page 2 - The Behrend College Beacon. Friday, August 20, 1999 The Behrend College Beacon published weekly by the students of Penn State Erie, The Behrend College News Editor Shannon Weber Features Editor Deanna Symoski Wire Services Editor Angela Rush Sports Editor Man Wiertel Editorial Page Editor Katie Galley Postal Information: The Beacon is published weekly by the students of Penn State Erie. The Behrend College; First Floor, The J. Elmer Reed Union Building. Station Road, Erie. PA 16563. The Beacon can be reached by calling (814) 898-6488 or (814) 898-6019 (FAX). ISSN 1071-9288. A view from the lighthouse Because the name of our newspa per is the Behrend Beacon, we here on the Beacon editorial staff felt that it would be appropriate to call our weekly staff editorial A View From The Lighthouse. Last year we had a letter to the editor which called into question different aspects of what the staff editorial was. So to quell some of the confusion, here is our expla nation of A View From The Light house. A staff editorial, is exactly what the name implies, an editorial from the staff of the Beacon. As a staff we choose a topic that we feel needs to be discussed. When then form an opinion about the topic that the whole staff agrees upon. Finally, one mem ber of the staff puts our thoughts into words and writes the staff editorial. You will notice that no one person puts their name on A View From The Lighthouse. That is because it reflects ■ GTO The Critic Too late for blame Once again, in the wake of another violent disturbance with many left dead, Americans are forced to try and explain to themselves just exactly how such a massacre could happen within the borders of the world’s most prosperpous nation. Gun control ad vocates point the blame toward the NRA; the NRA and its right wing al lies point toward violence in popular culture, and popular culture gives Right Wing America the finger. The truth must be that nobody re ally knows why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 of their classmates and wounded 24 others last Tuesday at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The diary of one of the shooters revealed that they had planned this attack for a good bit of time before it was acted out. According to CNN, the diary also revealed that Harris and Klebold hoped to kill at least 500 people dur ing the attack, and then hijack a plane and crash it into New York City. Some news agencies have re ported that Klebold and Harris liked Editor in Chief Jason Snyder Managing Editor Michael Frawley Advertising Managers Erin Edintfer Associate Editors Jessica Tucci Distribution Manager Letter Policy: The Beacon encourages letters to the editor. Letters should include the address, phone number, semester standing and major of the writer. Writers can mail letters to behrcoll2@aol.com. Letters must be received no later than spm Tuesday for inclusion in that week’s issue. the opinion of the entire staff, even though one person is responsible for writing it. We at the Beacon are planning to make many changes to the paper over the coming weeks to provide the campus with what we hope will be a better paper. So please bear with us as we go through our growing pains. Good luck in the coming year! IN WARN& WAY to play violent video games like Doom. A lot of people play Doom. Not a lot of people want to kill their peers. If popular culture such as vio lent video games and violent mov ies gave people the insatiable urge to kill, we would all be dead. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye at least ten times in the past three years. Holden Caulfield never told me to kill anyone. In fact he probably never told anyone to kill anyone. So popular culture is not to blame. How about the NRA? Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But when there’s more guns than people in the country, people kill people with guns. It is true that the United States has more deaths by gunfire than any other country. In 1994,14.24 per 100,000 people died from a gunshot wound. So if the United States had stricter gun con trol laws, like the United Kingdom, for example, this may have never happened. It’s hard to say. What is interesting about the past few school shootings that have Carey Smith Matt Heidecker Advisors Robert Speel Jim O'Lnuxhlin The Voi Fresh meat for the grinder Well, as another summer comes to a close, it’s time to take a look at what the upcoming school year has in store for us. While most of the upperclass men have heard this all before, and are approaching this year with their nor mal, blasd attitude, there are many freshmen out there who need to under stand just what they are getting them selves into. I know that there is not a single stu dent on this campus who has not heard the standard warnings about college life. Your parents and high school teachers/councilors probably spent the last half of your senior year of high school drilling into your head all of the pitfalls that you can get caught in dur ing your first year, and if you were anything like me (and I’m willing to bet that you were), you tuned them out, then went out and partied the entire summer. Now you’re back in school and completely unprepared for an en vironment like Behrend. Well, never fear, I’m here to try and set you straight. Trust me, the adjustment to college life can be very rough, but once you get into the swing of things, you’ll Live From Gu Living with a roommate requires respect Think back to your high school graduation day: you just received your diploma and you were thinking of the ways you were going to spend your last summer at home before you went away to college. You could get a summer job, or just party and have fun before you had to buckle down for the upcom ing semester. So now the time has come for you to get ready and depart to a new world, and all of your friends and family have a piece of advice to give you. “Remem ber your college years. They will be full of memories of all the good times you’ve had” or “don’t drink too much” or “don’t mix your whiles and your reds,” but nobody warned you about roommates. Li ving in a dorm, a suite or even the apartments, students are forced to live with people they’ve never known or JON STUBBS caught the attention of the media is that at least two of them have been the do ing of more than one person. Perhaps the killers were examples of a psycho logical phenomenon called, “groupthink”. Neither one of the kill ers believed that they had anyone else to trust except each other. They may have started bouncing ideas back and forth from one to the other and they began sounding less and less crazy. However one dissects it: whether guns, popular culture or psychology is to blame, nobody will ever really know. We have plenty of theories to make us all feel better; it’s too bad that we can’t find a clear-cut answer to this mystery. Maybe if someone had just asked Harris and Klebold why they were going to do this minutes before they had slaughtered 13 people, we would have all slept easier last Tues day night. However, be it as it is, we’ve waited way too long to ask why. Jon Stubbs was the features editor last semes ter for the Beacon. This column previously ran in the Beacon on Thursday. April 29,1999. Editorial e o have one hell of a good time! First of all, and I know you don’t want to hear this, but your classes are going to be a lot of work. Most likely you have heard the old cliche, that for every hour you spend in class you should spend two or three hours outside of class studying. No matter what the class is this holds true. Every semester, I take one class that I think is going to be a cake course just to boost my GPA (and for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term GPA, don’t worry, you’ 11 soon be obsessing about it like the rest of us). I would always try to find one course, like underwater basketweaving, that any idiot could pass. Then, after slacking off half the semester, I would discover that, oh my God, I’m getting a C. After saying a few choice words, which are better left out of this editorial, I would do the required out of class work and get my A. Someone once said to me (please don’t ask me who, I have enough trouble remembering last week, let alone this long ago), “Get the best grades that you possi probably would never care to meet. Even if you do know your room mates, living together may cause a rift among already existing friends. The sharing of basic facilities in small space provides the perfect en vironment for conflict. Before you know it, it’s two in the morning and you are arguing over closet space and how much space your food takes up in the refrigerator. Is there anyway we could avoid this disturbance of peace? I gave this problem a lot of thought and I’ve finally came up with a solution: RESPECT. Respect is earned only if it is given. This basic principle of life was taught in kindergarten; never take without asking, respect other people’s prop erty. Yet, by the time we reach col lege I guess most of us have forgot ten this simple fact. Instead, we al- A response to forwarded chain letters By Maria Savvas The Simpsonian Simpson College “Warning: If you do not pass this on, something as bad as those in the stories or WORSE will happen to Please, if this were really true, I would have been dead a long time ago. Fortunately, I’ve been able to steer clear of any 18-wheelers that would like to make me their next road kill victim. Forwards. They are an almost unavoidable part of everyday life for anyone who holds an email ac count. In my opinion, bored college kids who have a lot of extra time on their hands make up most of these stories. These little hassles are received on the average of three to four mes sages in a day. More if everyone has your address, less if you are one of the fortunate ones. letter* to the editor behrcoll2@aol.com Reason If any of these stories actually bly can, or what is the use of paying for a college education.” For any col lege student, those are words to live by. Now the second thing that will greatly increase what you get out of your college experience is to get in volved. Behrend offers some won derful opportunities for students to get involved in campus life (wow, now I sound like a go to Behrend ad; hmmmmm maybe I’ve found a new career). As a member of the newspa per staff last year, I went to many ac tivities, and found them to be a very enjoyable experience. But with the number of students that attend Be hrend, around 3600 I believe, I was surprised at how small the turn out was. And as for student organizations, last year’s SGA election was uncon tested, with fifteen open seats. Only eleven people ran (including me, I wonder if I won?). Getting involved in activities like this make college much more interesting, and it looks good on your resume after you gradu ate. Finally, just a quick warning. Par- low strangers to sleep in our roommate’s bed, we gobble her food and even have parties on Monday nights while she is studying for an exam. Once these injustices have been committed against us, we resort to guerrilla tactics, such as defacing her property, labeling our food and totally ignoring her presence. Is it the dishes that have been sitting for a week or is it the garbage which hasn’t been emptied in four days that really pushed your buttons? Fed up, you begin to tell your roommate how you exactly feel whether she wishes to hear it or not. Hopefully it does not result in any physical violence. I wish that these uncomfortable moments of life could be avoided, but how? The roommate agreement that all on-campus students fill out in the beginning of the year is a distant come true, I should receive a cheek in the amount of $5OO dollars, a trip to Disney Land, while possibly find ing my soul mate in the next seven days. Do you think that if you for ward a message to as many people that you can think of you’re going to be paid for it? By sending one of the forwards to just 10 of my friends my crush will ask me out. On the other hand if I don’t send a different one in the next hour of receiving it, I am going to have bad luck in relationships for the rest of my life. I don’t think this is a very legit way to base the future of my relationships on. If I was going to have bad luck in relationships for the rest of my life, I probably don’t need some forward to tell me. What I don’t get is why all the meaningless ones get passed around to everyone. In my case I receive most of my forwards from my friends. If they know that they are dumb and they don’t want them, then why do they send them to me? With the overabundance of all the for- Mike Frawley tying can be detrimental to your grades. Now I know that I should not be the person to lecture any body on this subject, as I spent most of the summer in a drunken haze (featuring an incident in Niagara Falls with a border guard which I will never be able to live down). But it will effect your grades. I have friends who carried GPA’s of 3.5 4.0, then they turned 21, started to party and drink too much, and ended the semester with a GPA so low I won’t even repeat it. So please heed my warn ing and control yourself. Hopefully my words of wisdom (quit snickering, I can hear you, damn it) will help you on your way. College can be a very rewarding experience, but you have to make it one. Good luck and have a grrrrrrrrreat year (I love Frosted Flakes). Mike Frawley is the mananinp editor of the Beacon. His column will appear periodi cally tlmnif'ltoiti the semester. yodele Jones memory by October, and by that time many have had their first ma jor argument with their roommates. By this time we are so far gone, that we could care less about her wants or needs. When you walk into your “home,” you wish you were back in your 8 a.m. class lis tening to your teacher explain the forces of nature; instead you are in the middle of a warzone. Is there anyway to recapture the feeling of the first day, when you first moved into your apartment and all was well with the world? I highly doubt it, but I just heard that Ohio Hall has 64 single rooms, all roommate free. Ayodele Jones was the mana^in,edi tor last semester Jor the Beacon. wards that are being passed around, I know that I, and some of my friends, are starting to de lete them without even reading them. Unless there is a check made out to me when you send it, or you really want to be involved in a kiss war with me, don’t waste your time. While most of these forwards are just company for my trash can, some of them, I have to admit, can be comifal. Most of the jokes are pretty funny in a sick sort of way and who wouldn’t want to take a cool quiz? So not all of them are bad, but just learn to sort them be fore you send them. As a last bit of helpful infor mation, here’s a forward not to waste your time with. If you re ceived the, “So kewl, gotta try this,” forward that you have to send to 11 people, don’t. Sorry to disappoint the people who want to see the really hilarious video, be cause there isn’t one.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers