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| Policy vote favorable but questionable |
Kristen H. Butler
Freshman
KB56269 |
To
The Editor:
“A recent national survey of the sexual
victimization of college women ... estimated that a campus with
10,000 women has approximately 350 rapes each academic year. Over
the course of an average five-year college career, between 20 and
25 percent of women students are raped. Larger numbers are stalked,
and a majority are sexually harassed every academic year. Fewer
than five in 100 rapes are reported. Of those five, only one is
prosecuted, and less than half of those are convicted. Of that one-half
of 1 percent who are convicted, only half serve significant time
in prison.” (Excerpted from http://webits3.appstate.edu/apples/life/Rape/stop_rape.htm).
This is why it has become the responsibility of universities everywhere
to both educate their students about, and protect students from,
sexual offenders. These sexual offenders hardly ever break their
cycle of violence, and their victims spend a lifetime trying to
heal the psychological and physical damage done.
Appalachian students’ safety is top priority, and I feel that
a policy to suspend sexual offenders for eight semesters (minimum)
should not only have been conducted long before now, but should
have been voted upon with none “abstaining” from making
the difference in the security of students. What message is sent
when nearly half of the Faculty Senate doesn’t even vote? Students
can only guess at their motivations.
The integrity of Appalachian depends upon action taken to secure
our society’s future. The Faculty Senate has cut to the chase
as to where Appalachian wishes the future to turn — however,
they choose to do so with a double-edged sword. |
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| US foreign policy: Putting us in
jeopardy |
Ben Lassiter
Senior
ASU Box 13583 |
To
The Editor:
US foreign policy is a threat to US national security.
Let me explain.
If you encourage economic policies that impoverish the world’s
poor - ‘free trade’ that sucks resources from poor nations
and caters to first-world corporate profit - you create anti-US
sentiment in nations.
If you support a racist regime in Israel to the tune of $4 billion
a year (more than we give to all of Africa) at the expense of the
well-being of the Palestinian people, you alienate and enrage the
entire Arab world and swell the ranks of terrorist sympathizers.
If you make clear that the United Nations will be ‘irrelevant’
as long as it does not concede to US unilateral demands, you alienate
your first world allies.
If you occupy military bases all over the world in places like Saudi
Arabia and South Korea, you create feelings of subjugation and hatred
in the population.
If you withdraw, undermine and ‘unsign’ international
treaties, you disillusion the international community - (undermined
the International Criminal Court, no Kyoto Protocol, ‘unsigned’
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ect..)
If you don’t show up at a world summit on sustainable development,
you send the message that meeting the basic needs of the majority
of the population of Earth, like sanitation and food, are not high
priorities for your administration.
We cannot expect to be safe in our country while our government’s
policies oppress, subjugate, impoverish and enrage the world’s
poor and voiceless.
We are an empire. Empires oppress. And empires fall.
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