| Writing out loud |
|
|
| Written by Lauren Paterson Argonaut | ||||||
| Monday, 16 November 2009 | ||||||
|
Students may be surprised to see the mock Berlin wall hanging on the
downstairs wall of the Idaho Commons, but many weren’t shy about
grabbing a marker and making their voices heard. The Young Americans for Liberty Group is a national organization that now has a chapter in Moscow, and one of it’s prime goals is to promote events on campuses across the nation — Kyle Gray, president, said the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of these. “We especially wanted to give people a chance to write on the wall without any sort of ‘framed’ questions, so that’s what we did,” Gray said. Gray said the goals of YAL are to educate people on the ideas of limited government, sound money and a non-interventionist foreign policy. “I think much of my generation is intellectually paralyzed by this idea of the left and the right they’ve been brainwashed into,” Gray said. He said the main parties are nothing more than competing families in a political mafia. “It’s a brilliant game, because while everyone is busy fueling the left-right hysteria, the police state is breathing down our neck unnoticed,” Gray said. Gray managed the Ron Paul Meetup group before the 2008 election and was later contacted by YAL and asked to start a chapter at University of Idaho. Gerald Dalebout, another UI student who was also interested in starting the chapter, contacted Gray and was made vice president. The group currently has over forty members. “We believe communities and states should have more power in decisions rather than the federal government forcing their will on them,” Dalebout said. Dalebout said he is hoping to pursue a doctorate in educational policy and implement some of the ideas the group stands on. “I want to get to a place where I can make a change in our system,” Dalebout said. “Right now, the government has a monopoly on education. It makes it so it costs too much and produces too little, so rather than getting into the system and trying to change it from the inside, I want to make policies that will change it from the outside.” Dalebout said he is glad they made the wall a public open forum rather than forcing a message down everyone’s throats. “We simply showed what Marx’s 10 planks were and let the students sort out the information through self expression on the wall,” he said. The wall was certainly a collage of different ideas, with anarchy symbols, quotes from the forefathers, a poster of Obama as the Joker from Batman with ‘facism’ written underneath and even a drawing of the Mayflower by a citizen only 7 years old. “By no means are we a group to force people to believe what we believe in,” Dalebout said. “We simply want to see the people get more involved in our political system.” Gray said he was shocked how fast the paper filled with comments. “I had no idea it would generate that many responses. I really enjoyed the Thomas Jefferson quotes, the responses defending us from the people calling us uneducated and the comment giving us a ‘Bravo’ for creating open debate,” he said. “However, my favorite comment had to be the quote from Hitler, ‘How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.’” Anyone wanting to know more about the Young Americans For Liberty group can visit http://www.yaliberty.org/, or look for the Young Americans for Liberty at University of Idaho (YALUI) on Facebook.  Add as favorites (41) | Views: 721
Write Comment
|
||||||
Moscow, ID | |||
| |||
| More... |
