he doesn’t own an apron, powers up

with pantsuits and professional perfume

so she can spend nine-to-five

between four eggshell walls

making 100K. I went to school

made ready for the bake sale

with ready-made cookies, courtesy

of Greenberg’s bakery, came home

to play ponies with the babysitter, eat dinner

with my mother, tell her what I want

to be today, never dreaming of a future

that required wrapping myself in smells

from an oven to make me a woman.

ost evenings last August or an August before that

rich red sauce bubbles on the stove—

spicy curls of steam are sneaking,

sneak from beneath the pot’s slanted lid.

Cornhusk eyes gleam between the geraniums, night owl

perched on the lip of the paint chipped flower-box.

Garden days have produced the most fruitful suppers,

lined long wooden tables in squash, corn, tomatoes.

Our stereo drips fuzzy tones—words are like sour water,

our barn’s leaky faucet. His hands clutch her waist,

Her skirt’s petals, these strange pleats that keep evening’s beat.

Failing floorboards and the crickets creek

(in dissonance joins the furnace groan.)

Tonight is a symphony:

we crouch on carpeted stairs.

But ten eyes between railings we are—they sway back

and forth—sway they on the cheap linoleum.

ooking over the contents of this particular issue of the Dartmouth Free Press, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. With all the weighty issues facing us today, it’s simple to conclude that it’s hopeless for any of us to do anything. After all, these are huge problems facing all of human society—what can we, as individuals, do?

We progressives are often criticized for being too idealistic, for “caring too much” about things that just “can’t,” or “won’t,” change. These charges paint those who “care” as impractical, naive, and foolhardy and are leveled to cast doubt on ideas that may sound nice, but (as our friends who so proudly identify as “pragmatic” would say) are not relevant to the real world. I respectfully disagree. Let me be clear: I do not claim that every cause with a banner raised in its name demands urgent action. After all, there really are too many competing causes, too many pressing priorities, too much for us to truly give each its due. But this point is not synonymous with surrender, nor does it demand we sacrifice our idealism on the altar of pragmatic compromise.

Simply put: some big causes cannot be ignored and cannot be postponed, no matter the objections raised by so-called political realists. Environmental change and global warming, for all the political noise that now obscures their urgency, cannot be put off. We have to do something about them now if we are to do anything at all. The national debt, coming to a precipice, is ready to fall into an already cavernous hole created by Social Security and Medicare. Again, something must be done now. These big, world-changing issues do not wait, regardless of how committed we are to putting them off. We won’t magically get more time to act effectively just because we neglected to start dealing with the underlying causes early enough.

While there are many of these epic issues to deal with, many progressives focus on small, local, and personal problems. It is these small quests that many Dartmouth students find urgent and pressing. We need to be more queer-friendly. We need to create more gender neutral housing. And we need to better anticipate and respond to shameful outbreaks of bigotry: the Blarflex comic belittling a fellow student (and most minority demographics on campus); the GGMM’s failed joke about our incoming president, to name two recent examples. It wouldn’t seem that these are the issues an activist/progressive/concerned citizen should fill his or her plate with. They aren’t, well, important enough…right? Why pay attention to these when there are, frankly, so many more important causes out there? Progressivism too often falls into this perennial trap, one that prioritizes the global at the expense of the local, as does our media and our societal attention span as a whole.

Too often we turn our attention to the sexy, trendy causes of the month. The 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia captured the attention of the world and an outpouring of support and money. And then it stopped. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina brought the world together in a grand signing of checkbooks and a flurry of brief service trips to New Orleans. And then we lost interest. These issues have not lost their relevance, nor have they been “solved” by any means. The displacement and devastation caused by the tsunami remains evident. Today, thousands of refugees from New Orleans are still languishing, scattered across nearby states in motley patches of trailer parks. These issues held our national and international attention not because of their inherent significance or our underlying concern—they held our attention because they were the issues of the day.

Yet if we don’t pay attention to the things around us, where can change be immediately and significantly affected? Issues close to home are rarely as sexy and exciting, and they also (necessarily) lack the grand human drama involved in disasters and catastrophes. We become complacent, acclimated, and apathetic. College-hopeful juniors and seniors happily take service trips to Africa, Southeast Asia, and other exotic regions to relieve poverty, but never really stop to think closer to home. At home in California, I saw many students head off to Ghana, Malawi, and the like out of an admittedly admirable desire to address poverty. Yet these exotic crusades too often ignore the all-too-close urban decay in the cities and towns nearby.

Tip O’Neill once said that “all politics is local.” So is change. We always reach for the grand sweeping changes because they are most noticeable, and we imagine they will be the most broadly felt. But if we do not first attend to issues crippling us at a local level, are we really in any state to help others? Can we, as starry-eyed, self-consciously idealistic college students, eradicate poverty in Africa if we don’t have the formula to do so in America?

We have to pay attention. The end of apathy does not simply come when one is moved by the pleas of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Greenpeace, or any number of advocacy groups. Even the causes dear to me, on a personal level—those of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), or the Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM)—I realize are not as immediately pressing as others worth participation and energy. My two dollars could do little to help these causes. Yet those same two dollars, used instead to buy ice cream for a low income child I tutored in my area (while explaining the physics behind salt, water, and ice cream), made an immediate, and I hope, somewhat lasting impact in at least one life. We often forget all of the little things that we can do by virtue of action rather than abstract concern. This is not to say that the big issues are to be ignored. It’s simply to say that, on an individual level, the small ones can take us far further, and collectively have far more of an impact than our dedication to a thousand “big” causes.

Each of us has different talents, different abilities, and different capabilities for change. Whether it’s something big, like the ability to create national awareness about global warming, or small, like the ability to organize a fundraiser for renovations to a local school, or yet smaller, like the ability to spark a child’s interest in science where none existed before, we can all do something. Of course, the “big” issues will continue to be important. But in everyday life, we all too often forget about—and are therefore apathetic towards— the pressing, local issues we’ve become blind to. Activism, and progressivism, have for too long been defined in unsuitably narrow terms. Whether it be the Civil Rights Movement, which began with humble community organizing in Birmingham, Alabama, or the small, decentralized, and eminently local effort to fundraise and elect Obama, the roots of large change have always grown from small acts. In this day and age, overextended as we are and easily distracted by shiny, new causes, it’s important to remember this. Those who complain that individuals cannot effect change are looking to the wrong end. There is a great deal, however small it may be, that each person can do to make our world a better place to live in. Really, it begins at home.

id you know that evangelical Christians are more likely to buy lottery tickets and less likely to recycle? And that Jehovah’s Witnesses seldom have computers? And the only safe sex is between husband and wife? How do I know these things? I found them on the Internet. Got a problem with that? You shouldn’t. The film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West was shown in part on CNN and Fox, won prizes at three film festivals and was distributed with 70 U.S. newspapers. And believe it or not, one of its sources was the Internet… In fact, the movie even displayed a subtitle saying, “Source: Internet.”

My daily paper, the Los Angeles Times, did not include a free copy of Obsession. I got my copy at the Dartmouth Review sponsored lecture: “Understanding Radical Islam.” More about the Obsession “documentary” (if you can call it that) later—first let us discuss the finer points of Paul Marshall’s Dartmouth lecture.

Dr. Paul Marshall is a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, a neo-conservative think-tank devoted to such worthy causes as attacking organic farming and advocating the bombing of Iran. Dr. Marshall has written over 20 books, which would appear to be quite the academic achievement, at least until you actually look over them. Unfortunately, with titles like Radical Islam’s Rules: the Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law (2005), The Rise of Hindu Extremism (2003), Islam at the Crossroads (2002), it becomes immediately obvious that these are the kind of under-researched and over-the-top fear-mongering books that the right-wing pumps out on a weekly basis for Fox News aficionados. Now, to be honest, I have not read a single one of his twenty books. As far as I know, they may be well written and insightful, but if his lecture was an accurate preview, they are likely nothing more than a misguided attempt to package an unbelievably biased conservative-warped history into respectable academic opinion by parading a bunch of fancy degrees and accreditations in front of it.

At his lecture, Dr. Marshall spun a half-hour history of the entire Middle East using a neatly formulated, if not highly simplistic and suspect, worldview of Muslims: “When we were good and faithful Muslims, we succeeded. When we stopped being good and faithful Muslims, we failed.” He claimed that the Islamic world had about “1,000 years of stunning success” followed by “300 years of crushing failure.” This failure—caused by things like political repression, lack of economic development, and human rights abuses—is what led some of “the Muslims” to become extremists and regress back to the Islam of the seventh century. Accordingly, extremist reactions such as terrorism have nothing to do with United States foreign policies or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And these issues also couldn’t possibly have to do with the 65 years of history that Dr. Marshall chose to completely skip over—from World War I to the first Iraq War—when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and Europe and the United States decided they could randomly draw national boundaries and choose Middle Eastern leaders based on their own interests. Even though I am only a junior AMES major, I am pretty sure this was an integral period in the formation of the current Middle East and its present problems.

Its not like I wasn’t expecting this kind of hidden-agenda fact twisting in order to reinforce the extremist/terrorist stereotype of Muslims. A blitz in my inbox from the former Review Editor-in-Chief entitled “Islamism and the West” could only mean as much. One of Dr. Marshall’s first statements was that Muslims exposed to American higher education are more likely to become terrorists. Thankfully, I think the three Muslim friends sitting around me were able to laugh this off as ridiculous fear-mongering rhetoric. Before coming to the lecture, I had hoped that Dartmouth College students, supposedly smart Ivy Leaguers that they are, would have the sense to be critical of Dr. Marshall. I was pleasantly surprised to find an audience that I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about—mainly AMES and Arabic majors, or at least familiar faces from my classes. I didn’t, however, have as much hope for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who received a free copy of Obsession in their daily papers.

Unfortunately, watching Obsession without criticism will make you walk away fearing all Muslims. The producers thankfully made it easy to suspect the integrity of their collaborators. The first “expert” to enlighten the audience was Walid Shoebat—a former PLO terrorist. This incited comment from everyone in the group watching the film with me. Former PLO terrorist?! Why is he not in jail? How in the world has he now become a staunch right-wing, Israel-supporting, Islamophobic, evangelical Christian?! After minimal research we found that Walid Shoebat claims to have bombed an Israeli bank, except the bank insists that no such bombing occurred. Sounds a little suspicious, no? Why would you claim to be a former terrorist? I can only suggest insanity. Obsession “expert” number one is sufficiently disredited.

Then there are the rest of the “expert” contributors. Nonie Darwish, daughter of a Shahid (martyr), is pro-Israel Arab whose Egyptian army officer father was assassinated by the Israeli military. Then we meet Kaled Abu Toameh—a Palestinian journalist, although Israeli-Arab working for the Jerusalem Post would be much more accurate description. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, organized Campus Watch to check anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian rhetoric by professors at U.S. Universities. Lastly, Steve Emerson, investigative journalist, suggested that there was a “Middle-Eastern” element to the Oklahoma City bombing.

The heavy criticism of Dr. Paul Marshall and the spurious cast of Obsession is not intended to make light of terrorism. My aim is to dispel its current entanglement with Islam. Yes, terrorists may use Islamic religious rhetoric, but Christians could easily make use of the Bible to support unnecessary killing of innocents—and they have. Terrorism will never be eradicated if we don’t address the real historical reasons for its support. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its offspring organizations across the world, like Hamas, gained their support by distributing food and other supplies to needy people. Perhaps we should focus on this fact, rather then simply believing that 95 percent of Muslims hate America (as an interviewee in Obsession states). Of course, Terrorism is inexcusable. Killing of any innocent human beings is unacceptable. But it is also unacceptable, to a lesser degree, for media undertakings like Obsession (and pretty much any FOX News Programming) and neo-conservative think-tanks like the one Dr. Paul Marshall is part of, to propagate the all “Muslims as terrorists” stereotype that has led to so much harassment, hate and discrimination.

efore Post Secret became so popular and a full-time job, what did you do? Do you plan on continuing to pursue it after Post Secret?

I was a small business owner for 20 years. I sold the business, and now spend 50-60 hrs a week on Post Secret, so it takes up all of my time.

How did Post Secret get started and what was your inspiration for it?

It started as an art project four years ago. The business I had was monotonous, so when I was at work I would think about creative projects to do. I think everyone has a fascination with secrets that is borne in childhood, so one of them was self-addressed postcards. I started handing them out to strangers and inviting them to mail them back to me with a secret on it. They were special to me, and I was shocked how they resonated with other people too There have been over quarter of a billion visitors to the Post Secret website, five Post Secret books, and Post Secret confessions on such topics as life, death and god.

Did you expect anything close to the response you got? How long do you intend to continue the project?

Secrets have always been fascinating to me, but I was shocked that so many other people felt a connection too. My initial goal was to receive 365 postcards in one year, but in the first year I got well over 10,000.

When did you realize how popular Post Secret was getting?

I found out when I stopped printing and passing out postcards, but still was receiving them. The idea had already spread virally across country; people in different states began to buy and create their own postcards. I was getting postmarks from all over.

How has the purpose of Post Secret evolved over time since it started and where do you see it heading in the future?

From the very start, I did not want paid advertising on the website. Instead, I used the popularity of Post Secret to promote suicide prevention, and to help raise funds for suicide prevention. Over the past 4 years, $250,000 has been raised for suicide prevention.

How do you choose the secrets to put on the website or in your books?

One of the proven ways that people can deal with the issues that can lead to suicide is to share feelings of depression and isolation before they wall us in. My hope is when people can release their secret on a postcard, can give it a physical presence, maybe that can spark further action taken on that secret, maybe even action that can make the secret true or false. I like the secrets that surprise me, that are funny, sexual, or hopeful, and I try to arrange them every week in a way that tells a story about us. Sometimes it seems like the secrets are having conversations. I get about 200 every day, they come to my home, and I read them all and keep them all; I think each one is precious. And, there are two art exhibits that tour the country with postcards.

What do you think appeals to people most about Post Secret?

People come to the website initially out of curiosity, but eventually you come across that secret that really speaks to you, that might articulate a secret you’re keeping from yourself, that builds a connection between you and the stranger and the project in general. I think that’s why 1 million people come back to the site every week.

Do you think the secrets people write about are true? Does it matter if they are or not?

I think of the secrets as literature or works of art. Sometimes when you walk into a bookstore, the book that changes your life is the one in the fiction section. So I think when you’re talking about personal revelation, there are different revelations from truth and false[hood]. When we write our secrets we may think of them as true or false, and when we see them on the website we might realize the opposite.

How did you choose the medium of a postcard and why do you think that is important?

I liked the idea of connecting a very old form of communication, postcards, with a very modern form, the blog. I also have had a special relation with postcards all of my life; I think they’re pretty special. They can carry so much more than we imagine.

Have you published any of your own secrets?

There is one of mine in every book.

What is your favorite or most memorable secret?

The most memorable I’ve received was on a Starbucks coffee cup, “I serve decaf to customers that are rude to me.”

Have you received any criticisms of Post Secret?

The only criticism I’ve really heard is from religious people who say that the only person you should share your secrets with is God $mdash; but I haven’t really received any aside from that.

Are you excited to be coming to Dartmouth?

I’m really looking forward to coming to campus. My favorite part is sharing the stories behind the secrets and showing images of postcards that were banned from the books by the publisher. What’s really fascinating for me is that at the end of the talk, young people come up to the microphone and share their own secrets in front of their classmates. It’s not anonymous there. And I’m very pleased to be associated with Active Minds. I wish it had been around when I was in school.

hen even the most rabid free-market economists are in favor of government intervention, you know things are bad. No, I’m not referring to bank nationalization (though there does seem to be an awful lot of chatter leaning in that direction). I’m talking about Obama’s plan to reform the federal student loan program by cutting out private lenders.

The concept behind permitting private lenders into education was that the government could pay small amounts to subsidize those loans, instead of lending the whole amount itself, making student loans more attractive. Banks were expected to then leap in and flood the market with loans, amplifying the government’s reach. In practice, however, this system has served as a big favor to banks and the financial services industry (representative beneficiaries: Bank of America and Citigroup); the vast majority of loans made by “private lenders” involved little more than their doling out government money. The “amplification” concept rarely came to fruition, and when good times turned to bad, the “amplified” loans were the first to disappear. As a result, the government’s direct-loan program has ended up forking out most of the money while private lenders use government dollars to fill their pockets.

“Services” Rendered

If private lenders and their services had added (any) substantial benefit to the student loan process, one could argue that they deserved a cut of the money. As it stands, however, not only do the loans propagated by such companies have default rates of over seven percent (government ones, by comparison, clock in around 5.8 percent), they also fail to provide the enhanced “service and amenities” claimed by their extensive marketing. The “services” that the majority of lenders provide are along the lines of call centers in India and the distribution of fancy brochures. The rest of the money went to bribes—I mean, “gifts”—for student loan officers to fill out the companies’ own bottom lines.

It may sound as though I’m painting with too broad a brush, or being sensationalist. If only. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo first uncovered this cozy relationship between loan officers and lenders, and since then it’s been exposed all over the nation.

In an effort to persuade Obama of the program’s worth, Sallie Mae, the biggest private lender in the program, apparently brought 2,000 overseas jobs back to America. But does bringing 2,000, most likely minimum wage, call center jobs back to the U.S. justify the decision to keep funneling money into an exploitative cartel? Are 2,000 call center jobs worth an estimated $94 billion over ten years, not to mention the shameless exploitation of college students?

The answer is quite clear. That $94 billion distributed over ten years, largely wasted even before this economic crisis destroyed its fragile façade of purpose, would have been better off in a federal loan program than in the wallets of Sallie Mae and Co. Simply put, it’s wiser to provide students with more financial aid than to cynically purchase 2,000 minimum wage jobs at a call center in Utah.

A Hard Fight

Why, then, does Obama’s proposal face so much opposition? Think of it this way: if you stood to lose $9.4 billion a year of easy, virtually risk-free money, wouldn’t you be willing to spend big to keep it? And spending is exactly what the private lenders are doing. They are hiring big names like Tony Podesta (brother of one John Podesta, part of Obama’s transition team) and John Gorelick to lobby for their bottom lines. Aside from such influential connections, the private sector companies have little in the way of an argument. Even the most conservative papers have yet refrained from coming out in support of the private sector—the reason being that this entire program, a testament to the so called “free market,” was a travesty. In fact, it was hardly free market, as the government’s money and fingerprints are all over it. But this program’s failures also clearly are connected to the private sector’s involvement. These disingenuous folks have racked up a damning track record, and reaped gargantuan profits doing so.

Even with the other side standing to lose $94 billion and spending every penny to maintain the status quo, the Obama plan will most likely succeed. Lawmakers are aware that this situation is a serious indictment of private lenders (many of whom are already being handed money in the banking bailout). Additionally, Obama has the necessary star power to get his message across. And to top it off, the other side lacks a strong argument (to say the least) in support of continued privatization.

A Bellweather

Money does talk, however, and a lot of it is on the table. If this proposal loses, we’ll find that not much has changed in American politics; Capital Hill will continue to be there for the taking­—assuming, at least, that one has the capital, connections, and influence to master it. Yet the circumstances of this situation may yet lay our most jaded fears to rest. Yes, buckets of money are at stake, but with things as bad as they are there is hope that the government will take action on behalf of the common good.

We need to support future generations, who already have to deal with the results of the economic collapse, climate change, and countless other serious issues. With so much at stake, $94 billion for students to attend college is a sound investment. If nothing else, it’s a start.