4A - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, November 4, 2004 OPINION RIO 4w 420 MAYNARD STREET AILe Std guu & z ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 The tothedaily~michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JORDAN SCHRADER Editor in Chief JASON Z. PESICK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE 4TToday, I hope we can begin the healing." - John Kerry, during his concession speech yesterday in Boston, as reported by the Associated Press. COLIN DALY Tw 'c I)NDy The struggle continues, don your revolutionary T-shirt VIEWPOINT Two wrongs, rights, lefts don't make pair I Tl__ f__-- __.... TT .. _ _ _ BY AUBREY HENRETTY A mother and her three daughters were shoe shopping at the shoe store where I work a few days before the election. The oldest daughter - barely 6 years old, if that - was clearly the mouth of the group, following me around and grilling me for information. As I was measuring her youngest sis- ter's foot, she noticed the Kerry for President button pinned to my shirt. "John Ker-ry," she sounded out. "We're voting for Bush." I love kids this age. They have a way of dispensing with the bullshit - of saying exactly what they mean and calling the world exactly as they see it using the simplest and most evocative language possible - that makes me sing and dance inside. "Democrats, she said after a moment, "want to make things more expensive. So you shouldn't vote for them." Smiling slightly, I bit my tongue. Hard. It was all I could do not to give this precocious little one an equally simple and compelling reason not to vote Republican. For example: "Well, sweetie, Republi- cans don't think poor people should be allowed to go to the hospital when they're sick." Or: "Repub- licans want to take your privacy away." Or even: "Republicans want to kill families who live in other countries." But her mother was sitting right there, looking vaguely irritated. In an ideal world, I would have closed the store on the spot and bought this woman a coffee on the condition that she'd sit down and talk about the elec- tion with me. I would have asked her why she was really voting for Bush (surely there would be a more complicated reason than the fear that the Democrats would take all her money away), listened carefully, and offered a series of calm, well-reasoned, passion- ate replies in hopes that even if I couldn't change her mind, at least I could show her I cared and wanted to understand where she was coming from, that pro- ductive political discourse is possible. Instead, I bit down harder, stealing a glance at her talkative daughter. I was that young once, that blonde, that bold. Children, for all their bullshit-rejecting acumen, cannot talk politics because they don't have enough information. Adults - American ones, any- way - can't talk politics these days because they've been trained to spew childishly simplistic talking points and shut their ears to the opposition. I blame the Bush administration (and its media subsidiaries) and its polarizing rhetoric. They tell us our choice is them or the terrorists, and to me that is no choice at all. I can pick one kind of violent reli- gious zealotry or another. I can choose to invade countries that neither attacked mine nor threatened to - removing an odd dictator now and then, but at the cost of hundreds or thousands of lives - or I can love terror and hate freedom. No. I love freedom, but I hate the Bush admin- istration. There, I said it. I hate the Bush admin- istration for curtailing my civil liberties and then deigning to tell me it's for my own good, for fanning the flames of homophobia in the name of a God they claim speaks directly to them. I disagree with nearly every important domestic and foreign policy move the administration has made. I have very little patience for prescriptive religious zealots, and I hate that the leader of the Western world - the one with the most nukes, I might add - cannot pronounce the word "nuclear." What I hate most of all is that I am using the word "hate." And meaning it. Dictators and terrorists and religious nutcases and sullen six-year-olds "hate" things. I should know better. I should tone it down. People on the Right have the same problem, and if you think they don't, you haven't been listening to a word they've been saying. We get so angry we can't speak, and when we finally spit out arguments, our words are full of anger and spite. Saucy little girls we might have won over had we been patient walk away with their good Christian mothers (decent, hard-working women who may or may not believe that Jesus wouldn't want gay people to get tax breaks or joint health care plans) and by the time they outgrow their pricey Swedish sneakers they (and their mothers) will be out of our reach. We (and by "we," I mean intelligent and thoughtful Americans - on the left, on the right and everywhere in between) should all tone it down. More than should. We must. Because more than half of us have just elected a president who won't. If there's any hope for us as a nation, we have to listen to each other, to find common ground. We have to respect their Libertarian, Bush-supporting uncles, our radical left-wing ex-roommates, our gay relatives enough to hear them out, to want to understand and engage them. If this sounds wishy-washy to you, the spin has gone to your head. It will be difficult and painful and slow at times, but the old saw about walk- ing a mile in someone else's shoes hasn't done us wrong yet. Lace up and get going. Henretty is a University alum and was the Daily's editorial page editor and a columnist. I al LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Bush should push the" policies he campaigned on TO THE DAILY: Today's viewpoint by Daniel Faichney, Chal- lenges ahead in the next four years (11/03/04), was simply not logical. In keeping with the editorial mourning of the Kerry campaign (One-party state, 11/03/04), Faichney continuously insisted that President Bush "must" do this, or "needs" to do that. Seemingly, Bush must be John Kerry. Every line of this viewpoint was devoted to explaining how Bush should adopt Kerry's policies. A high voter turnout does not mean that Bush should abandon everything he said in his campaign and be Kerry. It means exactly the opposite. The country elected Bush (both through the popular and electoral vote), and his "responsibility" to the country is now to follow through on what he has promised to do and what he has campaigned in favor of. While I strongly disagree with many of Bush's moral values, the country has spoken, and it wants Bush. Nick Jordan Rackham Country should apologize to younger generations for re-electing Bush TO THE DAILY: The most heated election in recent memo- ry is now over, and the people of the United States, with a mandate no less, have spoken. Through the voice of older generations, they have affirmed the record of President Bush - and so much more. By casting their bal- lots, they have affirmed record budget defi- cits, the leading of thousands of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians to their untimely deaths with the threat of imaginary weapons of mass destruction and the guidance of an economy that could not even net the creation of a sin- gle new job. At a time when the youth of this nation are already facing massive disinvest- ments in education and an increasing per- centage of the budget devoted toward other generations that make up the same popula- tion - senior citizens - it is hard for any non-youth voter to argue the common adage that we are indeed the future. With a blatant disregard for the well being of our future, whether it be through getting the opportunity to have a good education or for that matter, a job, to securing our livelihoods by not waging unnecessary wars or sacrificing our genera- tion's fair share of tomorrow's gross domestic product through gargantuan deficits, to you America, I say this: I demand an apology for your approval of Bush. Our generation is not one to demand pref- erential treatment, nor are our demands unselfish. What we merely ask for is an equal opportunity in life, to fulfill our potentials and to do so without such inherent disadvantages created every day by this administration. It is not your generation that sends soldiers to fight on the front lines in Iraq, it is not your generation that suffers from the underfund- ing of No Child Left Behind and it is not your generation that must deal with an economy that is getting near record lows in investment, shrinking the job market by the time we enter the workforce. When the baby boomers were born in the 1950s, both social and foreign pol- icy issues were rampant. The majority of the population was still bent on the notion that two groups of people could somehow be separate but equal and the notion of Middle East peace and amicable relations with Asian countries seemed very far away. In 2004, we see these problems seeping through societal structure again, appearing once again to be the price our generation must pay for the repeated mistakes of the generations before us. Quang Nguyen Engineering freshman Coverage of football game too focused on Edwards TO THE DAILY: Let's hear it for the Daily's sports staff. Like most other fans who stayed the dura- tion Saturday, I revelled in the Michigan football victory all weekend. I soaked up all the football coverage I could find. Imag- ine my surprise when it was all Braylon, Braylon, Braylon. To be sure, every time a ball is thrown between the second "I" and the "N" painted on the endzone turf, everyone knows Edwards is coming down with the ball. But as Chad Henne and Spen- cer Brinton (who share the number 7) can attest, there are more than 100 players on the team, not just No. 1. The Daily I knew would have more balanced coverage, only to read the sports headline Braylon's late show (11/01/04) before I got angry, though I kept reading. Thank you Chris Burke for letting me know I was not the only one out of 110,000 to see Jason Avant's spectacular grab to tie the game in the second overtime and for showing that someone else noticed Michael Hart piling up over 200 yards with admirable second, third and even fourth efforts and even noting that Garrett Rivas was not only not bad, he was actually per- fect in the clutch. All in all, great coverage of a great comeback. It's nice to see some- one who actually knows football writing about football. Ryan Kotenko Engineering freshman al VIEWPOINT I'm a homophobe and I need a hug ... BY JASMINE CLAIR Proposal 2 passed. Does that mean that Michigan is full of heterosexist bigots? Maybe. But this year's election shows that people are going to need to do some more soul-searching in order for gays to retain thei r r- vhte NT nPnallinn nwill not nrmanat honest. And the passage of Proposal 2 last night suggests that there are many more just like me who sympathize with my position but are too afraid to openly acknowledge this out of fear of being tagged as a "sexist" or "heterosexist." So instead, they silently voice this at the polls. Pnar n arnao 1rean nn.T I A not hlipvp best. Not simply because it banned gay mar- riage (the Defense of Marriage Act already does this), but because it triggered an entire population's lack of understanding of the gay community and used it to prevent gays from entering into unions of any similar purpose including civil unions. People were