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?
Movies Galore!
by: Claude Pomerleau C.S.C. - printed on 02-06-2002
I don?t recall a Christmas/New Year cycle with so many entertaining and challenging movies, domestic and foreign. Vacations are usually twilight zones when it comes to movies. Not this year.
First, the political thriller "Lumumba." It only lasted for a few weeks in December, but it is showing this week at PCC?s Cascade Festival of African Films. It?s a moving political biography of the first Congolese leader after independence from Belgium in 1960.
Have a Self-Centered Christmas!
by: Bill Dailey, C.S.C. - printed on 11-28-2001
From time to time, crotchety cultural cranks (such as the author of this piece) lament our culture’s self-centered values, our unwillingness, in politics or personal aspirations, to consider the common good. Indeed, recent articles in the pages of this venerable publication have lamented our collective apathy and self-absorption here at UP. Where are the leaders who will challenge us to ask not what can be done for us, but what we can do for others? Not me.
Illness, coverup at Umatilla Chapter one of five: setting the stage-- workers fall ill and questions arise.
by: Jim McCandlish, J.D. - printed on 11-03-2000
Congratulations. You live 175 miles west of where 12% of our nation’s stockpile of chemical weaponry is stored at the Umatilla Chemical Depot near Hermiston in northeastern Oregon.
A deadly nerve gas called "sarin" (injuring 5500 and killing 12 in the 1995 Tokyo subway attack) and a blister agent called "mustard" (popularized by the Germans in WW I) are stored in an area known as "K Block"--89 earth-bermed igloos (also called "bunkers") in a geometric configuration worthy of thegarden at Versailles.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” an archaic notion
by: Emily Marie Dinges - printed on 03-28-2001
Discrimination. That’s an icky word. It is defined as “treatment based on class or category rather than individual merit.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the United States military is doing today: discriminating against gays and lesbians.
Before 1993, gays and lesbians were barred from serving in the military. President Clinton worked to change this and the compromise solution, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was born.
No More America! I am in Spain!
by: Annmarie Phelan - printed on 02-28-2001
This is it. Submerged in another language, another culture. I cannot speak or understand all that well, but somehow I am able to live in this country. It is my home for four months. My home. Spanish family, Spanish classes, Spanish food. No more America. No American handshake. “Dos besos” instead — a kiss on each cheek — is how I greet people. No standard American house. Most everyone lives in apartments, and the houses you do see do not share the same outward aesthetic beauty to which we are accustomed.
A one year old monkey, Happy Birthday
by: Mono Vergara - printed on 10-24-2001
After a year of publication, I can step back and look at the 13 issues that we have successfully completed. Part of our mission has been accomplished; we brought a new forum for people to talk about the issues that affect their lives. During this period we all have learned that The Wise Monkey is needed more than ever. Today the world is facing the atrocities of war, and after thousands of years we still don’t seem to understand that war accomplishes nothing.