Are students in the Loop?

By Jeff Trull

One of the exciting new changes at UMass Dartmouth this semester is the launch of “The Loop,” a free bus service for UMD students. A joint effort by the UMass Dartmouth Department of Student Affairs and the City of New Bedford, the new bus service will carry students to and from the New Bedford Star Store campus. Currently the program is in a “pilot” stage, suggesting the service must be popular enough for it to be made permanent. While the concept is alluring, will students utilize the service and make the program worthwhile?

The Loop boasts service to 72 places of interest, all of which are in walking distance from its Star Store stop. On its flashy website, descriptions of area restaurants, shops, nightclubs, and museums are all detailed, some of which offer a discount to UMD students. Complete with a detailed bus schedule and map, the Loop’s website proves there is much to offer in downtown New Bedford. All of these places are accessible by bus seven days a week. The Loop runs on continuous schedule weekdays from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. The program even offers weekend nighttime service, with the last bus departing from New Bedford at 11:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

One of the main draws with the new bus service is the ability to get to and from a bar or nightclub without driving. A major qualm of mine is that there is no legitimate nightspot nearby that UMD students can get to without having to hop in a car. Discounting Applebee’s and TGI Fridays, which mostly serve as restaurants, Dartmouth itself has little to offer for college students in this area. However, there are several bars and nightclubs in New Bedford, such as the popular Catwalk Bar & Grille, which is only a few blocks from UMass Dartmouth’s Star Store. Previously students had to resort to driving, which requires a designated driver, or taking a taxi, which can cost ten to fifteen dollars a person, round trip. As a student, I don’t really like either of these options. The Loop bus can at least help solve some of this problem with a safe, free ride. Currently, the bus only operates until 10 p.m. on Thursdays. This is a popular night out for many students, and most who head out to bars stay much later than 10 p.m.. Even the later hours on Friday and Saturday are probably not enough to appease night owls who may stay out until 2 a.m. Perhaps the schedule can be adjusted in the future to meet these needs if there is enough demand. In the meantime, students can at least cut a taxi fare in half by taking this new bus into New Bedford.

Despite the various destinations and my personal excitement, I’m not convinced that UMD students will latch on to the new service. While art students who attend class at the Star Store campus will almost certainly utilize the Loop, other students may be less inclined to make the trip. My view may seem pessimistic, but I base this on my observations that many students fail to take up the school on many of the great events and services it has to offer. For example, students could attend last fall’s “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” free of charge in the school auditorium. Was the theatre filled to capacity? Far from it! While perhaps a few hundred did attend the show, thousands did not. I’ve noticed this trend at many other campus events, where there is only lackluster support from the student body. As far as the new Loop service goes, I expect that results will be similar: a few hundred students may use it, but the majority still will not. Whether or not this is enough to justify the service, that I’m not sure of.

Despite my meager predictions for the Loop, I hope that students prove me wrong. New Bedford has all sorts of entertainment to offer, and it’s now even easier for students to discover this city. At the very least I applaud another great idea from Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Jean Kim and UMass Dartmouth Department of Student Affairs this year. This addition is another step in providing more activities for UMD students and enticing more students to stay at school on weekends. Students can no longer complain that there’s nothing to do at school. After all, leaving campus has never been easier than it is now.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Media’s attack on religion

I am becoming increasingly perplexed by the amount of media attention being placed on Mike Huckabee and the entire Republican field’s religious backgrounds. I have been candid in my support for Hucakabee, a former Baptist Minister, but I have obviously not dwelled on his religious status as a factor in choosing to support him.

I’ve expressed previously that I disregard the vast majority of social wedge issues, as I contend that they are essentially trivial in the long-term. Accordingly, I have chosen to support Mike Huckabee and Republicans in general in the upcoming election based on the merit of their economic and foreign policies. If voters choose not to support a particular candidate because of the candidate’s expressed faith in a higher power, then I cannot help but question the criteria these voters have established for measuring political viability to start with.

I support Republican candidates in this election because I feel that sound fiscal policy will prove to be the most crucial issue of the next administration, and, in my view, conservative fiscal policy is most appropriate at this juncture in American history. Mike Huckabee’s support of the Fair Tax is in my opinion the strongest element of his economic policy — however he is realistic in saying that it is not an immediate remedy to the complexity of Federal taxes. His record as governor speaks for itself, as he reached a term limit in Arkansas, leaving behind a near $1 billion budget surplus, building infrastructure and improving schools. I would argue that it was his stellar record, not his personal religious beliefs which led him to be named one of “America’s Five Best Governors” by Time Magazine.

Beyond my distain for the media coverage of Huckabee, I would further question the attention paid to religion as a whole in coverage of the upcoming election. Mitt Romney has faced severe and unfair scrutiny over his Mormon faith. It is fair to not support Romney for changing his positions repeatedly to get elected, as it is fair to not support him for being out of touch with the middle-class due to his extraordinary wealth.

Nevertheless, I would argue that it is unfair that considerably more people know that Romney is a Mormon than know that he closed a near $3 billion budget deficit as governor of Massachusetts. Similarly, it is unfair that more people know that Mike Huckabee is an ordained Baptist Minister than know that he created a $1 billion budget surplus in his time as Arkansas governor.

All too often, the media’s “Christian Right” is picked apart for expressing beliefs on social wedge issues and other trivial issues, despite the fact that these debatable beliefs rarely, if ever, find their way into legislation. For example, Mike Huckabee’s caucus win in Iowa has been portrayed as a reflection of the Evangelical presence in the state. In reality, this presence only helped him win because the Evangelical voting constituency is not easily swept up in the media’s discrediting of candidates with expressed religious values. Those who would rather measure a candidate’s viability by irrelevant social positions rather than by his or her record as an elected official are certainly entitled to do so. But if the economic well-being and future interests are your priorities, then please look past the media’s agenda and vote rationally.

Gregory Gravelle
Class of 2010

The real dream of MLK Jr.

By Lance Gagnon

Probably the most cliché aspect of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the repetition of the “I Have A Dream” speech. We hear people talk about it every year, discussing whether King’s dream has been fulfilled or not based on that speech alone. While it was a great speech, I can’t help but feel that its overexposure is not advancing his cause beyond where it left off. Though King’s work as a civil rights leader deserves to receive exposure, if we are to complete his dream it is more important that we focus on his work with the Poor People’s Campaign.

By 1968, Dr. King saw that the anti-segregation phase of the civil rights movement was over. King believed that the next step in gaining equality in our nation would be in the form of economic justice. He thus created the Poor People’s Campaign, a self-proclaimed “multiracial army of the poor” that wanted Congress to pass a poor people’s bill of rights. King continued to work on this campaign until the day that he died; his assassination happened while he was in Memphis, Tennessee to support black sanitation workers in their struggle for higher wages and better treatment.

Dr. King did not only ask for better treatment for the poor in the work place, though. At the same time, King also recognized the effects of war on the poor. In his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” King pointed out how war is used to oppress the poor, sending them “to fight and to die in extraordinary high proportions to the rest of the population” in countries where they would fight and kill other poor people. He claimed that once we are done protesting the Vietnam War, we would be stuck protesting wars endlessly unless we take on “a true revolution of values” that opposes not just racism, but also militarism, extreme materialism and the valuing of profits over people.

Though Dr. King’s campaign was created to deal with the issues of his time, many of these issues still have not disappeared. The rights of the poor are still often ignored in our nation, allowing for poverty and homelessness to persist in the face of the abundance of corporate and military wealth. The most basic rights of the poor – the rights to necessities such as food, shelter, clothing and medical attention – are still treated as commodities that the poor must struggle to afford. Often, they are given no choice but the worst variations of these rights, such as unhealthy yet cheap food or medical care that covers only emergencies.

These basic rights do not even cover all of the rights of the poor. Further human rights, such as the right to a healthy environment and the right to workplace unionization, have been discussed but not fully addressed. The abolition of war, a subject that has made the rounds of our current anti-war movement (historian and political activist Howard Zinn has brought it up at every anti-war rally in Boston), has been completely ignored by the vast majority of politicians who hold the power to carry it out.

It would seem that King’s dream has failed to come true, but the fight for social change is not over. We can still push for a new bill of rights that reflects not just what a group of 18th century rich people thought were the most important human rights, but one that reflects what the most oppressed members of our current society feel they are missing. When this is achieved, we can honestly say we have made Dr. King’s dream a reality.

Clintons fight dirty with Obama

By Lee Lukoff

If you were to ask me two months ago who I would predict to be the next president, I would have told you Hillary Clinton. Since she announced her candidacy she had been polling far better then her primary opponent Barack Obama and all of the Republicans. However, today I’m not really sure of the likelihood for another Clinton administration.

Just a few months ago Hillary was talking about uniting the Democratic Party to fight the Republicans in November. Clinton didn’t need to resort to negative campaigning early on because she was riding high on cloud nine as the presidential frontrunner. However, since Obama proved his legitimacy by defeating Hillary in Iowa, Hillary has quickly changed her tone on the campaign trail. Now, instead of uniting the core constituency groups of the Democratic Party, she is fracturing her base of support by employing dirty tricks through her campaign surrogates that are reminiscent of the dirty politics that so many Americans are sick and tired of. I’m convinced Hillary will say anything and do anything to win. So far in the campaign I have seen a few dirty tricks that have proven my theory to be valid.

Exactly what dirty tricks are Hillary employing to win? Let’s start with her actions in Iowa. Clinton knew that she was clearly losing the youth vote to Barack Obama. She decided that instead of courting those same voters she was going to attempt to disenfranchise them by telling Iowa College students not to caucus if they were from out of state.  The Student Public Interest Research Group’s Young Voters Project issued an immediate condemnation of Clinton’s call for out of state voters to stay out of the Iowa caucuses. The group stated: “We live here in Iowa for the majority of the year. … To say that students who didn’t grow up in Iowa, but who now live here, shouldn’t have the choice to participate in the caucuses is blatant voter disenfranchisement.”  Instead of encouraging students to end their apathy, Hillary Clinton hoped that they would continue it, just so that she would have a better chance of winning in Iowa.

After losing in Iowa, Bill Clinton went to New Hampshire knowing that he might not be back in the White House if Hillary lost again. So he told a group of young voters that Obama’s opposition of the war from the beginning was not factually accurate. Clinton dismissed Obama’s opposition of the war saying “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” So Bill shows up on the scene distorting the true facts about Obama’s record in an attempt to save his wife from a near political death.

As the fight continued into Nevada, the Clinton campaign turned to voter disenfranchisement again in an effort to mitigate the influence of the Culinary Workers Union who had endorsed Obama. The Nevada State Education Association, who had ties to the Clinton campaign in its leadership, filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to shut down nine casino caucus at-large sites created to allow both union and non-union shift workers to vote during the workday. By shutting down the casinos, workers would not be allowed to caucus at their job site and would not be able to vote. This political trick reeked of sleaziness because a majority of the members of the union were Latino voters who typically favored Obama. By shutting them out, Clinton would benefit. While the lawsuit was ultimately thrown out, the Clinton’s had resorted to dirty politics to win in Nevada.

The Clinton campaign knew it was in for trouble after losing the South Carolina primary by a margin of 55 percent to Obama and Clinton’s 27 percent. Since Obama had done well in the Palmetto State, where 55 percent of the primary voters were African American, this was a huge win. In an effort to mitigate the loss, Bill Clinton showed up on the scene telling the media that “Jesse Jackson, won South Carolina twice, in ‘84 and ‘88. And he ran a good campaign, and Sen. Obama’s run a good campaign here.” By invoking Jesse Jackson, Clinton pulled the race card in an attempt to make Obama look like the “Black” candidate who won in South Carolina only because a majority of the voters were African Americans. The race card was the last straw for many neutral democrats, who now appear to be endorsing Obama because they can’t stand the tactics the Clinton’s are using.

So far in the campaign the Clinton’s have tried twice to disenfranchise voters in an attempt to gain votes. They have given speeches distorting Obama’s record on the Iraq War and they have invoked the race card in an attempt to make voters believe that Obama isn’t an appealing candidate to anyone except African-Americans. These actions are truly reprehensible. They show that the Clinton’s will do anything or say anything to get back in the White House. Do America a favor and vote against Hillary Clinton on November 5 to show America that the politics of personal destruction have no place in our democracy.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Jesus is not a joke

Dear Editor,

It’s probably predictable that you would hear from a Christian chaplain on this topic, but so be it. The cartoon “Corporate Mango” by Jon Diotalevi printed in the January 31 edition of The Torch was an inappropriate depiction of Jesus as a.) reactionary, b.) quoter of a word like “poop,” c.) vengeful, d.) ridiculously cool-looking dude.

No doubt if you had depicted certain other religious heroes from world history in a similar fashion, there would be serious trouble. But Jesus always seems to be an easy hit, these days.

Please be thoughtful the next time you run pictures of religious subjects in a Beavis kind of spirit. Not everything automatically qualifies as “literary liberty.” This was beneath the dignity of an institution of the caliber of UMass Dartmouth. There are many in the university community who do not take this as funny, and who do take their religions seriously.

Rev. Neil Damgaard
Protestant Chaplain