Voices

Voices is the Op-Ed and personal essay section of The Georgetown Voice. It features the real narratives of diverse students from nearly every corner on campus, seeking to tell some of the incredibly important and yet oft-unheard stories that affect life in and out of Georgetown.

Voices

Teenage years in Switzerland spent drinking, not driving

I am 19 years old, and I don’t know how to drive. Gears are mystifying. Internal combustion engines? I know they exist, but don’t even get me started on the indecipherable rules of the road. The point is I just don’t know how. So why, in the years since I could legally drive, did I never get a license to do it? How did I miss out on the quintessentially American rite of passage of learning to drive?

By January 26, 2012

Voices

American system fails to provide educational equity

Isaac Newton, one of the all-time greatest minds in the field of physics, touched upon a fundamental truth when he humbly admitted that “if I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Because knowledge is a global public good, as philosophers almost universally agree, Newton was entitled to the combined wealth of human knowledge accumulated before him; accordingly, his addition to this wealth became the right of all men after him.

By January 19, 2012

Voices

Canada autism registry: Safety at cost of sensitivity

Recently, the city of Ottawa, Canada formed a child autism registry. A collaboration between the Autism Organization of Ontario and the Ottawa Police Department, the registry allows 911 dispatchers to respond to emergencies involving children with autism spectrum disorder. The two organizations argued heavily for the formation of the registry, saying that it would help these children receive optimal emergency care.

By January 19, 2012

Voices

Carrying On: Politics beyond the Hill

A few nights a week, I run roughly two miles to the White House and experience a brief moment of awe that, despite all that has happened during my time at Georgetown, the white walls still stand—untarnished, opaque, and foreboding. Every so often, I like to remind myself that I live in a city where leaders make decisions that resound further than a few city blocks. I will be the first to admit that I haven’t paid as much attention to the decisions made within those walls as some of my peers have. What I have paid attention to, however, is the image these leaders have constructed—who it is they wish me to see beyond the walls, rather than who they are within them. Just last week, I found myself lingering in front of the White House as men dressed in orange jumpsuits piled into a makeshift prison in the middle of the sidewalk clutching “Close Guantanamo” signs through the bars, in response to a promise made during Obama’s campaign that will likely go unrealized.

By January 19, 2012

Voices

Counterculture condemns copulation with contraception

In modern media, sex is often portrayed as a tool for pleasure. The cast of Jersey Shore doesn’t show love or commitment to each other, and Cosmopolitan only monetizes and sells sex as recreation. Instead of signifying a unique relationship, intercourse has been reduced to the simple sharing of a sensation. Even hundreds of years ago, philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized the negative ramifications of this most basic, hedonistic use of sex: “Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.” According to Kant, those who engage in casual sex are reduced to mere objects and insatiable animals.

By January 19, 2012

Voices

Even Georgetown students struggle with mental illness

As Georgetown students, we pride ourselves on being accepting of all those who study and work at our school. To most students, the days of widespread institutional racism, classism, and heterosexism are gone. Bureaucracies have been established, policies enacted, and we all live thinking that justice has overcome bigotry. And, in many ways, it has—when I’ve encountered racism, it has been with my distant, parochial relatives, not with my classmates at Georgetown. But while students would camp out in Red Square, stage protests, and hold rallies against a racial or social injustice on campus, no one will venture to openly discuss issues of mental illness.

By December 1, 2011

Voices

Faster-than-light particles may contradict Einstein himself

It was rumored that only three people in the world have understood Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it,” physicist Niels Bohr once said. Quantum theory is now recognized as the most significant advancement in physics of the last century, yet recent experiments in Europe suggest that neutrinos can travel faster than light, in seeming violation of quantum theory and Einstein’s equations.

By December 1, 2011

Voices

Carrying On: An N64 to fall back on

Over Thanksgiving break, my roommates sent me home with a request. Actually, it was more like an order: “Don’t come back unless you bring your Nintendo 64.”

By December 1, 2011

Voices

Political correctness muddles discussion of race on campus

A few years back, several incidents pushed issues of race and diversity at Georgetown to the forefront of the campus’s mind. In 2007, the attack of a gay student on campus prompted the formation of the LGBTQ center at Georgetown. In the same year, some criticized the priorities of Georgetown students when a protest on the alcohol policy received more attention than a vigil for the Jena Six that was held on the same day. In 2008 and 2009, students protested the Hoya and the Georgetown Heckler for publishing satirical articles that they found insensitive toward minorities and women who had faced assault.

By December 1, 2011

Voices

We’ve got 99 problems, but income inequality ain’t one

Everyone is painfully aware that the proportionate income of the richest Americans is growing. Like a cancerous tumor, the wealth of America’s elite threatens to envelop us all. As their collective fortunes reach critical mass, the moral fabric of our society will tear apart, fire and brimstone will fall from the sky, machines will rise up against the human race, and Nicki Minaj will be the last cultural legacy of humanity. Or maybe not. Unfortunately, the dystopian visions enthusiastically broadcast from Zuccotti Park by the Occupy Wall Street movement present a distorted picture of this economic trend. True, the income of the top one percent has increased steadily from roughly 10 percent of the total national income in 1985 to 17 percent in 2009.

By November 17, 2011

Voices

Teach for China crosses the Pacific, chalk in hand

At first the books came individually, and then there was a flood of them. After Tim Worm (SFS ’10) posted a message on RenRen, China’s equivalent of Facebook, pleading for help in procuring English-to-Chinese dictionaries for his class of more than 50 students in rural China, the result was a deluge of packages and messages. “I got a bunch of friend requests, with everyone saying ‘Thank you so much for helping us out,’” he said. While he and his fellow teachers at the middle school were amazed at the kindness and generosity of strangers, the feeling was very much mutual. Worm’s new RenRen friends appreciated graduates from top-flight institutions in China and America who were spending two years of their professional lives at rural schools in the Teach for China program.

By November 17, 2011

Voices

Respectful mayhem: a night at the helm of SafeRides

John briskly stopped the van in the middle of the road, allowing me to swiftly unbuckle my seatbelt and exit the passenger-side door of the vehicle. I raced out of the van toward the two huddled bodies lying on top of each other in the middle of the black concrete on P Street and screamed, “Is everything alright?” The first body looked up and made eye contact with me. “Yeah, he’s my roommate,” he responded. “We’re just … uh … wrestling.” The roommate verified the claim. It’s not every night I witness an impromptu drunken wrestling match in the middle of the streets of Georgetown. Then again, it’s not every night I volunteer in the SafeRides van.

By November 17, 2011

Voices

Occupy Towne

Whipped cream-flavored Burnett’s vodka in hand, two Jane Hoyas approach the cashier at Towne Wine and Liquor on Wisconsin Avenue and engage in familiar debate about splitting the bill—“I’m out of money … Buy you a fro-yo at Sweet Green tomorrow?” “Perf!” Unfortunately, the situation was not perfect. With $13 in hand, the thirsty ladies thought they had enough cash to pay for the vodka, but they forgot about one of D.C.’s more sinister institutions—alcohol taxes.

By November 17, 2011

Voices

Laziness: a college gamer’s biggest obstacle before Level 1

This Friday, Bethesda Softworks will release Skyrim, the fifth installment of The Elder Scrolls series of role-playing video games, and my GPA will subsequently plummet to unprecedented lows. Or at least that’s what I hope. In the summer of 2006, when The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out, I logged about 150 hours playing the game. When I say that I have been counting the days to Skyrim’s release, I am not lying. But there is an obstacle that may keep me from recording monumental hours on my Skyrim account. Since graduating from high school, I have become too lazy to play video games.

By November 10, 2011

Voices

In the media, not all sex scandals are created equally

Anyone who spent this past hot, sweaty summer in D.C. remembers the sex scandals that loomed large in the nation’s media coverage. We were assaulted daily by front-page images of a shamed Anthony Weiner, breaking down after a futile attempt to explain why he felt compelled to tweet pictures of his genitals to young girls across the country. If Weinergate wasn’t enough, accusations then surfaced about Congressman David Wu’s alleged sexual encounter with a teenage girl. And, of course, there was the infamous photograph of the Congressman himself in a tiger suit. Needless to say, Wu, like Weiner, promptly resigned right before the big U.S. debt downgrade, by which time we had realized that our nation’s politicians were, in fact, going mad.

By November 10, 2011

Voices

Moving in and moving on, finding a home on any hilltop

Leaving L.A. for college, I was trading a city I barely knew for a small campus packed with a few thousand other teenagers, which hardly seemed like a place I could eventually have the confidence to call mine. Yet somehow, when I walk across the Hilltop, I feel an organic connection with this place that I’ve never felt anywhere else. When I walk in front of Healy or purposefully pause in front of White-Gravenor to glance south across the panorama of the front lawns, I feel like we are one.

By November 10, 2011

Voices

Reservation under iPhone

Last weekend, my older brother came down from New York for a visit. My mom told us that we could use her credit card to go out for a nice dinner, so naturally we treated ourselves to a three-course meal at Georgetown’s quintessential gastronomic splurge spot, 1789. The restaurant was packed on Friday night, but I noticed a 20-something man sitting at a table across from us, enjoying his locally raised, braised-to-perfection loin of lamb … alone. His dinner companion was lying on the table next to his bread plate—an iPhone that consumed his attention throughout the course of the meal.

By November 10, 2011

Voices

Twuesday Tweetacular: dispatches from the hashtag front

A few days ago, a friend of mine was sitting at her computer, her face expressing deep, hopeless concentration—writer’s block if I’ve ever seen it. When I asked her what was stumping her, she sounded exasperated: “I can’t think of anything to tweet about.” Her answer surprised me, but not because of the importance that she was assigning to coming up with a bite-sized sentiment to bestow on her dozens of followers. Rather, I was baffled that she had enough self-awareness not to just type up her latest passing thought and throw in some number signs and words without spaces between them. From my experience, that’s what Twitter is all about.

By November 3, 2011

Voices

Founding Fathers fought slavery in their own way

As many have noted, ”all men are created equal” did not hold true for the vast majority of Americans until 1865, 1919, and even beyond. The founders did not create a republic for all; they created a republic for the few, but even this was a significant accomplishment—no other country had affirmed and secured natural rights in the same way that the United States did in 1788. In any case, this hasn’t stopped Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law, from categorically negating the legacy of the founders. In an editorial special to CNN last month, Kennedy writes that black Americans, in large part, reject Herman Cain because he esteems the founders as great men, who “did their job … a great job.”

By November 3, 2011

Voices

Troy Davis is yet another victim of a broken system

Troy Davis was convicted and sentenced to death before many students at Georgetown today were born. His fate has been sealed our entire lives. On September 21, 2011, yet another American man was killed for a crime he did not commit. Having spent most of his adult life on death row, Davis had to spend his last day in an agonizing battle. First the world heard that the President would not intervene. Then, the Supreme Court deliberated for hours over a stay of execution, which he had successfully received three times before. But he was denied a fourth. From his fatal injection at 10:53 p.m. to death at 11:08 p.m., Troy Davis passed away and became a pallid shadow cast long and low over the United States.

By November 3, 2011