Staff Box

Convocation 2003: Obie agency
By Nabilah Talib

As I walked in to Finney Chapel for the Spring 2003 Convocation, memories of other Convocation speakers Christopher Edley and Julian Bond reminded me of the strength and power of the spoken word. It would be impossible to leave these events without a drive to make a difference in your community and the state of the world. They incite a passion for idealism that can be implemented and executed through the consistency of listening students, an ideal that brings to life and revitalize the power and agency of the student.
This semester’s speaker was Rev. Gardner Calvin Taylor, a remarkable preacher, civil rights activist and Oberlin alum to say the least. At age 84 he delivers a powerful speech about the state of the world and his memories of Martin Luther King Jr. a man Taylor says, “is one of the first spiritual geniuses America has produced.” In his speech Taylor creates a scriptural comparison to the state of the world and the actions of America’s leaders illuminating a subtle connection to text of the Bible and King’s successful leadership.
Taylor illuminates the comparison between the humble beginnings of a powerful leaders in the Christian tradition; not having a lot of earthly wealth or status but having fight for a spiritual strength and power that is a vehicle for social change.
King was a man amongst the people struggling along side the community not only demanding rights for his community but for his family and his children. The personalization of his passion and fight made it that more important thus making failure not an option. In personalizing this ideal it could be you an Oberlin students, faculty, staff, and community member who creates a social change that will never be forgotten or slandered. Your efforts will be the thing that empowers communities to mobilize and personify the statement that failure is not an option.

Washington in January: A journalist in a candy store
By John Byrne

If New York is the metropolis where money is the most vital currency, the lifeblood of Washington, D.C. is power.
Scores of reporters stream through the Capitol each day and there is not one, but three press galleries, where the energy in the air is almost palpable. Senators walk side by side with reporters and photographers, and are at the beck and call of enterprising journalists, pulled from the House and Senate galleries by pages with notecards. In every interstice, there is someone with a camera or a pen, ready to take down the lavish prose as it drips from the lips of the country’s tetrarchs.
While in Washington last month doing an internship with McClatchy Newspapers, I had access to the marble floors of Capitol Hill, and watched, breathlessly, the press conferences of several larger-than-life legislators.
A slightly twanged and remarkably articulate Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) stood beside a reticent Sen. Lincoln Chaffee (R-Conn.) as they unveiled an alternative to President Bush’s hefty tax cut. After casually fielding questions about Chelsea and her Chattaqua Christmas, a well-coiffed Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) delivered a bombastic critique of the Administration’s plan for nuclear energy safety. The Democrats’ leading doyenne was met in the hall by her hardened counterpart, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and traded raised eyebrows.
Asking questions at a press conference is a bit harder than it looks. First, you must surmount a feeling of naivete and forget for a moment that you are the youngest person in the room. Then you must edge out other reporters by being the first to vocalize a question and hammer away until everyone else is silenced. There is little hand raising, despite what you might have been led to believe by civilized classroom settings.
From my front-row seat, I finally spat a question out faster than the rest of the group. Dianne peered down at me and delivered a clear and concise response. I was too awed to remember any of it.
There is so much to write about in Washington. Unlike most college campuses, where dredging for news is like pulling teeth, D.C. is so awash in dazzling new events that it’s often difficult to sort out what’s important. An army of twenty thousand lobbyists try to convince you that their agenda should be yours. A cavalcade of Hill staffers do likewise, playing up the importance of their boss’ legislation—perhaps already the fifth that their office has spun out this year. And if nothing else, there is the droll, balding Ari Fleischer, who will try to make you feel that the world is always at peace.
The State Department won’t return phone calls. The car companies talk your ear off about the environmental salience of their new hybrid vehicles (not telling you the Japanese developed them first) while concurrently issuing vague, vitriolic statements about foreign automakers. New Congressmen prattle on for twenty minutes longer than you had anticipated, not realizing your editor will probably splice their only quote out of the article anyway. Protesters invariably accuse you of undercounting their numbers.
The writing though, and the sweet feeling of publication, can be a rush. I penned a story for The Sacramento Bee on a Human Rights Watch report that accused the U.S. government of undermining their own anti-terrorist efforts by lavishing money and resources upon governments where terrorism bled from their own hands. The story, in its full length, was picked up and syndicated by another paper.
I did another piece on a freezing January peace rally for The Raleigh News and Observer, shadowed by a rather bitter thirty-something photographer. He had flown up just to take pictures for the event. I wondered if his gelid mood came from the temperature — he rather seemed to relish castigating me for speaking anything of my own opinion to those present. He had a point, but he seemed to believe that his peripatetic teaching along those gray Washington blocks was an imperative life-lesson for my journalistic oeuvre. Thankfully I lost him in the swelling crowds, and interviewed about a dozen North Carolinians.
At first I thought I was doing a national story for multiple papers, but they decided, much to my chagrin, that there were going to take the wire story. At the time, however, I didn’t know this, so I interviewed an array of protesters. I found an older black man standing alone who I thought might have something interesting to say. He told me that he was a writer, had been drafted in Vietnam, and that those protesting had nothing at stake. He called this “cheap virtue.”
On the downside, writing national stories for local editors — some of whom are three time zones away — can be challenging. In the morning, we’d send out budget lines, or short summations of the story we’d be writing, which would alert editors within the company and those who subscribed to the its wire service. I’d file my stories around four and it would be examined by bureau editors and then go into the queue.
But from there it was simple prayer as to whether or not it would end up in the papers the next day. Generally, articles coming out of Washington get jammed in toward the end of the A section. Quite often they’d be dramatically different from the ones I’d written. On one occasion, an astute editor inserted a typo in the second paragraph.
On the whole, though, it was an inspiring experience. I’d never seen so many reporters in one place. And as any good D.C. reporter can tell you—you’ll learn more in talking with a gaggle of Hill reporters on one afternoon that you’d learn from reading the pages of the nation’s newspapers for six months.