4 -Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.cam
4 - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom
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ASHLEY GRIESSHAMMER
JOSEPH LICHTERMAN and ANDREW WEINER JOSH HEALY
EDITOR.IN CHIEF EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS 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.
Imran Syed is the public editor. He can be reached at publiceditor@michigandaily.com.
War's hidden tolls
Massacre opens talks of troops' mental health
n March 11, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly killed
17 Afghan civilians and wounded five others in what media
outlets are now labeling the Kandahar Massacre. Though
several of Bales's family members and colleagues initially expressed
disbelief at these accusations, new information has shed light on per-
sonal traumas that might have contributed to this heinous act. Clear-
ly, Bales should be held accountable as an individual, but that doesn't
address the whole problem. Recent reports of the events leading up
to the massacre - along with studies indicating that many veterans
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from mental disorders -
reveal the need for new measures of psychological evaluation by the
military to prevent the recurrence of similar tragedies.
The victims' families said that by accepting the
money, it didn't mean that they forgave the killer."
- Deputy chairman of the Panjwai district council Fazal Esaqzai said yesterday about U.S. giving
$50,000 to families of victims of the recent massacre in Afghanistan, according to The Washington Post.
One year after Fukushima
Bales's family was "totally shocked" by
the accusations, according to a BBC profile.
Most oftheir accounts suggest that Bales had
his share of everyday struggles, but was oth-
erwise a-well-adjusted man. The complete
picture, however, is less serene. Over Bales's
11-year career in the U.S. Army, reports sug-
gest alcohol abuse, a misdemeanor assault
charge and domestic problems that threat-
ened his marriage. He suffered serious brain
trauma in one of two wartime injuries. More
disturbing still, Bales apparently witnessed
a fellow soldier's dismemberment, the con-
sequence of an attack that occurred only a
day before the massacre in which Bales is
implicated.
As a result, the embattled soldier's lawyer
will argue that the killings were in part the
result of military negligence. Bales claims
he was sent on a fourth tour of duty against
his will, which begs the question: How many
tours are too many? With a volunteer force,
it may be difficult for the military to find .
the appropriate number of troops to fight in
Afghanistan, but Bales's past and unwilling-
ness to serve another tour of duty necessi-
tated a more thorough psychological review
than he received.
Bales's case has also opened up a large-
scale discussion about the effects of war on
military culture as a whole. If convicted,
Bales should be ultimately held account-
able for his crime and serve the full penalty
afforded by the law. But the flurry of cover-
age surrounding Bales and the Army's role
in his crimes shouldn't overshadow the pos-
sibility for renewed foreign policy discussion.
Huffington Post blogger and vietnam veteran
John Graham suggests that the blame doesn't
rest solely on the instruments of war: "On
trial should be any of us who accept war as
an unavoidable part of our political landscape
and not as the last resort to protect national
interests that are vital, immediate and real."
year after a tsunami rav-
aged the Fukushima Daiichi
uclear Power Station, Japan
still struggles
to clean up the
aftermath of
one of the worst
nuclear accidents
in history.'"
The Fuku-
shima incident is
an ugly reminder JOE
that despite the SUGIYAMA
overwhelming
benefits nuclear
energy has to offer, the repercussions
of a meltdown can quickly outweigh
them. That being said, it would be
foolhardy to suggest that nuclear
facilities around the world should
be disassembled and abandoned as
a viable energy source. Countries
can use Fukushima as motivation
to implement more stringent laws
to protect their citizens from falling
victim to a nuclear disaster.
By the estimates of the Tokyo
Electric Power Company, owner of
the plant, the remediation of Fuku-
shima won't be complete for nearly
four decades - a process that will
cost Japan billions of dollars. This
doesn't include the cost of displacing
more than 300,000 people and quar-
antining asizable chunk of acreage in
a country where land is at a premium.
Some maysuggest that a 9.0 earth-
quake followed by a devastating tsu-
nami are circumstances that simply
couldn't have been planned for. This
mindset would render the Fukushi-
ma accident unavoidable as well, but
according to a March 9 article in The
New York Times, that might not be
the whole story.
It seems that the risk of a devas-
tating tsunami had been brought to
the attention of Japan's Nuclear and
Industrial Safety Agency. However,
the agency and Tepco failed to take
proper precautions that adhere to
international nuclear regulations.
Implementing an emergency
energy system could have prevented
the plant meltdown altogether. Such
systems have been utilized in Europe
for several years now, and Tepco
was "well aware" of Europe's strides
toward safer nuclear energy. The
entire event may have been avoided
with a little forward thinking.
Such forward thinking has been
the catalyst for the United States
Nuclear Regulatory Commission's
recent policy changes. The NRC
has put in place provisions that will
require nuclear plants to have extra
monitoring systems in their spent-
fuel pools. They have also required
containment structures, which
would "help prevent or mitigate
core damage in the event of a seri-
ous accident."
Each of these orders has addressed
one of the shortcomings that led to
the plant meltdown in Japan. Such
a proactive approach by the NRC
will hopefully alleviate the concerns
surrounding nuclear energy, but it
should be noted that no amount of
precautionary measures can totally
eliminate the risks involved with
nuclear power.
That leads to an important ques-
tion: Is nuclear power worth it?
Right now, 65 nuclear power plants
account for approximately 20 per-
cent of the United States' total
energy market. From an energy
standpoint, our country needs
nuclear power to avoid becoming
even more dependent on fossil fuels.
However, there's no way to quantify
the cost of human lives that are put
at risk by these facilities. So what
should we do?
The solution that the NRC has
created plans to lower these risks of
nuclear meltdowns to an acceptable
level. There is practically no man-
made infrastructural item that
doesn't carry some risk of harming
humans. Everything from bridges
to buildings is designed with a cer-,
tain degree of uncertainty that can
be accounted for but not eliminated.
Engineers are trained to do
everything in their power to lower
these risk factors, but an 'Act of
God' - a term commonly used in
construction contracts - must
always remain as a possibility in the
minds of the designers.
Proactive safety
for nuclear plants
lessens concern.
With this, we must understand
that there will never be a totally 0
safe solution to nuclear power. We
must trust that the NRC standards
have lowered the risk of a nuclear
accident to an acceptable level. The
United States can't afford to lose
such a large contributor to its ener-
gy supply if it ever hopes to lower
its dependence on coal-fired power
plants, but the safety of American
lives must always be at the forefront
of the nuclear conversation. It isn't
too much to ask that the NRC and
their recent policy changes reflect
such a mindset.
Unfortunately, learning from
mistakes is a necessary step in pre-
venting future disasters - see Hur-
ricane Katrina. Yet, as devastating
as the Fukushima meltdown has
been to Japan, it has provided the
rest of the world with a warning
of the dangers of nuclear energy.
Hopefully, Fukushima will be the
last disastrous lesson needed in the
world of nuclear power.
- Joe Sugiyama can be reached at
jmsugi@umich.edu. Follow him on
Twitter at @JoeSugiyama.
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Column was offensive and
ignorantabout the Holocaust
they could have
imagine. Perhal
everything I've
War II have mi
"the Nazis stooc
TO THE DAILY: ry" because they
I don't make ahabit of writingletters to the way, murdered
editor, but Jason Jao's column, "Wall Street they thought "in
of Wermacht," may be the most ignorant and This column
offensive piece I've read in The Michigan written, and it
Daily in all my time at the University. It will- been published.
fully trivializes the Nazis, and by extension, Michigan Daily
the Holocaust. It manages, somehow, to con- of opinion on it
flate the actions of the Nazis with the recent able person cou
media coverage surrounding the financial should get ane
services industry. And those are just its most first rule-of-thu
charming sections. op-ed comparet
I especially enjoyed its final line, which the Nazis' brut
states outright that "the Nazis stood on the victims?" If the
wrong side of history because they couldn't inkling that the
see the forest through the trees." What harsh glare of pi
exactly does that mean? That the Nazis had I know that
the right idea generally, you know, but had a writer's next
tough time figuring out the big picture from between Big Ph
the details? Gosh, if only they hadn't been so regime in Camb
focused on those silly little details, like the
gassing, the concentration camps and the Alex King
medical experimentation, who knows what Businessjunior
accomplished! We can only
ps my history teachers and
ever learned about World
isled me, but I thought that
d on the wrong side of histo-
py lost the war and, along the
more than 51 million people
ferior."
never should have been
certainly never'should have
While it is laudable that the
strives to achieve a diversity
:s editorial page, no reason-
Id argue that all viewpoints
equal say. Generally, a good
mb I like to use is: "Does this
the latest media sensation to
al subjugation of Holocaust
answer is yes, it gives me an
article may not be fit for the
publication.
I'm looking forward to this
piece on the similarities
harma and Pol Pot's vicious
odia.
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MICHAEL SPAETH I
Poetry as innovation
Jao's comparison to Nazi
Germany was incoherent
ers and Nazis recei
things; consideringl
this description, it's
the Nazis simply t
attention for his col
TO THE DAILY: ing the Nazis to at
Jason Pang Jao's article comparing Wall when its done in Wa
Street bankers to Nazis was as despicable and as ugly on the pages
offensive as it was incoherent. Whatever criti- His article shou
cisms one has of our financial services sector, lished. Now that it I
appropriating the imagery of World War II the Daily owe the s
and the Holocaust to make that point is deeply
insensitive. Moreover, the only comparison the Michael Ambler
author was able to draw was that both bank- Public Policy junior
ved money to do immoral
how many other groups fit
obvious that Mr. Jao chose
o shock readers and grab
lumn. This tactic of invok-
tack one's enemies is ugly
shington, D.C., and it's just
of the Daily.
ld never have been pub-
has been, both Mr. Jao and
tudent body an apology.
We live in an age of unprecedented innovation. In the
past eight years alone, we've witnessed the emergence
of technological breakthroughs such as Facebook, You-
Tube, Twitter, the iPhone and the iPad. Clean and alter-
native energy are becoming more prominent due to fiscal
and environmental concerns about our dependence on
oil, coal and natural gas. Innovation is everywhere and it
will continue to define our lives in the 21st century.
However, most of us aren't computer programmers
or chemical engineers. So how can we contribute to a
vibrant atmosphere of innovation without expertise in
a certain field? The answer: we can all write poems.
Innovation is all about seeing the world through
unique perspectives and creating something new
according to them. Similarly, poetry is all about cre-
ating one new image, phrase or shade of emotion that
only one person can imagine and bring into reality.
Innovation is driven by imagination and a sense of end-
less possibility. With poetry, the sky's the limit:
One driving force behind the success of late inno-
vation giant and Apple CEO Steve Jobs was his artis-
tic sensibility. In his 2005 Stanford commencement
address, Jobs described his enrollment in a calligraphy
class after he had dropped out of college, despite his
knowledge that the class did not have "even a hope of
any practical application" in his life at that time. How-
ever, Jobs said, "If I had never dropped in on that sin-
gle course in college, the Mac would have never had
multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts." If
we train ourselves to view the world from an artistic
perspective, the potential for innovation is endless.
All other forms of art can facilitate innovation, but
poetry is the most manageable art form for us to explore
within the constraints of our daily routines and responsi-
bilities. By the time we've finished learning a melodic line
on our musical instrument, considering the next event in
a short story's plotline or drawing a picture that isn't ter-
ribly deformed, we could have written several thoughtful
lines of poetry. We can all write poetry because we can
all write in the English language - that's all we need to
write a poem that's meaningful to us.
There are absolutely no rules governing poetry.
Someone can write three words and call it poetry. A
poem can be simple or even silly. People need to real-
ize that a poem doesn't need to have groundbreaking
insight or be written in any particular way to be con-
sidered "poetry." Writing poetry simply trains us to
view ourselves and our surroundings from a unique
or unconventional perspective. Innovation is all about
thinking "outside the box" and poetry is highly condu-
cive to that type of thought process.
Writing poetry also leads to self-fulfillment. When
we create something, it feels good. The goal of writ-
ing poetry isn't publication, fame or approval from our 0
peers. Instead, it's about viewing the world in a new
way - your own way - without any criticism or cyni-
cism. It's an exciting feeling to be completely free of
any logical or imaginative constraints. This is the type
of mindset that we need to develop if we're going to
innovate in the 21st century.
An artistic mindset is critical for modern innova-
tion, yet politics sometimes threatens to restrict our
ability tolexplore our artistic potential. Last January,
House Republicans proposed to cut $7.8 billion over
10 years from the National Endowment for the Arts,
the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
Corporation of Public Broadcasting, even though these
cuts represented only 0.3 percent of the proposed cuts.
In November, the Los Angeles Times reported that the
NEA and NEH each received only $155 million per year
in federal funding and were "among the smallest agen-
cy appropriations in the federal budget." Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney also has proposed
to cut federal funding for several agencies including
the NEA, NEH and CPB by half.
While funding for the arts has faded from the
national conversation in recent months, we must not
forget their importance in the context of national and
global innovation. Luckily, a pen, paper and an idea
do not cost much money, so we can still create a large *
amount of poetry in the meantime. However, other art
forms require more expensive supplies and funding for
programs that teach skills to create those types of art.
The proposed cuts to the arts reflect a lack of under-
standing about their enormous contribution to innova-
tion, which is deeply troubling in a country that prides
itself on progress.
We can be the world's nextgreat innovators if we view
the world from an artistic perspective. Writing poetry is
a valuable first step towards achieving thatgoal.
Michael Spaeth is an LSA freshman.
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