a new action film comes out, but I’d just as soon watch a Meg Ryan chick flick (well, maybe not Kate and Leopold). So imagine my glee this summer when I learned that my friend had never seen When Harry Met Sally.

Voices

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?

It was three o’clock in the morning, and after having spent hours conversing in French and sipping French wine with other students, my words in French were leaving my mouth in much the same fashion that boulders leave mountains. That’s when I decided it was time to go to bed.

Editorials

Gimme a U, gimme an I …

To most incoming first-years, the shiny new iMac computers in Sellinger lounge and on the lower floors of ICC represent one of the many novelties of university life. They inspire a vision of grandeur: They are part of an institution on the cutting edge of technology that constantly provides up-to-date means for carrying out a quest for knowledge.