Education should take precedence over other concerns
By: Fidel LeBlanc Unless you’ve been living in self-imposed exile from American society, you know our economy is in the toilet. Obama has made mending the economy his primary goal since becoming president. He wasted no time getting to work on an admittedly optimistic stimulus package while there were not many surprised faces when House Republicans spoke out against it, calling it “too costly” and “slow-moving.” As a student in an increasingly hostile economic environment, the first question I would ask myself is, “How will this affect me and my education?” The original plan, which cost $819 billion, was trimmed down by the House to reduce what they felt was reckless and ultimately pointless spending….
University would benefit from a needed veterans center
By: Ted Randall / Special to The Beacon Ted Randall is the Associate Director of FIU International Student and Scholar Services. Veterans are under siege, and sadly enough, it has become a national trend to ignore the needs of our veterans. Forty years ago, from the pestilent battlefields of Vietnam, U.S. service members returned to their home country to become third-rate citizens. The record is full of astonishingly abhorrent stories about the substandard treatment of our veterans: filthy, rat-infested Veteran medical centers, substandard health care, non–existent transitional assistance and the absolute ignorance about and denial of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sadly, with wars on two fronts, we face the same staggering deficits in veteran care and…
Statehood for Puerto Rico more complicated than it seems
By: William Sewell Fernandez / Special to the Beacon William Sewell Fernandez is sophomore international relations major and member of the Latin America and Caribbean Certificate Studies Program at Florida International University. In response to the Feb. 20 column “U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico eagerly demand statehood,” as a fellow Puerto Rican I feel it is my obligation to clarify certain aspects regarding its absurdly optimistic tone. The article erroneously claims that statehood is a realistic possibility for the island and that the majority of Puerto Ricans have conclusively decided to support it. The people of Puerto Rico have no effective self-determination procedure. The island’s territorial status rests solely on the powers of Congress. One…
We are not a ‘nation of cowards’
By: Matt Ruckman / Staff Writer Eric Holder, President Obama’s pick for the Office of Attorney General, won high marks for re-defining water boarding as torture. He then took one giant step backwards after his speech to the Justice Department. In his speech, Holder urged people to use Black History Month as a chance to discuss racial matters, ending with, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” Cowards? In the year of the election of the first African-American president, I thought that would be the last descriptor of America,…
Gerrymandering cannot be tolerated
By: Alejandro Diaz / Contributing Writer Art these days has never taken such a creative form. Drawings and renderings of mythical creatures such as dragons and other flying beasts have been sprouting up all over the country. I’m sorry to break it to you, art majors, but this is not a story on the latest craze in the art world. It’s the political one. New computer-based software that is being used to apportion voting districts has made the job easier for politicians, who have access to someone who can maneuver their way around a computer. What’s sad is that these hired map makers now have more power than voters and even politicians themselves, and the…
Peers face problems we don’t always see
By: Eric Feldman / Opinion Editor It’s halfway through the semester and I already know the one lesson that I am going to walk away with from these couple of months: never assume anything about anyone. The first revelation of this message actually came back in 2006, as I was still intending to be an education major when I entered college, and was flipping through television channels and saw part of The Ron Clark Story on TNT, where Matthew Perry played a determined teacher in a rough neighborhood. Perry’s character was frustrated by one particular student who never turned in work and always caused trouble, but when he went to the student’s house to talk…
