Today, military women are at greater risk of being sexually assaulted than killed by enemy fire.
According to the Department of Defense, rape in the military is a major problem facing an estimated 8,000 women in uniform today. The incidences are high while the reports are low, and underlying all the trauma and deceit is one problem: silence.
Why are they silent? Department of Defense data on sexual assault from the 2011 fiscal year shows that the vast majority of rapes and sexual assaults in the military go unreported.
The mission of military training is to build an unquestioning obedience to authority that will result in an efficient warrior mentality within the ranks, yet the result too often perpetuates violence and dehumanization. The military is idealized as a brotherhood dependent on self-sacrifice, strength and obedience to authority. Unfortunately, due to the epidemic of sexual assault, this brotherhood betrays too many women in uniform.
According to a recent report in the National Journal, many victims are blamed or diagnosed with a personality disorder in order to explain their distressed state, which results from the assault. This diagnosis halts victims’ careers by labeling them as vulnerable and weak.
The 2012 documentary, The Invisible War, reports that more than half of women who are raped do not report because the person to whom they would report is the rapist or a friend of the rapist. Because of this, the documentary suggests that in the past, reports were not treated seriously enough, and victims were not granted adequate confidentiality.
Even though the military has made some improvements, many victims still end up distrusting the system they are taught to trust the most. Department of Defense data suggests that the response to reports needs to be significantly more effective.
In the past, unit commanders, who are not trained in dealing with legal matters, had the authority to dispose of offenses that their subordinates reported. Because commanders’ promotions are dependent on the conduct and performance of the troops they supervise, they had an incentive to make sure that allegations and convictions within their troops were few. Less than five percent of reported offenders are convicted, and those that aren’t are not included on the national registry for sex offenders. They can then easily claim civilian victims as well.
Last year, fewer commanders brought up charges, and fewer soldiers charged with rape or sexual assault were convicted than in 2010. After Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta watched The Invisible War in April of this year, the government took away commanders’ discretion to charge alleged offenders and gave the responsibility to a special court martial, for which at least a colonel or Navy captain is in charge. This is a definite improvement, but only time will tell how effective the change will be.
According to the documentary, women who are raped in the military return to society with a higher chance of suffering from PTSD than men who served in combat. They experience just as much as men in combat, but the added trauma of sexual assault causes the likelihood of suffering from the disorder to spike.
These women have trouble adjusting to society; they may have trouble holding a job, struggle in their personal relationships, become more dependent on social welfare or even find themselves homeless.
In the past few years, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has increased aid to female victims of PTSD significantly; however, they still have much more research to do on women’s health issues that stem from deployment.
This is not just a problem within the military but a problem that affects the economy, social welfare, jobs and the general well-being of American society. This is a problem too many people face daily, even though most say nothing about it. Take notice and give a voice to those military women who are silent.

As Americans, we’re profoundly conflicted about science.
On the one hand, we’re deeply suspicious of scientific inquiry; there is a strain of thought in American culture that is informed by a certain Faustian parable, that of the man so greedy for knowledge that he sells his soul to the devil for the hope of ultimate understanding and pleasure. In a nation of deep Christian roots, the Faust myth gets at a basic dilemma that has plagued us and the Western imagination since the Enlightenment: is science a savior or a sin? What should be the reach of human knowledge and endeavor?
In the narrative, Faust is an alchemist who is dissatisfied with the limits on his understanding and wants ever more; F.W. Murnou’s silent film portrays Faust as a doctor who craves ultimate medical knowledge to save his city from the plague, and enters into the pact in order to glean it. Like Eve and the apple or even the Greek myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods, we are wary of one who tries to know too much.
In this way, science is seen as transgressive; we feel there is something about science that is an overreaching of our human boundaries, that the endless unchecked pursuit of knowledge is a type of fatal hubris. Experiments in neuroscience, prodding electrodes genome mapping, and understanding the ultimate nature of the cosmos are all types of inquiry that leave many feeling deeply unsettled in that they threaten to displace God and morality and put the human mind front and center. Neither of these correctly portray true science and the act of scientific inquiry, but still we fall prey to the fear that there is a Mephistopheles lurking at the side of every microbiologist.
On the other hand, we put an enormous amount of faith in science to deliver us to a utopian ideal. We are driven by the idea of progress; our early American hearts pounded at the sight of the expanse of land we assumed to be ours for the taking because writ large over the frontier and the subsequent spreading of the railroad was the idea that we can make for ourselves a perfect, advanced civilization. Technological prowess was a means to this end. Our feeling of the sublime in the face of giant feats of science and technology like the Hoover Dam, the power of flight and our move into space played on our already existent notion that we are and will continue to be a nation among nations.
So what is science to us: a sin or savior? Is it a Faustian overstepping of morality and boundaries or a means to realize our visions for the future?
Neither view, unfortunately, presents an accurate portrayal of science at all – or scientists for that matter. While the two myths are pervasive, they are still myths. While science itself is enmeshed in the larger culture and so is necessarily involved in the feedback loop between our myth-inspired ideas about it and the field itself. For example, scientists might appeal to politician’s ideas about progress in order to get funding for certain technological endeavors—our popular conceptions should not be conflated with the actual process of science, which couldn’t be farther removed from the Faust myth or a hyperbolic utopian fervor.
(It should be said that most individuals won’t necessarily be able to articulate these tensions; one might just know that they are morally outraged over something like stem cell research but also cherish their tablet and smart phone and ability to use the internet to connect to the world at large, despite the fact that both of these phenomena stem from the same process of doing science.)
At its heart, science is skeptical, predicated on experimentation and necessarily self-correcting. Good science is modest and wary of broad claims. It’s methodological. It’s about repeated experimentation and reproducibility. No scientist would ever claim to have found “The God Gene” — a title dreamed up by pulp science reporters who will often pursue sensationalist stories and only present the end “goal” of a study or technology and not the process itself — nor would a good engineer or doctor claim that science is the answer to all of the world’s problems. Science has a methodology that is different from almost everything that came before, where one poses a specific question about the natural world, formulates an experiment that might yield an answer, and then subjects that study to rigorous peer review.
With all of the other issues in the world, one might wonder why examining our own assumptions and lack of understanding of real science is even important at all. But extracting ourselves from the myths surrounding science and paying attention to its actual methodology will not only cull some of the culture wars but possibly make us better, more informed citizens; indeed, it is true science’s constant need for proof, for good answers and good research, that will ward against misinformation, pseudoscience and illegitimate claims to knowledge, which are ever more abundant in an age of mass dissemination of information. Unless we learn to be critical, discerning citizens, we are bound to always play the fool.
What does that mean for higher education? Don’t schluff off your science courses. It’s not merely the content that is invaluable, which it is, but the process of scientific inquiry that can train your mind to question things and filter the world with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Last week, in a stroke of utter stupidity, our nation’s House of Representatives voted to drastically cut the funding of the country’s food stamp program. The program, called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), would see 3.8 million Americans kicked out by 2014.
SNAP has been for years connected to a farm subsidy bill when these programs go up for federal funding. This conglomeration was a political compromise that brought a liberal program (SNAP) with a more conservative one (mainly funding for big farms). Many people, then, could see something was wrong when the Republican majority House decided to split the two when they went up for funding.
Then, last week, the House confirmed liberal suspicions and fears by drastically cutting a program that has taken on a truly vital importance since the economic downturn in 2008.
Republican reasoning for the drastic spending cut was that SNAP had grown enormous since the Great Recession began in 2008, increasing from 26 million participants in 2007 to 48 million now. Many Republicans believe that the extreme swelling of this program was due to some people ‘gaming’ the system for free benefits. Senator Paul Ryan (R-WI) stated that the safety net of SNAP was turning into a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
Furthermore, many people not directly hit by the recession may believe that, by now, the economy has recovered. Unemployment has dropped to 7.8 percent from a high of 9.1 percent in 2011.
Unfortunately, these numbers do not paint the whole picture. The Americans that lost their jobs during the recession have most often not found a job that pays as high. The economy has recovered some since the hit of 2008, but it is the richest Americans that have received the most positive effects of the recovery. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the top one percent rose 31 percent from 2009 to 2012. The real income of the bottom 40 percent of Americans, on the other hand, has actually fallen six percent over the same time period.
As for the hammock that is lulling able-bodied workers to dependency, it’s interesting to note that the benefits of SNAP are $4.45 daily for food. It would also be interesting to note that two thirds of the recipients for SNAP are children, the disabled or the elderly. As for the others, most are adults with children. So it is hardly the able-bodied adults that are receiving the extremely generous benefit of $4.45 (I dearly hope you can see the irony here), but it is instead the people that are most in need.
In America right now, there are 45 million people under the poverty line. This number has drastically increased since the onset of the Great Recession, and many may believe that SNAP must not be doing enough to keep Americans out of poverty. The reality, however, is that SNAP kept more than four million people over the poverty line last year, and kept many more people from sinking further into poverty.
Lastly, the food stamps program has fundamentally helped children recipients of the program over the past 50 years. In the 1960s and 70s, a group of economists studied the impact that the food stamp program had on the children recipients. They found that, in comparison to children that had not received the benefits that the food stamp program provides, they grew up to be physically healthier and productive adults and were also less likely to need the safety net in the future.
Amidst a shrinking government evidenced by sharp drops in public employment, and declining spending, House Republicans needed a scapegoat in order to appeal to their conservative constituents back home. But what they’ve just done is cut one of the most important and successful social security programs in the United States right now.
This egregious act of shortsighted selfishness would not only hurt millions of Americans now, but it may also hamper this nation’s growth in the future.

For one reason or another, I thought it would be a good idea to wear my friend, Christien West’s,  “Reagan-Bush 1984” hat to parties last Saturday. I’m not particularly conservative. Not particularly liberal either. I voted for candidates of both major parties in the 2012 election; I try to vote for the individual, not the party affiliation. However, I do consider myself very engaged in politics. I hope to make a career of public service.

On more than one occasion on this evening, an unwitting, inebriated individual came up to me and slurred out a compliment about my Reagan hat. You said the magic words, my friend. Always ready for a lively political debate, this was my queue. Never mind the fact that our generation seems to have bought into the baby boomers’ “Reagan as god” zeitgeist, it seems everyone has forgotten the not-so-good things Reagan did during his presidency. Iran-Contra, anyone? His entire folklore can be summed up in that one epic shot, when he tells Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Reagan beat the commies, man; nothing else mattered. The Gipper made Americans more free while liberating Eastern Europe and displaying the military might of America to the rest of the world, drastically increasing defense spending during his presidency.

Listen, the debate over Reagan’s presidency can be had from now until Barack Obama becomes a conservative savior. But, from Syria to sequesters to Social Security, Fox News seems to ask, “What would Reagan do?” It seems we’ve retreated from analyzing Reagan’s actual policy to accepting it as revolutionary and trying to implement 20-year-old ideas into the modern world.

On Saturday night, people would tell me Reagan was their favorite president. I’d ask why. I heard a lot of reasons: he won the Cold War, people would tell me. Never mind the Soviet Union was already falling apart inside. He was a great public speaker they’d say; the aforementioned “tear down this wall” speech was exhibit A.  Never mind Obama and JFK could tap into the American ethos just as strongly as Reagan. And both cut taxes upon entering office!

Americans have become so scarred by actual policy debate that they’d rather sit back and watch their country tear itself apart than actually think about the best course of action. Don’t question any of Reagan’s policies because he is a god- a flawless and fearless leader who led the Western world, along with Margaret Thatcher, into a new, deregulated and liberated economic era. Infallible as the Pope, his policy decisions have been taken as conservative doctrine, a sort of GOP catechism that tests one’s readiness for the national stage.

This isn’t to say liberals don’t do the same thing. They’ve become so enthralled with defending Obama’s policy initiatives from the right that they never seem to stop and think if a particular idea is actually a good one.

Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in last week’s New York Times made the case that

“it is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional.” But what about this current state of affairs is exceptional? Instead of passing laws and waging wars for moral reasons, we base our opinions on political allegiances or personal vendettas. The GOP has spent the last two years trying to defund the Affordable Care Act, seemingly forgetting that its roots can be traced to conservative ideas. We used to fund the sciences and arts while also allowing American individualism and innovation to become the envy of the world. Now, science and education funding are the first to go. Intelligence was cherished and idealized. Now, politicians hide their Ivy League degrees in a closet, pretending to be folksy and talking down to Americans. Instead of following the smartest person in the room, we listen to the one talking the loudest.

America is exceptional. But instead of telling me Reagan is your favorite president because of his beautiful baby blues, tell me it’s because he signed the INF Treaty with the Soviet Union, reducing the nuclear threat. Tell me it was his efforts to curb runaway inflation while reducing unemployment that made you love the Gipper. Having those conversations is at the root of American exceptionalism. We used to be informed; now we’re afraid of what we might find out.

So next time you see someone wearing a “Reagan-Bush ’84” hat, be ready for a debate.  Don’t just tell me Reagan’s your favorite; teach me something. That’s how you win one for the Gipper.

Recently, Pope Francis, the influential political leader of the oldest Christian church in the world and spiritual guide to its 1.2 billion members, got a new car. It’s not new, actually, but new to the pontiff. The 20 year-old Renault 4, given to Francis to symbolize his efforts to fight poverty, has 186,000 miles on it, according to the Catholic News Agency. The reception of this old vehicle is the most recent action during Francis’ papacy that solidifies his ushering in of a new age of the Catholic Church. After the popular papacy of John Paul II, Pope Francis has once again brought the world back to realizing all that is good about the Catholic faith. Although some of Francis’ actions may seem revolutionary in contrast to those of his ostensibly bookish and aloof predecessor, they simply embrace key aspects of Catholic social teaching that have been in the shadows for too long.

Francis has been raising eyebrows since he first stepped out to face the faithful on the day of his pontifical election. Unlike Benedict who, while scholarly and knowledgeable about the faith nonetheless drew criticism for his strict adherence to pompous dress codes, Francis’ first appearance as pope was refreshing. Dressed simply, Francis looked uncomfortable in his new position of power and while he now seems more at ease with his new role in the Church, he continues to startle the world with his “revolutionary” actions. In late June of this year, Francis caught the attention of many Vatican observers when, in response to a reporter’s question about gay priests, he responded: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Many people saw this comment as revolutionary to the Church, and in comparison to many of the things Pope Benedict said concerning the same issue, it is. However, a closer examination of Church teaching reveals that this comment is not a turnaround of Church doctrine. According to writings by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “The Church seeks to enable every person to live out the universal call to holiness.” While further research will expose that other Church teaching on homosexuality is questionable, unreasonable and possibly discriminatory, Francis preaches the best the Church has –that God loves everyone and that holiness can be achieved by all–and leaves out the rest.

The recent events of chemical weapons use in the Syrian civil war have also given Francis the opportunity to demonstrate his style of servant leadership. Pope Francis truly lives out that which he preaches. On a recent Saturday, Francis led a group of hundreds of thousands of the faithful in a  five hour long vigil of prayer and fasting for peace in Syria. The Pope, a one-lunged man in his late seventies, fasted the whole day and prayed for five continuous hours during the public vigil. In a truly powerful demonstration of Francis’ dedication to promoting peace and spreading the Good News of God embedded in the Catholic faith, the Pope asked the crowd:

“Can we get out of this spiral of sorrow and death? Can we learn once again to live and walk in the ways of peace? Invoking the help of God under the maternal gaze of Salus Populi Romani, the Queen of Peace, I say yes it is possible for everyone. From every corner of the world tonight, I would like to hear us cry out: Yes it is possible for everyone!”

What Pope Francis says and does is not revolutionary. Instead, his words and actions represent what the Church has finally gotten in this modern age: a humble man who,  reflecting on the ministries of Jesus, demonstrates all that is good in the Catholic faith.

The adventures of Edward Snowden captivated the American people this summer after his massive leak of classified government material showed just how involved the United States government is in our daily lives.
The government leaks released information that the US government, through a government agency called the National Security Agency (NSA), compiles phone records and emails of just about every American and scours over them, searching for key terms, phrases and people. The NSA defends this compilation by stating that they are using this surveillance to catch terrorists.
While extensive government surveillance is constantly portrayed in popular media, advances in digital technology have given major corporations (such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft) the ability to collect vast amounts of data of our personal lives, often without our explicit knowledge.
Have you ever noticed the cleverness of Facebook ads and, unlike years before, how their ads are actually for things we may buy? The truth is, with the help of massive data collections, corporations can acquire a great deal of information in our digital lives. There is a distinction between our digital lives and our own lives, but that distinction is becoming more blurred with an ingenious bit of innovation called Google Glass.
While there are other new products that could potentially be misused and allow privacy violations, there is no item more controversial than Google Glass. Shaq Katikali, an information privacy professional, describes Google Glass as a “phone in front of your eyes with a front-facing camera. A heads-up display with facial recognition and eye-tracking technology can show icons or stats hovering above people you recognize, give directions as you walk, and take video from your point of view.”
As well as being pretty cool, the Google Glass unfortunately creates a myriad of privacy issues. Katikali gives two frightening examples of what the Google Glass could do: First, Google Glass could enable police officers to use the video collected by Google Glass cameras to aid in their investigations without the individual’s knowledge.
The second example is the possibility of losing everything if someone hacked your Google Glass. Katikali asks, “How many of you will turn off your Glass while punching in your PIN? How about when a person’s credit card is visible from the edge of your vision? How about when opening your bills, filing out tax information, or filing out a health form? Computers can recognize numbers and letters blazingly fast – even a passing glance as you walk past a stranger’s wallet can mean that the device on your face learns her credit card number.” These frightening scenarios are made possible as technology further integrates itself into every aspect of our lives.
Massive data collections are by no means an inherently dangerous thing. These collections allow just about every entity that uses it to become more efficient. However, there are many reasons to be a little more suspicious when contemplating buying new products such as Google Glass.

Mike Hogan / Opinion Editor

In a little over two weeks, another class will have completed their education at Saint Louis University. They’ll wear their funny hats as they walk up on stage and accept their slips of paper, and then they’ll go forth to live their lives in various corners of the globe. And a few months later, a new batch of budding Billikens will arrive to follow in their footsteps.

From the reductive perspective of an outsider, this cycle could seem mechanical, like an assembly line fashioning young minds. The newly credentialed alumni could walk out of Chaifetz and never look back, their transaction with the University completed. They could forget about their experiences here, forget about the struggles over the past year to make SLU the best it can be. But we who have been here cannot distance ourselves from SLU that easily or that callously.

Yes, we paid at the door, and yes, we received a service with an economic value. But SLU has been more than just a business for the thousands of us who’ve studied here, because we did more than just study. Many of us lived here, laughed here, learned lessons here that no class could encapsulate. We developed relationships with faculty, staff and fellow students that fundamentally changed us, some of which we will maintain to our dying days. We grew as human beings, mentally, physically and spiritually, to an extent that we may never fully comprehend. Even the most jaded graduate has bright memories of great times here at SLU. And every single one of us spent several precious years of our youth as a member of the SLU community.

And that is what SLU is: a community. It would be absurd to reduce this University to a corporation dealing out knowledge and housing arrangements. Buying your laptop from Best Buy didn’t alter you as a person. You didn’t spend four years interacting with the man at the car dealership (hopefully).

Businesses may be governed by the will of a single person—though there’s evidence that such arrangements are often counterproductive. Communities cannot be, especially communities of over 10,000 people of various needs, backgrounds and interests. This is what the no confidence controversy of the past year has been about: not tenure, not hiring procedures, not business decisions, not even basic professionalism and respect, though those factors are all important.

Fr. Lawrence Biondi, S.J., has transformed this University over the past 25 years, and many of his successes were likely facilitated by his apparently unilateral decision making power. But such a governance structure cannot be the basis for a fair and functional community. Perhaps the error of the SLU community in the past has been its acceptance of the benefits of having an ambitious and influential University president at the cost of the freedom to communally decide the direction of the University. If Fr. Biondi makes poor leadership decisions, as many argue he has already done, the SLU community finds itself with neither the aforementioned benefits nor the freedom to effect change. This is a problem that we cannot simply forget or ignore.

Summer is coming. Seniors are leaving. But they will remain connected to the SLU community, through relationships with the faculty that remain here, through precedents set for the students that follow them and through the reputation of the institution that granted them their degrees. It is important that recent graduates and summer-vacationing students alike remain informed of the situation at SLU.

Alumni, in particular, have a lot of power to decide the direction of the University. The alumni network is SLU’s greatest team of recruiters, its most effective Career Services Office and a major source of University funding. Alumni are the largest constituency of the SLU community, and it is they, along with faculty, staff and current students, that truly determine the success of the University.

So stay involved and stay informed. This is our University. This is our community. It is our responsibility to keep it moving in a positive direction. We are always Billikens, no matter how far we are from SLU in time or space.

Saint Louis University’s 2013 commencement ceremony will be held just 16 days from today, and still the commencement speaker remains a mystery. There are a few theories going around campus as to why this might be the case. One holds that graduating students might be underwhelmed by the choice of speaker, and so the current silence is a delaying action to prevent a full-blown Billiken rebellion. On the other hand, it could be that the speaker will be someone awesome, and that the administration is building anticipation for the crescendo of this class’ undergraduate career. Still others point out that, historically, SLU hasn’t announced the speaker until closer to commencement. In any case, the editorial board of The University News is holding out hope that the speaker will be someone from the following illustrious list:

Ryan Lochte – Hey, at least the speech would be short. There’s no way he could come up with enough material for even a 10-minute speech. Moreover, the ceremony is at 9 a.m., so we need a speaker who’s a man in the morning.

Joe Buck – Nothing says St. Louis like the velvety voice of this sports commentary icon. Buck’s voice is like gooey butter cake. With provel cheese on top. Served with a Ted Drewes’ concrete on the side. Hopefully SLU can score him to be the speaker.

Pope Francis – After Fr. James Martin, S.J., gave last year’s speech, it would be fitting to continue the tradition of bringing in famous Jesuits. And who’s more famous than the Vicar of Christ? On Holy Thursday, Francis visited a detention center in Rome to wash the feet of 12 young offenders; surely SLU can offer superior accommodations.

The specter of Barack Obama in a chair, accompanied by Clint Eastwood – After senior week celebrations, the new graduates will likely be a bit tired during commencement. The speaker may feel like he or she is addressing a room full of empty chairs. Mr. Eastwood has relevant experience for this situation.

Manti Te’o’s girlfriend – Speaking of invisible commencement guests, Lennay Kekua seems like a solid choice. It takes real rhetorical skill to convince someone that you exist when, in fact, you do not. SLU students, prepare to fall in love.

Kim Jong-un – The supreme leader of North Korea and the world’s youngest head of state would certainly give an interesting speech. Maybe he can offer some advice on transitioning leadership after the departure of an entrenched dictator. Better check his bags when he comes through customs, though.

So, if one of those six shows up on stage to give our graduation oration, you heard it here first. And if you’re not happy with whoever winds up winding up your college listening career, remember, you can always just assume it’s actually Daniel Day-Lewis in character. Congrats, graduates!

Mike Hogan / Opinion Editor

It’s a familiar scene. A few weeks ago, you were gearing up for March Madness. As tip-off approached, you argue with your friends, family, classmates, coworkers and anyone else who would listen about your favorite team. You picked upsets, you belittled favorites, you made compelling arguments for the superiority of one team over another. Or, maybe you weren’t that informed or invested, but you still got swept up in the excitement and the constant conversations. And at the end of the day, you filled out a bracket, and hey, maybe you put a few bucks in the office pool, just to have some skin in the game.

Sound familiar? If so, then you may have broken the law.

A March 21 article in Forbes by Marc Edelman argues that NCAA betting pools likely violate a number of state and federal laws. These laws apply not just to the NCAA tournament, but to the majority of sporting events, from the World Series to the Olympics.

Yet most states have authorized other forms of gambling, such as lotteries and casinos. Even some sports are apparently exempt from these laws; betting on horse races is legal in many states. How is a horse race different from other sporting events? The law cites the fact that the outcomes of sporting events are largely unpredictable, even by the so-called “experts.” This applies equally to the Preakness and to the PGA tournament, so why is it legal to bet on one and not the other?

Perhaps it’s because our culture has created a certain aura around sports figures. Sports are supposed to be noble endeavors, undertaken for the love of the game and the pursuit of perfection. Gambling, on the other hand, has traditionally been viewed as sinful, at least according to the old Puritan ethic that even today underlies many aspects of American culture. To gamble on sports somehow corrupts the ideal images of athletes as role models.

Yet in the age of mass media, this idealization of sports seems rather naïve. Even college athletics are a multi-billion dollar industry. Every year there are hundreds of players who treat their (subsidized) college education as nothing more than a stepping stone to the big money of the big leagues. Clearly many athletes  of the most popular sports are in it for more than just love of the game, or even a free education.

Perhaps gambling is illegal in order to avert match-fixing schemes and other moral hazards for those who are involved in the athletic organizations. This is a legitimate concern, but it’s not like sports gambling doesn’t occur in spite of the laws. On the contrary, sports gambling is an enormous industry that manages to be both mainstream and underground.

Wouldn’t this industry be easier to regulate if it were legalized? That way, gambling centers could be monitored, making it easier to keep players, coaches and other insiders away from the betting books.

Finally, sports gambling could be a vast source of tax revenue for state governments. Currently, several states are considering revising their laws against sports gambling, principally for this reason. The old-fashioned moral arguments against gambling don’t hold much weight, especially considering the many precedents for legalized gambling across the country.

Whether it be the Super Bowl, March Madness, the Fall Classic or any other sporting event, the reality is that people all around the country are betting on it. It’s time that our governments recognize that reality — and start to regulate it.

When the two bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, their effects were felt, to one degree or another, by people across the globe. The victims and those close to them have suffered the most, but their grief is shared by people around the world.

Now, there’s hardly anyone in the U.S. that can turn on the news, or tie their shoes for their morning run, or say a prayer without thinking of the attacks in Boston. The criminals who perpetrated these attacks have branded scenes of horror onto our collective memory.

These experiences, these images, these stories spur us to action. It’s an instinctual response. First, fear; fear drove tired runners to keep running, away from the blasts, away from the horror. Fear kept millions of others indoors and brought one of our nation’s proudest cities to a standstill. But in spite of fear, there was also a compulsion to do something, to seek justice, to aid the suffering. Exhausted runners continued running out of a desire to help those in need. Law enforcement officers died in the pursuit of justice.

And now, around the country, the specter of the Boston attacks is driving politicians and concerned citizens to push for change. Policies on immigration, gun control, surveillance, legal rights, trial procedures and more are being reanalyzed through the lens of Boston.

In the rush of emotions following the occurrence of the unthinkable, it’s difficult to stop. It’s difficult to think. We want justice; we want change.

These things will come. Yet we must not allow them to result from hasty decisions and rash policy changes. Changes to the laws and policies that govern this country should not be just another ripple rolling forth from the site of the bombings.

As tragic and horrific as the Boston attacks were, they were a single occurrence. Our immigration policies and our gun regulations should not be decided on the basis of extreme, but rare instances of violence. Rather, they should be determined after careful analysis and debate in light of everyday issues.

It’s hard to think about statistics when all you can see are explosions. This is the way the human mind works. People tend to fear flying on planes much more than driving cars, though statistics show that driving is, in fact, a riskier endeavor than flying. It’s the big, terrible, spectacular catastrophes that burn themselves into our minds. In reality, it’s the small, mundane things that make the biggest difference.

When we talk about immigration, we should think about the effects on the economy. When we talk about gun regulation, we should think about the shootings that occur every day around the country.

At the same time, we should carefully consider whether there’s anything we can do to stop Boston from happening again. Many of the policies being discussed today wouldn’t have stopped the bombings; politicians know this. They’re using this disaster to forward their own agendas. Citizens should be aware of this, so that they can make informed decisions about those agendas. And if we determine that Boston was the result of systemic problems, we should address those problems with all the wisdom we possess.

We cannot forget the events in Boston and Watertown, nor should we. But as a nation, we must do our best to make our policy decisions in light of, but not necessarily in response to those terrible attacks. This is the United States of America, and no one can decide the fate of this country but us.