By Ross Beroff, editorial columnist
Identify as male? Check.
Grow up in the Suburbs? Check.
White? It’s complicated, but everyone just assumes I am.
Attend a top university? Check.
Privilege?
I was told recently to check my privilege.
Because I’m white...
We all know the feeling of panicking over money. Whether it is next month’s rent, a car payment or dreaded textbooks, it is part of the college experience to continually worry over expenses both now and for the future.
n the headlines of news articles and broadcasts, the phrase “situation in Ferguson” has been overused, as if to suggest that Mike Brown’s death and the protests that have resulted as a response are simply a set of circumstances that describe the condition of the town. It is my personal opinion that the use of that phrase represents the ways in which the deaths of black people have been normalized in American society, and the media’s acceptance of this normalization is what dumbfounds me.
On Monday, days after the Ferguson grand jury decision, the White House concluded its review of police militarization. The highly anticipated results are not what many had hoped for. President Obama has left much of the federal programs providing local police with military equipment untouched, instead making multiple recommendations for reforming and regulating the disbursement and tracking of the equipment.
Two weeks ago, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift removed all her music from Spotify, furthering a nationwide conversation about music streaming culture. Do services like Spotify and Pandora help or harm artists? According to Swift, such services neglect to give artists and their collaborators the recognition and compensation they deserve for their work.
The sleep-inducing term “net neutrality” instinctively makes me want to continue scrolling, close the tab or turn the page. The more I saw it and in my news alerts, the stronger the will to ignore it, but I eventually learned the unfortunate truth: the implications of this discussion affect every Internet user out there.
Huntington is silent. The icy snow mixture crunches with my hurried footsteps to Dodge Hall. I’m running through the spiel I’m about to tell the parents of prospective students coming to Northeastern on this chilly spring Saturday morning. My thoughts are momentarily interrupted by the balloons I pass by, seemingly out of place, tied around the fence around Krentzman Quad. “Well, that’s some show of pride,” I muse.
On Nov. 1, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard ended her life in Oregon. She made this decision when she learned she was terminally ill with brain cancer last January and was given just six months to live in April.
On Oct. 1, 86-year old Jean Davies died after starving herself for five weeks. She stopped drinking water on Sept. 16 with the hope of leaving behind back pain, fainting spells and other conditions that enveloped her body, The Independent, a U.K. news source, reported.
Insensitivity seems to be the criteria for the more unique costumes of Halloween, with this season featuring costumes like an Ebola doctor and sexy Ebola nurse, Malaysian airline flights 370 and 17 zombie flight attendants and pilots, sexy ISIS militants, football player Ray Rice and his battered wife, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson and deceased Michael Brown -- and these were just the ones that received heavy news coverage.
Last week, one of our peers wrote an op-ed questioning the effectiveness of fossil fuel divestment for combating the climate crisis. The central argument was that divestment won’t “even remotely damage fossil fuel companies financially.” The truth is, he’s right. The fossil fuel industry is a behemoth of capital and influence. To them, the fraction of Northeastern’s endowment that is invested in fossil fuels is of no concern. This is the most powerful industry in history and there’s simply no way we can break their bank.
