Michael Vondriska: Ask questions, seek solutions

All semester I've been trying to get a job.

For the last two days, I've been easily distracted -- from homework, classes and nights out -- by traveling between New York and Philadelphia in search of that perfect position.

It's too bad that along the way, I've zoned out much of the world around me. I forgot that the United States is attacking Afghanistan. And that a plane crashed Monday in New York City.

Even the sheer volume of information broadcast on those two topics over the past week, on television, radio and in print, wasn't able to shake the thoughts about where I'll be next year from my head.

Instead, it took two very different events to change my mentality -- one which brought me back into reality, and another which forced me to reconsider how we should be analyzing the information we see everyday in the mainstream media.

The first was my encounter with Penn for Peace, camped out on College Green, on Monday. The activists there are critical of the government's role in the military action in Afghanistan, as well as the passage of certain recent domestic legislation, and have taken to College Green to draw attention to the harm they believe is being inflicted on the world. I stopped, took a flyer and listened to two of the members state their case.

It turns out they had much more to say that I thought that they would.

They explained how a small number of the cluster bombs that the United States is dropping on Afghanistan do not explode upon impact, and in turn, act essentially as land mines. Making this a significant problem is the fact that relief aid packages dropped in the same region were originally painted the same color, yellow, and are of a similar shape, confusing children and adults and possibly leading to unneccesary casualties.

Another activist talked about his thoughts on the economic stimulus package debated by Congress. Why, he argues, should relief for those unemployed after Sept. 11 be given to corporations who once employed these people rather than to the individuals themselves?

Their facts may be debatable and their motives varied. But in the end, the members of Penn for Peace were able to help me realize that since Sept. 11, I have been more or less isolated from many of the incidents gripping our nation and our world.

I read about them in the national press and have seen students on campus struggle with their sometimes tragic effects. I had tuned into CNN to hear the most recent news from the front. And I had even criticized the Bush administration for its legislative handling of much of the post-terrorist attack.

Generally, however, I counted myself among the 86 percent of the country who say they approve of the current U.S. military action in Afghanistan, and had not allowed myself to become involved and enraged over the minutiae of the issues.

Although I certainly didn't agree completely with Penn for Peace, they were able to get me to begin asking the questions that should be asked in times like those we are facing today -- questions about whether we should be in this war, about what the goals of the campaign are and about how the federal government is justifying their actions to the public at large.

The second event -- the one that, for me, has redefined how I view news coverage -- was Peter Jennings' reaction on ABC to the crash of American Airlines Flight 587:

"Oh, my God, it may have happened again."

Gone, obviously, are the days when destruction and devastation were pitted against a dry news cycle, and therefore garnered the spotlight.

Instead, every household in American hoped that the crash simply wasn't another act of terrorism.We have suddenly moved into a new disaster-all-the-time type of coverage.

With this new type of mentality, it is easy to read the front page of your major daily or tune into prime-time network news, brush up on the previous day's troop movements and then to move on.

This new framework forces even the most avid news junkie to get through pages of major war coverage before getting to other news -- news that is still of vital importance to our nation and our world.

And with this, it is very easy, as I did, to become numb to the information you get every day. The new challenge of today is not to keep abreast of all of the news -- for at any given point you'll be able to find all you'll want to know and more on the Internet -- but rather to be able to synthesize the information that you do receive.

So ask the questions that you want to ask. Engage in a conversation not within the frame of terrorism as the norm. And then perhaps you'll avoid my mistake of blindly ignoring the world around you.

Michael Vondriska is a senior Accounting concentrator from St. Louis, Mo., and executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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