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Friday, March 29, 2024

Like most college seniors about to graduate, you want answers. You need to know where you’ll be in a few months. Realizing you don’t have the power to see the future, you seek out someone who does: a psychic.

As you walk through the door of the tiny, dimly lit shop, a whiff of incense hits you like a train. You’re early for your appointment and you have to wait a bit until the psychic is ready. You think to yourself, “Shouldn’t she have known I’d be coming early?”

After mindlessly investigating tie-dye scarves and aromatherapy herbs, you head back to meet the woman who will tell you your future. “This better be worth the $20 I paid for this,” you think as you take the cup of tea she hands you.

The psychic instructs you to drink the tea until the leaves at the bottom of the cup are visible. The leaves will reveal your future, she says. As you look down into the cup, you realize you were just conned out of $20. The leaves do not spell your future. Instead, they read …

Darts & Laurels

This Wednesday, we said goodbye to one of the greatest scientific minds of our time. Stephen Hawking died at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76.

Although his death has created a worldwide mourning, it is, like the rest of his life, impressive. In 1963, when he was graduate student at the University of Cambridge, he was told he had only two years left to live after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He lived for 55 more years and devoted his life to achieving, in his words, “a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is, and why it exists at all.”

While we usually award darts and laurels to individuals or groups, we felt Hawking’s death, a non-concrete person, deserves its own dart. The world will be forever changed by his discoveries.

Exactly one month after the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida, students across the country took a stand against gun violence Wednesday. At 10 a.m., high school and middle school students walked out of their classrooms. Many did so against the wishes of school authorities.

To say we are proud of all of these students is insufficient. We are beyond proud. Our pride has reached a point where no word exists capable of describing just how proud we are.

To the students who participated in these walkouts and the people who continue fighting against injustice and violence, we award our first laurel.

On Sunday, Gov. Rick Scott signed two education bills into law that are likely to improve the lives of students across the state. One will permanently expand Bright Futures for the top two tiers of award recipients and prevent public universities and colleges from restricting speech to “free-speech zones.” The second bill will provide scholarship funding for bullied students to transfer to an eligible private school and threatens to decertify teacher unions if their membership falls below 50 percent of the employees they represent.

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We are thrilled to see Gov. Scott making moves to increase scholarship funding and protect the rights of free speech. Although we are pleased about the scholarship funding for bullied children, we are wary about the threat to decertify teacher unions if their membership falls below 50 percent of the employees they represent. This threat will likely encourage teachers to join their union and remain members, but we are still not thrilled at the intimidating methods it is taking to do so.

As usual, however, we have to celebrate the almost complete victories. As such, we award our last laurel to Gov. Scott for 75 percent of the new bills signed this week. However, we can’t let him off that easily. Gov. Scott is also the recipient of our last dart, for his ill-advised threat to Florida teachers.

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