I, along with Gwyn Davidoff, recently directed The Laramie Project here at Olin. For those of you who didn’t come to see the show, it deals with the beating and death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, in Laramie, Wyoming. This article is a highly abbreviated version of my director’s note. If you’d like to read the original note, please email me at nicholas.monje at gmail.com.
Tag Archives: activism
Common topics include divestment, militarism, diversity & inclusion, protests & community organizing, etc.
A Safe Conversation Space
At the beginning of high school, I had the feeling I was gay, and I was very worried about this possibility. I had seen flamboyant gay men on TV and heard about bear culture [overweight, hairy gay men that are usually dressed in shiny black leather and chains] from friends who knew the internet. I did not feel that I had much in common with these people. I felt misrepresented and confused. If I was not “gay,” how could I be gay? By the end of the year, I was more convinced I was gay, and with this realization I had to resolve the disconnection between my idea of myself and what I knew about “gayness.”
A Few Thoughts
I would like to challenge some of the underlying assumptions upon which much of the argument in “The Meaning of Empowerment” was based.
The author states that much violence is due to greed or hateful religious beliefs. This is a gross oversimplification of reality. The reasons that people commit acts of violence are complex, but I believe that people are driven to violence because they have needs that are not being met, whether those needs be physical, emotional, social, etc.
The Meaning of Empowerment
Reading the front-page article in the most recent issue of Frankly Speaking, this reader became very perplexed. The article used phrases like “military-industrial complex” and “ultimate institution of disempowerment, of aggression, domination, and death” to describe the U.S. Armed Forces. The article included radical implications – that a nonlethal defense-sponsored project, or even a project sponsored by a company whose customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, is undeserving of Olin students’ time and effort and just plain immoral.
Is Our Empowerment Zero-Sum?
Four SCOPE projects this year (Lincoln Labs, Raytheon, Draper Labs, Parietal Systems) are directly related to the military. Another project (Adsys Controls) is the creation of an advertising tool for a company that sells some of its products to the military. Not to mention the October press release on Olin’s website declaring that our College has been named a subcontractor in two “government-funded defense contracts,” one for the Navy and one for the Air Force (which is now a SCOPE project, as well).