Category: Opinions

Editorial

If the Syrian refugees avoid drowning and manage to arrive in Europe, they justifiably expect that they will be helped, aided, noticed, maybe even respected in the majestic continent.  Instead, many Europeans wag their fingers and shake their heads.  They’ll spread their religion!  They’ll use up all of our resources!  There’s not enough space!  The Americans, on the other hand, should take a stand and fight against these nonsensical statements.

The horrors experienced by the Syrian refugees seem almost unimaginable in the eyes of the comfortable American population, yet, these horrors are still occurring.  Some might shift away from such a crisis, but as freedom-fighting Americans, we must help.

Perhaps some in Europe don’t truly understand the Syrian refugee crisis, but we in America surely do.  Most of our parents were immigrants, and we’ve definitely heard several times the story of their daring escape to America, the land of the free and home of the brave.  This personal understanding of the immigrant struggle allows for a sympathetic view of the Syrian refugees, for the ability to see them as people instead of lesser beings.

Just look at the historical evidence: the Holocaust, the Nanking Massacre, the Rwandan Genocide.  These are few of the many crises we, as Americans, did not interfere with soon enough, or even at all.  In response to the Holocaust, the U.S. enacted restrictive immigration quotas, showing obvious anti-Semitism, and the American public only found out about the horrors occurring at concentration camps near the end of World War II.  However, even this late knowledge of the Holocaust is preferable to the utter ignorance of most Americans and Europeans towards the Nanking Massacre and the Rwandan Genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

Because of this international ignorance, some people still have the gall to deny these events, despite the existence of Holocaust survivors, despite the decades the Chinese spent rebuilding Nanking, despite the thousands of pregnancies resulting from Rwandan war rape.  The lasting effects of these massacres and genocides push for our immediate action; as the saying goes, don’t let history repeat itself.

During the Holocaust, the U.S. decided to restrict immigration.  Judging by the outcome, immigration quotas do not help.  Instead, the government should allow more refugees to enter the U.S.  This country simply cannot call itself the land of opportunity without giving Syrian refugees a chance.

Donations, the primary source of aid, can be made to organizations like the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency), which teamed up with Kickstarter and can be found at https://www.kickstarter.com/aidrefugees, or Islamic Relief USA, which can be found at http://irusa.org/donations/.

By Jacqueline Nguyen

It’s no secret that physical copies of newspapers are an endangered species.  Once every month a few come tumbling down the proverbial hillside into oblivion, and with them a little piece of my heart.  Just kidding about the last part.  What used to be romanticized as risking life and death in order to uncover the truth is now “19 Pictures That Prove Man Buns Have Gone Too Far” and a “Who is your Disney daddy?” quiz.  Those are from Buzzfeed.  Google them.

The topic isn’t taboo.  If it was, you wouldn’t be reading this, or skipping to the comics as you are all more likely doing right now.  It seems like we arbitrary group of nerds here at The Legend just don’t get that the world is changing, and traditions cannot last forever.  One of those is true.  But this isn’t even about the family finally coming to a silent agreement that no one has the patience for a full game of Monopoly every Friday night or Dad not realizing that simply earning a perfect SAT score is not going to get you into Berkeley anymore.

Maybe we should all be home in our underwear behind a screen, leisurely doing all our interviews on Facebook and uploading everything solely onto the internet like 12-year-olds in the YouTube comment section, well partially.  Maybe, just maybe, people would look to our quaint little website a little more often instead of googling news.  Easier and faster?  Of course!  Better?  Arguable!

Call me lame and cliché when I say this, but I like the feel of newspaper toner rubbing against fingertips I just washed.  I feel like my own version of a superhero when I’m out uncovering the mystery that is why the band teacher chose to have his students play a song that I can’t even pronounce.  Writing the guide to asking a girl out to prom was also a blast.  I like to think I’m my own comical genius—but enough of my rambling.  I’m here to give you all a preview of what’s to come within the next several months.

There will be a lot of your monthly logs of Interact’s activities, your comics that you will probably be compelled to criticize, maybe a once in a lifetime happenstance that we might have to be sensitive about and your opinions and editorials that give our perspectives on the world.  There will be your people doing homework during class who shouldn’t be, journalists being turned away for doing their interviews the day before publishing date and your editorial staff being frustrated at said journalists.  There will also be your pizza layout parties, your random displays of affection and group of people who act as one big idiosyncratic weird yet fun family.

So sit back.  Enjoy the show.  Don’t focus too hard on the statistics and beware of lots of factual mistakes.  We hope those won’t happen often this year.  Without further ado, this is the 50^th Anniversary of PHHS The Legend.  We hope that you will continue supporting us throughout this year and help keep this tradition alive for years to come.  However, I beg of you: Please don’t make us work at home in our underwear.