| Summary: | September 25, 2014 • theconcordian.org 4 OPINION Concordia College held its 2014 Faith, Reason, and World Affairs Symposium last week, titled “Sustain-ability: Local Action | Global Impact.” (Disclaim-er: I presented an OK con-current session during this symposium). This marked my second symposium, and the second time I have felt the symposium to be a bit esoteric for students. How can we residents of Moor-head, Minn. grapple with issues as large as global climate change? I think it’s natural to question our abil-ity to affect change on such a level (indeed, this was a contention of my concur-rent session), and I worry that it leads to discourage-ment rather than invigora-tion. The more emphasis we place on global changes, in my opinion, the more we create disillusioned stu-dents. Having completed my second symposium, I am reminded of my first. My freshman year, I at-tended the symposium “Be-yond Genocide: Learning to Help and Hope.” I had little idea what to expect, but throughout the week, I heard the often graphic sto-ries of many genocide sur-vivors. Put simply, I found myself overwhelmed. With-out a clear path of action – without a way to channel what I had experienced – I felt discouraged. I remem-ber angrily calling friends specifically because the topic of genocide had frus-trated me, and I couldn’t find anything to do about it. With the encouragement of a friend, I discovered an outlet for my energy: writ-ing a proposal for an action-oriented symposium. Over the course of sev-eral weeks, 2014 alumnus Levi Bachmeier and I fleshed out a symposium that we believed could in-spire Cobbers to direct ac-tion. We titled our sympo-sium proposal Discovering our Neighborhood: Concor-dia College, its Community, and the World. While our proposal was not accepted, I found myself inspired to review it this year. “The most valuable feature of this theme,” we wrote, “is its palpability. By promot-ing awareness of students’ immediate environment, this symposium encour-ages tangible involvement and increases the likeli-hood of student engage-ment. Moreover, this topic pertains to the lives of av-erage students more than past topics, bridging the gap between apathy and ex-citement.” While I now find it more than a bit ambitious that a student who had been on campus for a matter of weeks would propose to improve such an important Concordia tradition, I do think the Lipp-Bachmeier Symposium had some mer-it. I stand in the wake of the symposium which was cho-sen above ours (amongst others), and I still feel the need for visible change. While this symposium of-fered amazing plenary sessions, I am left with a description of the horrors of climate change without a clear way how I, Concor-dia junior Zach Lipp, can affect change. Or, perhaps more likely, the point of the symposium isn’t action. The symposium exists to remind me and my fellow math majors that not every problem has clear solutions – that we should feel frus-trated and that frustration should linger. Discomfort can help us grow, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Does the symposium inspire action? Speaking to troops in Tampa, FL; President Obama emphasized: “I want to be clear. The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission.” With growing international pres-sure and mounting Congressional demands for a cogent strategy toward the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Obama administration is laying out its strategy. Still awaiting Congressional approval, Obama plans to hit ISIS with: tactical air strikes, training of regional troops and 40 plus international allies. The key element to this strategy is no American troops on the ground, a rhetorically powerful component in a post-Bush era. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is the cor-rect approach on ISIS. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey argued that American troops may be necessary to defeat ISIS, while Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno nuanced the idea in saying that troops, not necessarily American, were quintessential to the effort. For now the prospects of American troops being re-re-deployed to Iraq appear nixed between Obama’s statements and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi stating that “Not only is it not necessary . We don’t want them. We won’t allow them [foreign troops].” Contrasting opinions on varying degrees of Ameri-can involvement bring up larger questions of interven-tionism and isolationism. To what extent should the United States involve itself in intrastate affairs of other regions? Moreover, how does the superpower remain in control if said superpower relinquishes control on geo-political events like those in the Middle East? What may be happening with the Obama administra-tion is the return to realistic foreign policy goals. If any-thing was learned from Iraq 1.0, it was that unilateral-ism fails in accomplishing socio-political goals but also that American involvement spikes extremist sentiment. Perhaps it is time for the United States to acknowledge other countries’ failure to launch, like Turkey’s; who is waiting for the United States to mobilize international support and to resolve the problem. Retaining the super-power status becomes impossible if every issue needs addressing and every conflict requires fighting. This is not to say that the United States should re-cluse from international agency. But it is difficult to jus-tify constant military intervention into areas that cat-egorically reject American intervention in addition to instances when most of the heavy lifting should be done by regional actors. Especially in regions like the Middle East where state stability and governmental ability to manage conflict are vital to preventing situations like ISIS or other spillover issues. The ISIS fight is not entirely the United States’ fight. Sure, we ought to fight and hold ISIS accountable for its horrifying acts towards our journalists and local per-sons; but ISIS is not an immediate threat to the United States. The president should seriously consider waiting to marshall the larger international response until Tur-key signs on to fighting the good fight. Until all relevant persons have a stake in the issue, there is no collective investment in the fight. In the age of intrastate conflict, the United States needs to follow realistic foreign policy; and in this case, Obama needs to demand that regional actors like Turkey carry their weight. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves in the same scenario in the future: in-stead of having local actors do the work themselves, the United States or others have to fight on their behalf. Turkey’s failure to launch ‘ISIS is not an immediate threat to the United States.’ Taylor Tielke Opinion Columnist Are your maps racially biased? Who keeps ruining maps? Everyone has that one nerdy passion no one shares. I love maps. Maps of malls are super useful when I’m being dragged to one and can’t find the bathroom, and I use road atlases all the time when I’m driving across the country because my GPS doesn’t understand that I refuse to enter Nebraska. But above all others, I have a special affinity for geopolitical world maps. I’m not ashamed of the fact that my computer’s desktop background is a Hobo-Dyer Projection oriented South- North with Australia at the center. I love maps. All maps. Except for the Mercator Projection. As you learned in eighth grade Geog-raphy, it’s impossible to represent Earth accurately on two dimensions, so car-tographers have to choose how they are going to distort their map: usually size, shape, or distance. The Mercator Projec-tion is the map you see everywhere that has Greenland the same size as Africa, de-spite Greenland being one-fourteenth as large as Africa in reality. This distortion holds across the map; the closer to the poles you are, the larger your country ap-pears. This is actually a problem, despite how banal it sounds. Mercators are often found in classrooms, and children have been shown to think that larger things are more important (Source: science). To con-nect the dots: kids see North America and Europe as being much bigger than South America, Africa and South Asia; however, the opposite is true. This means children may be led by the Mercator Projection to learn that North America and Europe are more important than continents where white is not the most common skin color. Gerardus Mercator may not seem to have cared much about black people, but he did care about sailors. The Mercator projection wasn’t designed to be subtly racist; it was designed for navigation. You can draw a straight line on a Mercator better than nearly any other map, which has made it an indispensable tool on ships since the 16th century. But the Mercator map was never meant to be hung on a high school wall. And while it is impos-sible to pin what caused this projection to become so common in a place it shouldn’t be, the effects in the present cannot be ig-nored. Saying the Mercator projection is rac-ist sounds like political correctness run amuck, but it points to an issue endemic within our schools: subtle eurocentrism. “Subtle” is the operative word here. We like to shelter our children from painful realities like racism and sexism for as long as possible, so any Native American sports mascots or “provocative” short-shorts get banned. These problems are easy to push aside because they are so ob-vious. These problems are easy to discuss when we feel that our children are ready to face them. But who has an open con-versation with their child about maps? Who talks to their child about how they eat pizza, hamburgers, and mac & cheese in their cafeterias but never see any real ethnic diversity in food unless it’s part of a special “Indian/Mexican/whatever week” à la Explore in DS? It’s these kinds of subtle problems that encourage, or at least permit, eurocentric viewpoints, though no one ever says anything about them because “there are more important things to worry about.” So I’m taking a stand because I love maps and I don’t want them to contribute to racist undertones in schools or at large. If I never see a Mercator in another class-room, it’ll be too soon. Scratch that, let’s put a Mercator in every geography class-room, and let’s talk about its biases with our kids. Have any opinions of your own? Contact The Concordian! Visit us online at theconcordian.org, or follow us on Twitter: @ConcordianPaper or our opinions account @CCLendMeYourEar You can also submit opinions online or at concord@ cord.edu or to FPO 214
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