Letters policy
We welcome letters, but please include your full name, address and a daytime
telephone number. We edit all letters for libel, length and clarity.
Send letters to: Letters, Illinois Times. P.O. Box 5256. Springfield, Illinois
62705. Fax: (217) 753-3958. E-mail: editor@illinoistimes.com
ALL THE NEWS PRINT TO FIT
Blackburn College is a picture book-lovely little campus on the edge of what was once the tallgrass prairie in west-central Illinois. It is a place of industrious students and devoted faculty and staff who work hard to be teachers and mentors to their young colleagues. Students do just about everything there is to be done to keep the college running.
A camera crew was recently here to shoot a development video. Late in the day, a member of the crew declared, “Blackburn is the best-kept secret in Illinois.”
Indeed, those of us who love this little college often wonder why so much that is so good can go so unnoticed. News organizations rarely find us newsworthy, yet in one terrible moment we became much more interesting when a student was sexually assaulted on our campus.
In that moment, when two lives intersected in a way that brutally injured them both, Blackburn College became interesting to area news media. Our community has responded with courage and character. Yet all of their goodness and hard work and values and all the things that make you think there really is hope for humanity were never enough to catch the eyes of the news hawks who patrol our area.
Why does every evening newscast begin with stories of injury and mayhem? Maybe it’s naïve to say it, but a world of hope requires us to decide right now to refuse the culture that revels in the horrible and ignores the daily decency of the great majority. The news media peddle what sells. Let’s quit buying the trash that passes for news and rededicate ourselves to celebrating the good, mourning the bad, and working every day to build the kind of world we want our children to inherit.
Jeff Aper
Carlinville
Editor’s note: Aper is the provost of Blackburn College.
SO THAT EVERY VOTE COUNTS IN 2008
Americans may not be agreeing much on politics these days. But I think one thing most of us can agree on is fair elections. As the nominal bastion of democracy in the free world, the United States must serve as a role model for operating fair elections.
The Green Party recognizes this, and, in cooperation with the Libertarian Party, has successfully initiated a recount of Ohio ballots.
No one seriously expects the results to change the final election outcome. The point is to raise public awareness about ongoing major irregularities in the voting process. With the implementation of computer-voting machines, there have been numerous reports of major malfunctions, with votes either disappearing or materializing out of nowhere.
The biggest problem with most of the computer-voting machines is that they do not simultaneously create a paper ballot. Without a hard copy of the ballot, there is no way to verify the accuracy of the computer’s record.
Although computer voting was implemented to increase the accuracy of voting, it may be doing the opposite. We will never know unless we have a way of verifying the results manually. Let’s hope the Ohio recount raises public awareness of the very serious problems with our current voting systems.
Aamir Zakaria, M.D.
SpringfieldÂ
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2004.
