4 - Friday, September 12, 2008 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@umich.edu ANDREW GROSSMAN EDITOR IN CHIEF GARY GRACA EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR GABE NELSON MANAGING EDITOR Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. The future of textbooks New technology offers worthwhile solutions s your first full week of classes comes to a close, if you haven't stood in the ridiculous line at the bookstore, you've certainly walked by it. Regardless of whether you stood in an endless maze of a line, you certainly felt your pocket burn when purchasing your textbooks. That burn was probably a little less severe if you bought your books online. Thankfully, that is an option the University will be making easier starting next semester. If the University hopes to help students in the future, though, it's going to need to keep up with changing technology. YouTube was being used by Islamist terrorist organizations to recruit and train followers." - Sen. Joe Lieberman (l-Conn.), responding to YouTube's ban on videos that incite violence, as reported yesterday by the Washington Post. Lieberman had pushed for the change since earlier this year. ROSE JAFFE E-MAIL ROSE AT ROSEJAFF@UMICH.EDU '~P0I0.r beam sdon'lneed !:1 <0 W~e q of- plerity/ T~ f'cl 6 6 0 Websites like Amazon.com and Halfcom allow students to shop directly for cheaper, used versions. To make things even eas- ier, many sites are emerging that help in the search for used textbooks, including Uloop.com and local upstart mtextbooks. com. Uloop.com simply connects students with sellers of used books. Mtextbooks. com, which launched this semester, took that a step further, compiling lists of the textbooks needed in courses and then con- necting students with people selling those books or offering them information about other options. Beginning next semester, the University will finally throw itself into this mix with the next program UBook. The program will connect with CTools and allow students to find the books needed in a course and stu- dents sellingthose books. The logic goes: If students know about their textbooks earlier, they'll have more (and therefore cheaper) options. Combine that with a student-to- student exchange, and textbook buying just got a lot easier and cheaper. Here's the catch: Professors won't be required to list the textbooks for their courses. They should be. In light of the other private websites like mtextbooks. com sprouting up, it is especially impor- tant that the University makes UBook the most trustworthy place to get textbook information. Besides UBook, which is an excellent pro- gram and hopefully will live up to its lofty expectations, the University needs to keep up with the changing textbook market. Because the University didn't keep up with online markets, a survey last year ranked the University 38 out of 39 colleges in terms of textbook affordability. For example, new electronic read- ing devices like the Kindle are becoming increasingly popular. This wireless read- ing device, which cost about $350, allows people to download books at roughly 60 percent of their original cost on average. The University makes a lot of its joint effort with Google to digitize all the books in the University library. Why couldn't the Uni- versity take the lead in connecting these two advancements to make digital text- books available? UBook will hopefully be a program worth celebrating next semester. But if the University wants to rank higher than sec- ond from last, it's going to have to be proac- tive from now on. A toast to Amethyst Since July, 130 university chan- cellors and presidents have signed onto apetition callingon U.S. lawmakers to rethink the nation- al drinking age. A stale issue, right? In our lifetimes we've all wondered why, at 18, you can serve in the mili- tary, vote and sit on x a jury but not have a beer. The Ame- ARI thyst Initiative has PARRITZ incorporated these arguments (and more) into its petition, but it has done so on an academic and professional .level. And it has a cavalry of univer- sity presidents on its side. So maybe it's not such a stale issue. The Amethyst Initiative wants us to take a closer look at the efficacy of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. And it explicitly doesn't ask that Congress lower the drinking age to 18. In other words, these college presi- dents just want to talk. Unfortunately, efforts to critically challenge and review policies like the 1984 National Minimum Drink- ing Age Act have been stifled by the explosive emotions surrounding this issue. For example, many critics of the Amethyst Initiative - including the national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and University .of Michigan President Mary Sue Cole- man - accuse the petition's support- ers of advocating underage drinking. Others accuse the petition of trying to shift the responsibility of regulating underage alcohol consumption from university officials to high schools. These critics' accusations are straw-man arguments. Though these types of arguments are effective in advertising, lobbying and convincing kindergarteners to share their toys, they aren't appropriate in an academ- ic debate. Then why do these arguments always win? Well, try arguing with a mother who has lost a child to a drunk driver. Or try arguing with a univer- sity president accountable to both lawmakers and parents. On campus, the Greek community experiences a similar struggle with emotional responses to alcohol con- sumption. The Greek system's current policy - largely created in response to Courtney Cantor's tragic death nearly a decade ago - is ambiguous, and its enforcement is laughable. As a past fraternity president, I recognize these problems. Yet most attempts to re-evaluate the social policy are met with strong and often overwhelming emotions, and these emotions do little to improve the situation. Imagine this emotion as a thick cloud of fog, smothering any call for rational debate. Well, Amethyst just bought a pretty big fog light. And they're shining it at you. What can you do? As a source of fresh logic, looking at the actual initiative is a good place to start. But what does it actually say? Nowhere in the statement does the petition advocate reducing the drink- ing age to 18. And nowhere does it say that regulation responsibility should be shifted to high school adminis- trators. Rather, it calls upon elected officials "to support an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21year-old drinking age; to consider whether the 10% highway fund 'incentive' encourages or inhib- its that debate; and to invite new ideas about the best ways to prepare young adults'to make responsible decisions about alcohol." Innovative. But incomplete. A possible solution to the petition's shortcoming would be some new research. Fortunately, research hap- pens to be the lifeblood of universi- ties, and who better to launch and supportnew research than university presidents. Many of the numbers are there, produced annually'by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alco- holism and the University of Mich- igan's Institute for Social Research. But so far the data has been incon- clusive. Critics have pounced on this fact, including Coleman, who cited statistics fromthe1970s when she told the Daily that some states' lowered drinking ages caused higher levels of binge drinking (Coleman responds to Amethyst Initiative, 09/04/2008). She also cited a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimate that the minimum drinking age of 21 has saved more than 1,000 lives a year. But how many students die each year from alcohol poisoning? According to the NIAAA, 1,700. Alcohol debate smothered by emotions. There is clearly room for new research. How do similar statistics, for example, compare from countries in the European Union, where most national drinking ages are 18? Or Can- ada? Or China? Ifyou've ever visited a foreign country and interacted with its adolescents and young adults, you quickly realize that the U.S. culture of alcohol binge and excess is unique. And it's clearly dangerous. At this point, there is little incen- tive to participate in and fund original research. For a university president to maintain the status quo of a 21-year minimum drinking age is, regretta- bly, easy. Ad Parritz can be reached at aparritz@umich.edu. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS: Harun Buljina, Emmarie Huetteman, Emily Michels, Kate Peabody, Robert Soave, Imran Syed JOSHUA BIRK / IN Real community organizers The Democratic Party and its support- ers have taken grand exception to the jabs that the Republican Party has thrown at the resume of their beloved presidential nominee during the past few weeks. In his viewpoint Wednesday (What isa community organizer?, 09/10/2008), Scott Kurashige stomped his feet in righteous indignation at those fraudulent, conniving, almost comi- cally evil Republicans. How dare Republicans mock commu- nity organizing? Community organizing, Kurashige wants us to believe, is something very noble - so noble that those miserly Republicans are blinded to its power by their own selfishness. It's above their char- ity grade. Only the most "politically active and astute young Americans" (read: col- lege liberals) can see it. And we should take Kurashige's word for it. He is politi- cally astute because he sharply critiques the Right. And he is active because he has lived in Detroit, worked in Detroit and taught about Detroit. Oh, and did I forget to men- tion the two books in progress? Well I, too, have lived in Detroit. I am a native of Ypsilanti, but spent the past year working for a non-profit youth work organi- zation in the Motor City. I mainly spent my time working one-on-one with high school students from the local housing projects. My work involved everything from helping the kids find summer jobs to taking them to foot- ball practice. It was rarely glamorous, and truth be told, it wasn't often fun. It was just, hard work. Along the way, I saw things that brought me both tears of pain and tears of joy. But my story is immaterial to the issue at hand, because the fate of Detroit is not about me. It is about the people of the city. I was merely a specter. I was there for a moment and then I vanished. I made no deep roots in the city and thus I hesitate to deign my work with any predi- cates that suggest anything more than a brief stint of service. I wasn't a "community orga- nizer" in Detroit, despite the fact that I orga- nized service projects to help the city and its people. I was merely a link in a long chain of people who had at some point decided to do the same - sacrifice a little in the short term with the hope of accomplishing a lot in the long term. I tried my best to be a good role model for a few young men and women, but I knew one year of inadequate me wasn't enough time to patch up all their bumps and bruises. Many more people needed to come into the'lives of those young people in order to leave a truly lasting impact. " A real community organizer is not some- one like me, the one-and-done sort. Nor is a community organizer someone like Barack Obama, who manages to squeeze in a few years of inner-city work before heading off to Harvard Law School. Kurashige wrote that the best community organizers spend their time "getting to know the people who make up communities and gaining inti- mate knowledge of their problems," while "empower(ing) people to express their needs and concerns." But this work, while admi- rable, fails to capture the essence of what it means to be a real community organizer. A real community organizer doesn't need to spend his time "getting to know people" because a real community organizer is one of those people. A real community organizer doesn't need people to sit around in a circle and "express their needs and concerns" because a real community organizer already knows what those needs and concerns are. Those of us who swoop into cities like Detroit or Chicago - whether it be with the University of Michigan or the Developing Communities Project - should be hesitant to speak authoritatively for these 'cities' inhabitants. Because, at the end of a year or two or five, almost all of us will go back to the cozy confines of Ann Arbor, Kenwood, Ill. or some other place away from the hurt- ing community that we so often, and arro- gantly, claim to be a part. Might not that air of arrogance be what the Republicans find so funny? A famous Michigan man once said that, "Those who stay will be champions." Such is the case with our communities. Those who stay with their hands to the plow, year after year and decade after decade, those are the community organizers we should herald. Their work is not funny and seldom fun. But you probably won't hear that from them, becausethey're busyworkingwhilethe major- ity of Ann Arbor is still flabbergasted that an ignorant conservative from Podunk, Alaska, would dare make a joke about The One. Joshua Birk is a Law School student. JENNIFER SUSSEX VIEWPOINT An unconventional message Pat Buchanan hailed it as "the greatest convention speech" and said it topped other speeches he saw live, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ted Kennedy. Begrudg- ing praise from staunch conserva- tive commentators aside, Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention attracted approximately 40 million viewers. It beat the ratings from the American Idol finale. Does this mean the information generation is finally getting with it? Given that most 18 to 25 year olds have been inseparable from their televisions since our neonatal days, it's not surprising that a group of college kids clustered around the television two Thursdays ago. The flummoxing part is that we piled into a pint-sized room without fir conditioning, willingly forsaking the usual Welcome Week frolic. Another bit of oddity was that I was happy to grab a couch cushion to sit on instead of standing in the door- way, considering that there were more than 25 people in the room. All of that because someone stepped ontothe porch and said two words (two and a half counting the conjunction): "Obama's talking." It would be simple to hypoth- esize that the reason why our gen- eration is tuned in to this election is becausethe Obama-McCaindebates are analogous to the first televised presidential debates between Ken- nedy-Nixon in 1960. Obama is eloquent enough to wow even Pat Buchanan. Similar- ly, John F. Kennedy impressed his critics and overshadowed Richard Nixon with his luminosity. Like Nixon, John McCain is a disaster at the podium. McCain gave a speech in Kenner, La. that was so bad, even. FOX News admitted it "wasn't his best." McCain has trouble reading the teleprompter. Many news networks juxtapose Obama's youth against McCain's age and turn it into a question of experience. Some challenge that Obama is too green and that would make him a poor representative of the nation. I find it difficult to believe that Obama would be more inept than George W. Bush who was born into Washington prestige. Within eight years, he has man- aged to plunge the country into trillions of dollars worth of debt, conduct a war on false premises and take away rights granted to prison- ers under the Geneva Convention - to name a few. McCain's years of experience in Washington, D.C. led Obama to remark that his opponent was so similar to President Bush that Americans don't want "the next four years to look just like the last eight" and "eight is enough!" Obama's speech in Denver made it clear that what's in store is more chimerical war-mongering as Republican politicians extol the value of finding new sources of oil by drilling through the habitats of furry critters in Alaska. McCain and his cronies have found another source of black gold in Iran. While anyone can address the obvious problems with a conserva- tive triumvirate, Obama has man- aged to succeed at this same strategy where John Kerry failed. Kerry couldn't get the votes of middle America as someone who married a ketchup heiress. Nor, will McCainif he continues to define the middle- class individual as someone who earns less than $5 million a year. Obama's talking, and we want to hear more than the standard rheto- ric that is far from the reality these candidatespurport to represent. Obama summed itup best by say- ing, "I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans; I just think he doesn't know." At this remark, everyone watch- ing Obama's speech with me laughed. And the people hold- ing "Change" signs waved them around in applause. Then, I started to realize that this is like noticing - in mid-chuckle - that the joke's on you. I'm reluctant to believe thatpoli- ticians - including Obama - have soft spots in their hearts for each of us, but at least Obama can com- prehend life beyond the upper ech- elons of society. You know, that "stuff" like being able to afford "medicine," having a "job," being able to pay "rent" and having a "home" with "heat." Jennifer Sussex is an LSA junior.. 0i LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor. 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