York has definitely been a great benefit to me. With all the complaints that I may have about it, i can’t deny that by going to this school, I have received an education of a quality that far surpasses any other school in the area. I didn’t only benefit from the high academic standards that teachers have for York students, but also from the encouragement that some teachers gave me to think critically, and to always look beneath the surface of an issue. As a result of this fine instruction, I am much more articulate, both verbally and in writing, and I feel that I will be able to thrive in any academic environment.

However, attending York did limit me in a few ways, most of these relating to the social atmosphere. First and foremost are the issues caused by the size of the school. Though the small number of students at York does have some definite benefits academically, I feel that at times I stagnated socially due to the fact that I only related to the same 50-75 people every day. Even though some people may feel more comfortable at York due to the fact that they know everyone, I think that I would have a more developed personality if I had been given the opportunity to relate to a larger group of people in an academic setting.

Another thing about York that I have taken issue with is their alleged “atmosphere of trust.” In case you are unfamiliar with what this entails, it simply means that our school has put forth the idea that because of our small population, it is perfectly acceptable to leave valuables lying around campus and expect no-one to mess with them. For as long as I can remember, this has always presented York with a problem. Since my first year at York, there have been complaints from students who have had all sorts of personal possessions stolen. All kinds of items have been taken, and there is only one similarity between all the cases: the victim of the theft left the item outside, unattended and in plain view. Though this may not be as prevalent a problem in the magically benevolent world of York school, in the real world, this behavior is just plain stupid.

In my mind, this mindset that we exist in a vacuum of absolute trust is astonishingly ill conceived. Though the bulk of the York population may be good people, the bulk of the world population is not. I’ve noticed that the atmosphere of York has a way of conditioning students not to take proper precautions with their belongings, and though most get along fine by having this outlook at York, when they leave York, many students find it to be a shock that not everyone is so considerate. Just a few months ago, I spoke with a York alumnus who said that  when he went to Harvard, he was shaken to the core by the attitude that some of people have there.

I’m fortunate enough to have a large network of friends outside of York, and while some of them may not be model citizens, they have exposed me to the reality that there are bad people in the world, and you have to develop the practical skills to deal with them. Hanging out with them has taught me how maintain a level of trust for my fellow man, while still having a healthy concern for my own well-being. Though I may have made some stupid mistakes along the way, I feel that the consequences of these mistakes have provided me with the street smarts to go out into the world and be able to fend for myself, something that my high school never could have given me.

All in all, I really am glad that I chose to attend York. It provided me with the best education available, and I believe that that will take me far in life. But, as with all things, York is not perfect, and I am happy that I was able to compensate for the school’s shortcomings on my own.

I feel that the “war on drugs” is a particularly important issue, one that doesn’t get the type of coverage that it deserves. I personally am connected to this conflict in a number of ways. Most immediately by the fact that I have a number of people who I am close to who have become casualties of this war. Over the course of my life, my friends and family members have been arrested, jailed and even killed as a result of their (often rather innocent) involvement in drug related issues. Another less emotional connection that I have to the drug war is the fact that it is literally happening in my back yard. Salinas, a city rather close to where I live and go to school, is on the verge of becoming the gang violence capital of the world, and much of this violence is an indirect result of the drug war.

Before I start spouting my own opinions on drug legalization, the abolishing of mandatory minimum sentences and the all-encompassing evil that is Richard Nixon, I thought that it would be good to give some background.

The War on Drugs was started in 1969, by Richard Nixon. Many view the moment when he gave the infamous “Public Enemy Number One” speech as the distinct start of the Drug War.

Here’s a clip from the documentary, “The Last White Hope”. While it is irrefutably biased, I think that it does succeed in giving voice to a variety of pro-legalization views, from those of the veteran stoner Tommy Chong to independent “bad boy” Ron Paul.

Before Nixon gave said speech, the drug culture of the 1960′s was extremely optimistic. While the hippies were overindulging to the point that it could have been harmful to others, many thought that the illegal status of most drugs was going to fade away. In 1968, Stanley Owsley, the main manufacturer of high-quality LSD in the U.S. and a major hippie cultural fixture, is quoted as saying that “in six months you’ll be able to go into a gas station and buy Acapulco Gold, filtered, non-filtered and menthol, just like with cigarettes.”

In short, many thought that marijuana and some other “soft” drugs would be put on the same level as alcohol, as they arguably should be. But soon, after Nixon’s war cry, even the infamous Haight-Ashbury was riddled with narcs, and drug-busts soon became commonplace. With this, the lighter-that-air drug culture of the 60′s became criminal and dangerous, and the once strong legalization movement became fractured and lost its wind.

And for a while, the war started to work. After a certain number of seizures, arrests and life-sentences, the use of marijuana among the youth of our country started to decline. Some declared that they had achieved victory in the war on drugs, but in truth, the front had just shifted.

As 1970′s came to a close, cocaine became the drug of choice for high society and rock stars alike. With this, the demand skyrockted, and one man stood to profit from this. His name was Pablo Escobar. As the head of the Medellin Cartel, in the 1980′s Escobar smuggled thousands of tons of Colombian and Peruvian cocaine into the U.S., mostly through connection points in the Caribbean. His landing point in the States was Miami, and this lucrative influx narcotics eventually led to a bloody power struggle among the various crime families of Miami (and Scarface), whom the media nicknamed the Cocaine Cowboys.

After several years of fighting between police and rival cartels, the situation in Miami began to cool down, and it seemed as if the authorities had somewhat curbed the importation of cocaine to a certain degree. The truth was, that with all of the seizures and casualties among employees, not many cocaine manufacturers wanted to do business in Miami. So they found a new route, Mexico.

Mexico has long been, and remains, the main producer of a large amount of heroin and marijuana that comes into the United States, so finding a criminal network to traffic cocaine into the U.S. wasn’t a problem for any South American cartels. The influx of cocaine money, as usual, led to a power struggle between major cartels. Soon, South American cartels were moving so many narcotics through Mexico that many cartel demanded that they be paid in product rather than cash. As as result, many Mexican cartels were able to demand 30-50% of the shipment given to them from suppliers.

This led many cartels to ramp up the competition, since they needed a monopoly on the trade to get the best price for their powder assets. The wars between cartels that we see today really began in 1989, with the arrest of Miguel Angel Felix, the former head of the notorious Guadalajara cartel. After a temporary struggle for supremacy by various cartel leaders, the power dynamic among the cartels evened out, and there was a brief respite from the violence in the mid to late 1990′s.

The violence steadily began to worsen in 2000, when the Bush administration renewed the “tough on drugs” platform of the Reagen era. Many DEA raids were conducted in Mexico, higher ups in cartels were arrested, and shipments of drugs valuing millions of dollars were seized. Another contributing factor to this new wave of violence is the shift in methamphetamine production. Since the 1950′s, most methamphetamine in the united states was produced domestically, using industrial ephedrine of pseudo ephedrine from allergy medication. But recently, many of the ingredients used in the manufacture of street amphetamines have been more closely monitored and controlled, making it easier for crminal organizations to import Mexican-made methamphetamine.

Despite the efforts by former Mexican President Vincente Fox and the current president Felipe Calderon to fight cartels by deploying military units to border towns, the violence continued.

Many view the 2005 Neuvo-Laredo drug wars as the tipping point in the Mexican Drug War. Since then, law enforcement agencies have seen cartels that have been better equiped and better trained than many of the police who are charged with fighting them. Cartels have acquired and used rocket launchers, grenades, military-quality machine guns and even, on occasion, tanks.

The situation is very dim. It is blatantly clear that the tactics taken by law enforcement, arrest then arrest some more, are not working. There is no evidence that this form of prohibition can be efectively enforced. Mexican and American lawmakers have exhausted literally every option, from gang prevention programs to deploying special forces units to fight existing cartels, but absolutely none have worked.

It is my honest opinion that there is only one way to end this violence. By taking away the revenue that feeds these thugs. If we were to legalize and regulate the drugs that our government tries so hard to eradicate in this war on certain drugs, then all of the violent criminals who are making Mexico and our country a living hell would see their very livelyhood destroyed.

One that seemed particularly illogical to me was a campaign about the Mexican drug war. I find this to a fairly important issue, since there have been more casualties in the past few months in this war than fatalities among U.S. servicemen in Iraq over the whole course of that war. But, the way that these students approached this topic seemed rather backwards.

When I became aware of their campaign, I saw one student walking around with a home made t-shirt that touted some death statistic on the back. I asked him about, and when he turned around, I was rather surprised to see what the front of the t-shirt said. In big letters, it stated “The Mexican Drug War Is a Problem. Don’t do Drugs.”

I see several problems with this statement, aside from the fact that he is blatantly plagiarizing Nancy Reagan. First and foremost is the assumption that stopping a middle class white kids from indulging in illegal narcotics will end a conflict that spans most of North America.

Saying that not doing drugs will stop the drug war is, in theory, correct. However, theories are often proven false. The statement on the front of this kids t-shirt implies that this situation is a direct cause-effect scenario. People want to do drugs, our government doesn’t want them to, so there is a war. Well, I dont see it as being that simple.

There has been a definite spike in drug-related violence over the past two years, despite the fact that both our government and Mexico’s have been pouring billions into fighting drug cartels. The kids doing the awareness campaign implied that this conflict is caused by a greater number people doing drugs, and therefore the war would end if this market was eliminated. Studies tend to indicate otherwise.

While the U.S. does have one the highest cannabis use rates in the world, it is not necessarily on the rise. In fact, one can say that this is quite the opposite of the truth. In my AP psychology book, I recently saw a graph that gave the numbers for the use of cannabis and other drugs among high school seniors over the past 50 years (http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/97trends/sd3-5.htm). The graph stated that the highest rates of use were during the 1970′s, which made a lot of sense to me. After that, the rates steadily declined, rose for a short while in the early 90′s, where it has stayed at a relatively constant level since.

This data would show that there is probably some other factor at work, one that isn’t directly tied to the users of drugs. While it is good that people are becoming more aware of this problem, I’d like it if I didn’t have a bunch of ignorant sophomores shoving false solutions to the problem in my face.

This got me thinking about how I generally discover new music. I have fairly eclectic tastes, and i generally make a point of not discriminating between genres, so this allows me to steal an almost infinite amount of music from my friends, much of which is often new to me. Almost all of the rest of the bands I find, I hear about on the internet. But there is also a small minority of groups which i discover at shows or festivals, most often as opening acts.

About a month I went with a friend to see a ska show in San Jose. I knew that some of my friends from L.A. were following them, so I thought that I might as well check it out. The main act was a band that I had never heard about before, called Leftover Crack. The moment they got on stage, I knew that it was worth the trip. Everyone in the band was dressed in black jumpsuits, with makeup that made them look like some Scandinavian black metal band. They played for about 2 hours, and I don’t think that the singer stopped moving the entire time, even though he seemed so inebriated that he could hardly stand up. Though the sound quality and acoustics were horrible, the band really played well. The bass player didn’t saw away at his instrument as is common in most punk shows, and the drummer played some of the cleanest fills I’ve ever heard.

After it was all over, I decided to buy a few cd’s to see if this band sounded better sober. And lo and behold, they did!

I bought two albums at the show, Fuck World Trade and Riot Ska, Fuck World Trade being my favorite. All in all, this is one of the best punk albums I’ve heard. Leftover Crack gets a reputation for being a very political band, and this album is no exception. The lyrical content seems to convey that they are anti-. Anti-religion, anti-government, anti-police, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist… The seem to be against everything except for reckless intoxication, but the tongue in cheek death metal influences seem to make their never-ending grievances tolerable.

Leftover Crack seems to have found the perfect blend of genres: traditional ska/punk with a screeching death metal edge. The drummer plays fairly basic beats through most of the album, breaking out of the expected high hat/snare ska rythym only a few times, to pound out a very clean-sounding double bass beat during the crescendos of a few songs. The bassisst is solid, and clearly isn’t limited by his role in the band.

But what really made this album for me is Sturgeon, the lead vocalist. On stage, he put on a decent performance, though he is so scrawny, it occasionally looked as if his 40 ouncer of Mickey’s might drag him to the floor. But on the recordings, in the words of Judas Priest, he cries like no other. At the start of every song, he keeps a subdued tone, concisely rattling off lyrics as fast as is intelligible. During the choruses, however, he breaks out a screech to rival the most excited Jonas Brothers fan.

Altogether, one of my top 10 albums.

Though I am no big baseball, I am aware of the preeminent accomplishments of the player known as A-Rod. I’ve often heard my uncle, a huge baseball fan, rave about the accomplishments of the “next Barry Bonds.” A lot of my cousins back East are big fans of him, and it seems to me that he was on the track to becoming a national icon.

This all went out the window when he admitted to using steroids during 2003. Yet, somehow, this made less news than Phelps’ pot infused shenanigans. The only major consequence that A-Rod suffered from his confirmed use of prescription testosterone and illegal anabolic steroids was having to sit through a half-hour long press conference. Phelps was suspended from swimming for 3 months, and had most of his sponsors withdrawn.

The disparity between these punishments made me cringe. Phelps puffing a little herb now and then had no effect on his stellar performance in swimming. In anything, it probably made him slower. Yet, he has won more awards for his hard work than any other athlete in the history of the world, and brought more honor to his country than any individual of his generation. In the article that I posted a link to in part one of this entry, the writer said that Michael Phelps’ use of marijuana was “just idiotic.” My opinion is quite contrary to this.

As of yet, about 100 milli0n Americans have smoked marijuana, including two of our presidents. If it is an “idiotic” behavior, then we wouldn’t have so many responsible adults in our country doing it.

The mistakes of Rodruigez are far greater in my mind. His drug use was not innocent and recreational. He was using illegal steroids which are proven to be much more harmful than marijuana, for the sole purpose of enhancing his skills in his sport. Not only did his admission of drug use end his credibility as a good individual, it did away with all credibility as an athlete. While Phelps is undeniably a good athlete, it is impossible to distinguish which of Rodruigez’s achievements were genuine, and which were drug-enabled.

Which leads me to my main point. There are undoubtedly some in the athletic community who see no harm in using performance-enhancing drugs in order to improve ones skills at a sport or event. But, since there is only one Olympics, only one World Series, and only one Super Bowl, all athletes who put forward an honest effort towards their game are overshadowed by the accomplishments of cheaters. This is why I propose that we set up an alternate set of games for all athletes who choose to use steroids or other banned drugs.  A “Juiced Olympics” if you will.

Not only would this present a venue for us to view the true capabilities of the enhanced human body, but it would provide endless entertainment. Due to the mass amounts of steroids some of the would be comsuming, bouts of post match “roid rage” would be common, and the Olympics would inadvertantly also become a blood sport. This would create a brand new pool of events for people to bet on. Our governement could provide liscences to different bookies, allowing the general population to benefit from the taxes taken off of these bets.

Once again. I win.

There have been several major scandals in the past year and the past few months in particular that piqued my interest in this issue. The first being the Tour de France rider who was stripped of the yellow jersey for use of steroids, and more recently the drug use “scandals” surrounding Michael Phelps and Alex Rodruigez.

I’ll tackle the tour bit first. My brother, an avid bicyclist, follows the Tour religiously, and I heard a lot about Floyd Landis having the win taken from him. Every cycling fan who I heard from was pretty much as angry as Rush Limbaugh when he learned that his Oxycotin prescription was through. Since cycling is an endurance sport, and a sport where individuals tend to have more to gain, doping is a much wider spread issue than with some other sports. My brother told me that when Landis got busted, most people weren’t really that surprised, since his team is notorious for drug use.

This really led me to believe that Landis was in the wrong. If there are teams that have stricter guidelines about doping, then people like Landis have an unfair advantage over the rest of the racers. He didn’t achieve his victory through hard work or by having one of his testicles removed to reduce drag resistance (Armstrong in ’09 baby!). He did it by cheating, plain and simple, and there is no reason for him not to be banned from the sport outright.

Then I stumbled across this article. It gives a nice perspective on two more recent events in sporting. Namely: the Micheal Phelps bong fiasco and A-Rod’s admission to having fun with needles. This collumnist gave a really reshreshing spin on the stories. I guess that it would be easiest for me to adress them one at a time.

First with Phelps. So I’m guessing that everyone is already aquainted with the specifics of his “irresponsible and immature mistake.” But for those of you who know little about anything aquatic, I’ll reiterate. The fastest man in water (ever), Michael Phelps, was caught on camera taking a bong hit at a frat party at Univeristy of North Carolina. Somehow, it got leaked to a British tabliod, and everyone freaked the hell out. Sponsors withdrew their funding, Wheaties asked for the giant check back, and every high school swimming coach in the Bible Belt recoiled in fear.

But, by certain demographics, there was no negative reaction whatsoever. On Facebook, someone started a group entitled, “I bet I can find a million people who don’t care that Michael Phelps smoked weed”, which gained members faster than any other non-political “1 million group” to date. Several of my stoner friends started dedicating their bong hits to Phelps, and almost all of my non-pot smoking friends expressed nothing more than mild amusement.

To me this expresses a certain contrast of ideas in our society. From what I can see, it is perfectly acceptable for Michael Phelps the citizen to smoke pot, but it completely unacceptable for Michael Phelps the role model or Michael Phelps the athlete to smoke pot.

When I saw some of the headlines, it seemed like a total farce. A few of them looked like they were right out of the Onion: “24-year old World Class Swimmer Caught Having a Good Time at Frat Party!” It seemed like it was hard for the media to make a big deal out of it, because, for the most part, it wasn’t a big deal. To tell the truth, I doubt that anyone was surprised at all. I mean, this is a man who consumes 2,000 calories for breakfast every morning, so he has got to blazing some strong shit to keep up that kind of appetite.

My personal opinion is that people really shouldn’t be talking trash about what Phelps does on his own time. This is a man in his mid twenties who has accomplished more in the realm of organized sports than any other individual EVER! The only person who should be able to diss the fastest man in water is the fastest man on land, and Usein Boldt is Jamaican, so I doubt that he’ll be giving any press conferences about the bong fiasco in the near future. If your kids want to be like their hero Phelps, tell them that they have to win at least 8 gold medals in the Olympic Games be fore they can light up.

To be continued…

Next time: A-rod’s dabbling with steroids, and my modest proposal to solving the doping problem in the Olympics.

(note: BMEzine is fairly graphic, and even in the “clean” sections you get a lot of extreme genital mods and gratuitous nudity, so for discretion sake, I won’t include a direct link. Feel free to look it up on your own if you want too, but don’t say that I didn’t warn you.)

The arguements on both sides of this isssue are numerous, and equally deserving of consideration, but most people get too much of a knee-jerk reaction when they see a swastika to hear both of them.

First the anti-swastika rap. Any indiviual with even a minimal education would make the connection between the infamous swastika and the atrocities commited by the Nazi officials who took part in the Holocaust. No one can overstate the extent to which they dragged the before noble swastika through the mud with these horrible crimes, and many would say that because of this, the swastika is now permenantly tainted as a symbol.

The other school of thought seems to probe a little deeper into the issue. They analyze the roots of the swastika as an ancient symbol in different schools of Buddhism, Hinduism, and several Native American traditions. Some say that even though the swastika does have obscenely negative connotations to the bulk of our society, that it is not past the point of no return. They argue that the swastika, even with its simplicity of shape, holds a great amount of symbolic power that could be used for good in our society if we were to remove the negative sentiment that it is tied to. The people who I have heard this argument from are all fairly well educated, well read, and strongly anti-racist, so I do feel obligated to acknowledge their efforts to undertake such a difficult task as trying to clear the name of the sullied swastika.

I personally adhered to the first school of thought without question up until recently. Even though I have heard several people explain the pro-redemption arguement, seeing the swastika portrayed in certain contexts still ticks me off. In the past, I’ve hung around groups of people who have been tattoo-enthusiasts of sorts, and have therefore seen quite a bit of ink. The swastika is fairly common mark in the BDSM community, biker clubs, and in various gang cultures. I get the feeling that the people who are into kinky sex and hook suspensions who wear the swastika generally don’t do so to tick off minorities, because these people are the ones who put forth the strongest efforts to “take back” the swastika. German swastikas are also fairly common among 1%er biker clubs. While there are definitely some overtly racist bikers, most 1%ers who wear the swastika do so for shock value, and not to propogate ethnic hatred.

But one particular mark that tends to really set me off is a German eagle with a third Reich swatika banner below it, which a lot of the white power gangbangers in Salinas wear as a chest-piece. Members of the Aryan Brotherhood or the lesser known Nazi Lowriders frequently use the swastika, and the negative connotations that come with it, as a terrorist tool. They use it to scare innocent people, and the violent crimes they commit only further denegrate the image of the swastika.

That’s why I say, it’s too soon. Though I can see why some good people have legitimate, honest reasons to wear the swastika, there are still people who want to use it to inspire fear and hate. It might be 50 years, or 500 years for that matter, before people are able to strip the swastika of its fascist ties, but for them to do so, I believe that the world will have to be a much better educated and more tolerant place. Today, there are too many people who don’t know the positive aspects of the image to resurrect its positive aspects.

The concept for this site is fairly simple. Indaba, inspired by it’s eponymous African word for gathering, started out as a group of grad students who used an online file-sharing site to create and mix house beats. As soon as the creators of the site realized the potential for music creation that it had, they turned the site into a free world-wide music mixing forum.

At first I was really excited about seeing what this site was really about. In his interview on the Colbert Report, one of the site’s founders described the first collaboration that occurred on Indaba. He said that he, two of his close friends, a man from Libya and a lawyer in some former Soviet republic all worked together to create a dance remix of an Eminem song. This got me psyched to check out what kind of music people have created on Indaba. A lot of times, I find that bands are really limited by the range of music they are exposed to. Some  groups have a tendency to produce better, more interesting music as they go through lineup changes, and I thought that creating music through an online medium might really jump start the artistic process.

When I got around to actually logging on to Indaba, I have to admit that I was disappointed. Though there were  few techno mixes that sounded decent, they were pretty lackluster. The people who were doing the electronic music on Indaba obviously weren’t professional d.j.’s, and I could tell that they were all adding cookie cutter samples. The treble and bass on the different track lines that people added weren’t ever leveled correctly, and in a couple of instances, people even put in tracks that were the wrong tempo.

The selection of rock and blues on Indaba was even more disappointing. There were definitely a few artists on the site who were really good, and the tracks they initially laid down sounded good. However, other users often added riffs and solos that didn’t fit with the original mood of the song, and alltogether brought down the song to a lower level.

After thinking it over, I realize that Indaba is a good concept, but it really doesn’t substitute sitting in a room with another musician to compose a song. As it is, the site could be good for brainstorming. A d.j. who has songwriters block could log on and potentially get some great ideas, but I don’t think that any finished product will come directly  from this site.

The concept is fairly simple, a lesbian who is curious about the male psyche dresses up in (very convincing) drag and “lives among us” for a year. Kind of a Jane Goodall type of experiment, but with slightly less hairy specimens. Though it was an interesting read, and Vincent does prove to have a uniquely witty snap to her writing, I did feel that it was somehow lacking.

Much of this sentiment can probably be attributed to that gosh-darned y chromosome of mine. On about a dozen occasions throughout the book, I found myself yelling at the ceiling, “No shit! We’re not f*ckin’ aliens.”

This was apparent in her first quest to understand manhood: the bowling league. As it said in the article, the other men on her bowling team were all regular blue-collar guys, the kind of guys that I would expect to see in a crappy sitcom on TBS. Rather than approaching them as individuals of equal or greater complexity, she described them in a way that I feel can only be described as “East-coast liberal snobbery.” She comes onto the bowling team believing that they are just “some of the proles,” and it seems like she doesn’t expect them to show even close to the same amount of tolerance or compassion that she does.

Of course, she is surprised. Though the men on the team do tell jokes with homophobic or racist overtones, blacks, mexicans and gays are no more the butt-end of their humor than any other group of people. She is also “shocked” at their stances towards affirmative action and unionized labor. She initially thought that these men were pro-union simply due to the fact that they were working class, and anti-affirmative action simply because they are white and undereducated.

It seemed that with every new situation that she entered, she held some sort of general bias that, in my opinion weakened the overall effect of the novel. This was really evident in the chapter where she catologues her experience in strip clubs. Though I also do find strip joints to be gross, Vincent spent too much time in the chapter detailing how “plasticized” all the strippers were, rather than describing the reactions and mindsets of the men who she was supposed to be “studying.”

Overall, I consider it a worthwhile read, but it would have been a lot stronger if she had maintained a “researcher’s” standpoint rather than constantly analyzing everything through her highly subjective feminist lens.

As i watched the conflict between Israel and Palestine unfold during the first half of this month, I stood on the sidelines of debates which revolved around it, and watched my friends quickly jump to support either Palestine or Israel. It took me a while for my opinions on the subject to solidify, and I still don’t fully understand how I feel about the issue.

My family has gotten the Christian Science Monitor for several years, mostly because they have a focus on articles having to do with foreign affairs, and usually portray objective views on such issues. As I saw the media begin to cover the situation in Gaza, the images alone were enough to make me confused about the problem. Initially, I heard reports that stated that Israel wasn’t allowing reporters into the Gaza strip, which seemed fairly sensible since they were bombing the living hell out of it. Then a few days later, I had received no fewer than 10 requests on facebook to join groups with names like: “stop the bloodshed in Palestine”, whose walls were plastered with images of mutilated corpes and dying children. The facebook statuses of my friends touted the death toll of innocent civilians, along with figures for how many of them were women and children.

At this point, I was wishing that I could live in some sort of media-free vacuum, so that I wouldn’t have to expose myself to all this extremely depressing information. I was so fed up with feeling bad about problems that I couldn’t change, that I started to wish that Israel and Palestine would just fall off the face of the earth. Eventually I recovered from this phase of self-pity and nihilism, and i tried to reassess the situation.

I looked at Israel’s side of the story. After wading through several hours of conservative news footage, I saw that Israel was trying to say that their involvement in Gaza was in retaliation to rocket attacks in that killed two Israelis a day before the bombing started. They stated that Israel was solely targeting military targets, and that civilian casualties were minimal.

For a second, the gun-toting redneck side of my personality believed that. If Tijuana fired improvised rockets at San Diego, I sure as hell would expect California to retaliate. But then, my rational hippie side kicked in. As I went through the articles which favored Israel, the most disturbing image I could find was a 90 year old Israel woman, lamenting the loss of her patio furniture to a Qasam rocket. The “attacks” that Hamas staged against Israel were about as effective as the new Guns n’ Roses album was listenable.

The longer I immersed myself in the media’s coverage, the more I came to side with the Palestinians. Most of this is probably due to the blunders of Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni. I would watch a video in which she would say that Israel was targeting purely military targets, then I would see another one that aired at the same time that shows the rubble from a UN hospital. I would see a press conference which would say that Israel was using legitimate, conventional arms, then I would see pictures of children whose skin was burned off by chemical weapons.

By the end of the conflict, I thought that I had everdosed on CNN. I stopped viewing the issue as a conventional conflict, and stopped trying to choose a side. I was just disgusted at the loss of human life, and I wanted to put an ax through my computer and go live out the rest of my life in the woods.

Back to square one.