4 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, January 7, 2003 OP/ED olhe A lbigatn :flaiig 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 letters@michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JON SCHWARTZ Editor in Chief JOHANNA HANINK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE One seldom heard an unexpected thought in the Bush White House or met someone who possessed unusual knowledge." -David Frum, former White House speechwriter and coiner of the term "axis of evil, "in his forthcoming book "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. "The Drudge Report broke Frum's quotation on Sunday. BONNIE KELLMAN MIXED NUTS Everyone's religion is better than yours AUBREY HENRETTY NEUROTICA You can't speak universally about the reli- gious epiphanies you failed to have during winter break. It's no ,useyour biases would plaster themselves across your forehead and people would shake their metaphorical index fingers at you for waxing philosophical without a license. So you decide to dispense with the authoritative English major nonsense and openly possess situation-specific and entirely fallible opin- ions. Risky. Though you come from a mostly Catholic family (meaning most of the people in your family are currently or were at some point Catholic), you missed church on Christmas morning for the second year in a row (the sec- ond time in your life) last month, opting instead to sit at the kitchen table with your grandfather (who is Baptist) and drink tea and watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" while your parents and your brother were at Mass. There are many reasons you might have stayed home. Perhaps you're a walking stereotype: a bitter (and guilty - don't forget guilty) raised-Catholic who refused to ruin this otherwise idyllic holiday morning by spending it in church. Maybe you're an athe- ist. Maybe it's something else entirely. Maybe you think religion is by definition extremely divisive and you're starting to wonder if it's worth all the tribulation it causes. That afternoon, you heard about a church- bombing in Pakistan, a couple of malicious or misguided miscreants playing God with explosives. You had been slicing carrots next to the small TV in the kitchen. The blast killed a little girl. This gavb you pause. You literally paused, furrowing your brow at the CNN field reporter, struck by the tragic irony of the girl who went to church to be saved and in actuali- ty would have been safer at home. What, you asked yourself, if you had passed on church because you thought reli- gion was inherently and often dangerously divisive and your family had gone and been vaporized by crazy fundamentalists without you, thus proving your point on two levels and leaving you sad and lonely (and guilty) for the rest of your life? It could happen. This sort of thing happens all the time, all over the world. But why? You are not naive (or bitter) enough to suppose that people would stop hating each other if only they'd resolve to give up their organized religions along with their cigarettes (except during finals) this new year. Besides, religion brings people together, right? Culture, tradition, inner peace, com- munity, charity ... it would be wrong to sug- gest that most religious institutions don't do a lot of people a lot of good. They do. Even religions criticized for having outdated rule books do their part to raise awareness of issues pertaining to their allegedly antiquated rules; they provoke thought and discussion and dissent where was none, which is more than you can say for 90 percent of the cur- riculum at your local public high school. Organized religion feeds the hungry and cares for the sick. If that's not reason enough to keep it around, what is? Salvation of course. Eternal bliss. Most of the world's religions claim to hold the key to ethereal happiness. In many cases, the only key. Back in the kitchen, you were staring at half of an unsliced carrot and thinking about that key, about the way people use "faith" and "reli- gion" interchangeably. It makes sense. Faith, defined this way, is devotion without reason. Religious people tell you that they believe wholeheartedly in their conceptions of God. If this is true, it necessarily follows that they believe any conception of God other than theirs is wrong. You can't believe completely in two religions at the same time. Even if there isn't (and there often is) an old holy text under a rug somewhere mandating the ruthless killing of outsiders, the null hypothesis is that everyone else is wrong. You will never see a sign in front of a church, for example, that says "The Way, the Truth and the Light ... we think." In your experience, you've met two kinds of people who are sure they know what hap- pens when you die: those who exude calm and those who exude the worst sort of arro- gance - arrogance that can manifest itself as smug piety, superior pity or violence. For all the -good religion can do, having God on one's side is the ultimate excuse to think and/or act this way. You don't know what the answer is; you haven't been constructing an argument, here. At best, you've set the stage for a question; at worst, you've wasted a lot of words. In either case, you're in no position to judge anyone. 0 0 Despite the related benefits to the homeless bundled into the 1996 ordi- nance, the city's current panhandling restrictions are prone to capricious and discriminatory enforcement. Arbitrary and baseless criteria about whom to arrest and how to enforce the ordi- Dirupting Engler's move a new low Former Michigan Gov. John Engler allowed petty politics to mar the conclusion of his 12 year tenure as the state's chief execu- tive. Two days before Gov. Jennifer Granholm was sworn into office, Engler vetoed House Bill 5467, a pop- ularly supported transportation bill. HB 5467 would have created the Detroit Area Regional Transit Author- ity, in an attempt to coordinate trans- portation systems in southeast Michigan. The transit authority, which took legislators two years to develop, must now be reintroduced. Beside the obvious benefits of link- ing Detroit's and the suburbs' bus sys- tems, DARTA would have created a vehicle for establishing a long-term transportation plan for the Detroit area. Metro Detroit's current system is a completely inadequate tool to provide transportation for the region's popula- tion. Once the region begins to consider this new transit option, an organizing body such as DARTA is essential. Engler had proposed the establish- ment of 15 charter schools under the direct control of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. After much debate on the House floor, the proposal passed the House on Dec. 13, the same day DARTA also passed the Legisla- ture. On Dec. 30, the Senate voted against the charter schools proposal That same day, Engler vetoed the DARTA bill, reportedly stating "that if force claims it is seeking solutions to safety concerns arising from panhan- dling, for it knows all too well the moral and legal implications of push- ing the homeless "out of sight, out of mind." This raises an important ques- tion: are the homeless actually perpetu- ating crime or are civic leaders simply unwilling to look at the poor? Under- standable, given that the image of a man begging for change is one not eas- ily forgotten from the comfortable inte- rior of an Ann Arbor boutique. DARTA for regional cooperation the region couldn't get its act together on education, it didn't make sense to help transit." Engler's rationale is dis- concerting and indicative of the atti- tudes toward Detroit that marked the Engler era. The governor's decisions to treat the city with kid gloves and exploit tensions between Detroit and its suburbs in order to generate politi- cal capital led to sour relations between Detroit and its surroundings. The charter schools legislation would have established schools in the Detroit area, which would have been detrimental to the public school system in the state. Supporters of the bill claim that students at these schools perform better than those in the present public school system. However, these charterj schools would only be band-aid solu- tions for the ongoing problems with city schools. Instead of establishing a few marginally improved schools, the state should increase funding in order to improve the entire system. Incoming legislators should garner the state's discontent about the veto against DARTA in order to gain support when reintroducing the bill. Promptly passing it again with the new Legisla- ture is necessary to get this authority off the ground. A failure to pass this bill relatively soon would hinder securing federal funds for the authority. This link would allow for a free flow of peoples and ideas within the area, which would help build a vibrant city and metro area. VIEWPOINT When you come to a forkinthe road ... go left Aubrey Henretty can be. reached at ahenrett@umich.edu. BY JASON PESICK John Edwards is running for president. The former trial lawyer has all of the assets that a presidential candidate should have. He's from the South, he's articulate, he has a nice family, he's intelligent and at 49 he looks younger than some of the graduate stu- dents attending the University. In order to win the Democratic nomination, however, Edwards will have to fight off a bevy of presidential hopefuls, most of whom have more experience in public service than the first- term North Carolinian. As the Democratic field begins to take shape, political observers have found a com- mon denominator among the candidates. The primary might as well be called the good-hair primary because most of the candidates have great hair. Edwards has found his way into GQ magazine, Sen. John Kerry's trademark is the thick mop on his head and Senate Minori- ty Leader Tom Daschle would be unrecogniz- able without his dark locks. While the fact that leading politicians have great hair doesn't surprise anyone who has ever seen a picture of John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, the contrast between this field and the man who just announced that he will not be a candidate, for- mer Vice President Al Gore, should make Americans think twice about the current mood within the country. While Gore has his faults, unlike these well-coifed Democrats, he is a man of ideas. He was not - and likely will never be - the natural politician that Edwards is. While all the men vying for the Democratic nomina- tion are extremely intelligent, none of them have a vision for this country that rivals Gore's in any way. And the sad part about all this is that it would seem that as the world enters a more serious era, the country as a whole would want to support more serious candidates. It must be some sort of twisted irony that the beauty pageant about to take place on the Democratic side in 2004 would follow the serious debates between Al Gore and Bill Bradley. The problem is not that hair is bad. The problem is that the country is at a fork in the road, and it is trying to take it as Yogi Berra likes to say. Neither the citizens nor the politicians who lead us have decided whether this is truly a dangerous era. In the weeks immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was facing grave dangers around the world and that we would have to make significant changes in the way we ran our country. We started by invading a country; then we were going to search the globe for terrorists. We were going to become energy independent. We were going to spend more money on for- eign aid, give up some civil liberties and we were going to be at a constant state of alert. The United States was poised to make major changes even if that meant sacrific- ing some of the cushiness of the '90s. After having to endure listening to Tom Brokaw and historians praise the Greatest Generation for enduring during World War II, the Baby Boomers, Generation Xers and even the members of Generation Y had found our moment of glory. We had found our opportunity to escape from the world of Starbucks and elliptical trainers in order to be another great generation. Then we lost focus. The president didn't lead anyone to greatness the way that FDR did. fIe told us to get back on our elliptical trainers and to keep drinking our espresso. We decided not to let anyone change our myopic way of life, and then we lost focus. We decided to invade Iraq, not to secure Afghanistan. We forgot about the dangers of foreign oil, and soon all of our grandest notions degenerated into a frenzy of flag- waving and patriotic halftime shows. We also decided to go back to out, old ways of evaluating candidates and shun the people with ideas. Even though we are told ad nauseam by the commentators on television that Sept. 11 changed everything, it does not appear that anything has changed. As a country, it is time to decide how seri- ous this world in which we now live is or whether we even live in a new world at all. We need to evaluate the current situation and decide how serious it truly is. If we decide that the world is a dangerous place and that our way of life is at risk, we need to be better citizens. And if we decide that the threat is not quite that imminent, we should work towards self- improvement anyway because it shouldn't take a grave threat to our civilization in order to find some idealism in this country. Pesick is an LSA freshman and a member of the Daily's editorial board. 0 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Augusta National debate is the result of bogus posturing To THE DAILY: Stephen Carley sums up his op-ed regard- ing the Augusta National controversy (Women shouldn't want to golf where not want- ed, 1/06/03) in one sentence, "I am no great golf fan." As his article is full of inaccura- cies, let .me clarify. Augusta National is a country club. The Masters is the most presti- gious golf tournament in the world (with the possible exception of the British Open) and is played at Augusta National. The controversytregarding the Masters lies with the fact that Augusta National approach in attempting to achieve country club reform. In suggesting that The Mas- ters should change locations, Burk showed extreme disrespect for theagame of golf, and alienated many golf fans who would otherwise support her cause. Furthermore, her attack of Augusta National reeks more of a publicity stunt that a true attempt at reform. Despite its all-male membership, Augusta National is very open to women, allowing over 1,000 rounds per year for women. If Burk truly wanted reform, she would start with Shoal Creek (as well as many other prestigious clubs) that not only have an all-male mem- bership, but also forbid women from play- ing the course. Women's rights in golf need to be THE DEADLINE TO APPLY FOR A WINTER 2003 COLUMNIST POSITION IS APPROACHING QUICKLY. E-MAIL YOUR SAMPLES TO E'DnPAGEEp/iD @UMCffDt/ BY THIS FRIDAY, JAN. 10. THE OPINION SECTION IS ALSO LOOKING FOR NEW EDITORIAL WRITERS. IF 0 0 THE BOONDOCKS APX)N ' f