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April 2022
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The Lost Opportunity for Unification5/12/2021 ERIN SPELLMAN
As a member of the Boston College Class of 2021, I find myself, like so many other Seniors, spending time reflecting on my BC experience as we approach graduation. The education I received here at the Heights—academically, socially, spiritually, and philosophically—has truly shaped me in ways that I could never have imagined. As I log into Canvas one last time to submit a final research paper, I realize that this is the time to celebrate and to recognize that which my classmates and I have accomplished during our four years on this beautiful campus. The various events of Senior Week will lead us to the day we could only envision and work towards when we entered campus for the first time as Freshman in the fall of 2017: Boston College’s 144th Commencement. The past four years have brought great division to every aspect of life in America. While we may have differing views about the root causes of such division, it is clear that the one thing we can, in fact, agree on is that this division down party lines very much exists; it is a living, breathing, deep seated division that has dominated much of our college experience, both on and off campus. However divided we may feel politically, the Boston College Class of 2021 graduates do share common ground as we move forward into the world: We have worked diligently for the past four years to earn our degree, we have walked the same steps across a campus we love, we are shaped in the spirit of a Jesuit education, and we are all BC Eagles. What a wonderful opportunity to recognize such unification of the Class of 2021 on Graduation Day. Unfortunately, instead of capitalizing on the common ground of BC’s Class of 2021, BC’s Administration has chosen a highly divisive figure, New York Times columnist David Brooks, to speak at our Commencement. BC’s choice of Brooks is highly suspect given that University President William P. Leahy, S.J. argued that “…our nation must address and resolve social and political differences creating harmful divisions...” in a late January letter to the BC Community. Nothing screams “addressing and resolving division” like a commencement speaker whose headlines state that “Trumpians are having a venomous panic attack” and that “The G.O.P Is Getting Even Worse” or his likening of the January 6th Capital events to the atrocities of 9/11. I wonder how the Republican students and their Republican parents in attendance will feel about a speaker who suggests that “we do face a political crisis in this country, and the Republican Party is the epicenter of that crisis.” While I most certainly support a diverse range of views and a respectful exchange of ideas, the time for such scholarly endeavors has already transpired for us over the past four years. These newly anointed BC alumni and their parents will think twice about future gifting to the University as they recall being subjected to the proselytizing of a highly divisive Brooks. Any reasoning for this decision by BC escapes me. Even Brooks’ own New York Times colleague David Murray stated in a 2017 opinion piece on controversial graduation speakers, “Free and open debate is indeed one of the hallmarks of democracy. But it’s not one of the hallmarks of commencement addresses. This is something I wish college administrators would get through their thick heads.” As I close my time at the Heights, I wish that I had taken the opportunity to suggest a Commencement Speaker candidate that appeals to all, such as the President of Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Peter Slavin, who was at the epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic and who led MGH’s emergency response to the Boston Marathon bombing crisis in 2013; or Catherine D’Amato, the President and CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank, who is combating the dire issue of food insecurity in the Boston area; or Astronaut Christopher Cassidy, who returned last October from his 3rd visit to the Space Station after living for 196 days in outer space. I can only imagine the perspective BC graduates and their parents could have enjoyed together by any of these speakers, unified in the discussion of the greater good of mankind. To current and future Boston College students; I encourage you to stand up for your beliefs and fight for unity on this campus.
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ERIN SPELLMAN
In the wake of the “Me Too” movement, a growing number of women have come forth to accuse New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior, prompting many calls for an investigation and the Governor’s resignation. To date, eight different women have courageously shared their stories of Cuomo’s unsolicited kissing, touching, and abhorrent behavior. Yet, the Democratic Party, the party that has attempted to lay claim to advocating for survivors and sexual harassment or violence, has dug in their heels to protect Cuomo, and to discredit and dismiss the allegations by these women. While we must continue to shed light on this growing scandal with a full investigation of these allegations, we must not allow the liberal media to ignore the elephant in the room: the New York nursing home scandal. After portraying Cuomo as the heroic figure to emerge from the pandemic, the media has continuously ignored his administration’s deadly nursing home policy. On March 25, 2020, Cuomo’s Health Department issued a mandate which required nursing home facilities to not turn away patients who were COVID-positive. Even though an association that represents medical directors warned against this, the state Department of Health, in conjunction with the Greater New York Hospital Association, the non-profit hospital association, pushed this mandate forward. As a result, nursing homes were unable to appropriately prepare to accommodate those who had tested positive, and hospitalizations and deaths in New York spiked. By February, 2021, 15,000 patients in nursing homes had died of COVID-19 . This staggering number of nursing home deaths was only revealed finally after the Cuomo administration was forced to acknowledge that they had deliberately reported an inaccurate and widely deflated number of 9,000 deaths. Michael Kraus claims that he and many of the nursing home executors in New York were “petrified, but they were more petrified of the Department of Health… once it was shot down, I never spoke about it again” after the March 25th order. Kraus stated that once his concerns about placing COVID-19 positive patients in residence with our most vulnerable citizens, the elderly, were shot down, “I never spoke about it again”. But why did Cuomo continue to enforce his Executive Order mandating New York’s nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients when the numbers began to reflect that this was, in fact, a deadly policy? The Cuomo Administration has stated that their reasoning for enforcing this policy was concerns about hospital capacity. However, this reasoning is not sound. The emergency hospitals at the Javits Center and the USNS Comfort were supposed to serve as overflow hospitals and sat nearly empty in March and April of last year. The story of the most probable reason for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s deadly decision begins in 2018 when he received a generous donation of $1.25 million dollars from the Greater New York Hospital Association. In early January of 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a 1% drop in reimbursements that New York’s health care providers receive for government-funded Medicaid healthcare programs in order to reduce the state’s budget. It is very likely that hospitals and nursing homes were losing tremendous amounts of money or were barely breaking even at the onslaught of the pandemic. At this time, Cuomo updated the annual budget bill to create corporate immunity for healthcare facilities and officials in the healthcare industry. Since nursing homes work with thin profit margins and have been undercut by Medicaid reductions, they have been using their corporate immunity status to save their businesses. New York is not the only state that has enacted immunity to the healthcare industry. All of the 19 states that had enacted similar protections, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, prove to have the highest number of deaths in nursing homes. According to Congressman Ron Kim (D-NY), “people are 7.5 times more likely to die from COVID-19 in states with corporate legal immunity.” Without a doubt, Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations deserve investigation and he deserves to be condemned for these actions, if proven to be true. However, the governor’s falsification of data and favors to corporate donors—which resulted in 15,000 deaths—should also be condemned. The majority of the media is only focusing on Cuomo’s sexual harassment claims and one must hope that the eight brave women that have come forth are being used as pawns in the political game of chess to cover up the nursing home scandal. This week marks the one-year anniversary of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s deadly COVID-19 nursing home mandate. He must be held responsible for his corrupt actions that resulted in so many deaths of our most vulnerable and devastated thousands of families forever.
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The Magical World of Hypocrisy2/28/2021 ERIN SPELLMAN
Long gone are the days of simply producing classic cartoons and child-friendly adventure stories. The entertainment powerhouse known as Disney has self-declared its role in serving as the justice meter on many hot-button topics. The problem with Disney stepping forward in this capacity is the utter hypocrisy they display in manufacturing their outrage for topics of their choice. Disney swiftly fired popular actress Gina Carano from the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian on the basis of her conservative views after she compared the political climate in the United States to that of Nazi Germany. According to Disney, Carano’s social media post stating “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews” was so egregious that it warranted her immediate dismissal. Yet Carano’s comparison of Nazi Germany and the United States was a comparison also made by her co-star, Pedro Pascal; the difference being that Pascal used his comparison to attack the Trump administration’s policy towards illegal immigrants to the Holocaust. Pascal referenced the Holocaust to attack Trump was acceptable in Disney’s book, while Carano, well known for her conservative views, was summarily dismissed for suggesting that the political climate in the US today is showing shades of what could unfold, as it did in Nazi Germany. Given the horrors that occurred in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, there really is no place for comparison by either actor; however, it sure does beg the question about Disney’s motivation for accepting this comparison by a liberal actor while terminating that of a conservative one. And for Disney, this is just the tip of the proverbial hypocrisy iceberg. Disney’s live action remake of the original 1998 film Mulan was partly filmed in China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang, where it has been reported by human rights groups and foreign governments that an estimated one million Uyghur Muslim residents have been forced into internment camps under the title of “re-education.” Many of the women in these camps have allegedly been raped, tortured, sexually abused, and subject to forced sterilization, an act of genocide. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has captured satellite imaging of Xinjiang which has led many experts to believe that there are 380 internment camps, many of which are close to industrial parks, illustrating how Uyghur Muslims may be used for forced labor. The Chinese government continuously denies the mistreatment and genocide of Uyghur Muslims. In 2019, a senior official in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claimed that most people held in the internment camps had returned to society, although journalists, human rights groups, and diplomats have not been allowed to visit the camps. It appears as though Disney, in all their self-righteous desire to right the world’s wrongs, does turn a blind eye to what may, in fact, be a genocide. At the end of Mulan, Disney uses its credits to thank government organizations in Xinjiang, such as the Turpan Bureau of Public Security, which is rumored to be involved in the internment camps, as well as the publicity department of the CCP Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomy Region Committee, which is reported to be a propaganda group for the CCP. Although a major humanitarian crisis did not deter Disney from filming in Xinjiang, recent Georgia legislation banns abortion in cases with fetal heartbeat detection did. Disney has chosen to discontinue production in the state of Georgia over Governor Brian Kemp’s signing of this legislation. Once again, Disney’s hypocrisy is on display for choosing to cancel filming locations based upon their “high moral ground” on the hot-button issue of individual freedoms, yet again another question is begged: what greater loss of individual freedoms could there be than a genocide? If Disney is going to take a political stance that they are opposed to the comparison of Nazi Germany and the United States, or that they are opposed to governmental regulations that restrict individual freedoms, why do they pick and choose who is going to be punished? With Disney controlling much of the media Americans rely on, there is simply no way to reach a level of unity so desperately needed in this country when major corporations pick and choose what tone should be set on certain issues. |