OPINION | CAMPUS VOICES
Thank You, Niko
By Luke A. Powery | November 14, 2022What can creatures teach you about life?
What can creatures teach you about life?
Solutions for real change take sacrifice, reorganization of priorities and hierarchies, and rethinking of our current institutions. And the next global leaders need to have the skills to garner support for these kinds of reforms and set them in motion. We will need to be bold, but not in the way Duke imagines.
I’m ignorantly unaware that I just made someone else’s life a little harder.
Duke is a constant. But just like the students who grace its paths for a few short years before moving on, administrators also make a graceful—or occasionally ungraceful—exit when their time is done.
I have been warned to choose between being loud and assertive or being a woman.
I am a product of the framing of the gunsmoke by people in power.
Even though classical music, to some extent, seems to be dying publicly in the modern world, it still pulsates with life and remains capable of changing lives. We shouldn’t be embarrassed to embrace this belief.
So don’t strive for perfection, strive for mistakes, and strive to let that inner kid know how proud they are of you, because they know all the trauma and pain you’ve suffered, and how every mistake has brought you closer to what you could be.
It is not my responsibility to identify accessibility issues, the thinking goes, because unlike disabled students I am independent, capable, and ultimately complete— illusions that we so desperately cling to within the culture of thriving and overachieving.
Sophomore year is a strange, awkward and uncomfortable phase to be in, one in which the rhythm of college I settled into as a freshman has been plunged into utter chaos.
It shouldn’t feel played out to say things aren’t great for women in technology. The normalization of an issue itself doesn’t solve any problems.
There’s nothing worse than hearing “just vote!” after confronting how little progress Congress has made with issues like immigration and gun violence. But voting is, at the very least, a form of harm reduction.
I urge you to listen to these unknown bards because in hearing them, you are hearing the wisdom of the Holy.
The reality is, if we want to study mental illness, we have to make something mentally ill.
Competing against students that attended private schools, come from wealthy backgrounds, have had increased access to opportunities or just possess plain talent means that the average student with nothing but a passion to learn will never be enough.
If your values are at stake on November 8th, what will you do to stand up for them?
Such hypocrisy is indicative of the problematic nature of American exceptionalism—the belief that America, with its foundations rooted in democracy and freedom, occupies a unique mantle in modern history and thus assumes the responsibility to play a distinctive role on the world stage.
I would rather be unknowing than know failure.
As students attending a university with a privileged position in the local economy and politics, what responsibility falls on us to work towards reparations and dispelling the long-held trope of the ignorant, uncaring Duke student?
We can start by considering whether the term “borderline” has any sociocultural basis beyond a pejorative.