This is Holy Week for all Christians, and hopes of the end of Lent and the Easter holiday have kept people going after the end of Spring Break. Take some time away from dying those Easter eggs and wishing you were back in Miami to read this week's laurels and darts.
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Highland Park has put forth the effort to make its view of the Raritan more aesthetically pleasing. The borough anticipates many volunteers aiding the city in planting all sorts of flowers and plans on Raritan Avenue, the main road running through Highland Park. This is part of a several yearlong endeavor to improve the main part of the town.
Highland Park has four Main Street initiatives to help reach that goal. Besides "greening" Raritan Avenue, they include promotion, organization and economics. The borough will promote through a street fair that will be held soon. Organization will come in the form of Web sites to promote Highland Park and tell people of events there, and economics will help attracting businesses to the community. There are also plans to redo downtown Main Streets' roads and sidewalks. Also, they plan to construct rain gardens that will filter off runoff that pollutes the rivers and streams.
For coming up with comprehensive plans to improve downtown that are also environmentally conscious, Highland Park gets a laurel.
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Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., has proposed a bill to remove the middlemen from the college loan process. Right now, there are two types of loans for undergraduate and graduate students - direct and guaranteed. The direct type is where the federal government provides loans to students. The guaranteed type is when organizations, like banks, provide loans, and the federal government pays out 9.5 percent.
Kennedy, along with several other senators, is promoting the direct route. The guaranteed route is tying up $18 billion that could be given to students instead of banks. Furthermore, it would ensure that the money goes directly to students and is not misused by the banks. The savings would be quickly felt by all students.
For introducing legislation that could greatly help students get a fair loan at a substantial savings, Sen. Edward Kennedy gets a laurel.
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On Tuesday, someone under the age of 18 once again shook the very foundation of our nation. Jeff Weise, a 16 year-old high school student, began the morning by taking a gun and killing his grandfather. He then took guns to school, killed five of his classmates, an unarmed security guard and a teacher at Red Lake High School. Hopefully, the first time someone read these horrific facts, they were shocked and appalled.
Now imagine, reading these same facts for the first time, but instead of this event occurring in 2005, picture in 1995 or 1998 or any other year before Columbine. Instead of having this event grace some of the front pages around the nation, or having it on television for a little while, it certainly would have been the top news for at least two weeks. There would have been speculation galore. How could this happen, what is the cause, how can it be prevented from happening again?
Come back to the present, and think about the event again. Most people were appalled, sure, but shocked and fixated, not nearly as much as before. It says so much about our nation that such a terrible event can be shrugged off, saying, well, Columbine was worse. People need to instead think, what is happening here, what can we do to prevent this from happening again?
For simply comparing Red Lake to Columbine and then only reacting on a small scale, the media and the public get a dart.
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For any of you who have gone over to Wendy's in the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue campus or in the Busch Campus Center after break, you may have noticed a minor change in the menu. Nope, it's not the switching deal where fries can be replaced for a salad - that happened a while ago. It's that the price of a medium soda has gone up by ten cents. "It's only a dime," they may say. But when food vendors don't charge tax - and good thing - we end up being forced to either break another dollar bill or downsize to a small.
For forcing students who live off the dollar menu to choose between going thirsty or going broke, Wendy's gets a dart.
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