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

April Fools’ Hoya issue is tasteless and mean

A disclaimer on the front page of the Hoya’s annual spring joke issue advises its readers to proceed with caution. “Chill out, tight-ass,” it reads. “This issue is a joke.” Ah, so Jack the Bulldog didn’t actually have an affair with the West Virginia Mountaineer.

By April 3, 2008

Voices

Pushing papers all around campus

Seeing that The Fire This Time’s latest edition had come out gave me a strange thrill.

By April 3, 2008

Voices

Looking past the smoke and mirrors

Contemporary airlines have done everything they can to convince squirrelly passengers that riding in their jolly contraptions is virtually the same as traveling in a car. Southwest Airlines, with its uniformly perky staff, brightly colored planes and incessant “ding!”-ing has become an industry leader, largely thanks to the company’s ability to make truculent travelers feel at ease. Nevertheless, on March 6th, the F.A.A. levied a record-breaking $10.2 million fine on the airline for its failure to ground planes that had not been properly inspected and certified as up to code. And no khaki-clad, coddling flight attendant or cute cobalt-blue plane could change that.

By March 27, 2008

Page 13 Cartoons

Lying her way to the highest office in the land

When did misspeaking become synonymous with lying? When Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) suggested that she merely misspoke about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia, her statement was not an error in recollection, it was a lie. It is only one of many lies put forward by the junior Senator from New York as she desperately scrambles to save her nearly mathematically impossible campaign for the Democratic nomination.

By March 27, 2008

Voices

Promoting abstinence while screwing students

“For a while, I honestly wondered whether it was worth using a condom at all,” a friend told me when I asked her—a well-grounded, intelligent girl what she thought about her four years of abstinence-only sexual education at our high school.

By March 27, 2008

Page 13 Cartoons

Helping Haiti to help itself

The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere is merely a few hundred miles from the tip of Florida. What was once France’s richest colony and the first Caribbean island to gain its independence is now a country where people lack the basic amenities of the 20th century—running water, electricity and plumbing. Haiti is an incredibly beautiful island, but it has been afflicted and bankrupted for decades by despotism and conflict.

By March 27, 2008

Voices

Rebuilding New Orleans

My last few spring breaks have consisted of lounging around, drinking heavily and doing a lot of nothing. I was sick of it, so last week I chose to mix it up and head down to New Orleans with GU’s Habitat for Humanity group. The 24 of us were excited to get down to business and build some houses when we arrived.

By March 13, 2008

Page 13 Cartoons

The El Salvador Experience

What I heard at dinner on the first night of spring break was hard to believe. A group of seven other Georgetown students, two leaders from Campus Ministry and I spent the break in El Salvador as part of the “Magis Immersion and Justice Program,” and to kick off our trip we went to a small restaurant with our guide and bus driver. I was practicing my Spanish and chatting with our driver, Santos, about how much I was looking forward to the week. It was Santos’ response that took me by surprise. Rather than returning my excitement or laughing along with me, he became very solemn and told me this would be one of the most important weeks of my life. He told me that our group would be learning and seeing so much during our time there that our lives would be changed afterward. I found Santos’ statement touching, but couldn’t help but think he was being a little dramatic. I knew I would be exposed to different lifestyles and challenges during the trip, but it seemed unlikely that one week could change my life.

By March 13, 2008

Voices

Time to live up to Catholic justice

An institution has got to live by a code. That goes for Georgetown, too, and its Jesuit ideals.

By March 13, 2008

Voices

Blogging your way to the rich and popular table

In the space of a year and a half, I have managed to further the independence movement of a small African country. Am I staging a die-in in Red Square? No, I’m doing something that actually achieves results: blogging.

By March 13, 2008

Voices

A dose of reality and disillusionment

If I had to pinpoint the problem with the United States government, my answer would be simple. Me.

By February 28, 2008

Voices

Trying to translate the US political system to German

In the month that I’ve been working in Germany before my semester begins, I’ve learned plenty: what a plus sign in a phone number means, how to say instantaneous [augenblicklich] and to buy groceries on Saturday, since everything is closed on Sunday.

By February 28, 2008

Voices

Roadtrip: Seeing America right

Everyone our age remembers (and maybe even occasionally watches) the 90s classic “The Sandlot.” It had all the elements of a cinematic triumph: the backdrop of 1960s America, James Earl Jones and baseball. Plus, you had to admire Squint’s cajones when he made out with va-va-voom lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn after fake-drowning. The movie brimmed with great moments, but the 4th of July scene is by far the best in the movie, a perfect pictorial encapsulation of summer-time bliss, in which the whole squad gazes in wonderment at fireworks splayed across the sky as Ray Charles’ bluesy rendition of “America the Beautiful” swells in the background. The only thing that could have made the scene more quintessentially “American summer” is if all the boys, inspired by patriotic pyrotechnics, had decided to hop in a Chevy and drive off down the highway to where the setting sun meets the waving sea of wheat.

By February 28, 2008

Voices

Attacking American Unreason

You’re dumb. It’s a message you can hardly avoid lately, unless you’re doing the very thing that’s making you dumb: not reading. Georgetown’s already told you so, in the form of a 72-page Intellectual Life Report that says you study less, drink more, and “earn” good grades more easily than your historical counterparts did. Your degree, it seems, will be a testament to an intellectual odyssey through a University in a “crisis stage.”

By February 28, 2008

Voices

University fails on affirmative action

Fact one: there’s a direct connection between that college degree we’re all struggling to earn and economic mobility. Fact two: economic mobility has stagnated in the last three decades, mainly because it is becoming increasingly difficult for poor minorities to obtain a higher education, according to a new Brookings Institution study. And fact three: a majority of black children born in the middleclass ended up with lower incomes as adults, and nearly half wind up in the lowest quintile of earners (only 16 percent of whites face the same fate).

By February 21, 2008

Voices

Dispatches from fractured Kenya

“My friend, how is your Valentine’s like? Here in Kenya it is exclusively a youth affair. The seniors dismiss it as merely foreign culture. Still, shops are still colored by red. I wish you were near! We would celebrate together! Keep good, my friend. Pray for us.”

By February 21, 2008

Voices

Dirty rotten scoundrels on the ‘Riviera’

“You were dealing with illegal drugs. Tell me, as a [former] police officer, how that isn’t being a drug dealer?”

By February 21, 2008

Voices

Obsession doesn’t culminate in face paint

I have never been to a Georgetown basketball game. Okay, you can stop throwing things at me now. I watch them on TV sometimes, and I stay vaguely aware of how we’re doing, much as I stay vaguely aware of how much money is on my GoCard. I don’t have season tickets, and I don’t want to go through the hassle of finding a ticket, getting up early, and taking some sort of bus to the Verizon Center. I relish brunches in a mostly empty Leo’s, and the quiet feel of the campus when all the action is elsewhere. I haven’t lost my voice yet, and I have never scrubbed blue facepaint out of my hair (or at least, never for basketball reasons.)

By February 21, 2008

Voices

A Valentine’s card to the little people

Sunday mornings are sacred. Whether you welcome the week with mass, mimosas or Meet the Press, those first few waking hours are universally recognized to be a precious time, and barring nuclear disaster or a major sporting event, one’s routine should not be disturbed. Last weekend, throwing caution and luxuriously slow-brewed cups of coffee to the wind, I determined that my civic duty to the voters of Montgomery County, Maryland was greater than my ritualistic weekly reading of Date Lab in the Sunday Post.

By February 14, 2008

Voices

Don’t mourn, organize: ten years of GU Solidarity

The Georgetown Solidarity Committee (GSC) is ten years old this year. We are officially a Georgetown tradition; we were invited to table on Copley Lawn during Traditions Day. We’ve done a lot in those ten years. I’m not going to list all of our accomplishments in this column—for that, go to www.georgetownsolidarity.org—but I will tell you why we’ve lasted so long, drawing enough students to our weekly meetings to become a lasting voice on campus.

By February 14, 2008