Fire Truck Terminology

So... my "Ranch Family" (i.e. My grandparents, my auntie Tanya and her four wee sprouts) sent me an eclectic cigar box full of fanciful pens to satiate my addiction. My absolute favorite is the one that looks like a match and says "Support the Crawford Volunteer Fire Department," half because it's clever and utilitarian and half because I know a lot of the people on the Volunteer Fire Department and they let me ride in the fire truck on my 18th birthday. I got to press the button for the siren: not the wailer, but the one that goes "bwooooop."

I think that's the technical name. "The One that goes Bwooooop."

The cigar box, is in fact, probably worth more than the pens inside it, but as a whole I'm pretty sure the whole deal is priceless.

So, I've been noticing an interesting thing lately. Over the past few semesters, in a lot of my classes, something has changed.

It used to be that when professors would ask non-traditional sorts of questions like "who plans to graduate and live in a nuclear family" and a million others that I won't go into, there were always at least a couple of people who raised their hands. Questions like "who thinks gay people shouldn't be able to adopt?" are greeted with silence, and I'm sure that not everyone at Centenary is that progressive.

It's wierd. I can't tell if it's because more and more liberal people are coming here, or that more people are just more liberal in general, or maybe that people with conservative ideologies are just not ready to play devil's advocate if they know they're going to be vehemently disagreed with.

I'm not sure I'd be up to it if I knew that people were going to shoot me down for saying that Intellegent Design makes sense, for example. It doesn't make sense to ME, but it makes me a little sad to think that instead of speaking up, there are people on campus who've basically been trained to just keep their mouths shut to avoid serious disagreements.

That's my thought for the day. Thanks for reading it.