There’s nothing like waking up in the morning and reading a column that makes your blood boil.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last week or so, you’ve probably read coverage on Hurricane Harvey.
At this point, we have seen our fair share of anti-Trump posts during his presidency. We realize, of course, that a lot of President Donald Trump backlash is driven by emotion. However, a lot of the resistance Trump is met with has been valid and important for Americans to take note of and discuss.
Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced his decision to end DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the controversial Obama-era executive order that allowed illegal immigrants who were brought here as children to remain in the U.S. and receive work permits. The fact is, DACA was the epitome of our nation’s foolish immigration policies, and President Trump was right to put a stop to it.
It’s not uncommon to feel like you have a million things to do but not enough hours in the day to get them done.
In an interview with Playboy, singer-songwriter Halsey recently opened up about the struggles of identifying with her black culture while being white-passing. Depending on what form of social media I saw this article, I either saw people supporting her — often those of multiple ethnicities who felt a struggle to connect with their cultures — or people telling her to grow up and just get used to the fact that she’s “white.”
As I start to type this, I can already envision your eyes rolling at the headline. Nonetheless, please hear me out. Trust me, I do know that anything said in Taylor Swift’s favor is shot down pretty fast, and I know there are a million reasons as to why, but this is important.
Over the summer, I had the opportunity to visit some of the most unique cities America has to offer. From New York to San Francisco, Savannah to Berkeley, the more culturally rich and fascinating cities of the country tend to also be home to some of the best bookstores on Earth. Comfortably nestled somewhere in the beating heart of a city, often miles away from the nearest Barnes & Noble or Target, the independent bookstore thrives.
You step into the ballroom, four hooded figures following you on either side. The figures on each end carry torches, and the others carry various gemstones. You recognize that one is an emerald, another jade and another topaz. The rest of the stones you can’t discern, despite having a masters degree in geology. The two figures nearest to you grab you by the arm and strap you down to a chair at the end of the ballroom. Someone pries your eyes open and forces you to stare into the light. The hooded figures assemble in front of you, each holding their gem in a different orientation and position. The light shining from the ceiling focuses into a beam, which begins to refract from one gemstone to the next. Once the light passes through the sixth gemstone, the beam hits your eyes, and everything goes white. Out of the whiteness comes a message, and upon reading it, your fears and doubts vanish. The message, of course, reads:
A Twitter search of the hashtag “goals” revealed to me a serious cultural problem. It led me to this tweet: “Today at Chipotle a girl asked her boyfriend if she could get chips with their meal and he replied, ‘It's your world babe I'm just living in it.’” It was followed by a few blank lines so that readers could soak it in before the Twitter user wrote, “Ok need.” It got 85,000 retweets.
College is a time for exploration and self-discovery. Hardly any of us will leave UF as the same person we were when we got here. Letting the experiences you have in college lead to change and growth is a normal and healthy thing to do during this time. What isn’t healthy or normal, however, is letting the people around you dictate how you change and how you grow.
With the beginning of another school year comes something that is a mystery to most and dreaded by many: fraternity and sorority recruitment. As of last Wednesday, sorority recruitment at UF has come to a close. For many women on campus, the last week has been filled with makeup, dresses, heels, small talk and long hours. Girls from all over the country — and world — come to UF to visit each sorority house and find their homes and future sisterhoods through a process that could accurately be described as grueling and rather unpleasant.
Over the summer, a lot of UF students had the luxury of living in a bubble. Some students spent the past three months in the woods as camp counselors. A few used their time off from classes to travel abroad to where they had little-to-no access to the internet. Others went on mission trips, worked at time-consuming internships or just spent their days sleeping for long periods of time. Basically, a lot of Gators were fortunate enough to be gleefully unaware of a lot of the chaos happening around them over the past few months.
Welcome back to the swamp, Gators! I hope everyone has been having a fabulous summer, after all, I already know all the Florida residents have been having a warm one. However, now that we are all back in action and ready to go, it's time to get serious. Let's talk about the planet, and how to make it better.
On Aug. 7 my little brother and I had to trek across London from one airport to another, accompanied by two large suitcases, phones that did not work outside of the country and the exhaustion of a day of traveling. Due to general miscommunication, we were separated from the rest of our family, whose flights were out of Heathrow Airport the next day. Ours was out of Gatwick Airport (which has no direct Tube line, mind you).
President Donald Trump’s address Monday evening was alarming and infuriating to many Americans for a number of reasons. Somewhere in between the incoherent babbling and deplorable attempts at defending himself and his actions, the president announced that not only does he plan on keeping troops in Afghanistan, but he wants to send more.
Somewhere in the midst of my junior year at UF, I decided to adopt a dog on a whim (this part of the story I don’t recommend).
College students are notoriously unhealthy and lazy individuals.
It’s 2017, and we have Nazis running around without care and without shame. Please, dear reader, take a moment to absorb the utter absurdity of the sentence you just read.
I don’t mean to get sappy or sentimental right off the bat, but today marks the first day of my last year of college, so maybe I can’t help it. Although it may sound cliche, I realize with each new semester how much, however slight, I’ve changed from the last, and I try to recognize what I want to do differently each time around. Indeed, senior year seems to lend that idea even more gravity.
Solutions by The State News
