Brigham

On Friday, October 13th, members of the Eugene and University of Oregon community gathered in front of the PeaceHealth University District Hospital to protest the proposed closing of the only major medical center proximate to the U of O and downtown Eugene. The nearest hospital for nearly 200,000 residents will now be Riverbend Hospital in Springfield, which is nearly an additional 15 minute journey compared to the current commute.

“Do you know when civilization ends? It’s when stupidity is accelerated.” I think stupidity could easily be replaced by selfishness here, but either way this sentiment rings true in contemporary American society as much as it did in France during 1977. People are so caught up in their prescribed livelihoods that they’re unable to recognize what they’re actually doing. Our young protagonist, Charles, recognizes this fact, but rather than accept his absence of control over the situation, he finds himself in an endless loop of despair and lack of solutions rooted in modern livelihoods being directed towards the attainment of money.

Everything in the world has been defined, or in terms of my current metaphor, “boxed up.” I aim to convince the reader that these boxes should be fully opened to reveal the more accurate defining characteristic of the world, which is its abstractness and lack of definition. I am not discussing scientific or physical phenomena, such as north and south or positive and negative, but that of the human condition. We’ve placed fulfillment into a narrow economic understanding and created models of a meaningful life by means of film and television that are unattainable for most people.

Content Warning: Racism, Anti unhoused violence, Misogyny

As I begin the final term of my first year in Eugene and am starting my first full term with The Student Insurgent, I feel a good deal of reflection is in order. As I flew away from my life in rural upstate New York, I expected to feel the world open up to me and to be engulfed by an array of new experiences reaching out for me, but the romantic projections of my life after high school were met with the reality of the mundanity of the life I have always lived.

The leaked Supreme Court opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last May sparked an increased awareness of the Court and the legislative power it holds but has since dissolved into the same general ignorance of the judicial branch evident before. With a jammed Congressional body such as the one we have now, the weight of each decision SCOTUS makes is significantly higher, as drafting a bill becomes near impossible for contested issues like religious expression, free speech, gun ownership, and environmental regulations.

On February 3rd, at around 9pm, a 50-car Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic materials derailed. Tons of vinyl chloride and other harmful chemicals involved in the making of plastics, spilled into the area surrounding the town of East Palestine and the Ohio River. The residents of the town were then evacuated and the EPA and local government began evaluating what kind of cleanup measures needed to be taken. It is an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions, yet all guilty parties have begun the effort to minimize it and deny that such a thing happening was inevitable.

Social media, news media, and advertisements comprise many of the images we see daily, but many people simply accept this virtual reality instead of questioning its existence. Modern man has been moved to look through windows into many detached experiences through the mediums of social media and news that no other generation has been subjected to. The structure of this intake of information has led to a new way of consuming and producing news.