Mankato landmark lit blue by University to honor healthcare workers for #LightItBlue campaign
Mansoor Ahmad
Web Editor
Minnesota State University, Mankato lit the Ostrander Bell Tower with blue LED lights for the #LightItBlue campaign to show support for healthcare and medical workers on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic this past weekend.
The Bell Tower’s lights were visible as soon as the sun set Friday evening, and were lit until early morning on Saturday. Mankato joined numerous other cities across the United States during the #LightItBlue campaign which honors medical professionals and other essential workers during the global medical crisis caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.
Great photos of the bell tower.
Having been a resident of such countries as Saudi Arabia, Oman, South Korea, Mexico and Cambodia for now nearly half my lifetime as well as a US Navy Gulf War veteran of a country that used to gay witch its war vets, having, since then, been detained by US Immigration in San Francisco as well as the US Bangkok Embassy for suspicion of being a non citizen despite my having my DD 214 discharge papers and my US Passport–as much as I respect the diversity program at MSU and how I would love to see the whole university Islamasized and Christisnized and sexually witch hunting its football coaches and to see its science programs adapt creationism and the idea that it is only six thousand to the CMBR, as much as I would like to chat with the university president about parallax triangulations and cepheid luminosities and radial velocity measurements of binaries as well redshifts of S 1a Supernovas ten billion years ago and the Universe’s accelerating expansion–can our well insured university president speak one lousy foreign language with any semblance of fluency? How many third world countries had he been to? Does he care whether or not the TAs and adjunct faculty have health care or is that only for the rich kids? The Reporter staff needs to go around asking about whether or not everyone on campus has access to the basic human right of health care. I have it here in Saigon. Do you have it in the land of the free?
Daniel Sebold
MSU Alumnus
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Surely the faculty and staff of MSU who are proponents of celebrating diversity also believe in the scientific liberalism that humans come from a very narrow genetic base in norteastern Africa that very nearly went extinct two or three hundred thousand years ago and that if you could go back a hundred thousand years and transport a small baby into the the Tweny-First Century into a neigborhood around MIT that that child would do as well in school as any modern human raised in that neighborhood by decent parents. Evolution is a very slow process.
So we humans are all pretty much equal and deserve the same rights. Surely a student preaching racism and sexism on campus would be frowned upon by multiculturalist liberals. If so then I can only assume that all students and staff at MSU have the same access to affordable health care, that the liberal multiculturslists have assured that this is the case. This should be easily verifiable by the Reporter staff.
If this is not the case, then maybe multiculturalism means something else like the neoliberalism of Ayn Rand. Perhaps all these cultures have been gathered together to compete with each other and that engineering students from Minnesota must now compete with engineering students from impoverished countries for lower wages and benefits. If this is the case then there is no equality and we are all dehumanized into a state of animalistic competiton in a world wide war-torn corporate oligarchy.
Let us hope that our beloved university president is a true liberal who has guaranteed affordable health care to everyone at MS U and who cares about all future graduates having jobs that pay a living wage.
In the past, diversity functions at MSU have mixed American militarism, ROTC, into their festivities, which suggests to me that multiculturalism has more to do with colonization and America’s eight hundred miliary bases around the world thereby guaranteeing a cheap labor pool for the corporate oligarchy. Interesting that foreign students are allowed to pay in state-tuition to subsidize this style of fascism while the banking system exploits American students with life time debts in a country without affordable health care. And the salaries of state university presidents with Ph D’s in brain dead disciplines like Education rack up salaries approaching a million dollars a year.
There is a brutal irony to diversity. I had lived in Oman where I photographed Afghan Peshtun baby faced slave laborers on their bicycles with their cute little round hats and plastic flowers on their handle bars–I was teaching in the ancient oasis town of Buraimi on the UAE border where I shot thousands of photos (I have over a half million photos from seventy-seven countries.) But one of the most interesting photos I have ever seen was on an MSU web page, not one of my photos, of an Afghan Pakistani Peshtun Engineering student posing in front of the MSU Library in his traditional clothing and cute little round hat–the same library where an American Afghan War veteran had committed suicide six months earlier.
As a veteran of the 91 Gulf War back in ’91–under the GI Bill I was pulling straight in Spanish at MSU while putting up with an administration that refused to deal with the relentless gay bashing I was enduring on campus, not a healthy place for American war veterans. Ironically, I am not even gay. I had already put up with the fabrications of an NIS witch hunt shortly after having returned from the Gulf War while still in the US. Navy. The Navy just knew back then that we male linguists were all gay. After all, learning foreign languages was a girl thing. The Covid Virus is proof that America with its horrid disparities in wealth and availability of health care on and off its college campuses is not a healthy country for college students, especially for war veterans struggling already with war issues, but my words fall on deaf ears as they always have.