Sense of entitlement
To the Editor:
Josh Pollick's proposal ("Giving credit where credit is due, DP, 2/06/06) that the College of Arts and Sciences begin offering academic credit for internships reveals more about problems with College students like himself than with the College.
First, Pollick's suggestion is ripe with a sense of entitlement: Where did Penn students get the right to a stimulating, rewarding and compensated internship experience? If Pollick and his peers have found their experiences so vacuous, they are free to do what the vast majority of American college students do: work at restaurants, construction sites or at the family business. Perhaps if he spent less overtime making copies at NBC Universal, Pollick might even have time to, God forbid, read something for its own sake.
Which leads to the governing principle of his objection: If learning occurs unrecorded on a transcript or resume, it might as well never have happened.
For all the complaints about Wharton careerism, College students like Pollick seem, as he admits, to want the dinners at Pod without having to take finance or deal with the curve. If such students wish they were in Wharton, that is their prerogative, but I wish they would stop trying to turn the College into a career counselor.
Justin Raphael
College senior
White trash theme
To the Editor:
It has come to my attention that write-trash mimicry has become a common theme for informal parties at Penn. But before Penn students don any more wife-beaters, overalls and straw hats, I hope they might think twice about the mindlessness and insensitivity of these parties.
This past January, the nation witnessed a "white trash" tragedy. Twelve coal miners died in a West Virginia mine explosion. For hours, loved ones believed in a miracle; later, they grieved their tremendous loss. I watched the event unfold over CNN airwaves, and I remember one distraught family member sobbing into the camera, "We might be dumb, but we love our families."
Back-country "white trash" areas have more than their fair share of poverty, blue-collar hardships, poor education and poor health care. But the white-trash individuals that Penn students so callously mock at parties embody so much that is good: hard work, appreciation of life and love.
Penn is a university that celebrates diversity across the racial, religious and socioeconomic spectrums. I encourage all Penn students to embrace this diversity, to be sensitive to our "white trash" peers and to take a lesson from the mining community in West Virginia.
Emily BuzzellCollege junior
Protecting workers
To the Editor:
The Philadelphia smoking ban ("Smoking ban bill rises from ashes of past tries," DP, 2/8/06), on the face of it, may seem designed to annoy smokers and please non-smokers. However, the most important thing it would accomplish is legally protecting workers from the effects of secondhand smoke.
Someone working full-time in an establishment where smoking is permitted spends hours at a time breathing smoke. And secondhand smoke causes about 3,000 lung cancer deaths and 35,000 heart disease deaths in adult nonsmokers in the United States each year, according to the American Lung Association. How well do you think a waitress can pay for chemotherapy?
Certainly, some people might choose to work where people smoke, but others do not have a choice. It is not about deciding to work only in healthy environments -- it's about paying the bills.
Perhaps some Penn students are too well off to understand that poverty takes away more freedom than any presidential Constitution-bending ever could.
Go talk to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck in West Philly and then talk to me about who should be responsible for what's in the air they breathe.
Yes, passing the ban will take away the convenience of lighting up in a bar. But is keeping that convenience worth the harm to those who can least afford it?
Devin McIntyre
College sophomore
Cartoons have been printed for satire
To the Editor:
Sana Jaffrey's guest column ("Cartoon hypocrisies should be fixed," DP, 2/10/06) confuses the current turmoil surrounding the Danish Jyllands-Posten's printing of satirical images of Muhammad, specifically by drawing an erroneous analogy.
The printing of distasteful depictions of the Virgin Mary or Jesus in The Philadelphia Inquirer is not analogous to the current situation; the Western media are printing the images in an effort to articulate the cause of Muslim violence. They are reprinting the images as news, not as satire.
We, as residents of the international community, have a right to know why Muslims are acting in such a violent manner -- simply reporting the existence of offensive satire is not enough.
If Muslim objectors are going to act violently, they should expect the media to report their actions, along with the alleged cause of their grief. We should be able to view the satire ourselves as a supplement to the news story in an attempt to better understand the source of Muslim outrage.
It is important to stress as well the importance of retaining the freedom of speech, offensive or not, in countries that recognize it; rightfully, the Danish government refused to punish Jyllands-Posten, citing this necessary freedom.
Josh Stanfield
College freshman
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