You may have met University City’s newest celebrity on your walk to class. Conversation and controversy have surrounded the now infamous preacher who parades both the Drexel and University of Pennsylvania campuses with his megaphone and bright white signs screaming, “Jesus saves!” While sights like this are nothing new to campus and certainly nothing new to Philadelphia, they are still difficult to ignore — especially when the perpetrators demand so much attention from their surroundings.

While personal religious or moral belief is acceptable, zealotry is far from a tolerable practice. With the world becoming more focused on secular means, major religions have started to feel the pressure of becoming irrelevant. As a response, tensions between secular communities and the religious community have risen, creating a caustic culture for both parties to express their dogma in extravagancy. University City’s newest character is no exception to this rule. So what place can religion have in an increasingly secular society, if any? The truth is that religion can serve a purpose if adapted to promote a sense of humility, sustainability and respect for the individual.

The first step to adapting religion to a secular society is to strip it to its core principles. The essence of all religion is a constructed code for conduct, a set of morals, and a fundamental appreciation of the natural world. The commonalities that have been established as the core principles are apparent in all religion. The divide and conflict among religious groups is not the message but the messenger. Sacred texts should not be interpreted as biographies of prophets, gods or goddesses but rather taken for these core values. Herein lies the cardinal mistake that religion today is making: promoting the messenger rather than the message. Sound guidance can come from any hand, but by placing religious figures on pedestals, idolization takes precedence over humility. Most organized religions recognized the tendency toward idolization and created powerful and oppressive systems for control. Religion should not follow this pattern, as it distracts from the message. Rather, religion should be a personal ideology, holding sanctity within the individual rather than within a large community. Being content with a custom-fit interpretation of these core ideas while expressing a sense of humble thought is how religion functions, not by forming organizations of collaboration and control.

With the rapid industrialization of developing countries, the continuing consumption of fossil fuels and other natural resources by both developing and developed nations, and the lack of appreciation for the natural world among a greater part of the population, it hardly comes as a shock that the world is suffering under the gluttonous weight of the human species. While evolutionary trends suggest that this consumption is natural, as species tend to exploit available resources, the beauty of human nature is the will to counteract these urges. As a species that exhibits the strength to go against brute nature, why is it that we continue to damage our only home in such a way? This is where a new religious outlook should come into play. Early storytellers and poets were immersed in the natural world and awestruck with the diversity and beauty that they encountered. They recognized the importance and brilliance in what they saw before them. Many creation stories outline these magnificent organisms and ecosystems as being a product of the divine. Although science has now offered alternatives to the theory of creationism, this appreciation should not be lost. It is important, just as religion tells us to respect the individual and to respect the community. With this trend of increasing rates of consumption, we now respect manufacturers who can deliver goods rather than the environment. And again, it follows that we idolize the commercial and corporate rather than respect the root of all that has made these leisurely products available.

The final issue created by religion and other ideologies is the blatant exclusion of specific groups based on their personal beliefs or cultural backgrounds. This again follows the false idolization of figures rather than an adherence to the core beliefs that all religions share. A beautiful thing would be to appreciate the diversity among individuals rather than select several and shun others. There is this underlying awe to the natural world that is forgotten for the sake of inclusion and the mass organization of these ideologies. Thus, exclusion is born, and from that stems intolerance and hatred, the exact opposite of what religion aims to support. From this we see all of the prime social problems that exist today: the remnants of caste systems, religious wars, political opposition and the hatred of individuals who only seek the love and compassion of another human.

The antithesis of religion is community. What should be a private matter rather than a public one has evolved into some of the most powerful groups in the world — all driven not by the essence of what it means to be exceptionally human but by a rudimentary gravitation toward extravagance. These primal urges manifest themselves in the structure that is most organized religion, reducing what was once a good thing into nothing more than a power-hungry behemoth derived from the preacher rather than the message.
The University City preachers and ideologues may claim to be patrons of the messages of their respective theologies, but in reality they practice much of what religion has warned against. Humility in practice is both a spiritually and socially beneficial practice. Admire the beauty in the natural world; appreciate the history of religion and the diversity of human thought and character. These are the things that unite us as a people.

Vaughn Shirey is a sophomore environmental sciences major at Drexel University. He can be contacted at op-ed@thetriangle.org.

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The government is shut down. Eight hundred thousand people are out of work. National parks are closed. NASA is closed. The courts are working unpaid and will soon be vastly understaffed. Investigations into health violations at food processing plants are on hold. Several organizations that keep us safe and ensure our well-being such as the Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration are now shuttered.

Welcome to the new normal.

Months and months ago, we were hit with the first inklings of a major budget impasse: the sequester. Sequestration was supposed to be an enormously unpopular and austere series of cuts, cuts that no one in Congress would think of allowing to pass. The targets were programs that both Democrats and Republicans loved and cared for. Surely with that kind of gun to their heads, Congress could pass a budget?

Nope. Sequestration became the new normal, and no one really cared after the first month.

Now, of course, we are struggling to pass a continuing resolution that will fund the government at sequestration levels. A real “budget,” which funds the government for a whole year, isn’t even on the table. The idea of even funding the government at normal levels is laughable.

All because of some dumb debate over whether poor people should be able to have health care!

The word on everyone’s tongue right now, of course, is “compromise.” “Compromise” is valued in politics, particularly when it’s the other side doing it. Each side of the aisle wants “compromise,” and neither is going to get it. “Compromise” was also the motto of the supercommittee to come up with a budget before sequestration hit, and they came up with precisely zip — we certainly didn’t reverse the sequester with “compromise.”

So our government is fundamentally broken and will probably not recover for quite a while. That’s not surprising considering things like gerrymandering, rampant disenfranchisement, the two-party system that prevents us from having any real choice, lax corporate fundraising laws, and all that jazz. We can at least take comfort in knowing that our politicians whom we didn’t vote for and don’t support are at least unable to pass any legislation that we dislike.

Luckily, we won’t have to deal with this broken government for much longer because we’ll run out of money and default sometime in late October or early November. Thanks to some happy quirks of finance, we may be able to prioritize payments and pay off China and Japan, at the expense of our Social Security and federal pension programs, and we may have a few weeks before a global financial crisis really takes effect. We’ll have a massively destabilized dollar, and economics textbooks will have to be rewritten because U.S. Treasury bonds will no longer be a perfectly safe investment, but at least that’s good for the economics textbook industry.

“Compromise” is probably not coming. The Democrats are more likely to cave than the Republicans because they stand to lose a lot less face and because their constituents are used to disappointment anyway. That being said, it’s still unlikely that a “compromise” will be reached in time to avert a global financial crisis. Even then, we will simply have to repeat this whole fiasco in three months or so when this continuing resolution expires. Short of a total dissolution of Congress and maybe a rewrite of the Constitution, there are not very many measures that can be taken to end this gridlock.

All over whether or not poor people should be able to get health care!

Help is not coming. We will hit the debt ceiling and default, and we will take the world with us. Default will become the new normal. We’ll raid Social Security and the federal pension fund to pay our foreign and domestic creditors and be done with it. The government will probably remain shut down, and more and more programs will remain unfunded. By next year we’ll have nothing more than a military and a room full of angry legislators, with poverty, hyperinflation, famine and despair commonplace.

Welcome to the new normal.

Justin Roczniak is the op-ed editor of The Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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On Sept. 24, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, finished an enormous speech on the Senate floor, weighing in at a whopping 21 hours and 19 minutes. This was one of the longest speeches in Senate history, surpassed only by Strom Thurmond’s 1957 filibuster against the Civil Rights Act,  Al D’Amato’s 1986 filibuster against a military bill, and Wayne Morse’s 1953 filibuster against the Tidelands Oil bill. Cruz spoke out mostly against Obamacare.

Cruz’s speech was not a filibuster in the traditional sense because he would have had to yield the floor for a vote at 3 p.m. Sept. 26 regardless of whether or not he was able to continue speaking. However, while Cruz spoke primarily against Obamacare, his real goal was to prevent the Senate from voting on a temporary spending bill that would have prevented a government shutdown.

The current spending bill on the House and Senate floors (known as the Continuing Resolution, or CR) funds the government through Dec. 15 (a whopping three months from now!) but provides no funding for the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. Cruz wants to block these bills from being voted on because the Democrats will amend them to restore funding for Obamacare. Cruz is, in effect, blocking his party’s own legislation simply to prolong the period in which the spending bill is not voted on because it will inevitably not pass and then be returned to the House so that Democrats can alter it and tack Obamacare funding onto it.

Let’s get one thing clear: Obamacare will not be defunded. The president will veto any spending bill that does not include funding for Obamacare, and Republicans will find it almost impossible to pass a bill over the president’s veto unless the Democrats suddenly become really, really spineless. The Republican Party has introduced 41 bills to defund Obamacare this year alone and has failed to pass any of them. Don’t they know when they’ve been beaten? Why are the Republicans even bothering to make an effort to defund Obamacare?
The answer is fairly clear: The Republican Party wants to break the government.

Think about it — I dislike partisanism, and I do not like to blame one party for all the country’s problems, but just look at how the average Republican candidate’s platform is structured. Virtually every Republican is elected on a platform of “slimming down the government” or “reducing government bloat” or “making the government more efficient” or some such thing. What would happen if the government actually worked? What would happen if there was a small and efficient government? There would be no reason to vote Republican. There would be no way to scare people into voting Republican with threats of “big government” because it wouldn’t actually exist. The Republican Party platform depends on the government not working, and it is against the party’s own best interests to allow the government to function effectively.

So, in effect, they are ensuring their re-electability by breaking the government. The angrier people are at the government, the more likely they are to vote Republican, and the vicious cycle continues. The people who promised us “fiscal conservatism” gave us such wonders as the welfare drug test program in Florida that costs much more than it saves, unsustainable tax cuts, and our bloated military budget. They promise “small government” that “doesn’t intrude in our private lives,” and yet they support abortion bans, actively attempt to deny people the right to marry the person they love, and have no problem with the NSA monitoring all Internet activity. The party is an exercise in contradictions, and this is what makes its members so electable.

The real question is this: How far are they willing to take this Obamacare fight? They will probably shut down the government this fall. There’s almost no time left in which to pass a temporary spending bill, and the amendment process will make this time even longer. What is worse, though, is that there is also a genuine chance that they may not allow an increase in the debt ceiling in time, which has never happened before.

If we hit the debt ceiling, no one knows what will happen. The government will be unable to borrow more money to pay for things, and people’s checks will bounce. This could be anyone’s checks, from Social Security to checks for government contractors’ work to military paychecks. How the government will prioritize payments or even function without being able to borrow money is completely unknown. We could theoretically start printing more money, but that would lead to serious inflation. We could also just allow checks to bounce, but that would make many people very angry and kill our nation’s credit rating, which could crash the world economy. There is no precedent for the debt limit being hit in the U.S. or any other first-world nation, for that matter. It would be a catastrophe.

Is it really worth it?

Justin Roczniak is the Op-ed editor of The Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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Many years of documented mental instability and multiple arrests for “minor shooting offenses” weren’t enough to keep Aaron Alexis, the shooter at the Washington Navy Yard, from legally purchasing a firearm.

Take a moment for that fact to sink in. Can anyone tell me with a straight face that we don’t have a problem with gun control in America?
Let me get one thing straight: I do not believe in extremely restrictive firearm bans. I do not think they could be effectively enforced or defined. A big, scary AR-15 is mechanically very similar to your redneck uncle’s semiautomatic hunting rifle; it just has angry-looking black plastic bits surrounding the barrel instead of a wooden casing. This is difficult to legislate against: Do we ban the scary black plastic bits, or what?

That being said, we ought not to be selling firearms to people known to have a history of mental instability and firearm-related offenses. If you are mentally unstable, you should not be able to purchase a firearm. If you have previously been arrested for a firearm-related offense, you should not be able to purchase a firearm. Is this so difficult to get across to people?
These arguments ought to be perfectly reasonable to literally anyone who isn’t insane and sociopathic, but unfortunately, the dialogue has been distorted by a little organization called the National Rifle Association. This organization is, unfortunately, run by insane sociopaths.

The NRA has advocated for everything from complete immunity for gun store owners for crimes committed with firearms they have sold, to armed guards in public schools (to discourage shootings? I think there were more than a few armed guards at the Washington Navy Yard, and that certainly didn’t stop the perpetrator). The NRA has also pushed back against any kind of tighter gun regulation, using that same old tired “slippery slope” argument. One only needs to look at the political articles in the NRA’s magazine, Rifleman, to get the picture. The argument seems to run, “First they’ll stop selling firearms to the mentally unstable, and then it’s only a matter of time until Obama will send armed death squads in the middle of the night to take your guns away from you!”

These arguments are ridiculous and serve only to increase fear and paranoia in the readership. This encourages behavior like stocking up on guns and ammunition “before Obama bans them,” thereby increasing sales for Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and other manufacturers associated with the NRA. Paranoia makes money for gun manufacturers but is bad for the rest of us who just want to be able to sleep at night.

This is why I’d like to take a moment to call on all NRA members to reconsider their membership. Does this organization really represent your interests? Do you really think that armed guards in schools are the best way to prevent shootings? Do you really want mentally unstable people to be able to buy deadly weapons without background checks? The NRA certainly does. If you don’t, then send them a message and don’t renew your membership.

Justin Roczniak is the Op-ed editor of The Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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If there’s one thing that sets Drexel University apart from other schools, it’s our parking lots. Drexel is home to a vast expanse of parking lots, which take up almost the entire 3100 block of Chestnut Street, all of the north side of JFK Boulevard, and various other sites all around campus. In a school that sits directly on top of two subway stations and that has a major intercity and regional rail station right next to campus, it’s important to have adequate parking. Why? Because public transportation and biking is for the poor, and every day I thank God that President John A. Fry recognizes this.

This is why I applaud Drexel’s decision to demolish the Intercultural Center in favor of a new hotel rather than building it on one of our valuable surface parking lots. Our real worth as a university lies not in the Hess Engineering Labs or our Intercultural Center but in our wealth of easily accessible surface parking, which we have in quantities that the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University cannot even hope to possess. Rather than senselessly destroy surface parking simply to add to university facilities, we have taken the sane and sensible route: cramming a building in the 20 feet between Creese Student Center and Chestnut Street, demolishing our engineering labs to build a new apartment building (it’s not like our school focuses on engineering or anything, after all!), and now taking out our Intercultural Center, essentially a useless building, and replacing it with a boutique hotel and conference center. My only qualm with the plan is that it will also take out the Intercultural Center’s parking lot, but alas, no plan can be perfect.

Now some of you may argue with me, so I’ll make my point clear: Drexel needs its large surface parking lots. With so much of the student body concentrated so close to campus and with Drexel offering incentives for faculty and staff members to own homes within the city and within walking distance from campus, it is clear that we need parking for all the automobile traffic thus generated. Plus, there are no good ways to get to campus otherwise, unless you’re willing to take SEPTA or bike like one of the poor, and if you’re poor, how can you afford tuition here anyway? Our students and faculty will always drive, whether the distance is two blocks or 200 blocks.

“But why not just put parking underground?” you might ask. Hmph! We are an exclusive school, with exclusive tuition, and we want our students to be able to show off their exclusive automobiles. Underground lots do not allow this. The underground lot in the new apartment building that will replace the Hess Labs ought to be replaced with a surface lot on Lancaster Avenue, perhaps in place of Savas, to really complete the plan. But I digress.

Drexel’s plan to demolish the Intercultural Center is truly a progressive and valuable one, and I, for one, am glad that our administration sees our surface parking lots not as vacant lots, simply available for development, but as opportunities. Opportunities to park cars.

Justin Roczniak is the op-ed editor of The Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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Let’s say you’re a Drexel University engineering student. Over the course of your college career, you will be required to take three classes in basic rhetoric (English 101, 102 and 103) and then can feel free to devote yourself entirely to “more practical” classes. Sure, you will have to take some electives, but will they really make you better, richer or wiser? It’s quite possible to come out of Drexel knowing steel beams and reinforced concrete backward and forward, without knowing who Homer or Plato were or understanding the underlying causes behind World War I or being able to appreciate fine art or knowing how to speak in public.

Did we finally cave in? Did we finally listen to the cry of the narrow-minded, overly focused engineering student who constantly derides liberal arts students for their lack of job prospects and whose only thought in an art history or literature course is, “How is this going to help me later in life?” Is this the sort of student Drexel caters to?

I’d like to start by debunking the claim that liberal arts education “won’t help you later in life.” Some basic liberal arts education can help in a huge number of ways. You’ll appear more urbane and sophisticated at social events. You’ll learn to appreciate and understand art and to see beauty in the world around you. You’ll see the wealth of entertainment offered to you by a simple book and see why classic literature is so revered. It is very difficult to relate Shakespearian literature or Renaissance art directly to practical career skills, but for heaven’s sake, there’s more to your life than your future career or how much money you’ll be earning. Stop worrying about your future and your finances and live a little!

Furthermore, classes like foreign languages and psychology can directly benefit your career. Foreign language study greatly expands the regions in which you can be employed. Psychology will help you understand customers, clients and employers; and sociology can do the same. Public speaking classes, of course, have an obvious practical value. To say these classes have no career benefits is a gross oversimplification.

Other universities have broad core curricula covering arts, sciences and the humanities. Students can be expected to take classes in art history, sociology, psychology, English, foreign languages and other areas. Drexel could benefit significantly from even a simple core curriculum that spanned more than freshman year. Who among us remembers English 101, 102 or 103 past the summer after freshman year, anyway? Even a few liberal arts classes could do wonders for our woefully uncultured engineering students.

We go to college to complete our education, and we go to graduate school to really specialize in our fields. Drexel ought to stop the needless early overspecialization and implement some kind of more expansive core curriculum.

Justin Roczniak is the Op-ed editor of The Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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What makes an institution great? Red bricks. Red bricks are a sure sign that an academic institution is committed to its students’ needs and can prepare them for the real world. Red bricks can singlehandedly turn an ugly campus into a beautiful one. Red bricks are what make a university great — look at the University of Pennsylvania.

It’s not the 300-year pedigree or the respected faculty or the enormous academic budget that makes the school great; it’s the red brick buildings! When the accreditation board comes to a university, they merely have to check off the box in their notebook next to “buildings are made of red brick,” and the university will almost assuredly pass with flying colors.

This is why I find no issue with Drexel’s latest campus beautification project: to paint all the orange bricks on campus red. Look at the General Services Building, which has already been completed. It’s hardly recognizable from what it once was! It is now a beautiful red-brick parking garage, which could look just as well at home in the streets of Prague or in pre-Haussmann Paris.

Through President John A. Fry’s vision, we’ve taken a boring, dowdy old orange-brick parking garage and turned it into a master work of architecture! Can you imagine the rest? Imagine Nesbitt Hall, Kelly Hall, Disque Hall or even One Drexel Plaza done up in wonderful red brick! I think I smell a Pritzker Architecture Prize in the making!
Worthwhile investments like painting bricks red and tearing out the outdated 32nd Street walk (at a whole decade old, it is clearly in need of replacement!) are what will really make Drexel a beautiful campus. While schools like the University of Pennsylvania invest in old, obsolete methods of campus beatification like narrowing streets, reducing surface parking on campus and adding trees, Drexel is confidently stepping forward into the modern aesthetic.

Drexel is not only painting old buildings red but also building new, enormous, monolithic concrete buildings on what was once dull and unproductive green space! These buildings, built in a style known as “brutalism,” will surely stand the test of time, as so many of their compatriots have. Fifty years from now, we will look back at Chestnut Square and the LeBow College of Business building with the same kind of reverence we have now for masterpieces like Boston City Hall and the Philadelphia Municipal Services Building.

I’d just like to take this moment to commend the school for taking these serious steps toward campus beautification. It is through all-encompassing and meaningful projects like painting all the bricks on campus red that our school will finally get past its “ugliest campus” reputation.

I’m glad that we live on a progressive campus that doesn’t waste money on expensive boondoggles that wouldn’t beautify campus at all, like putting a median on Market Street or destroying valuable surface parking lots near the center of campus for some more meaningless “green space.” Trees and grass only lead to dirt and pollen everywhere anyway, and they shouldn’t be encouraged. I look forward to a day when I can see a campus populated only by red brick or concrete buildings and where the scourge of the street tree has finally been eliminated.

The Chestnut Square development already took serious steps at reducing the amount of pervious surfaces on campus; with time we can fill in the lawn next to Nesbitt and the useless green space behind the Recreation Center, too! We can look forward to a beautiful campus reflective of Drexel’s real values, without a lawn or tree for blocks and blocks: only productive classroom and retail space! Painting bricks red is a step in that direction.

Justin Roczniak is the op-ed editor of The Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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In the previous issue of The Triangle, a student wrote an op-ed about achieving world peace. It was an anecdote about meeting a woman on a bus, having a heartwarming moment, and then somehow this meant that world peace is achievable in our time and we can all learn to get along if we just try to understand each other and a lot of other idealistic nonsense that sounds great, makes you feel good and ultimately achieves precisely nothing.

Certainly, we can have heartwarming moments and be happy with them, but can a heartwarming moment increase wages? Can a heartwarming moment turn around neighborhoods in North Philadelphia? Can a heartwarming moment save a West Virginia town from being inundated by a coal ash retention pond failure? Can a heartwarming moment reduce income inequality, build hospitals, provide power and running water to developing nations, end poverty and hunger, curb out-of-control defense spending, end our numerous expensive and unnecessary foreign wars, or restore SEPTA service to Reading and Bethlehem?

The answer is “no.” We need actions to change the world, not feelings.

Some people would contradict me on that one and say that feelings can change the world, man, and that like, whoa, we should totally legalize marijuana and like, dude, the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street were groovy, right? Those same people have never actually achieved any of the political or social change for which they advocate.

This brings me to my real subject: the American Left. It’s wishy-washy, it’s disorganized, it’s ineffective, and it’s generally disgraceful. Nowhere else on Earth could we have a political movement as contradictory and hypocritical as the American Left. How hypocritical is the left? Well, for one thing, its members tend to vote for Democrats.

Democrats, you know, those people who escalated the war in Afghanistan? Those guys who reformed the Glass-Steagall Act so that banks could make more money by crashing the economy, and then 10 years later passed a stimulus act that gave the banks even more money as a reward? The guys whose great “Affordable Health Care for America Act” was designed by the Heritage Foundation 20 years earlier? Those guys who are touting natural gas as “green” energy, and support fracking as an “alternative energy source”?

Yes, those guys. Neoliberal shills. Literally no different than Republicans, other than that they pay lip service to environmental concerns and occasionally make noises about raising income taxes on the very wealthy, though they’ll never actually do it. Granted, they do espouse and implement policies that are socially leftist. They have an excellent track record on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and women’s rights, for instance. Economically, however, they still bow before the almighty dollar. This is our “left-of-center” party, which, anywhere else in the world, would be considered downright reactionary. The Democratic Party is not a left-wing party.

There is no political representation for the far left in Congress today. No one has come out in Congress and said “I am a socialist” or “I am a Communist.” No one will bring up Marx during a legislative session. Even if you’re a moderate leftist, in favor of nothing more than a strong social safety net, these facts should be disturbing to you. The Republican Party has Libertarians, disciples of Ayn Rand, crypto-fascist Tea Partiers, and people who honestly want to turn the U.S. government into a Christian theocracy in positions of power. If the Democratic Party doesn’t have extreme leftist elements like the Republican Party has extreme rightist elements, then the overall narrative of politics in this country can only drift toward the right over time!

Because of our bizarre and obsolete “first-past-the-post” election system, we can’t hope for a third party to take charge or even to gain some miniscule amount of representation. Even third parties with wide support like the Libertarian Party cannot get a single candidate elected to the House or Senate, despite garnering a full 1.12 percent of votes to the House in 2012 (in a parliamentary system, this would have given them four to five seats). Fundamentally, the system is still skewed toward the two established parties and the two established parties have no vested interest in changing the status quo.

So how can the left get representation? If the left can’t get a third party elected, can it at least get the Democrats to advocate for more far-left policies? Yes, it can. It will have to make some changes, though.

First it has to focus on media presence. The much-maligned “liberal media” is a myth. Fox News has the highest ratings of any news organization. CNN and NBC are arguably vaguely right-wing, and they frequently throw left-wing movements in a negative light. MSNBC is “progressive” but fired liberal commentator Keith Olbermann and is funded by General Electric and Microsoft. Most of MSNBC’s “progressive” reputation comes from favorable coverage of Democratic policies, which, as stated above, just aren’t that progressive.

There is no Rush Limbaugh of the left. There is no off-the-hook, insane Marxist radio commentator we can tune into on our evening commutes. There is no Fox News of the left, either. The left is completely without a propaganda machine, which apparently is a valid way to gain votes in this day and age.

Furthermore, no one’s out there advocating for socialism; in fact, they’re distancing themselves from the word. You frequently hear self-defeating statements from casually leftist people, like “I support better regulation and a better social safety net, but I’m not a socialist!,” “I support women’s rights, but I’m not a feminist!” or “I want peace, but I’m not a hippie!” Statements like these only serve to weaken the causes they represent, by making them seem illegitimate. They also serve to further legitimize the right-wing narrative. Imagine the ridiculousness of someone in 1850 saying “Well, I support freeing the slaves, but I’m no abolitionist!”

These labels are perfectly fine to have, and they have enormous power from being demonized by the right for so long. The right has complained about and demonized Obama’s “socialist policies” for years; what will they do if socialism becomes a legitimate and popular political position?

Secondly, the left has to get organized. There is no “Tea Party” on the left. We had Occupy Wall Street, but that was equal parts honest-to-God Ayn Rand freaks and anarcho-capitalists as socialists. No concrete goals were made, no legislation was endorsed, and almost no social change came out of the movement. Ultimately, what Occupy Wall Street became was nothing more than a large homeless camp in the center of major cities, disrupting commerce and people’s commutes, all for essentially nothing. Also, the camps smelled bad, which certainly didn’t help. Some kind of Tea Party-style movement, arguing for leftist policy, which gets all required permits and is relatively clean-shaven, would do wonders for invigorating the left.

Thirdly, the left has to follow a simple mantra: “Don’t be stupid.” There are movements out there that are associated with the left but don’t need to be. I’m talking about things like PETA, the movement to get fluoride out of the water supply, or people who seriously believe in homeopathy.

Furthermore, the left ought to start getting permits for protests. OWS was convinced that the only way to legitimize itself was for entire camps to become martyrs to riot police. History shows that if there’s one thing America loves to see, it’s cops beating up hippies. The Tea Party got permits for its protests, and look how successful it has been! It has gotten actual legislators elected on “Tea Party” platforms.

Finally, the left needs to stop voting for the Democrats. The left will realize, eventually, that Democrats do not represent the left’s constituency. But get out there and vote anyway, for third-party candidates. They won’t win, but you’ll at least have the moral high ground.

The fact is that the far left is underrepresented in American politics, and the electoral system is set up to keep it that way. Today’s world is one where “leftist” parties are increasingly turning to privatization and deregulation as valid economic policies. If the left doesn’t sit up and take notice that the world is falling to neoliberalism and austerity, it’s likely to be rendered irrelevant.

Justin Roczniak is the op-ed editor of the Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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Let’s face it: If you’re an American, there’s some small part of you that longs for that very special period in American history, the 1950s. The economy was strong, major infrastructure projects were still feasible, gas was cheap, the suburbs hadn’t become all-pervasive and lifeless yet, you could still take the train to different places, and life was pretty great! The latest advances in technology weren’t dumb phone applications or a LEED-Platinum certified shed for your solar-powered lawnmower. They were rockets that sent people to space and machines that promised to give us nearly free energy. We were on the cusp of an entirely new era of peace brought on by technology, with flying cars, cities on the moon and automatic farming. I’d like to see an app do that.

When I refer to “machines that promised to give us nearly free energy,” I refer to, of course, nuclear power.

“Too cheap to meter!” was the mantra of the time. Ford designed an atomic car. The U.S. Air Force experimented with nuclear airplanes. Nuclear power promised us a bright and beautiful future of nearly limitless, extremely cheap and clean energy. Hundreds of nuclear power plants were built around the country and continued to be built until the 1970s. Then, of course, the accidents happened.

You’ve heard about them: Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl were all caused by cooling system failures. These were serious incidents, especially Chernobyl, but what really catalyzed the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. was Three Mile Island.

The Three Mile Island incident was an unmitigated disaster: there were a whopping zero deaths and injuries, and it released an incredible 13 Curies of radioactive material, giving the surrounding community an average radiation dosage of 1.4 millirem, which is around the amount of radiation you’d receive from half a chest X-ray, eating 140 bananas or living in the city of Denver (or some similar high-altitude location) for seven days. The accident was so bad that the plant had to be taken out of operation until 1985, after which reactor 1 was restarted and continues to operate.

This tragedy shook the American public, which loathes bananas and vacations to Denver, and the anti-nuclear movement took root. No new reactors have been built in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island accident for a combination of environmental and safety reasons.

This is wrong, this is bad for the economy, and this is bad for the environment. Nuclear power is currently the safest form of power available, which can be proven by looking at the very real metric of “deaths per thousand terawatt hours,” or how many people have been killed for every trillion kilowatt-hours of power generated by different fuel sources.

Forbes magazine came up with these numbers:
Energy Source                  Mortality Rate (deaths/trillion kWhr)
Coal                             170,000
Oil                                 36,000
Natural Gas                   4,000
Biofuel/Biomass        24,000
Solar (rooftop)                 440
Wind                                   150
Hydro                             1,400
Nuclear                                90
I hate to hear the argument that “nuclear power can be made safe” because it is already extremely safe; the statistics show that much right off. Even solar power and wind power have killed more people per kilowatt-hour, mostly from people falling off roofs while installing panels or being killed in the cramped turbine room of a windmill. Meanwhile, even accounting for the worst-case scenario of cancer deaths from Chernobyl, nuclear power still comes out as the safest form of energy available.

Despite this, it can easily be made safer still! Most nuclear reactors in operation today are very old designs that require active cooling. Upon a loss-of-coolant accident (such as in Chernobyl, Fukushima or Three Mile Island), they tend to spiral into uncontrolled chain reactions and melt down. They also operate under extremely high pressure, which is inherently dangerous. In layman’s terms, these older reactors can blow up violently, and they rely on an outside source of constantly flowing water to prevent them from doing so. Reactors are contained in high-strength pressure vessels, capable of withstanding thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure, to contain boiling coolant water in the reactor. This is what causes violent explosions during nuclear disasters. It’s not a nuclear explosion; it’s a steam explosion that happens to occur in a vessel containing nuclear material. Enormous, complicated, multiple fail-safe cooling systems are required to prevent the reactor from getting too hot and damaging the vessel, and if these cooling systems fail, the reactor tends to go out of control. We saw this at Fukushima two years ago. Even after the reactors had been shut down, they continued to increase in temperature until the containment vessels failed catastrophically.

So what if we could build a nuclear reactor that operates at atmospheric pressure? Even in the worst cooling failure, there would be no risk of explosion. New Generation IV reactors currently under development will be able to do just that, thereby negating any need for multiple redundant cooling systems or pressure vessels or any of the very expensive and complicated things required for older nuclear power stations. Toshiba has even begun marketing a reactor that could fit in your own backyard!

Waste products, of course, are still a significant issue. There are concerns not only about it contaminating the environment but also about waste being seized by terrorist organizations and used in “dirty bombs.” We cannot, as of yet, completely eliminate the waste products associated with nuclear power, but the Generation IV specifications claim that they will produce 10 times less waste, and this waste will contain none of the so-called “long-lived” fission products like technetium-99 and iodine-129 with half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years, resulting in waste that stops being radioactive after decades rather than hundreds of millennia.

Let’s face it: Most existing reactors are inherently unsafe, and many have been in operation far longer than they were designed to run. Fukushima Daiichi was a pre-Chernobyl design, for instance. Older plants ought to be decommissioned and upgraded to newer, safer, more powerful reactor designs. Germany has already recognized this but has overreacted and elected to terminate its nuclear program completely, ostensibly to replace it with renewable energy in the form of solar and wind. Unfortunately, the provision of baseload power on windless and cloudy days will still be required, so much of the capacity lost by shutting down nuclear plants will likely be replaced by coal and natural gas plants.

If we want to get serious about clean energy and live our lives without having to worry about energy conservation, or whether the lights will stay on when it’s cloudy, or having millions of acres of potentially arable land turned over to solar or wind energy production, we have to consider the nuclear option. It’s clean, it’s safe, it’s cheap, and it’s our best bet for a safe and sustainable future.

Justin Roczniak is the op-ed editor of the Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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In developed nations, we expect certain things from our transportation infrastructure. We expect sufficient capacity for our transportation needs. We expect it to function efficiently and to get us where we need to go. We expect it to be built and rebuilt according to our needs.

We also expect our infrastructure not to violently collapse under our vehicles, sending us plummeting hundreds of feet into a cold and deep river, leaving us with only seconds to escape before our cars flood and we drown, assuming that we aren’t stunned, injured or killed outright by the impact with the water and that we haven’t been pinned down under a 300-ton girder.

Unfortunately, that last expectation was not met sufficiently May 23, when the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington state collapsed suddenly, the second collapse of a major U.S. interstate highway bridge in less than six years. The other, of course, was the I-35W bridge in Minnesota, which resulted in numerous fatalities. The I-5 bridge collapse did not result in fatalities, thankfully, but it did result in a major piece of infrastructure being put out of service for months, which is serious enough.

The I-5 bridge was not listed as “structurally deficient,” but it was “functionally obsolete,” and more importantly, “fracture critical.” That last one means that the bridge, though safe normally, would collapse if any one of its structural members was removed or broken. This was all well and good for 50 years, of course, but then the unthinkable happened: A truck hit the bridge! Incredible! Who would have thought a truck would hit the bridge, which only carries thousands of trucks each day? This unforeseen incident resulted in an entire span collapsing. This is simply a thing you don’t expect out of a developed nation.

The fact is that our infrastructure is degrading at an alarming rate. Look at the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is essentially a pile of rust held together with spit and prayers, that carries a major interstate highway. Closer to home, look at the Norristown High-Speed Line bridge over the Schuylkill River, which will be closed indefinitely this summer because the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority cannot afford to repair it. There are more than 500 “structurally deficient” bridges in the greater Philadelphia area alone and simply no money to repair or replace all of them.

So how do we fix our infrastructure? The only real answer is that we’re just going to have to bite the bullet and pay taxes in accordance with the infrastructure we have.

The original federal gas tax was set at one cent per gallon in 1932, which is 21 cents in 2013 dollars. The federal gas tax today is 17 cents per gallon, four cents less than its true value in 1932. In the meantime, we’ve built thousands of miles of expensive-to-maintain interstate highways, tens of thousands of miles of high-speed arterial roads, and hundreds of thousands of bridges. Actual revenue has declined in that time, and the government simply does not have the money to pay for the infrastructure that exists.

Couple this with increased fuel efficiency in modern vehicles and the growing popularity of hybrid and electric plug-in vehicles, and you’ve got yourself a setup for a serious revenue crisis. Public transportation takes out another piece of the pie, and most transit systems are funded through a combination of the gas tax and the farebox recovery ratio, so a decline in gas tax revenue results in higher transit fares as well. The tax revenues dedicated to our transportation infrastructure, as currently structured, can only decline in purchasing power in the future.
The fact is that not only is gas tax revenue lower than it ought to be, but it’s declining at an alarming rate, and our infrastructure is going to decline with it. What can be done? Switching the tax to a percentage of the price of gasoline rather than a flat cent value could be a start. The District of Columbia recently replaced its flat cent-per-gallon-based tax with an 8 percent wholesale gasoline tax, meaning that not only does the tax rise with inflation, but consumers don’t see the tax as much.

But this is only a stopgap solution because gasoline consumption per vehicle is only expected to fall in the future. Revenues will continue to decline, deficits will grow, and deferred maintenance will become more and more common. Eventually we’ll have to do away with the gas tax altogether and instead tax vehicles on miles driven. Sure, there will be outcry, pandemonium, and a lot of wailing and grinding of teeth, but let’s get real, folks — unless you own a large four-wheel drive SUV, extol the virtues of “rugged individualism” and are fine with caulking the wagons and floating every time you reach a major river, we’re going to have to pay for infrastructure somehow. I would hope that those of us regular folks, who might own a sedan or a sport wagon, could understand this.

Justin Roczniak is the op-ed editor of The Triangle. He can be contacted at justin.roczniak@thetriangle.org.

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