Got an opinion?

Welcome back! If you haven't heard already, this week, the Indiana Daily Student is holding a recruitment drive for opinion columnists. To those of you already thinking "Yes!" -- you need only visit our Web site (idsnews.com) or drop by the IDS office (ground floor, Ernie Pyle Hall room 120) to pick up an application. \nHowever, this column is really intended for those on the fence. Those people who -- like myself, once upon a time -- never thought about doing such a thing until the opportunity suddenly stared them in the face. Yes, look at that mug shot above -- I'm staring you in the face, right now.\nFor many of you, upon thinking of opinion writing (if you think about it), what comes to mind is probably the columns of Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, Robert Novak , Clarence Page and others -- the columns that run in America's major daily newspapers. These writers are the ones who go on cable news shows and bash it out with one another over the day's major issues. And the IDS is certainly looking for people who aspire to such a thing. But there's more to it than that.\nOpinion writing is about 200 years older than what you'll see in the rest of the paper -- in 1643, just more than 20 years after English-language newspapers emerged, competing journals were already promoting opposing sides in the First English Civil War. By comparison, objectivity, as a journalistic ideal, didn't take hold until the mid-19th century -- and, then, only in America (in other countries with press freedom, papers often take explicit ideological stances). And in all this time, opinion writing hasn't merely reported on events -- it has shaped them. \nPublished as a series of 85 newspaper articles, from 1787 to 1788, the Federalist Papers both championed and interpreted the U.S. Constitution -- not only leading to its adoption, but to the nation's survival and the rise of modern democracy. From when he first began writing under his famous pen name for the Virginia City, Mo., Territorial Enterprise in 1863, to his death in 1910, Mark Twain chronicled -- and, to a large degree, shaped -- Americans' basic perceptions about our own culture. Read his "Innocents Abroad," and you'll find European-American differences that persist to this day. Starting in 1910 -- and still controversial more than 40 years after his death -- W.E.B. Du Bois laid much of the groundwork for both the future civil rights movement and the academic discipline of African-American studies via his newspaper columns and editing of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's publication, The Crisis. Winston Churchill warned of the rise of Hitler from his columns for the Evening Standard and the Daily Telegraph. Milton Friedman made the case for modern economic policy from his columns in Newsweek. In commenting on the worlds swirling around them, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe moved from newsprint to the canon of 20th-century literature. The examples go on and on.\nSo, are you ready to join them? Only one way to find out.