Being Blue at PSU

CW: talk of guns, shootings, suicide, and death. This is meant to be read as a satire in Carrie Bradshaw’s voice from Sex and the City. Once upon a time, the College Democrats and College Republicans debated on gun laws in America. My expectations going into tonight were on the low side – I didn’t want to be disappointed. But as the groups started speaking, I knew I would be in for a treat. The first topic was about having guns in schools and possibly arming teachers. The first debater on the Republican side opened with a quote from former president John F. Kennedy. Seems harmless at first. Then I realized. No one had told him that JFK had been killed from a gunshot to the head. That could be the only reason they would start with that quote. I mean, if there were stricter regulations on guns, that wouldn’t have happened right? Hopefully they didn’t notice my shocked expression as they tried to continue with their statement. I couldn’t help but wonder how they could start so confidently...

By Hailey Crawford Working in the science field is hard, but being a woman in the science field is even harder. Higher education may prepare us for the concepts we need to understand in the lab, or how to convert nano liters to liters, however it fails to conduct the discussion of mistreatment and misunderstanding towards women in scientific settings. It wasn’t until I decided to head to a classroom one afternoon during the first week of 7 th grade that I understood how prominent of an issue this was. It was the first meeting of our school’s robotics team, more of an interest meeting than anything else. Immediately, I was intrigued. I’ve always enjoyed engaging in new challenges, and I soon discovered this would be much more of an obstacle than the coding and mechanics I’d have to adapt to. It was just me, a couple other girls, and a whole lot of men. I wasn’t able to screw parts together without being told “I can help with that!”, or “Why don’t you go and work on our poster design be...

By Bianca Walder Why are Democrats Obsessed with alternative energy sources? Do they do more harm than good? Will they really save the world?  The idea is that if we were to stop using fossil fuels and slowly switch to an alternative “green” energy source, we can stop climate change and its negative consequences from happening. Sounds great right?  In reality, it sounds too good to be true. The society that we live in today is a capitalistic society running with the assumption of exponential growth in markets and production. Fundamentally, this system is unsustainable. The earth has a finite amount of resources to extract and manage. The world is not the industry’s oyster. We will realistically run out of resources relatively soon. It is appalling to me that this fact is being debated in a political arena. It is foolish, short-sighted, and greedy to not acknowledge that the world is changing in ways that will make human life incompatible with the planet. The reason that climat...