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

Fear mongering is my anti-drug

Like most first-years coming to Georgetown, I had a difficult time adjusting to college life. I was nervous about making new friends and being in a different environment. I was beset by problems and self-doubt; my parents had just been brutally murdered and, worst of all, I was fat.

By the September 18, 2003

Voices

The great Bengali monsoon wedding

There is a scene in Mira Nair’s film, Monsoon Wedding, where the bridegroom asks his fianc?, handpicked by his parents, about the odd similarity between an arranged marriage and a “love match?” “Well, how much more risky can this arranged marriage thing be from meeting one night in a noisy and smoky bar and hooking up?” he asks.

By the September 18, 2003

Voices

Letter to the Editor

I want to congratulate Rob Anderson and Mike DeBonis on their centerfold article on the Southwest Quadrangle (“Our campus, our space,” Cover, Sept. 11). It is well written and shows considerable knowledge of architecture. And I laughed out loud when I read, “If God is in the architectural details, Georgetown lost its faith long ago.

By the September 18, 2003

Voices

The war on sharing

VOICES BY DAVE STROUP This Tuesday signified a landmark victory for copyright integrity and intellectual property security worldwide. The Recording Industry Association of America settled with Brianna LaHara, a resident of a Manhattan housing project. Like many who fall between the cracks of society and turn to crime, LaHara led a double life. By day, she attended middle school and was on the honor roll. By night, she was one of the nation’s most wanted music pirates.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Letter to the Editor

I find it ironic that Dave Stroup’s Sept. 4 article “D.C. on Speed” appears in the same issue as an article regarding an injury to a fellow student due to a careless and speeding driver (“Student hit by Mercedes SLK,” News). While I take issue with Stroup’s factually and legally unfounded assertion that Attorney General Ashcroft is hiding “cameras in smoke detectors,” it is his closing editorialization-”the system is flawed”-that is inappropriate in a news article.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Correction

In “A boathouse at last?” (Cover, Sept. 4), the statement, “Various planning and historic preservation groups, such as the Old Georgetown Board, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the Georgetown Waterfront Commission and the National Capital Planning Commission, gave their enthusiastic approval to the boathouse plans,” is incorrect.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Our worsening body image

Cultural elites-and by elites I basically mean yuppies-love to compete. Some might say that’s why they’re rich. You go to Georgetown, so you’ve probably noticed this. They compete for everything. Schools, grades, clothes, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, rings, rocks, cars, apartments, starter mansions, pets, children, and finally schools for their children.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Dumb and Dubya

The President of the United States, George W. Bush, is not blessed with “darn good intelligence,” and I’m not talking about the CIA reports he was given. That’s right, he is not a smart man. The most common reaction to the above assertion goes something like this: “That’s not true.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Gone and forgotten

Jon Sarasuak kontatzen dizkio Andoni Egan?ari Ixil-en artean bizitako batzuk Zozoak Beleari liburuan. In all likelihood, you do not recognize this language. If you do, you are one of twelve speakers of Itz? left in the world today. The Guatemalan language of Itz? is one of four hundred and seventeen languages classified as nearly extinct.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

Celebrating the return of irony

After Sept. 11 2001, one pundit claimed that the stark presentation of good (courageous firefighters) versus evil (you know who), and its rude reminder of that seemingly forgotten but rather grave matter of “life and death”, brought to America “the end of the age of irony.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

Style versus substance

You’re a little hungry. What’s the first thing you think of? New South, but that was last year. This year’s first-years will never have to experience our spectacular old dining hall with its one-way-in, one-way-out door, long lines and dirty, sticky floors.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

More trite senior nostalgia

VOICES by IAN BOURLAND The rhetoric of official university statements, student-group campaigns and mass e-mails has always tended to ring hollow for me, as my eyes glide uncomprehending past assurances of the strength of our traditions and bonds as an intellectual and interpersonal community.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

I pus Saxa Gray

VOICES BY SCOTT MATTHEWS People still don’t believe you when you tell them you go to Georgetown? Maybe it’s the overalls and debilitating overbite, you hick. But anyway, the following list is a steady stream of nourishing conformity that new Hoya pups thirsty for acceptance can suckle (literally) straight from the teat of wisdom that is me.

By the August 28, 2003

Voices

Punish me

I used to get in trouble in sixth grade. All of the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t get an interesting reputation for it. I wasn’t the class clown, or one of the girls who got caught trying to sneak a bottle of cooking wine into the Halloween dance, or even the kid that nobody really paid attention to until they were stuck doing a group project with him and he promptly blew off doing his part.

By the August 28, 2003

Voices

The inherent merit of ideas

Consider the word respect. Respect conjures an acceptance of ideas and concepts, of allowing each to share an idea. Likewise, respect entails constructive criticism, even going so far as to (gasp!) say that another’s idea may be wrong. Tolerating respect does not change the veracity of the idea; it merely puts forth another’s opinion of it.

By the August 28, 2003

Voices

Stoking the engines of hate

VOICES BY REV. EDWARD J. INGEBRETSEN, A.C.C. I write this as a priest. It may be that the homosexual is, as Vatican documents repeat, “inordinately disordered.” But what is rarely noted is the surely disordered, even pathological, reaction to the mere presence of the homosexual in Church contexts. In the words of the old curse, dogs bark and people run screaming from the street when the homosexual voice is heard.

By the August 21, 2003

Voices

The she that isn’t me

When summer comes along, temperatures and hormone levels rise and clothing and inhibitions are minimal, which causes a temporary cease-fire in the battle between the sexes. Like many girls, I met a guy this summer, a singer/songwriter who spent his summer living in Manhattan trying to “break into the music business.

By the August 21, 2003

Voices

Let’s hope it’s genetic

Every summer, my family, including my aunt, uncle and two cousins go on vacation for a week in August. While there are usually eight travelers in all, my mom and my aunt, affectionately called “the Pearson twins,” in honor of their maiden name, run the trip with an iron fist.

By the August 21, 2003

Voices

Discouraging lunacy

In 1973, New York University professor Oscar Newman published a book called Defensible Space, in which he analyzed the spatial layout of a number of housing projects, mostly in New York City, and compared their designs with their crime rates and their level of safety as perceived by residents.

By the August 21, 2003

Voices

Not Nirvana, just clarity

I cried the day that Kurt Cobain died. That night, nine Aprils ago, friends and I lit candles and listened to “Pennyroyal Tea” as a meaningful, if juvenile tribute. I cried the next year too, playing my guitar as my mother consoled me, even though she had until that spring disdained Nirvana and their lyrical content-unsettling material for an impressionable nine-year-old, I understand.

By the April 24, 2003