Friday, February 27, 2009

What does it mean to be "un-American"?



Last night I was watching an episode of the ABC hit show Boston Legal, when a character named Denny Crane, said, "You're either for the war or you are unamerican."  or something to that effect.  This reminded me of the Crucible and our discussion of the War in Iraq.  In the Crucible, there is a quote that says, "you are either with this court or against this court."  I have to say that I disagree with this thought because I do not believe that you are either for the war (in Iraq) or you are "unamerican".  What exactly does it mean to be "un-American"?  I absolutely support our troops, but I don't know that I support the war that is going on currently.  I want our troops to keep our country safe and I want them to protect us, but I do not believe that we should call people "un-Americna" for saying that our troops should come home or that we are not for the war that is going on.  Today, President Obama announced his time table for withdrawing troops from Iraq; this time table would be removing troops with all of them being out of Iraq by August 2010.  I think that it is interesting that President Obama has made a decision for how to handle the war in Iraq while only having been in office for a little over a month.  I would like to return to my original question however, What exactly does it mean to be "un-American"?

Friday, February 13, 2009

RUN AWAY!! RUN AWAY FROM THE...illness?


I am pretty sure that everyone has been affected by the illness being passed around NT in some way or another.  And it sucks!  Over the past few weeks, NT has been experiencing an extreme case of a cold/flu bug that has been traveling from person to person and causing mass absences.  This illness is pretty much a cold with extreme symptoms such as a very sore throat, slight fever, and of course the stuffy/runny nose.  It seems as though throughout the 3 years I have been at NT, there has been some sort of epidemic every year.  Freshman year there was the whooping cough outbreak, sophomore year there was the norovirus and now this year the extreme cold.  I know that I have been affected by the illness, not once, not twice, but now almost 3 times!  This is ridiculous. I know when I went to the nurse they told me that it was an "upper respiratory viral infection" (in regular terms: a bad cold).  I also found out recently that between 100 and 200 people were sent home a few days last week to add to the already 300 people sick at home!! Ridiculous??  I think that it may be just slightly ridiculous that so many people are sick or have been sick over the past month or so.  What should be done about this?  I think that we should close the school for a day and have the school completely disinfected.  I think that it would be very beneficial to combat this illness.  There was a Chicago school that closed its doors this week for a day in order to disinfect the school because they had a flu virus going around.  Why don't we follow in their footsteps?  I think that if this cold or whatever it is doesn't go away soon, we may need to.  What should we do?  Should we disinfect the entire school?  Or is this just an exaggeration?