Weight of the World

To claim "Yo' momma so fat that when she wears a yellow dress, people flag her as a taxi!" would be a bit of an exaggeration but even so, it makes a good point. A recent study has shown that in the US, just over fifty-percent of the population is obese. Not merely overweight, but full-on obese. As if that weren't bad enough, a massive portion of the non-obese population is still fat- surprising, considering the country's obsession with "beauty" (the standards of which border anorexia). As a result of all this, I have often heard the claim made by those overweight "Sure I could lose of a few pounds, but I'm not morbidly obese!". Granted, they are not obese, but does that fact absolve them? After all, claiming that "I could be a nicer, more compassionate guy but at least I'm no Marquis de Sade!" doesn't make me any less of a jerk.

At this point, it must be stated that this is not directed against those who are fat as a result of a glandular disorder. If the pituitary is out of whack then's there nothing that can be done about it. No, this is directed to those who are fat as a result of personal choices.

True, no one chooses to be fat, but then again, it's not something that's completely out of our hands. Sure, with the increasing number of desk jobs and advancements in technology, it has become easier to be fat, the individual is not without blame. Choosing the elevator rather than the stairs, the brownies rather than the apple, the half-hour on the couch rather than on the treadmill- it all adds up in the end.

So what? Some may ask. So what if people are fat? Is that really such a crime?
Let's take a look at it.

Firstly, we have to ask ourselves, is it right for so many of us to be fat (not only fat but obese) when others starve? What does that say about us, especially at Houghton? Is this something we can condone? I doubt it.

Secondly, what are the religious ramifications? There isn't a religion on earth where being unhealthy is commendable and in many cases, fat, gluttony, and excess are considered sins. Should any religious person, bound by religious and ethical law, also be fat (or at least, fat to the point of being unfit or unhealthy)? Probably not.

Thirdly, there's the social issue. What does having a high number of fat individuals do to a society? In the case of manual labor, a healthy balance between underweight and overweight is required for the optimal results. As harsh as it may sound, when it comes to physical labor and athleticism, being fat really doesn't help anyone. True, athleticism and manual labor weren't meant for all, but even so, should push come to shove, everyone should be able to pull their own weight. So does being fat necessarily hurt society? No, but it certainly doesn't help either.

So after taking these three points into consideration, let us observe the reasons to be fat.

Let's see there's... there's...

Well, it doesn't seem that there are any benefits. Granted the extra layers of adipose tissue with help deal with cold, but only for a very brief period, after which movement- not fat- becomes the body's means of warming itself.

So what's the end result? Is it alright to be fat?

Of course. We have the rights to be whatever we want to be. It is our actions and choices, not our bodies and belt-sizes, that make us who we are. Nobody as the right to tell you to be or not be fat any more than someone can decide what kind of hairstyle you go for. But is being fat advisable? It it commendable?

Absolutely not.

Strange You Can Believe In

From the beginning of the presentation, the entire student body gathered in Chapel knew it was coming. Sooner or later, among such icons as Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and Nelson Mandella, he would eventually pop up. One could literally feel the entire congregation bracing itself for the moment that was inevitably coming.

And it did. As the choir sang its closing notes, clips of President Obama flashed up on the screen, at both his victory and inaugural speeches.

Many Houghtians didn't like that- as evidenced by both the segment in yesterday's STAR and angrily whispered comments in chapel- encompassing everything from the dryly sarcastic chant of "Yes we can!" to outraged murmurs of "Idolatry!".

Was it really that bad?

Granted it was on the grandiose side, but so was the entire presentation. A massive picture of MLK Jr was portrayed and accompanied by the swelling voices of the choir below and I don't recall anyone saying "Idolatry!". Sure Obama was portayed as the ending crescendo swept through the audience like a storm, but isn't that natural? Obama's achievement of being the first black president of the US has been the most recent milestone in black history- why wouldn't it be portrayed at the end? Was it- as some claim- a political statement? Of course not. The reason Obama was portrayed along with the floating, red, white, and blue subtitle of "PRESIDENT!" was because he is president. The subtitle doesn't scream "In your face, losers!"- it merely underscores the magnitude of the event.

The student body of Houghton is generally- with the exception of a handful of liberals and far-left extremists- conservative. Some disappointment is expected and natural. However bitterness about the outcome is totally and utterly unacceptable- especially this long after the end of the elections. Cringing, whimpering, or whining every time the word "Obama" is mentioned is, quite simply immature. If McCain had won, the conservatives on campus would be just as irked if the liberals sent up a wail of anguish every time he was referenced- perhaps it's time to extend to the left the same courtesy the right would expect if the situation were reversed.

So what's the conclusion? Don't we have the right to say what we want? Can't we complain?
Yes, we can.

But that doesn't mean we should.

Wining About Liquor

It's been nearly ninety years since the creation of the Eighteenth Amendment. And while it was laid to rest only thirteen years after its birth, some places in the world have yet to move on.

Houghton is one of these places.

Currently, the Community Covenant states that both Houghton students and faculty are forbidden from drinking alcohol either on or off campus. This rule has existed long before the temperance movement and only now is being called into question.

As always when it comes to the Community Covenant, controversy has sprung up across campus. Already, a petition to leave the rule unchanged is in circulation and speculations concerning the implications of a rule change have been flying around Houghton. Some hail a change in the rule as a form of freedom, while others have dubbed it a travesty of Houghton tradition. Some have pointed out that drinking is listed in the Community Covenant as a sin, while others point out that the same was once true for dancing.

Before we pass judgment, let's tack a step back and look at the facts

Firstly, let us look at exactly who would be affected by a change in this rule.

US law prohibits anyone under the age of twenty-one to drink, so by process of elimination, we can determine that only Houghton seniors and college staff. A decent amount, but we can narrow it down a bit further. The nearest liquor store is roughly a hundred miles away (and even then, it's not so much a liquor as a gas station that sells beer). This means that only seniors with cars will have access to liquor, as will various members of the staff. Despite the small number of students and staff who will actually have access to alcohol, the controversy still rages.

Secondly, let us attempt to predict what a change in the rule would do the college financially.

While most of those who make donations to Houghton care little for policy alteration, there is a minority who's charity is proportionate to the amount of change in the Community Covenant since their college days. The recent change in the dancing policy has led some donors to stop giving. A change in the drinking policy would almost assuredly have a similar affect only on a larger scale. All in all, Houghton could up to a couple thousand dollars in charitable donations. While the college would doubtlessly lose money, in the long run we must ask ourselves "what is the price of this freedom? Is a few thousand dollars in funding enough to alter our positions on a policy? Who are we changing the policy for anyways?", and so on.

Thirdly, we must look at the potential implications for the college itself.

Colleges nearly always bring to mind images of frat house parties, binge drinking, and wild bacchanaliae out on the quad. Granted, some colleges are like that but in general the amount of partying and drinking that occurs on campuses is greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, some students at Houghton are under the impression that this, or at least something similar, will happen to the college if drinking is permitted. I myself have even heard the quote "Even if they leave campus to drink... they're just gonna come back drunk...", suggesting that drunkenness is immediately associated with drinking (and indeed, it is, however it must be understood that while if you are drunk, you must have consumed alcohol, that fact that you've consumed alcohol does not necessarily mean you're drunk). Adding in the factor that the nearest liquor store is miles away and that only a handful of students can drink, one can safely predict that our Houghton isn't about to become Nero's Rome.

So now that we've had a look at the implications for the college's moral stability, financial situation, and student body (the few who can drink, anyways), what conclusions may we arrive at?
Is drinking going to harm the student body at Houghton? Considering how few students can actually drink, probably not. Is drinking going to harm the college's finances? Definitely, but we can't let money influence our principles- otherwise we're just stating that we can be bribed. Is drinking going to destroy Houghton's moral standing- no way.

Even so, we are left with more questions.
Is drinking even morally acceptable in and of itself? Providing you don't become a raging alcoholic, then yes- it is. If Jesus did it, the rest of us can as well.
Will the policy change encourage alcoholism? Not at all. As has been stated before, alcohol is extremely difficult to obtain here, even for those who can buy it legally. With today's gas prices, students aren't going to be constantly driving out to drink cheap beer in a gas station parking lot. Is this an endorsement of drinking? Absolutely not. Simply because a person is given the option of doing something does not mean that the person's choice is sanctioned by the one who gives the choice. Would a change in the Community Covenant allow the staff to live by a double-standard, being able to drink while students are forbidden? So long as the staff members are above the drinking age, then no, there would be no double standard.

So what's the final verdict? Let the rule be changed. A handful of students occasionally guzzling a beer or two or a professor relaxing with a glass of red wine isn't going to hurt anyone. Who knows? Perhaps that extra bit of relaxation will help seniors not stress out about finals and professors have some well deserved release from grading midterms.

Time to eat, drink, and be merry.

Cheers!

"If Music Be the Food of Love..."

...Then let it also be remembered that one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

What’s the deal the chapel’s organ music?

Aside from the pointless ritual of sitting and standing whenever it’s played (no doubt a cruel and cunning Wesleyan technique used to determine if anyone in the congregation had fallen asleep/died during the sermon) things have been going downhill since the beginning of the year. When we first arrived, the music was blaringly loud, excruciatingly antiquated, and puritanically solemn- the musical equivalent of having a brick smashed into your face.

Difficult to imagine that it could get any worse.
And of course, it did.

The music is still as loud as ever (if not louder) but any sense of antiquity and austerity has been lost (if not murdered and thrown into a ditch from a moving car). Now the music best resembles the frantic and twisted music you’d see in a horror movie set in a cursed amusement park. The weird (let’s admit it- just plain freaky) music that we hear as we shuffle out of chapel sounds like it was written by a demented clown from some hellish carnival.

J.S. Bach is rolling around in his grave right now.
Seriously, doesn’t this merit the administration’s attention? The way things are going, the organist must either be knocking back snifters of LSD or having his soul ripped out of body every time he plays (or every time she plays- I’m not sure which). Rehab or exorcist- it matters not; the point is that the chapel has no right to play god by punishing us this way. It’s bad enough that we’re forced to attend, you think they’d show some humanity and spare us the tri-weekly renditions of pained animals being strangled by their own digestive tract.

For the love of heaven, Houghton, there’s a reason why pipe organs are portrayed as appearing in vampyric crypts , the lairs of opera phantoms, and super-villain hideouts (at least they try to play decently). Let the facts be faced, if you don’t have any good songs to play, it’s best not to play anything at all.

Why The ******* Censorship?

Seriously.

This isn't the first time any of us have seen censorship, and it definitely isn't the first time its happened at Houghton but it seems to be happening more and more often now. Take last semester's 'SPOT' event, for example. SPOT is, essentially, a glorified variety show run by the student body for the student body- bot not last semester. No, last semester SPOT was run almost entirely by the college administration, bringing in the hosts of last years event as well as several acts deemed "classic" by the administration. Granted, it was the college's 125th anniversary- it's understandable that the administration would want this years SPOT to be perfect. If I were a 125 year old manager of La Scala, I wouldn't want to see a second-rate performance of Wagner's Parsifal. However, even if I were a 1250 year old manager of La Scala, I wouldn't dream of walking into another person's opera house and start telling them which acts to perform and which singers to hire. Yet essentially, this is what Houghton has done. Acting under the belief that somehow their 125th anniversary justified their actions, the administration commandeered (for lack of a better word) SPOT. Sure that semester's SPOT was decent, but so what? I personally don't care if that semester's SPOT was the greatest show since the creation of the Belagio's water fountains- the administration had no right to do what it did.

So what? There was another, student-run SPOT this year. We won't have to worry about the administration unfairly stepping in for another quarter-century. Surely they're done for now...

Not quite.

Administrative censorship reared its ugly head again this semester at the 'Houghton's Got Talent' event, in which certain acts were forbidden due to their content. In the Houghton Star, for example, a student stated that he had withdrawn his act because he had been forbidden from performing the song "Kiss" by Prince (in either its original or edited form) due to some "implied sexual language". After looking up the lyrics, I would agree that there are some implications in that song, however, (1) the same could be said for nearly every song written in the past decade and (2) I'm confident that the students of Houghton are capable of handling a handful of vague references.
Again at the 'Purple & Gold Dance-a-thon', the song (and arguable, the very anthem of the 70s) "That's the Way I Like It" was deemed "inappropriate" (again, if you've got a dirty enough mind you might be able to squeeze some kind of implication out of it, but if you're seriously that deranged, you'd probably see explicit references in the instructions for a pack of ramen noodles.)

So what's the message being sent here? Does the administration seriously consider us incapable of dealing with a few potentially salacious songs or acts? Is it that we're not trusted enough to make our own judgments? How far can/will the administration go to "protect" the student body from what it deems offensive. What's the criteria for something being offensive anyways?

Seriously, we can get married, get jobs, be conscripted in a draft and sent off to die- surely we can be allowed to decide for ourselves what is inappropriate and what isn't. After all, we singed a community covenant- a covenant is based on mutual trust, rather than a agreement which makes up for the lack of trust between two parties. We've signed on to obey and respect the community covenant- the administration needs to respect that covenant too, **** it.