Here begins the conclusion of my series on how Obama can come close to meeting expectations. Like all good trilogies, there must be a climactic finish which drags on much longer than you feel is really necessary. However, before delving into the political complexities of why college football needs a playoff system, I want to address a pressing complaint.
A number of stand-up citizens have brought to my attention that my articles have ceased being funny. This is hard for me to hear, especially since I don't know who these people are or why they're so invested in a college newspaper.
So first of all: bite me, I don't care about what you think. Now that I'm a second-semester senior, the only Vanderbilt person I interact with outside my suite is the guy from CT West who asks me what I want in my baked potato. Secondly, I'd like to apologize for making a legitimate effort to bring fresh perspective, and I guess now is the time to consider the possibility of beginning to write Neily Todd-style articles about how diversity is good and how Vanderbilt is a school.
To the point: Obama needs to do something about foreign policy. The United States government currently has stationed troops in 135 countries, or over 70 percent of the world. This means that most Vanderbilt students could not locate half of the countries we are in on a map. To be fair, a good number of them are strange, obscure and useless countries with names like Yemen, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and New Jersey. And yet, we puzzle over the fact that when we go abroad we have to can't wear our Confederate flag t-shirt, have to pretend we're from Canada and are forced to leave our signed photos of Bush at home.
Thinking of Sept. 11, the tragic deaths that occurred lie entirely on the shoulders of the terrorists with low tolerance of our women's suffrage. I'm not saying it's fair to blame Sept. 11 on American women either, but let's be honest: You females are all hung up on trying to wear suits and play sports, and now nobody can cook. No wonder we're in a recession. Yet one has to wonder how many terrorist attacks and threats could be headed off by resisting the urge to force these people to wear baseball caps and engage in premarital sex?
Why is American culture internationally valued about as much as Nigerian currency? Because we insist that everyone conform to our standards. We see ourselves as the moral compass of the world. Take this politically disastrous season of 24 as an example. First, the country elects a woman president. Then, she feels the need to push out thousands of American troops to fight in another country's civil war. This may sound like advocating permission of genocide, but do you know why Hitler happened? America and Britain dictating everything that Germany did: managing the country.
We need to have a noninterventionist policy, which is different from isolationist. It means that we only take action in other countries when our country is explicitly at risk. Other than that, how a country runs its own politics and determines its future is, oddly enough, up to that country and the people who live in it.
Justin Poythress is a senior in Peabody College. He can be reached at j.poythress@vanderbilt.edu.
