Eliyahu Gasson | opinions editor 

One hundred years worth of issues is bound to result in at least a few bad opinion articles, especially when that paper is staffed entirely by college students who belong to an age group that is notoriously opinionated, ignorant and impulsive.

Pobody is nerfect — I’m certainly not. Maybe in another hundred years, this article will be torn to shreds by some future editor at The Duke. Maybe all of my opinions will be criticized for being out of touch or poorly written. I hope they will be.

It’s worth looking back at past op-eds that we’ve published over the years so that we know what not to do. This is an exercise in learning from the past in the form of a blended series of belated letters to the editor I wish I could have written and contemporary critiques.

Misunderstood and a little insensitive

It is hard to think of a more off- kilter opinion than: “The almost all-day coverage allotted to the destruction of the Challenger shuttle was unnecessary.” That sentence was published in the Feb. 6, 1986 issue of The Duke. The article was titled “Shuttle Coverage — too much.”

In the article, the author criticized the constant coverage about the Challenger Space Shuttle which exploded shortly after launch on Jan. 28 the same year.

However, the article was less about the constant coverage and more about the people being covered. The author wrote: “It seems that because the six astronauts aboard had made a career of soaring through the atmosphere, they were more or less ‘just doing their job.’”

The author was critical of the repeated mention of Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher who had been on the Challenger flight. The author thought that the coverage of McAuliffe treated her as a special case, as though the deaths of the other astronauts were less tragic because they had made space travel their careers, and the explosion of the shuttle was some “common work hazard.”

A letter to the editor in the following issue titled “Space shuttle column criticized” said the letter writer had a “narrow-minded and ridiculous view toward the media coverage of the space shuttle tragedy.”

There were two problems with the article, the first being a terrible headline. The initial impression the average reader would get from it is that the author thinks the news is talking too much about a national tragedy. A better headline would have been something like: “Shuttle coverage needs to be better,” or “Coverage of shuttle crash misses other victims.”

A rule to writing any sort of article is that every sentence has to count in grabbing the reader’s attention. This is just as true for the headline and this headline certainly did. But it also set up an expectation that the author probably didn’t want to read or hear or watch anything more about the disaster, coming off as callous.

Good writing, outdated language

One writer had an article published in the March 6, 1986, issue of The Duke headlined “Do you think … maybe???” in which he laments about his love life on campus.

“This is not for the girls who are teases,” he wrote. “I am not a tease, because I’ll take anything I can get my hands on at this point.”

He spends about a third of the article detailing the different types of boys and girls “available on the market.”

“Let us, first, classify the three available girls on the market: 1) girls you love, 2) girls you are just friends with (and yes this is possible), and 3) TEASES. These girls will not admit they’re teases, but what do you expect them to say, ‘hey, I’m not a tease.’ … Now let us clarify the three available guys on the market: 1) guys you love (you know, funny, romantic, kinda reminds you of … well, good ol’ [writer] here), 2) guys you are just friends with (unfortunately, I think many girls see me in this light), and 3) JERKS,” he wrote.

The rest of the article is spent reflecting on his misfortune with women and finishes off with a confession — that he has a crush on a girl who looks like Jamie Lee Curtis. I hope she saw that.

The same author wrote an article for the April 4, 1986, issue headlined “Sorority fun leaves him dazed” left me a little … well … dazed. The author’s column was about Derby Days, a week-long event where sororities compete with each other to raise money for philanthropy.

The column served as a recap of that year’s Derby Days, specifically the game of musical chairs. The way the author wrote about the women competing is certainly outdated.

“And after carefully viewing the field, I, being the [c]onsumate Derby Days student, selected my winner,” he wrote. “She was Sigma Lambda Phi’s Nanette Overfield. She had everything going for her: a quick first step out of the blocks, great eye contact with her perspective chair, a great burst of speed to the chairs and even in her small frame she had some strength.”

He finishes off by, perhaps facetiously, volunteering to participate in Derby Days.

“I have yet to be maimed in my lifetime. And depending on the maimer, it sounds like a blast,” he wrote. “I know, I’m a sick little puppy.”

I’ll admit, the writer definitely had a voice, and it was certainly brave of him to write about the things he did. But, if he were writing for my section today, I’d definitely hesitate putting his articles on the page just for his own sake. The way he writes about women and kvetches about his relationships is off putting — so much so that his entertaining writing style is incapable of making me sympathetic.

However, I am willing to accept that the author maybe wrote these in jest.

Article frames AIDS as a moral failing

The editorial titled “AIDS research should be reduced in favor of non-preventable diseases” published in the Dec. 7, 1994, issue of The Duke is nothing short of reprehensible.

The writer clearly lacked compassion for people with the disease as he called AIDS activists “fanatics” and reduced the disease to a “behavioral issue.”

He also severely oversimplified preventative measures, arguing that “common sense prevents the dreaded disease,” completely ignoring complex real-world factors like sexual violence, lack of education and medical negligence.

If you don’t know about the methods through which a disease spreads, how will you avoid it?

The very notion presented in the headline — that AIDS research was overfunded at the expense of other diseases, including cancer, — completely ignores how research funding is allocated. AIDS was and still is a global pandemic. The global response needed to address its spread is obviously going to affect how much money is put into research on how to prevent transmission and treat symptoms.

Funding for prevention was and still is put toward educating people on what AIDS is and how it spreads, how to practice safe sex and distributing drugs and prophylactics that prevent its spread. Funding for a disease is not determined only by its death toll, but also by transmission rates, long-term care and economic impact.

But the most egregious element of his argument is his stigmatization of AIDS as a moral issue.

“AIDS is not a political issue. AIDS is a moral issue,” he wrote. “It is up to each individual to decide whether or not he or she wants to contract AIDS.”

He followed up his most absurd claim with an even more absurd conclusion that refutes his own moralization of the issue.

“AIDS can be prevented by being drug free and abstaining from sex … There are innocent people who have contracted the disease through no fault of their own such as children and those who receive tainted blood,” he wrote.

In fairness to the writer, he has already received enough backlash to this article. At least three readers were offended enough by his piece to submit a letter to the editor appearing in the three issues following Dec. 7.

The letter to the editor published in the following issue on Dec. 14, 1994, tore him apart for his belief that cancer is wholly preventable, pointing out that smoking, excessive sun tanning, exposure to radiation, environmental pollutants and food additives all increase a person’s risk of developing cancer.

The next letter to the editor about this article was published in the Jan. 12, 1995, issue. The author also pointed out that cancer can be prevented in certain cases. The reader went so far as to call the writer “unfeeling and misinformed.”

“People (very much like himself) need to be educated about the disease and the AIDS movement,” they wrote.

The next letter to the editor published in the Jan. 19, 1995, issue of The Duke echoed the same criticism.