Captin Picard Spanking Westly Crusher

To clear my head of negative thoughts before I head out the door for the day, let me puke out a few mini rants.

1. How could our government even think about not spending the money to fix the aging Hubble telescope? Compared to all the money we spend on blowing things up, a few million to fix Hubble seems small. Images of heaven are important to who we are as a race. Even though we disagree with and hate each other over trivial things like property, religion, and skin color, we can always look up and be humbled. I am a space baby, all of us young people are. We have grown up looking at deep field shots of galaxies, nebula, and today even planets. When ever I feel uninspired or down, there is always space--all those unexplored worlds that someday our children's children will touch. We might not be able to go there today, but the dream of going there is important...dreams are important, necesary, human. I can not imagine a world without a deep field space telescope!

2. (Sorry, college rant) I have noticed something troubling on campus this year, my fourth year on campus. Freshman are gangly, awkward, and immature...out of the house for the first time and trying to make sense out of the world through the code of laws handed to them in high school. In years past freshman were pretty googily at first but by winter quarter had adapted and become pretty cool.

When I first came to campus everyone was a hippy. Now don't get me wrong, hippies are nauseating on multiple levels, but at least hippies, even if they are fooling themselves, aspire to be better people, to live by the ideals of love and possibly inteligence (even if it only goes as deep as questioning authority). So, hippies are gross but I can live with 'em. This year however I am noticing something different. There are no more "hippies" the hippies turned into commercial hippies. Now you can go to Holstister or some other surf store and buy hippy clothes. Commercialism isn't even questioned by the younger generation...these guys are walking billboard zombies.

The first time I remember logging onto the internet was in my senior year of high school. I don't even think cell phones became popular until after I graduated high school.
This new generation of college kids, the 19 year olds, they have been talking on cell phones since middle school, watching high pace television since middle school, being bombarded with hyper aggressive advertising since middle school.

Red Square, http://webcam.wwu.edu/, has always been a place of meaningful dialogue. The radical anti-war protesters would clash with the young republicans. The radical "christians" would preach with signs warning that homosexuals were going to burn in hell. Poets would write thier lyrics in chalk on the red bricks. What ever was going on, it forced passer bys to look at it and then try and make sense out of it, to see someone elses perspective and possibly engage in conversation.

This year however people seem to be brain dead from all the cell phone radiation. People are actually writing, for lack of a better term, "shout outs", to their popular class mates. Here are some quotes that I remebered while walking through the squrare this week (gag me with a spoon):

"We love Michelle more than a fat kid loves cake"
"Sarah is a cool kid"
"Happy 19th birthday bobby, we are gonna get drunk tonight"
"look out Canada, April is 19 and thirsty"
"Rachel + Miguel" with a heart around it.

It is spring, parent and thier soon to be college children are tourning the campus. How embarrasing to have this middle school bull shit graffitied on walls that are suppose to house higher learning.