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The Cost of Recovery
By Cody Romano
Features Editor
While other girls in sixth grade studied lipgloss, Meghan McGrath studied the requirements for Harvard University’s medical school. When teachers posed questions to the class, McGrath — front and center —always raised her small, freckled hand to answer. She flipped through pages of an encyclopedia after school to prepare herself for a career in medicine.
“People like to say that you can do anything in America, but money matters.”
As a child, McGrath never suspected that the most challenging aspect of college could be figuring out how to pay for it. McGrath’s family struggled to afford her liberal arts education, even as Meghan worked 12-hour-shifts at a bakery to pay for textbooks and tuition. An unexpected health issue added to her family’s financial dilemma. Now McGrath, 19, says that the costs of college, and of cancer, are threatening her education.“People like to say that you can do anything in America,” said McGrath. “But money matters. If I wanted to study medicine, it would cost me life and limb.”
McGrath’s doctor called her last summer to discuss the results of an exam. The family doctor, who had diagnosed McGrath’s older sister with thyroid cancer years earlier, told her that the exam had revealed suspicious lumps.
McGrath shifted anxiously on her gurney as a nurse entered the pre-operation waiting room. She held her mother’s hand to keep from looking at her own, into which the nurse was injecting pain medication. Once the drug had warmed her muscles, nurses wheeled Meghan into a room full of blinding lights and parked her bed next to a table furnished with scalpels.
Someone covered her mouth with a plastic mask — and everything turned to black. When Meghan opened her eyes, she was laying in a hospital bed, unable to speak.
In a faint whisper, she called for her mother and ice chips to soothe the scar on her throat, which is identical to the one her sister has from the same type of surgery. She and her sister, whose cancer is in recession, jokingly say that they have matching scars because they’re best friends.
McGrath and her sister were the first in their immediate family to go to college. Their parents, whom Meghan describes as hardworking and lower-middle class, did their best to ensure that their children could afford diplomas. But the cost of recovery, coupled with rising college fees, puts Meghan’s education in jeopardy.
If McGrath attends her morning classes without Synthroid, an expensive thyroid supplement, she will suddenly become sleepy. If she can’t buy vitamin oil to rub on her scar, it may never heal. Meghan’s mother sent her textbooks as a gift during her freshman year and attached a note that said: “I hope you do well! Love, Mom.” But this semester Meghan and her parents could hardly pay for the Shakespeare anthology that her English course required. Now the student who spent her childhood dreaming of a diploma says that buying textbooks is a luxury she can barely afford.
Behind the Scenes of Franklin
Directors Adam Mitropoulos and Cody Romano offer a sneak preview of their psychological thriller about the relationship between a schizophrenic man and his mother.
Berkshire County Goes to College (Spring, 2010)
[blip.tv ?posts_id=3147439&dest=60690]
Third-graders visit the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts to understand the importance of a college education.
Flyer for My Film, 'Dawn'
Flyer for my movie, 'Dawn', which appeared in the Boston International Film Festival.
Victims of an Ethnic Sledgehammer
By Cody Romano
Chevron’s shareholders, whose stocks sunk 11% on Tuesday, should consider addressing their hate mail to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
Transportation Security Agency (TSA) works search travelers in an airport.
In the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s Christmas day bombing attempt, the TSA branded Nigeria a “state sponsor of terrorism.” The policy change, which entails that all Nigerians undergo more rigorous security screenings at airports, drew political support from a climate of fear and from media coverage which repeatedly emphasized the suspect’s ethnicity. (i.e. “Nigerian suspect…Nigerian bomber,” etc.)
The group’s impulsive restriction against an entire ethnic group proved to be a ticking time bomb against foreign investments. On Monday — just one day before stocks plummeted — Nigerian rebels sabotaged an oil pipeline owned by Chevron in the Delta State, which hindered oil production by 20,000 barrels per day.
TIMELINE
Sunday, Jan. 3rd – TSA announces that it has added 10 nations, including Nigeria, to a list of “state sponsors of terrorism.”
Tuesday, Jan. 5th – Scores of Nigerian residents and officials publicly condemn the TSA’s decision to brand Nigeria a “state sponsor of terrorism.”
Monday, Jan. 10th - Rebels sabotage an oil pipeline owned by Chevron.
Tuesday, Jan. 11th – Chevron stocks fall 11%.
Some may attribute attacks against U.S. companies to preexisting political instability within Nigeria. It is easy to spend time deliberating about the specific causes of this public uneasiness while ignoring the U.S. government’s responsibility to protect a sensitive relationship with its 5th largest provider of oil. This culturally insensitive counter-terrorism policy punishes an entire ethnic group for the behavior of a single deviant. It belongs to an “us versus them” attitude toward defense. When hatred toward Americans is believed to be intrinsic to these so-called “state sponsors of terrorism,” there is little need to acknowledge that, through diplomacy, the TSA has the power to mitigate or fuel anti-American sentiment in northern Africa.
When crafting counter-terrorism policies, will the U.S. embrace precise intelligence, or blanket restrictions which bolster negative sentiment — the needle or the sledgehammer?
Logic Plays Role in Romantic Poetry
By Cody Romano
Poet Pablo Neruda pensively inspects his desk
Readers who cherish Pablo Neruda’s passion filled poetry may scoff at the thought of equating it to something as rigidly intellectual as logic.
“I’m an anti-intellectual,” said Neruda, “I don’t care much for analysis or examining literary currents and I’m not a writer who subsists on books, although books are necessary to my life.”
The Chilean poet is among the most widely read authors in history because his writing feels organic. His messages are often eloquent in their simplicity, accessible but almost casually profound. Internationally, men and women have discovered visceral romance through his verses.
“If my poetry has any virtue, it’s that it’s organism, it’s organic and emanates from my own body.” he said.
While raw emotions seem to have guided many of Neruda’s writings, such as the sizzling love sonnets in Cien sonetos de amor (1957), logic still influenced the poet’s creative process. More specifically, his resistance to a logical fallacy known as “motivated reasoning” may explain the prism through which Neruda understood the role of poetry in his life.
Motivated reasoning is a common offense against logic. It occurs when someone finds a conclusion which one prefers and then selectively evaluates evidence in order to support one’s conclusion. Students who write research essays are guilty of motivated reasoning if they do not re-evaluate their theses to ensure that their initial statements reflect all relevant research.
Although poets have a unique license to alter reality, both poets and non-fiction authors share two tools: a creative goal and lucid observations about the world. Neruda believed that the world should charge poets with motivated reasoning if poets did not allow their experiences to direct their creative goals. His case against the intellectualization of poetry did not stipulate that poets should interpret the world literally, but that poets should honor their own literal interpretations of the world.
“When I was a child, my poetry was childish,” said Neruda, “it was youthful when I was young, despairing when I was suffering, aggressive when I had to take part in the social struggle, and there is still a mixture of all these different tendencies in the poetry I write now…”
Faith that truth exists within life experiences is what justifies expensive travel courses, in which students may learn more about France by watching pigeons eat crumbs by La Seine than they would from reading every volume by Proust.
Neruda’s poetry was always in concert with the experiences of his poetic life, each half worked to sculpt and reflect the other.When he first discovered passion through a woman, the poet wrote, “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender.”
Although most of Neruda’s work is fiercely autobiographical, only one of his poems travels behind the scenes to capture the poet’s creative process. In Sweetness, Always, Pablo Neruda delivers a blow to motivated reasoning in poetry: “Why, to write down the stuff and people of everyday,” he writes, “must poems be dressed up in gold, or in old and fearful stone? I want poems stained by hands and everydayness….Vanity keeps prodding us to lift ourselves skyward, or to make deep and useless tunnels underground.”
To Die For
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgVa8tCPYHk&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]
Can Grand Theft Auto drive this man insane? This cheeky spoof explores the hype behind one of the most controversial video games in history.