A Blog on McConnell Center Life

By Isabella Martin It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, no no no It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son, no no no My favorite movie is Forrest Gump. I watched it for the first time with my father when I was 12 years old. I really began to realize its significance when I was around 15 years old. I remember asking my father about the Vietnam War (where my grandfather was drafted), why America was involved, and what it means to be a 'fortunate son.'  Creedence Clearwater Revival’s anti-Vietnam War song does address an injustice of the war, one in which lower and middle-class families were sent to war while the 'ruling class' was not “being touched by what their parents were doing.” John Fogerty, the man that gave a tune to arguably one of the most influential songs in American history, wrote in his 2015 memoir, “You’d hear about the son of this senator or that congressman who was given a deferment from the military.” The Viet...

Aeschylus' 'The Orestia': A Prelude to Plato By N. Susan Laehn, PhD Most students of political philosophy will point to Plato as the father of occidental philosophical inquiry, and rightly so.   However, many of the themes contained in his work—the definition of justice, reason and passion, the link between order in the soul and order in the polis—are also found in Greek tragedies that predate Plato’s writings, namely the plays of Aeschylus.   Aeschylus’s Orestia , which consists of three plays— Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides— examines the balance between reason and passion and explores the meaning and method of justice.   Aeschylus’s trilogy opens with the murder of King Agamemnon at the hands of his wife, Clytaemestra.   Her son, Orestes, is called to take revenge for the death of his father, and he murders his mother and her lover. Summoned by the ghost of Clytaemestra, the Furies, clothed in black robes and embod...

By Eric Bush You can tell a lot about a Yao woman by the length of her hair. Women in the Yao ethnicity, a minority in the southern Chinese Guangxi province, cut their hair only once in their lifetime upon reaching adulthood. For hundreds of years, the Yao lived simple, isolated lives deeply rooted in tradition and untouched by the outside world. To survive in their rugged terrain, they grew rice on terraces cut into mountains. Today, the rice terraces are no longer economically viable solely from the crops they produce; instead, they are maintained because their stunning beauty draws busloads of tourists. Christian and I as we overlooked Ping’an Village I first visited a village in this area called Ping’an in 2013. At the time, it was extremely rustic; the road did not extend all the way into the village and we were forced to hike the rest of the way to our inn on foot. I fondly remembered this peaceful, laid back village, so six years later my brother, Christian, a...