Month: March 2019

While President Donald Trump was worrying about “making America great,” he could have been making American kind, compassionate, or — at the very least — capable of enacting and accepting change.

We’ve seen the headlines over and over. A lone gunman killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018. A domestic terrorists killed 58 people at the Route 91 Music Festival in Las Vegas in 2017. A madman killed 28 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

Tragedy strikes, and the world moves on, with or without you.

The nation watches on from a distance, offers its “thoughts and prayers,” and forgets anything ever happened the moment a Kardashian flaunts her newest body modification or shallow predicament to the cameras.

However, for the friends and families involved, everyday is another battle against the terrifying and sorrowful reality they have come to know. Some of those affected start charities, begin political movements, or simply try to learn how to live through the unimaginable.

Parkland prepared for the anniversary of the heinous act that ripped apart its community and pulled at the heartstrings of the nation. Valentine’s Day came and went without incident and Lori Alhadeff, mother of Alyssa Alhadeff, one of the victims of the Parkland shooting, said she was relieved.

“I’m like, ‘okay, we did it, we got through it,’” Lori Alhadeff said in an interview with Buzzfeed News.

Then, two suicides shook the community.

Sydney Aiello was a 19-year-old college student, friend of Alyssa Alhadeff, and survivor of the Parkland shooting. Aiello died by apparent suicide one month after the anniversary of her best friend’s murder. Within the week, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School died by suicide; the name has not been released as the family wishes to remain private.

In the midst of the two suicides connected to the massacre in Parkland, Jeremy Richman, father of 6-year-old Avielle Richman, a victim in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, also died by suicide.

These events emphasize the need to address the lasting effects of trauma. When the “thoughts and prayers” end and the world is tuning in to a new and different crisis, the survivors are left in deafening silence. The survivors are left alone with empty seats in the classroom where students used to learn, with empty chairs at the dinner table where children used to eat, and with empty spots in the cafeteria where friends used to laugh.

Aiello struggled to attend her college courses because she was terrified to be in classrooms. She suffered from survivor’s guilt after watching her friends be murdered in front of her. Her nightmares began the day her classroom became a war zone and since that day a different war exploded within her.

The real tragedy is that nothing is being done.

New Zealand had its first shooting since 1997 on March 15. Fifty people died at Christchurch Mosque. One week later, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the ban of semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles. The United States has had 15 mass shootings since 2007 and has yet to pass anything.

Our nation was lost the day politicians refused to amend gun laws after 20 children died. Our nation was lost the day politicians prohibited change after 58 people were senselessly killed. Our nation was lost the day politicians blocked revisions after 17 teenagers lost their lives. Our nation is lost, our politicians are wrong, and something must be done.

Reach out to your representatives and tell them enough is enough. Tell them it is unacceptable for military-level weapons to be in the hands of civilians, and it is increasingly important to adapt the means in which people can acquire fire arms. Tell them times are changing and so should the background checks. Tell them it is unacceptable for countless children, students and Americans to have died without a second thought.

And while you continue to fight and wait for a response, check in on your loved ones. Check in with your friend who tweets affirmations each morning and with the guy in class who sits by the door and doesn’t say a word. Check in with your parents and cousins. Check in with yourself.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

The average college student can typically be found doing schoolwork, eating or sleeping. While campuses do an adequate job taking care of the first two basic needs, the last one is often overlooked.

Universities should take more initiative to create a peaceful, affordable, on-campus location for sleeping for students.

Students who are involved in extra-curricular activities or athletics are on campus for multiple hours of the day. However, not all of their time is filled with activities. There are often large gaps in their schedules with classes in the morning, classes in the evening and on-campus events throughout the day.

According to an American Academy of Sleep Medicine article: “College students involved in extracurricular activities are more likely to have sleep deprivation… Insomnia and excessive daytime sleepiness were frequent complaints among these students.”

For students who live on campus, this is not such a big issue. They have the freedom to go back to their apartments and take care of their physical and mental health. For those stuck on campus for the day, options to take care of themselves are minimal, especially when it comes to sleep.

Since gas is costly, the option to drive home for these breaks is usually not much of an option. Therefore, students need a space to sleep that is on campus and readily available for students.

Having nap pods on campus would have multiple benefits on the student body. Since students would be rested, there would be a happier and more energetic vibe on campus. This would also increase attendance since there are no temptations for off-campus students to stay at home after their breaks from classes are over.

Lawrence Epstein, a doctor quoted in an American Academy of Sleep Medicine article, said: “After two weeks of sleeping six hours or less a night, students feel as bad and perform as poorly as someone who has gone without sleep for 48 hours. New research also highlights the importance of sleep in learning and memory. Students getting adequate amounts of sleep performed better on memory and motor tasks than did students deprived of sleep.”

Universities are responsible for the mental health of students. Having a safe place for students to get rest is a vital progressive step all colleges should take.

To show your support, email Dean of Students Del Beatty at [email protected] or Student Body President Cajun Syrett at [email protected].

By Stephen B. Armstrong

My mother used to work the occasional weeknight when my sister and I were kids — she taught art to adult students in Washington, D.C. My dad, always well-meaning, would take us to McDonald’s for dinner when Mom was gone, and then over to the mall to get books at B. Dalton.

I remember riding home one night from one of these school-night outings, squished up on the backseat of my father’s Ford Escort listening to the Ramones’ first album. A neighborhood friend, Adam, had loaned me his copy. To hear the songs over the noise of the car’s manual transmission, I had to press the portable stereo’s foam-wrapped speakers to my ears. The tracks all sort of sounded the same to me back then, with Johnny Ramone’s jackhammering guitar riffs and Joey Ramone’s wet shower curtain of a voice. I liked the music a lot.

As we got back and my dad rolled up our driveway, I told him I’d come in the house soon. Then over the next five minutes or so, I finished listening to the album’s second side, which ends with a track in which Joey declares “Today your love / Tomorrow the world! / Today your love / Tomorrow the world!”

The song’s yearnings for romance and global domination to this day strike me as paranoid–even psychotic–but there’s great art in Joey’s delivery as he manages to swathe the madness with melancholy and hope. Ever since that night, honestly, there’s never been a period in my life when I wasn’t listening to the Ramones.

The musical output of their 20-year run, I can tell you, is made up for the most part of charming but resolutely goofy takes on topics like lobotomies, worm men, dancing cretins, pet cemeteries and UFOs. The corny kitsch that distinguishes so much of the Ramones catalog, in fact, left me early on suspicioning that the guys in the band, despite their ability to come up with great hooks, were probably all nitwits or at least pretended to be. “D-U-M-B!” Joey cries out on “Pinhead.”

This willingness of mine to regard the Ramones as a low-brow put-on made it possible to ignore several songs that should have bothered me at a moral level, I’ll admit, ones like “Pinhead” and “Weasel Face” that make light of disabilities and physical shortcomings. But I’ve always allowed myself to ignore their cruelty.

Tracks about Nazis recorded during the band’s early years, as well, never struck me as anything other than bad taste gags, especially since two of the band’s founding members, Joey and Tommy, were Jewish. As Johnny Ramone explained in his autobiography: “We thought … Nazis were funny. We thought sniffing glue was funny, too.”

So I’ve never experienced much in terms of worry or remorse, either, when I’ve praised the Ramones to others, my five-year-old, for example, or when I’ve found my foot tapping along to a track like “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” the song I mentioned previously, even though it has lines like “I’m a shock trooper in a stupor / Yes I am / I’m a Nazi schatze / Y’know I fight for the fatherland.”

My perception of — and affection for — the Ramones, however, has undergone some painful changes recently. Clownish songs about brownshirt wannabes no longer seem as goofy and harmless as they did, not now, that is, as anti-democratic, autocratic and racist ideologies exert an increasingly dangerous influence over our country.

Just this past week, vandals knocked over headstones marking Jewish graves in a Massachusetts cemetery. Last October, an anti-Semite goaded by internet conspiracy theories shot up a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 people.burgh-shooting .And a year-and-a-half ago, white power revolutionaries wearing khakis and polo shirts marched across the campus of the University of Virginia, one of the intellectual capitals of the South, aping Nazi rhetoric as they shouted “Jews will not replace us! We will not be replaced!”

I’m too much of a supporter of the First Amendment to argue for censorship in popular music. Nor have I ever cottoned to the idea presented long ago by Tipper Gore that music can make good people do bad things. I refuse to believe, as well, that a track as silly as “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World” could lead someone to embrace Nazism and violence. Yet I find it not at all hard these days to summon in my head the image of a fledgling fascist, a burnished Wehrmacht helmet on his head and Apple AirPods pressed into his ears, listening to this song as he daydreams of rallies, flags, white ethno-states and murder.

This thought distresses me enormously, and I find myself wondering, for the first time really, if I’m doing something wrong now whenever I drop the tonearm or press the play button and listen to the Ramones — the world’s first punk band — and return to that rich, rich sound that first pierced me in the back of my dad’s little car 35 years ago.

Stephen B. Armstrong co-hosts Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll with Katie ‘n’ Steve Thursdays at noon on Radio Dixie 91.3 FM.