CHRIS SEGAL
News Editor
Sloshing through the puddles on campus earlier this week I felt the need to protest having school on rainy days. Public Safety needs to take a lesson from the Los Angeles Unified School District and start bussing students around to aid in our protest, since we know they don’t give students rides while they are waiting in the rain for the shuttles.
More than half a million took to the streets in Los Angeles to protest immigration bill HR 4437. On Sunday and Monday, Hispanics around the country traveled to major cities to hold rallies and to draw attention to the bill, which would make illegal immigration a felony.
Students from LAUSD walked out of class to show support for their Hispanic community and the district sent buses to help transport students. Besides walking out of the classroom a few students decided to walk into traffic. Traffic was held up in downtown as well as on the 110 and the 405 due to protesting. Some protesters decided the freeway was a great place to rally for support from average Los Angeles citizens. For citizens who are here legally and can vote, this is not the best tactic to get what you want.
To drive home my protest of classes on rainy days, Pepperdine students should get President Andrew K. Benton on our side by camping out in his front yard and disrupting his life.
I was downtown Monday running errands and a procession of students passed by waving their Mexican flags with police escorts at 2 p.m. The police allowed the students to cross the street while the light was green holding up traffic. What happened to bringing people to justice who broke the law by either crossing the border or the street illegally? Protests should draw attention to a specific cause and show support for change, not disrupt and hassle people going about their lives.
Another suggestion to the protesters: Don’t protest a bill by waving a foreign flag and shouting another country’s name. More Americans will have sympathy for the illegal immigrants if they showed they wanted to stay in America by waving our flag and shouting our country’s name. I’d be happy to have the illegal immigrants stay once they started paying the same taxes you and I pay.
A television reporter stops a student who was ditching school and asked why are you protesting. His response was “no hablo Ingles.” At that point, he should have marched back to school and demand his teachers give him a fighting chance in our society and teach him English.
Getting back to rainy days, if we, the students of Pepperdine, don’t get our way by protesting in front of the Brock House, the school should at least provide us with boogie boards so we can have some fun in that lagoon we call a track. Otherwise we will be forced to play in the rain on John Tyler Drive.
03-29-2006