Fury and sound

If you look at the political affiliations of Duke students on facebook.com, you'll notice a lot of moderates and apathetics, and it's really not surprising. It seems that some students who hold political views can't discuss them civilly to the point that others are turned off from the subject altogether.

Just take a look at first semester. When Bill Bennett (a man half of you had probably never heard of and the other half probably couldn't have cared less about) made his allegedly racist comments, campus walls were literally covered with signs, fiercely proclaiming that "We [no mention of who "we" was, by the way] condemn the racist statements," and "We will not stand for" whatever it was, and so on and so forth. In fact, one can still see these signs hanging around campus.

The problem is that it's not discussion or even persuasiveness-it's shouting.

Bennett's statement was an example of something obviously heinous, and his opinion really doesn't matter to me in the first place. But if somebody had sat back and just looked at the claim, rather than charging onto the warpath (on both sides, mind you), the situation would have been a lot better. I'm picking on the Bennett mess here, but I could just as easily go for Students for Academic Freedom, the sudden resurgence of the feminism debate, the rainbow flag nonsense-and that's just going back to August!

I simply cannot and do not believe that students at an institution such as Duke are incapable of real discussion. The problem is that the loud voices shout down the calm ones until both sides seem so radical that the mainstream students just say "forget it." Throughout this semester, I'm going to try to look at problems, at current events, at politics and at our school from an almost forgotten angle: objective common sense. I don't intend to obfuscate my own views-I'm an unapologetic classical conservative. But I don't think that will bother anyone since an average mature person is able to hear an opinion without gagging, even if they disagree with it.

Our government now more than ever has thrown statesmanship and protocol to the wind. Just take a look at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito. Senators Ted Kennedy and Arlen Specter, both former presidential candidates, interrupted proceedings for a heated argument Wednesday with voices raised over whether one senator's staffers had received a letter from the other's.

Our media has become so obnoxious that a comedian like Jon Stewart can go on a show like Crossfire and embarrass the presenters with his obviously superior understanding of the proper role of the press. It's a little disturbing but not at all surprising that Crossfire was canceled shortly after that appearance, while viewers are turning in droves to The Daily Show as their main source of news. It almost seems as though we have fallen into an Orwellian nightmare where peace is defined as constant ideological war.

Those who ought to be our role models are failing us, but I think Duke can do better, and I think most students have a desire to as well. Near the end of last semester I attended a speed debate sponsored by several campus political groups. Some of the questions, which I helped to draft, were slanted heavily to one side of the debate or the other, and we rather expected a bit of controversy and excitement. What we found, however, was that even those of us interested enough in politics to skip opening night of basketball season were genuinely interested in thoughts and positions other than our own. Instead of an all-out, knock-down brawl, we got something more rewarding: an exchange of ideas in a reasonable, thoughtful discourse.