Mason Zurovchak senior PrismND president
For one more day, I have an office in the basement of South Dining Hall with a breathtaking view of an interior hallway and a rather beat-up couch slumped against the wall.
It’s no secret that students here are among the most driven and talented in the country. What attracts all of us to attend the University of Notre Dame, often turning down hefty scholarships at other universities, isn’t just football and the Dome, but also the promise that Notre Dame will expand our opportunities, not limit them.
In the years following the Allies’ triumph, optimists’ hopes for a tranquil and amicable new world order governed from Washington and Moscow were disappointed as, seemingly inexorably, the world was divided into opposed spheres. After the Korean War, Suez Crisis and the failed Hungarian revolution, humanity trembled in terror at the seemingly incipient prospect of nuclear holocaust. Yet the Cold War remained so, and could be turned to inferno by neither the Cuban missile crisis, nor the war in Vietnam nor even the USSR’s unstable final years. How did two utterly hostile powers, diametrically ideologically opposed, engaged in proxy and secret conflicts in every corner of the earth, with vast arsenals directed towards each other, avoid war? Could it be that it quite simply never made sense for either power to make war on the other, and that thus Russians and Americans were guided, if not towards peace, at least away from the unimaginable horrors of nuclear exchange and modern total war? This may seem like a startling proposition to modern Americans, conditioned by the odious rattling of the military-industrial complex’s mouthpieces recklessly all too often showcased on the cable news. Yet the possibility of Russo-American mutual interest in peace merits at least exploration, for if the notion held true 25 years ago it holds true today, and recognition of such a situation could prove invaluable in our increasingly uncertain world.
I am a complete human being, complex and beautiful. I can be compassionate and mean, get silly and serious, have happiness and pain and experience times of glory and shame. So why don’t I see that complexity of who I am reflected in society’s views of people who look like me?
Solutions by The State News
