ver the last few weeks, mainstream journalism appears to have come to a consensus that the grievances of Islamic terrorists have little to do with U.S. foreign policy, that instead terrorism is aimed at bringing down freedom, democracy, and this fuzzy concept we refer to as "the American way of life".

I was just contemplating in my own snobbish way the difficult question of what this obscure concept might mean to "the average American", when this sign posted at the entrance to a Mobil gas station replaced my confusion with this remarkably concise treatise: "God Bless America. 2 donuts 99 cents". What advertising genius! But then I realized the true profundity of this statement ran far deeper than its advertisement, and that perhaps our Founding Father should have included it in our Declaration of Independence, if they had had donuts back then.

What I cherish about the American way of life is not the fact that I get to sequester myself in a small cubbyhole every four years to contemplate the relative merits of the latest Bush and the latest Gore, and ultimately throw my decision into a bottomless (poorly-counted) pile of equally limited decisions. It is that I can drive my car wherever I want, and buy donuts at an insignificant price relative to my income. Moreover, the person who had created that sign seemed to understand my consumerist yearnings, and was even prepared to satiate them in the name of our mutual American heritage.

Yet too often, when we pontificate on the freedom we cherish as Americans, we focus solely on social and political freedoms, while ignoring the economic freedoms from which the love of our country truly stems. Since the onset of The Cold War, the rhetoric has been that we are "privileged" to be Americans, and that therefore we must be willing to fight to defend our privilege, that only by fighting can we hope to bring the gospel of "American values" to foreign lands. The stated goal of such "freedom fighting" is often to liberate people from oppressive regimes that deny them suffrage. Rarely is economic freedom the stated goal.

By “economic freedom”, I don’t mean a Randian right to amass infinite wealth at the cost of others. Rather, I am referring to the most essential, yet most oft neglected, of human rights: the right to freedom from extreme poverty, or, as some put it, the right to have one’s basic needs satisfied.

Unfortunately, even liberal human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch make no reference in their charters to any human right to basic education, nourishment, or health service; instead, they define human rights violations almost exclusively in terms of the freedoms of speech, dissent, and suffrage. Some nations are routinely vilified for failing to provide the right to dissent, while other nations, whose property structures effectively deny people the right to eat, the right to education, and the right to health care, are never accused of violating human rights law.

In America, the need for governmental protection of economic freedoms is less acute. The cartoons of the Reagan era, which falsely depicted welfare recipients purchasing brand new Cadillacs with their monthly stipends still pervade our collective psyche.

Our affluent society tends to accept the conservative view that those who are unable to ensure for themselves the "right to eat" and the "right to medical service" simply did not try hard enough. However, this model simply cannot be applied to lesser developed nations in which there is no meritocracy; in many such countries, if one is born poor, there is no hope of finding an honest living. Thus it is essential to realize that if we truly wish to bring our "American values" to lesser developed countries, we must consider economic freedoms alongside, or even before, political and social freedoms.

Our approach to Latin American nations has always stressed political freedoms, justifying the focus of American aid on militarization, presumably in the interest of establishing national stability. Yet every military regime in South America that the United States supports seems to gear itself towards defending the interests of an elite ruling class. The latest militarization of Colombia clearly follows this trend, focusing anti-drug efforts on dropping chemical weapons on the cocoa crops of small farmers rather than removing elite metropolitan drug lords.

The most disturbing example is U.S. policy towards Cuba. Despite 50 years of U.S. sanctions, which prevented U.S. export of food and medicine to Cuba, Cuba remains the only country in all of Latin America in which all citizens are guaranteed adequate food, education, and health service. The Cuban health care system focuses high importance on getting adequate basic care to all its citizens; the success of this policy is statistically apparent: Cuba has consistently recorded the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America, (.72% in ’98) scoring even better than many American cities. Cuba’s life expectancy of 76 years is the highest in the region. The doctor to patient ratio is by far the best in the world. (1 doctor to 300 patients: six times better than the U.K.) Cuba’s focus on basic health care has not excluded the prospect of medical research: the country recently developed a new vaccination for meningitis B.

Yet the Cuban medical system has its critics. Some journalists among the Cuban immigrant lobby have called the system “wage slavery”, because a Cuban doctor only reaps about 10% of the profit of his or her labor. The rest goes back into the system to train more doctors. This view fails to take into account that most Cuban doctors would never have had the opportunity to receive their excellent training if the profits of their labor were not continually reinvested back into Cuba’s medical infrastructure.

The tragic side to Cuba’s health care system is that U.S. sanctions imposed since ’61 have deprived it of crucial medical resources. The U.S. Amendment to the Helms-Burton Act of ’95 even attempted to internationalize sanctions on Cuba, however no other country was willing to participate, limiting the measure’s effectiveness. Nevertheless, since the fall of Cuba’s primary supplier of medicine, the Soviet Union, there has been a dire shortage of AIDS and cancer medicine in Cuba. For instance, the inaccessibility of medicine to treat breast cancer has caused the number of Cuban women who die of breast cancer per year to skyrocket, totalling thousands of unnecessary deaths. U.S. patents on the medicine makes it illegal for other nations to produce the drugs, making all drugs patented in the United States after ’85 inaccessible to Cuba. In ’97, there was a Congressional motion to allow U.S. export of essential food and medicine to Cuba (H.R. ’51), but the bill seems to have been lost or forgotten somewhere in the Congressional pipeline.

Like any sanctions policy, the goal of U.S. sanctions is to cause the people of Cuba economic hardship so that they will rise up to overthrow their government, and attain the political freedom that America’s humanitarian lobby views as the most fundamental human right. However, our lack of concern for the thousands who die every year, casualties of the means to our political ends, belies our lack of understanding of the significance of economic freedom to people of lesser developed nations. One might argue that we’re thinking in the long-term interests of the Cuban people, but the collapse of communist Yugoslavia didn’t exactly benefit the Serbian, Albanian, and other Yugoslavian peoples. A peaceful nation turned quickly into a bloodbath.

By the conception of economic freedoms that emphasizes basic needs, Cuba could be considered one of the most liberated nations in all of Latin America. Yet human rights groups ignore this great accomplishment, instead calling attentio
n to the nation’s several hundred political prisoners; yet the persuasiveness of this point is severely limited considering the one thousand unidentified, but doubtlessly all Muslim, political prisoner the U.S. has recently taken into custody without charge. Maybe the removal of political freedoms is justified in time of national crisis. However, it is unfair to assume that Cuba has never faced such crises. C.I.A. attempts to assassinate Castro, or stage coups in Cuba, the most notorious of which was the Bay of Pigs Incident, are well documented.

Incidentally, Cuba remains the only Latin American nation on the U.S.’s short list of "terrorist states" (alongside Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and North Korea). If Cuba is a terrorist state, why not also call nations like Colombia, or Guatemala, which sponsor far more political violence, "terrorist states"? The problem is, doing so might make it harder to get funding of these military regimes through Congress.

If there is anything about U.S. foreign policy that can be said to encourage terrorism, it is the lack of consideration for this notion of "economic freedom". U.S. focus on establishing political and social freedoms in foreign lands not only ignores the main cause of suffering in nations like Afghanistan, but it can also easily be construed by radicals as "imposing Western culture" upon their society, creating a fundamentalist backlash that ends up actually reducing social freedoms. The Taliban is a case in point.

Only when people have sufficient economic freedom will they seek the political and social freedoms we enjoy as Americans. However, as long as economic freedom is denied, heinous attempts to overthrow the global power structure through guerilla warfare and terrorism will be the only real freedom fighting we shall see.

The "War on Drugs" has been so terribly ineffective that it leads one to question its true motives. Is the goal really to curtail drug use, or is it to segregate society and vilify the disadvantaged?

A combination of mandatory minimum sentencing and other unjust laws has led to an enormous rise in U.S. prison populations. Thanks to these laws, 60 percent of the federal prison population consisted of nonviolent drug offenders as of ’99. In ’97, about twice as many people were arrested for drug offenses as for violent crimes.

As a result, the U.S. incarceration rate is now six to ten times higher than in most industrialized countries. Indeed, in 2000 the U.S. surpassed Russia to become the nation with the highest incarceration rate worldwide. A side effect of this enormous boom in prison population has been an increase in spending on prison construction. Since it is mostly young college-age people who are ending up in these prisons, fiscal planners have found that the most logical place to acquire the funds needed for building prisons is higher education. Indeed, there has been a direct trade-off in spending: in ’95, federal funding for university construction dropped by $954 million to $2.5 billion, while federal funding for prison construction rose by $926 million to $2.6 billion. These numbers are huge. They reveal that in one year, the federal government reallocated more than a quarter of total spending for university construction toward prison construction.

The laws are unjust in other ways as well: they target minorities and the poor disproportionately while turning a blind eye to the rich. On paper, these laws may seem unbiased, but they tend to be enforced selectively. In ’95, the sentencing project reported that one out of every three black men in their twenties was under correctional supervision. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, African Americans comprise approximately 13 percent of the population and 13 percent of all drug users. Yet strangely enough, more than 55 percent of those convicted for drug offenses are African American. Indeed, the U.S. police and judicial forces in tandem maintain one of the oldest affirmative action policies in the country. This affirmative action policy ensures that a disproportionate number of blacks are convicted of drug crimes, despite the fact that their drug use is only average among the country as a whole.

According to Human Rights Watch, these drug laws violate international human rights treaties because they have the effect of restricting rights on the basis of race. Facing accusation of human rights violations from abroad, one would expect our government to make some effort to curb such discrimination. But instead an even more stringent and discriminatory drug law was introduced last year.

By the amendment to the Higher Education Act (HEA) of ’98, those convicted for drug use are barred from financial aid for a year. After two convictions, they are barred from aid for two years, and after three, they are barred permanently. This law was enforced on an honor system; students had to declare their convictions on financial aid forms. The law went into effect this past fall, and as a result, 7000 students lost their financial aid. Another 790,000 cleverly left the question blank, thereby managing to hold onto their financial aid and leaving drug crusaders fumbling. Unfortunately, governmental anti-drug forces have now wised up to this strategy and are threatening even those who refuse to answer in this coming year. This means hundreds of thousands of students could potentially lose their financial aid and be barred from higher education in 2001.

It doesn’t seem that lawmakers have given the least consideration to the potential consequences of this measure. To suddenly refuse a student financial aid forces him or her either to give up on his or her education or find a quick way to make a lot of money. And what quicker, easier way could there be to make money than to start selling drugs? This law presents the student with a choice of either dropping out of college or supporting his education by selling drugs. Rather than curbing drug use, this new law could turn drug dealing into a necessity.

Furthermore, in conjunction with the criminal justice system’s upside-down affirmative action policy, this law amounts to outright racism. Given that most drug offenders who are convicted are minorities, as are many financial aid recipients, the new policies are bound to thin minority populations in colleges. This legislation also has the secondary effect of weeding out the poor from colleges while legitimizing drug use among the rich, who need not worry about financial aid. All this, sadly, is occurring at a time when higher education in the U.S. was just beginning to lose its aristocratic undertones and become accepted as a rite of passage for all Americans. Removing several hundred thousand minority and non-wealthy students from higher education could set back that process by decades. Is the drug war primarily an effort to stop drug use, or is it another excuse to segregate blacks from whites by imprisoning them, and to prevent the poor and uneducated from rising to the upper echelons of society, where they may indulge in more "cultured" and forgivable drugs, like cocaine?

There is still hope for reversing these trends, however. The ever-expanding empire of drug laws is bound to overextend itself, and it may eventually topple under its own weight.

There is a growing grassroots movement among students and universities against this new elitist law, and with it, the growing realization of the absurdity of the entire U.S. drug policy. Organizations like Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) are forming on many campuses, and petitioning for change. At Hampshire College, SSDP succeeded in gaining support for an HEA Financial Aid Replacement Fund, which has raised over $20,000 to pay for the lost financial aid of five of it’s students. A chapter of SSDP has even formed at Dartmouth this year. The best hope for changing racist laws like these lies in college students, the future lawmakers of this country.

It is essential to recognize that organizations like SSDP are not "pro-drugs," as "hard-line" anti-drug warriors would have you believe. Instead, they generally believe that our government has adopted the completely wrong approach to the drug problem. These critics of the drug war favor treatment of drug users over imprisonment. It has been shown that for every $1 the government spends on treatment, it saves $7 on criminal justice. SSDP favors a more cost-effective approach to the drug war. It can hardly be a coincidence that the percentage of American citizens who smoke marijuana is two times the percentage of Amsterdam citizens who smoke marijuana, even though marijuana is legal in Amsterdam.

The criminalization of drug use has put its regulation in the hands of corrupt forces that are above the law. The same law that puts the drug dealer who is caught in prison empowers another drug dealer by removing her competition and tightening her control over her territory. As long as there is a demand for drugs, there will be a supply. The problem with criminalizing drugs is that it does nothing to address the demands of addiction. It needs to be recognized that drug use can be curtailed without recourse to imprisonment, that fighting a war on drugs is the surest way to lose all governmental control of drug use.

n a recent article in the Dartmouth Review, Alexis Jhamb ‘03 describes a prospective student who, while visiting Dartmouth last spring, stumbled across a Sexual Assault Awareness Week rally. The student, "Olivia", decided that the protesters were "crazy fools", and, Jhamb tells us, chose to attend the University of Pennsylvania as a result of her experience. Jhamb concludes that such displays are not only ineffective, but harmful, in that they deter interested students from attending the College.

From an educational standpoint, was Olivia’s tragic absence from the class of 2004 a loss or a gain for Dartmouth College? Faced with the choice of hearing people voice their opinions or seeing people minding their own business, Olivia chose the latter, undoubtedly less educational experience. Her described behavior showed a complete lack of respect for people whose opinions differed from her own.

The Review’s presentation of this girl as the ideal would-be Dartmouth student is insulting. If the rally had commemorated the Holocaust, a student would never consider describing the participants as "noisy", so why should the same scathing attack of this memorial to rape be admired?

Sexual Assault Week is a memorial to the victims of rape. The "rowdiness" of this crowd of mostly women demonstrates that many students have been strongly affected by issues of rape and sexual harassment.

Perhaps it was an ugly side of Dartmouth for a high school senior, naive to the dangers of rape, to see on her college visit, but Olivia must learn eventually that education does not always take place in classrooms. To allow this prospective ‘04 to continue to indulge in the dangerous fantasy that she lives in a different world from those who are raped is far more harmful.

Only a short while after Olivia’s decision to attend the University of Pennsylvania, Tabard hosted Sister Spit, an all-lesbian female performance group. Jhamb says that Hillary Miller ‘02 described the event as providing "an education that is not easily found in the Upper Valley area, and certainly not on this campus."

Pricking up her ears at the word education, Alexis Jhamb attended, likely expecting to see professors, degrees, equations, literary formulas, and such, but was disappointed to find only a bunch of women engaging in spontaneous poetry.

She then picked out a few compromising lines and jotted them down, using this information to write the event off as both cliche and confused. Most notably, Jhamb received mixed messages on whether illegal drugs were a good or bad thing.

If Alexis Jhamb feels that an explicit anti-drug message is something lacking in her education, I encourage her to attend my 6th grade health class on drug abuse. If Sister Spit had promulgated a clearly pro or anti drug message, it would have been compromising its artistic integrity in order to promote an agenda. Dartmouth students may potentially learn more from the true experiences of people than they ever could from hackneyed 6th grade pedantics.

Part of what education is about is extending one’s boundaries of experience and understanding. While drugs can be harmful to one’s health, and thus not advisable (because often the danger is greater than the education provided), one can at least learn from the experience of others free of harm. The apparent miscommunication between Miller and Jhamb is that Jhamb does not view personal experience as a source of education.

This view contradicts every tenet of the liberal arts education system that the Review so ardently supports. The literary value of a book is rarely its message alone. Psychology picks at contradictions within the mind. Even mathematics, though often seen as a grudging process of memorization, is, in its highest form, an effort to think along new lines.

All forms of education are an effort to expose things in their true form; Jhamb has presented education as a continuous struggle to hide behind predefined rules and one-sided stories.

This approach to education is ugliest in its tendency toward prejudice. Jhamb states, "Their tattoos (covering almost all available space on their visible flesh) and multiple nose rings (in a single nose) made me more than reluctant to affiliate myself with their group."

Although Jhamb does make more substantial criticism of the message of Sister Spit, she admits here that appearance alone is enough reason to avoid all association with these women. Such a statement reflects the closed-mindedness with which Jhamb has approached this performance: she is prepared to dismiss activists at Dartmouth merely on the basis of appearance.

The way to make Dartmouth the best school possible is not to turn the student body into a docile and homogeneous entity that does not offend mainstream sensibilities. Instead, students must acquire the enlightenment to look upon the experiences of others respectfully, especially if these experiences are vastly different from their own.