Wise Monkey News is here to provide young people an opportunity to discuss the issues that affect their lives. We hope that, through your participation, this website serves as a forum for the development, exchange, and expression of ideas that will prepare us to assume our positions as the leaders of tomorrow's world. Have something to say?
Hope for natives...but can society's attitudes change?
by: Kathy Kenny - printed on 02-14-2001
“They’re different, just not the same as us. They aren’t capable of achieving our standards. They’re backwards alcoholics…”
These are some explanations given to me as to why Native Americans have so many poverty problems and face such stern racism throughout the country. Once a population between 6 to 20 million, the Native American people have been eliminated to only a population of 2.4 million, although they began the century with a population of only 200,000.
A journey through Paris
by: Jefferson Azevedo - printed on 09-12-2001
Paris is romantic by definition, gallant by tradition, sophisticated by choice. I spent last year living, studying, and working in Paris; each day, upon exiting a metro station or turning a street corner, I came across a glamorous café or a staggering monument erected to celebrate French power. It sometimes felt like time had stopped in the bohemian life of the 20’s, as if I had been caught in a live oil canvas by Picasso or Van Gogh.
Protecting Freedom
by: Celine Fitzmaurice - printed on 03-28-2001
My views on US military and foreign policy changed drastically one January day in 1989. I was travelling on a delegation to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala with 20 students from my college and we woke up that morning in a hotel room in Guatemala City. After breakfast we boarded a bus and traveled through the Guatemalan countryside to the tiny village of Poaquil, San Jose where a series of “disappearances” had reportedly just taken place.
When dealt death and tragedy: How do we play our hand?
by: Ryan O'Connor - printed on 10-24-2001
My brother has been in El Salvador since last June. A friend of his from Santa Clara University, where he is a junior, was one of the victims of the attacks on September 11. She died, valiantly so it seems, aboard the flight that went down in rural Pennsylvania.
She had volunteered with my brother once a week, for an entire year at a San Jose-area school, tutoring children. She was the girlfriend of his co-editor on the Santa Clara student newspaper.
Questioning nature's world view
by: Isaac Vanderburg - printed on 04-25-2001
Last Thursday night, some 2000 years after the death of Jesus, a group of UP students gathered in Buckley Center auditorium to discuss two videos about the salmon in the rivers and the smoke in the air. After 60 Minutes assured the students that economists and salmon don’t get along, Ted Koppel assured them that neither do politics and the global atmosphere. Enraged by the evident injustice, students eagerly chortled over the issues, assuring each other that Bush is bad, alternative energy is good and the woman on Koppel’s program who had opposed the Kyoto clean-air agreement was typical of those damned pro-oil types.
Their flesh is the playbill
by: Isaac Vanderburg - printed on 02-20-2002
In the Pacific Northwest, salmon are their own force of nature.
They exist in cycles, like seasons.
They affect change, like hurricanes.
The cycle of an individual, for example, begins at birth when the wriggling infant is swept tail-first toward the ocean. It ends 2-5 years later when the salmon returns?strengthened by ocean fodder and force?to slice through rapids and impossible distances, and eventually to spawn and die.