Not another number - a personal definition of sexual assault
For the past year, I’ve struggled to accept what happened to me that night last fall. Now, I boil it down to two words: sexual assault.
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For the past year, I’ve struggled to accept what happened to me that night last fall. Now, I boil it down to two words: sexual assault.
To read Bailey Loosemore's interactive column and watch two videos from Stepp Cemetery, click here.
WEEKEND spoke with Brett Dennen and opening band Blind Pilot after their Oct. 11 show at The Bluebird Nightclub.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Two kids bounced on a storm drain cover in a field next to Pinnacle School Wednesday. Jumping from the cover, Landon David, 8, fell to the ground, the bottom of his yellow jacket flying over the back of his head.In a few minutes, he would participate with 63 other students in an attempt to break a jumping jack world record. He hoped to stay on his feet for the one-minute time limit.On Aug. 2, National Geographic Kids announced a collaboration with First Lady Michelle Obama to break the world record of the most people doing jumping jacks. The organization invited schools across the nation to gather their students and time them doing the activity for one minute sometime between 3 p.m. Tuesday and 3 p.m. Wednesday.More than 20,000 people needed to participate to break the record.“I was talking to a parent who told me about it, and I said, ‘Why not?’” said Pinnacle School fitness teacher Martyna Popik.Popik led the students in practicing their jumping jacks for one minute Friday and again Monday. The four kindergartners enrolled at Pinnacle, however, needed a little extra practice.“When they were practicing, they were going all over the place,” Popik said. “I was thinking, ‘Please do it right on Wednesday.’”The day of the big event, teachers herded their students into the field. The students ran across a blanket of fallen leaves, stopping to toss them in the air, as Popik made sure everyone participating was present.With everyone in the field, she asked them to enter an area sectioned off by blue cones.“The most important thing is, don’t stop,” she said, holding up a yellow stopwatch.David stood near the edge of the square. He said he was not confident in his jumping jack abilities, but he’d participate anyway.“I get tired doing jumping jacks,” he said. “I wear out fast.”David said he thinks he’ll be able to do 12 or 13 total jumping jacks in the 60-second time frame.Popik gave the signal, and the students started to jump.David jumped straight up, clapping his hands over his head but not spreading his feet to the sides like the other students. He repeated the movement, jumping in a circle near the other students in his class.He paused with 20 seconds left as he caught his breath.As the seconds ticked past the time limit, David completed his 45th jumping jack, nearly four times his original estimate.A few of his classmates fell to the ground, but David, smiling, stood strong.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Mickey Mouse and the Pink Panther are having a battle on the back wall of the Butler Park restroom.Splatters of paint remain from their two-dimensional war at the top of the park’s hill on Ninth Street. But it’s not the only paint war in Bloomington.In July, the City of Bloomington initiated a Downtown Graffiti Removal Pilot Program consisting of two city employees who remove graffiti from walls between Ninth and Third streets and between Indiana Avenue and the B-Line Trail. But with 30-some regular graffiti artists in the area and minimal, free wall space, graffiti defacing private walls is a never-ending cycle.“If you don’t want it to happen, you need to find a space for us to do it,” graffiti artist Mike Burchfield says. “It’s not rocket science.” On May 18, 2010, Burchfield was arrested for painting what he thought was a free wall — a wall provided by a business for graffiti artists to paint, usually as long as they have the owner’s business card.Burchfield was charged with seven counts of criminal mischief — a class B misdemeanor — and pleaded guilty to one. He spent one night in jail and 360 days on probation. Now, the City of Bloomington contracts him to paint murals around town, including the one at Butler Park.“I’m not hired as a graffiti artist,” Burchfield says. “But the wall’s full of characters with spray paint cans in their hands.” He’s painted the stage at Third Street Park for the city in addition to the wall at Butler Park. Since his murals were completed at the beginning of the summer, no other artist has illegally painted the walls.“They were re-painting that wall once or twice a week,” Burchfield says of the Butler Park restroom. “They paid more to fix it than they did to pay me.” A graffiti artist for 15 years, Burchfield admits he has more to learn.“I’ve not even reached the full potential of where you can take it,” he says. “You can mimic every other utensil with a spray paint can. It’s limitless, really.” Burchfield keeps a tackle box of any spray paint caps he can get his hands on, each giving his stroke a different pattern or weight.He tries to incorporate texture, shadows and shading in his graffiti, as well as a structure that makes every piece of the mural seem to fit together appropriately. As a day job, however, he is contracted to paint anything from standard walls in an apartment to 400-foot-wide walls at Cook Pharmica.“I love painting historic houses, all the intricate woodwork,” he says. “I’m a perfectionist by nature. By the end, I know every detail of the house.” At night and on days off, Burchfield works on his murals, sometime spending a few days and hundreds of dollars on one piece. But it’s hard to find space for that kind of work.“Legal walls are painted over and over again,” he says. “It’s frustrating because you paint something that takes 20 to 30 hours, and in two to three days, it’s painted over.” The city may want to keep graffiti to a minimum, but Burchfield’s mission is to provide graffiti artists with free walls and educate local businesses on preventing defacement on their walls.“Providing space is pretty key,” he says. “There’s not much I can do, but the key is having the space.” When artists need to know what to paint over on free walls, Burchfield is the guy to call.And when the city council met over the summer, Burchfield attended to explain that some of the tactics local businesses use to get rid of graffiti are in fact attracting it. “If they use a different color than what their building is to go over it, someone else is going to graffiti it,” he says. “It’s pretty much a challenge.“Everybody that does graffiti has their own guidelines,” he adds. “But I’m not big on graffiti on these mom and pop shops. It’s costly.” In early November, a new studio at the edge of the Bloomington Entertainment & Arts District will open, providing graffiti artists and community members a new public wall to paint.“We want community involvement,” he says. “If you want to paint something on a huge scale, come try it out. Or just throw paint on a wall. I have. It’s fun.” The collaborative studio, a brainchild of local artist Adam Nahaus, will give community members the opportunity to stop by during business hours and see artists of various media at work.In the studio and on free walls, Burchfield hopes to receive a response with his artwork, not a misdemeanor charge. “I wanted to make kids and parents interact,” he says about the Butler Park wall. “So I put really old cartoons with new cartoons. While I was painting it, this little girl and her grandpa came up, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s Mickey Mouse, but who’s that?’ And her grandpa said, ‘That’s the Pink Panther. That’s Popeye.’ “That’s what I wanted to happen, but you don’t usually get to see it. It was neat to hear.”
Our grandmothers would be ashamed. Just listen to the music we’re bumping and grinding to at parties.
Students remember fashion of the '90s.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>An IU freshman died Saturday after an early morning fire broke out at Terra Trace Apartments.Renee Ohrn, 19, of Gary, was pronounced dead at IU Health Bloomington Hospital at 4:32 a.m., Monroe County Coroner Nicole Meyer said in a statement.Ohrn was a resident of Eigenmann Hall on campus, Meyer said, but was staying with a friend at the apartment complex when the fire happened.Four people were transported to the hospital with injuries related to the fire, hospital spokesperson Amanda Roach said. Among the injured were Bloomington police Sgt. James Batcho and Bloomington fire Capt. Woodrow Hueston. Batcho suffered smoke inhalation after helping a resident down from a balcony, Lt. Faron Lake of the Bloomington Police Department said. Batcho was one of nine BPD officers who assisted the Bloomington Fire Department during the fire, Lake said. The IU Police Department was also on hand. Both the officer and the firefighter were treated and released from IU Health Bloomington Hospital Saturday.The fire broke out at about 3 a.m. at the apartments in the 300 block of East 15th Street.BFD Battalion Chief Rick Petermichel said the three-alarm fire affected all 12 units of the complex’s D building. Though it did not spread to other buildings, people in building C were asked to vacate at about 3:30 a.m.Saturday afternoon, residents of both buildings returned to gather their belongings. A blue and white blanket hung from a second-floor bedroom in the D building. Shards of glass remained where a window should have been.The fire that began nearly 12 hours earlier did not make it into the room, but outside the apartment’s walls, a layer of black covered the building’s stairwell.“The fire was originally coming out of the stairwell,” said senior Mark McWhirter, who lives in a house across from the building on East 14th Street. “It wasn’t coming out of any windows or apartments.”McWhirter said he saw the fire from his front lawn before police or firefighters arrived on the scene. He stood on a hill across the street as five people ran out the building’s front door, flames coming from behind them.Half an hour after McWhirter noticed the fire, he said he thought he heard a cry for help come from inside the building, but he didn’t think anyone was still in it.“I just cannot believe that someone passed away in there,” McWhirter said.The fire was still in progress about three hours after it started, McWhirter said.“We were here till sunrise, and it kept going on and on,” he said.Across the street from the apartments, two people sat with a snowboard, ski boots and a rug. Picture frames were placed on a wooden pole next to them.Windows from the first to third floors on the left side of the building were broken and, from the street, the stairwell on the third floor was visible through blackened wood beams. Most of the outside wall was gone.On the other side of the building, two women waited for a firefighter to return from their apartment.The firefighter walked down the charred staircase holding a black backpack, laptop and a birthday gift bag.“Here’s a laptop,” he said, putting it down at one woman’s feet. “Or, what’s left of one. The light’s still on. It could be salvaged.”She bent over to look at it, shook her head and left it on the ground.IU spokesman Mark Land called the fire a tragedy and said the University would do anything it could to help the students who were affected.“It’s a very sad thing,” Land said, noting the fire came just days after the death of another IU student, freshman Matthew Erickson. “To lose two students in the same week is very difficult for everyone.”He said Residential Programs and Services and the Office of the Dean of Students worked Saturday morning with the Monroe County Red Cross to support the displaced students.Six students stayed in Forrest Quad Saturday night with the option to stay for a couple of weeks. If they wish to move into a dorm room for the rest of the semester, Land said the University will work to make that happen at a reduced rate.Counseling and Psychological Services remained in Eigenmann Hall Saturday to help distraught students there, he said.“We’re going to do everything we can,” Land said. “It’s been a tough day in a tough week.”
A 19-year-old IU student died Saturday after an early morning fire broke out at Terra Trace apartments.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Red hedge clippers stuck out of IU groundskeeper Devin McGuire’s left pocket as he sat in the back row of the Frangipani Room on Tuesday. White stains covered his green uniform pants.He heard everyone was invited to IU President Michael McRobbie’s fifth State of the University address and happened to be close by.“I love the way IU has been growing for centuries,” McGuire said. “I’m happy for the president’s ability to run the University.”But mostly, he said he wanted to hear McRobbie’s take on blue-collar wages.“Being blue collar, I would like to see IU’s blue-collar wages come up to the median of the rest of the Big Ten,” he said. “I’ve heard we’re in the low end of the Big Ten, and I know of a higher end. It’d be nice to be somewhere in the middle.”Shortly after 2 p.m., McRobbie approached the microphone, standing before a red IU background on the Frangipani stage.His eyes flicked toward the audience every few seconds as he read an 18-page script.In the next 40 minutes, McRobbie covered the issues of declining state funding, rising tuition and student debt, IU’s role in the life of the state and questions about the basic value of education in a 5,669-word speech.State support for IU Bloomington has decreased by 30 percent in constant dollars during the past two decades, and 18 percent of the current year’s budget funding comes from the state of Indiana, compared to about 50 percent two decades ago.“In fact, if state funding continues to decline at this rate, and IU’s non-state revenue increases at just the rate of inflation, it will fall under 10 percent not long after IU’s bicentenary in 2020,” McRobbie said.IU and IU Health collectively act as the largest employer in Indiana, providing jobs for more than 40,000 people.“Over the course of the last three years, 17 startup companies have been established based on IU faculty research, with seven in the last year alone,” McRobbie said.Despite the lack of state funding, McRobbie said IU has made great strides to become more efficient.“The fact of the matter is that over the past two years, we have succeeded in reducing our ongoing base budget by $36 million,” he said.But the reductions should not limit the University’s quality of higher education, he said.“Not only could higher tuition rates price students out of a first-class education, but they could also price first-class education out of existence as the public increasingly turns to lower cost and lower quality options,” McRobbie said.The reality, however, is that many of IU’s in-state students pay less-than-advertised tuition rates due to significant scholarship and grant aid.“In fact, three out of four in-state students at IU Bloomington receive some form of financial aid,” McRobbie said.As for upcoming projects, McRobbie said the first major project to revive the Old Crescent area of campus into a lively academic hub will begin in the next few months, the Cyberinfrastructure Building at Tenth Street and the Bypass will be dedicated in October, and IU is currently making progress on the IU Jacobs School of Music Studio Building at the corner of Third Street and Jordan Avenue.“Every single one of these projects in some way contributes to our fundamental goal of excellence in education and research,” he said.Though IU is facing a multitude of challenges, McRobbie said anything can be accomplished with the efforts of everyone on campus.“With all of us working together, we can shape our response to that fundamental question about what it means to be one of the best public universities in the 21st century,” he said.Leaning back in his chair, McGuire scratched his chin. He placed his hands behind his head, elbows out to the sides, and stretched his legs beneath the chair in front of him.The president hadn’t addressed what McGuire came for, but he said the speech was positive overall.“I’m a groundskeeper,” McGuire said. “From what I understand, we’ve now determined the University’s new direction, and now that we know what that is, we can begin to move forward.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Five girls passed around a vodka-filled Minute Maid orange juice bottle in the minutes before Movits!, a Swedish music group, took the stage at Lotus Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night.“What is this again?” one girl asked.Next to them, two guys stood with hands in pockets.“I just don’t even know what’s coming,” one of them said.A minute before the concert’s starting time, the crowd began to chant the band’s name.Against the crowd, the two guys shouted, “Anders! Anders!”The music started before the musicians appeared. From offstage, they were rapping Swedish lyrics into an invisible microphone. Then, they hit the stage.In a blast of black tuxedos, unceasing feet movements and smooth vocals, Movits! began its second Lotus performance with an energy that continued for the next hour and a half.It isn’t a normal hip-hop band.At the front of the stage, vocalist Johan Jivin’ Rensfeldt waved a white sweat rag in the air. White tube socks covered the bottoms of his black pants.He reached toward the audience. The five girls screamed, waving their hands as Rensfeldt pulled away.“We played here last night, and it was probably one of the loudest crowds I ever heard,” Rensfeldt said to the screaming audience. “Tonight might have topped it.”Saxophonist Joakim “One-Take” Nilsson bounced, moving his feet in square patterns as his head bobbed with the instrument. When a microphone was not in his reach, he lowered the saxophone and sang into his instrument’s mic, pausing with his hips pushed forward at the front of the stage.After a few songs, Rensfeldt announced a love song.“It’s called ‘Shoot Me in the Head,’” he said, pointing two fingers at his temple.No fence separated the band from the audience, and a girl in a ribbon-waisted red dress climbed on stage.“Kelly, go!” her friend said from the first row.She held her dress as her feet landed near Rensfeldt. He continued singing as he wagged a finger at her, and she jumped back into the crowd.During the band’s final encore song, another crowd member made it on stage, standing next to Rensfeldt as he rapped the last verse.Jumping into the crowd, the stage intruder surfed his way through the final notes.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Film negatives, candy wrappers and strips of plastic table cloth popped out of eight orange plastic fencing panels. Decorated with all recyclable materials, the panels hung under a tent at Lotus in the Park on Saturday as part of the art camp booths.Lotus in the Park is a free portion of the annual Lotus World Music and Arts Festival. Located in the Waldron, Hill and Buskirk Park known as Third Street Park, this part of the festival offered Bloomington residents daytime concerts by artists featured in the weekend’s schedule. Visitors to the booth could grab materials from seven silver bags filled with red, blue, green, purple, yellow, orange and white strips cut from used shopping bags, table cloths and six-pack rings. The panels would be used later that night as a barricade at the Lotus Festival.Three of the panels began as part of a project through the foundation’s Lotus Blossoms program, where students at schools in five Indiana counties were asked to create aboriginal creatures on the fencing with black materials, said Deborah Klein, development director at the Lotus Education and Arts Foundation. But besides giving visitors a creative outlet, Klein said the panels taught the purpose of recycling and gave visitors an idea of how much they waste.At one section of three panels, however, two of the children decorating decided to try something different.With blue yarn, Mora MacLaughlin and Eliyah Zayin connected the panels together, stringing the yarn around the panels’ borders and tying it in multiple knots to make them hard to untie.“We think if we do enough here, they won’t be able to cut it again,” MacLaughlin said as she tied another piece of red plastic to a panel.Their plan: tie together three fencing panels so when Lotus Education and Arts Foundation volunteers tried to separate them, they’d forfeit and leave them as one.“This is so tied and knotted and stuck together,” MacLaughlin said to Zayin from the opposite side of a panel. “We should get other kids to help us do this.”Zayin did not respond. Instead he was focusing on tying his plastic strip to others that had already been tied to the fencing.“And also, another strategy of mine is tying them to the ones on here already,” Zayin said as MacLaughlin rounded the corner, heading toward the silver bags for more strips. “Do you see them all tied together in between there?”“No,” MacLaughlin said.“Exactly. They’re never going to know.”About 2,000 people attended the seventh annual Lotus in the Park, Klein said, including 500 to 700 kids. Throughout the day, many of them came through the weaving booth.“It’s fun to see the parents get involved because the kids see them doing it, and they stay longer,” Klein said.Outside the weaving tent, children ran through a pile of hay, stopping to sit and toss it in the air. Zayin and MacLaughlin focused on their knots, still busy at work.After about half an hour, MacLaughlin and Zayin had tied plastic strips of every color around the black borders of the panels.“And personally, I think it looks kind of nice,” MacLaughlin said.
WEEKEND columnist Bailey Loosemore explains the ins-and-outs of local music and how to get involved.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>An hour before the plane bringing 19-year-old Brett Wood’s body home from Afghanistan arrived, Indiana Patriot Guard Assistant State Captain Ron Coleman called a group of more than 90 motorcyclists to gather around him.Wood, a 2010 graduate from Owen Valley High School in Spencer, Ind., died Sept. 9 while on deployment in southern Afghanistan, and on Sunday, members of the Patriot Guard and Legion Riders met to lead a procession from Monroe County Airport to his hometown. In a parking lot near the hangar where the plane would land, Coleman scanned the crowd.Flag staffs poked out of a bag in the bed of his red truck, and the sky drizzled as he spoke. “Listen up; I’ll give you what information I have, but it’s subject to change,” Coleman said. A message went out last week requesting Legion Riders to attend the procession, and from across the country, they came to show support.“They put the call out and said what’s going on, and we showed up,” said Legion Rider Randy Kaiser of Post 61 in Kansas City, Mo. “From all over the country, we’re here.”They never knew Wood, had never even heard of him, but most of the riders were veterans, and they attended out of respect, Kaiser said.“When they come around that corner and they see that line of bikes, I know they’ll be amazed,” Coleman said, speaking about the family members driving to the airport from Spencer.After giving the group instructions, Coleman left them with a final request.“Be respectful. This is the first time,” he paused a few seconds, “the family will see their son.”***The events of 9/11 sparked Wood’s interest in joining the Army, said Wood’s longtime friend Derek Mundy.“It made him want to serve his country and protect his family,” Mundy said.Wood left for Afghanistan in July 2010, and on Sept. 9, he was killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar Province. Mundy and Wood graduated from high school together. Wood was his best friend. “I’ve known him as long as you can know someone,” Mundy said.Before driving to the airport, he and a friend painted “Never forgotten, Pfc. Brett Wood” on their car’s rear window. They both agreed they most remember Wood’s smile.“His James Dean smile,” Mundy said.***For three minutes, the Kalita Charters plane carrying Wood’s coffin whirred on the runway before becoming visible.More than 50 of Wood’s family and friends waited inside the hangar. They stood with hands in their pockets, arms folded across their chests or one arm wrapped around another person’s waist.Thirty Legion Riders with American flags formed three lines around the group, two acting as receiving lines for the coffin and the third wrapping around the back. There was not a set Color Guard but, in their place, volunteers held flags.As six pallbearers carried the coffin from the plane, the family members waited in silence. With the coffin placed before the family, the Legion Riders, police officers and other military personnel formed a half-circle around the group. The family remained quiet through a prayer and quiet still when asked to step forward for condolences.They approached the coffin in pairs. After a few seconds, the silence present during the routine military procedures broke, replaced by a woman’s wrenching sobs.In the circle behind her, the Legion Riders cupped the family in a protective circle, waiting as the family welcomed their son home.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Bringing craft beers into public attention is like undertaking the Sisyphus challenge, said Story Inn owner Rick Hofstetter. “Sisyphus was dedicated for all of eternity to roll a rock up a hill,” Hofstetter said. “If you look at a place like Portland, Ore., half of it is local beers. Or, I grew up in Germany, and every town had its own brewery.”But most people are unaware of local craft beers in their area, Hofstetter said, which is the main reason behind the second annual Hoosier Hops and Harvest Festival. Nine Indiana and 11 other breweries featured their drinks at the festival Saturday, offering four-ounce samples and 12-ounce glasses at each table. From hoppy to malt-heavy, the breweries spotlighted every type of beer.“I cringe when I see an ad like on the Super Bowl where the quality of beer is somehow equated with how cold it is,” Hofstetter said. “Saying it’s better because it’s cold, you can pass off some pretty mediocre beers.”Classifying beer as a craft brew depends on how much beer is made at a time, World Class Beverages Sales Manager Bill Jackson said.“It all comes down to the amount of barrels they’re producing,” he said. “If it’s six million or more, they’re microbreweries. Craft are microbreweries.”The number of craft breweries in Indiana is approaching 60, Jackson said, with four in the Bloomington area and seven around Indianapolis. One brewery in Indianapolis, Bier Brewery, sells out of their beer every weekend, Jackson said, because they make such small batches.Big Woods, a brewery out of Nashville, Ind., opened in November 2009 and has expanded every year.“We do very small batches of beer, one barrel at a time,” said one of the founders, Tim O’Bryan. Malt beers are O’Bryan’s favorite style, despite the festival’s promotion of hop-styled brews.While the company does make an India Pale Ale, a style of beer with an excess of hops, O’Bryan said their most popular brew is the Busted Knuckle Ale.The pale ale beers have double the ingredients and double the hops, Jackson said.“It’s like if you’re making soup,” he said. “It’s the seasoning of the beer.” “Typically the aroma is not going to stand out in really hoppy beer,” he added. “Then you take a drink, and it’s an overwhelming flavor. As the beer travels down your throat, the malt comes through and balances the beer.”With craft beers making up only two percent of the American beer market, Hofstetter said he hopes the festival puts more craft beers on the radar.“They can be made in very small batches very creatively,” he said. “I’d like to see beer turn into an art form.”
Patrick Munson (left) studies an artifact belonging to Beth Schroeder. She owns more than 1,000 artifacts but believes at least 200 are fake.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The black rock with a scooped center sat a little larger than Beth Schroeder’s palm. It could have been from another state, it could have been from another country, but in 10 archaeologists’ views, it remained a mystery.“Oh, it’ll stump the archaeologist,” said Patrick Munson, research scientist in the IU Department of Anthropology. “This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”Patrick and his wife, Cheryl Munson, visited the Monroe County History Center on Thursday for an Archaeology Roadshow as part of the center’s Third Thursday Series. The roadshow, coinciding with Archaeology Month, allowed community members to bring up to 10 artifacts for expert identification.After a lecture on the archaic history of Monroe County, Cheryl Munson invited members of the crowd to bring their artifacts forward.“This is a smaller crowd than we sometimes have,” she said. “Once, Pat and I had about 150 people at a roadshow. We had to give them numbers. This is a good crowd for getting to look at the material.”Cheryl Munson encouraged the visitors to record their artifacts and report them to the State Archaeologist Office.“If someone wants to put a state highway in an area, they know something about that area,” she said. “Archaeologists going through before construction only have a few hours get as much information as they can.”Beth Schroeder carried the black rock and other items forward in a Pabst Blue Ribbon cardboard box. She has nearly 1,000 artifacts at home, but she only brought the ones she and her husband, Tom, questioned.“Of the 1,000, about 200 are fake,” she said.Most of the artifacts came from her father, Beth Schroeder said, and as Patrick Munson analyzed the items, she wrote down notes on a stack of white envelopes. At Cheryl Munson’s table on the other side of the room, second year master student Nathaniel Pockras paused before pulling out his camera.Another visitor had just put away a human tooth that Cheryl Munson said most likely came from a Glacial Kame burial site in Delaware, Ohio. Pockras wanted a picture.“Excuse me, may I take a picture?” he asked.The man pulled the tooth, wrapped in cotton in a plastic tin, from his bag, and Pockras placed it on the table, trying to find the best lighting for a photo.Though Pockras is currently studying history and library science, he said he finds anthropology interesting and has traveled to multiple archaeological sites.“I like to park next to the sites and stand as close as possible to get a picture,” Pockras said. “I suppose I could get better photos if I asked someone to go inside, but it’s easier, and I can just drive on to the next one.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>One IU policy lists Dunn Meadow as a spontaneous free speech zone. Another states organizations must register to use the space 24 hours in advance. Yet another policy calls for registration 10 days prior.“Policies that force you to register ahead of time limit students’ ability to react to events,” said senior Nico Perrino, an IDS columnist and former IU Student Association co-executive director of legal affairs. “What happened on Sept. 11? What if a group of students on Sept. 12 wanted to hold a vigil? The fact that they’d have to register 10 days in advance would inhibit something like that.”About a year ago, Perrino and three other students formed a committee to attempt to change some of IU’s policies. At the start of this semester, he said he has seen few results.Perrino worked as an intern in the summer of 2010 with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit organization that defends individual rights at colleges and universities across the nation.While there, he learned that IU received a “yellow light” rating, which means the University has “at least one ambiguous policy that too easily encourages administrative abuse and arbitrary application,” according to the organization’s website.He contacted Neil Kelty, IUSA president at the time, and asked to form a committee to look into changing some of IU’s policies, including the designation of free speech zones and a policy regarding verbal abuse in the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities and Conduct.The committee began researching IU’s policies and previous individual rights cases at other universities in late October 2010, working off a memo from FIRE that contained suggestions on which policies to amend.“We spent a lot of time going over basic rights students have on campus,” Perrino said. “Once we’d gone over FIRE’s memo, we went to a faculty advisor and went over the policies.”On March 3, Perrino sent an email to Pam Freeman, former associate dean of students who retired on June 29, and other IU representatives requesting a meeting with the Student Affairs Committee, a subset of the Bloomington Faculty Council.“I look forward to meeting/working with your committee on these issues,” Perrino wrote in the email, “in hopes that we can soon make IU one of 14 universities identified by FIRE as places where student and faculty rights to free expression are unequivocally protected by campus policy.”Senior Jana Kovich, former IUSA co-executive director with Perrino, met with the SAC nearly two months later, on April 22, at the SAC’s final meeting of the academic year.“I thought of that meeting as our committee’s first introduction to the issue,” former SAC Chair Carrie Donovan said.Donovan said she had never before heard of FIRE or many of the policy issues Kovich discussed, but she knew Perrino and Kovich were asking the right people to help make the changes.“The SAC in recent years has spent a great amount of time revising and making recommendations to changing the code,” Donovan said. “We’re quite involved, in fact.”However, the SAC recommended Perrino and the other members of the IUSA committee gain support from other student organizations and IU Student Legal Services before meeting with the BFC.“The bureaucracy they wanted us to go through was absurd,” Perrino said. “We spent five months doing that, and the fact that we’d need to get broad support makes no sense.”But Donovan said the SAC viewed the recommendation differently.“It just seems like more people should be involved in part of the decision-making process,” Donovan said. “Everyone agrees this is an interesting conversation to have, and this is the right time to have it. We would just like to see more people at the table.”Mostly, Donovan said the SAC wanted to see responses from campus rather than an outside group.“The truth is, it’s coming from students, but the predominant voices have been from FIRE,” she said.A month after the SAC meeting, when action had not yet been taken, FIRE Director of Legal and Public Advocacy Will Creeley sent a letter to BFC President pro Tempore Erika Dowell explaining the organization’s mission and its concern about IU’s policies.The organization had been used to guide Perrino and the IUSA committee up until the April meeting, and with the May 24 letter, it stated that, while it knew the next BFC meeting was not until Sept. 6, “students must not spend another academic year under unlawful speech codes.”“It is about students’ own rights,” said Adam Kissel, FIRE vice president of programs. “Speech code litigation is very clear. Every day of delay is another violation.”When two months passed without a response from Dowell, Kissel sent a letter to President Michael McRobbie on July 25 again asking for policy revisions and a response from the administration by Aug. 15.Kissel received a response three days before the deadline in which McRobbie wrote that he forwarded the letter and accompanying materials to IU Vice President and General Counsel Dorothy Frapwell.On IU’s campus, however, Perrino said the silence from the administration ignores not only the IUSA committee’s requests, but also the law.“Why IU is pushing back against students who are trying to fight for their rights is incomprehensible,” he said.Donovan no longer chairs the SAC, but she continues to act as a member of the committee and said she would like to see the case again brought forward.“I suppose that with something like this, because it’s such a big issue, it can’t be owned by one committee,” she said. “That support can be garnered and put forward. It’s a story that’s still to be told, I guess.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The 20-member Bloomington Peace Choir began to sing as they made their way to the stage at Third Street Park. Kenya, Nigeria, Israel — in the first half hour of the Simply Living Fair on Saturday, the choir had already performed songs from cultures around the world. Visitors to the fair sat in fold-out chairs in front of the stage and milled about tents where Bloomington nonprofits and other organizations provided information about how to leave a smaller carbon footprint. “In America we have a lot,” said Vanessa Caruso, director of the Bloomington Local Growers Guild. “We can always have less and still be plenty comfortable.”Caruso stood behind a table, presenting visitors with information about local growers in their community. “We’re a co-operative for growers,” she said. “We serve as a network for all parties. We get growers and residents connected.”Growing locally for yourself is a main key to living simply, Caruso said. “Self-sufficiency is a big part of simple living when you’re less dependent on others,” she said. “You could go to Walmart and buy Miracle Gro, or you could have a compost pile in your backyard.”While the fair is part of the nationwide Going Local Week movement, Maggie Sullivan, board president for the Center for Sustainable Living, said the first fair took place more than 15 years ago. “We’re presenting a simple, sustainable lifestyle,” Sullivan said. Part of that presentation included workshops that fair-goers attended, from “Trashion for Kids” (how to make fashion from trash), to “Backyard Chickens” (how to turn poultry into garden helpers).At the Fair Trade booth, Mary Embry, a member of the Fair Trade Bloomington board of directors, displayed handmade bracelets.“They’re mostly made by women in developing countries,” Embry said. “It’s a beam of self-support.”The handmade goods are sold at Global Gifts in downtown Bloomington, a nonprofit store supported by 70 volunteers. The store asks volunteers to sign up for two shifts a month and pays the people who make the gifts.“The price you pay for something has been negotiated,” Embry said. “In a fair price, we consider the amount of work that goes into each project — the cost of the materials.”Embry supports lifestyle, but as an IU professor, she also teaches fashion merchandising classes in which she said she acknowledges but does not push her views.“I do talk about the issue of global development and its impact,” she said.But living simply can start at home, as well as on a global level, Embry said.“It’s a process to slowly notice what can be done through conscious decision,” she said.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In a crowd of more than 300 people, it’s hard to find silence.But as Craig Quimby and Joe Richards, firefighters with the Bloomington City Fire Department, hung a flag half-mast at Bloomington’s 9/11 Remembrance event at Ivy Tech Community College Sunday, only the wind made its voice heard.The flag had previously waved in states across the country as it made its way to ground zero with 70 members of deCycles Indiana.It’s been 10 years, but members of the Bloomington community remember the strength they found together in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They came together to honor that strength and remember those the community and country lost.Bob Loviscek, Bloomington Metropolitan Professional Firefighters Union Local 586 President“How would we evacuate the civilians?”That was the question Loviscek thought of when his dad, a member of Engine 33 in Indianapolis, called to tell him to turn on the television.Before it could be answered, a second plane slammed into the World Trade Center.“The reaction in the room was probably the same reaction you all watched,” Loviscek said. “Stone silence.”Nobody thought that in a matter of two hours, the twin towers would go down, Loviscek said to the crowd at Ivy Tech.Three hundred forty-three firefighters, 72 police officers and more than 2,000 civilians lost their lives, and, 10 years ago, it was Loviscek’s job to lower the fire department’s flag in their honor.“I remember lowering the flag outside the station and facing this lonely silence,” he said. “It forced us to change our lives every day. We saw the rebirth of citizens who affirmed their patriotism. As a nation, we slowly return to a sense of normalcy.”John Whikehart, Ivy Tech Bloomington ChancellorThe images of Sept. 11 are not ones of fear, Whikehart said.“They’re not about images of planes flying into buildings — those images of terror,” he said.They are images of strangers helping strangers, he said, images of the nation coming together in support.“We put aside, for a time being, our petty differences,” Whikehart said. “For a number of days, we were all New Yorkers. And our friends around the world, for a number of days, we were all Americans.”For Whikehart, the most lasting image of the attack 10 years ago is a photo of a firefighter walking up the steps of the World Trade Center as people frantically made their way out of it.“He was young. He was someone’s son,” Whikehart said. “And he was pushing against those trying to get out of the building.”He turned the focus to firefighters and police officers in Bloomington.“We want you to know that we never take you for granted,” he said.Mark Kruzan, Mayor of BloomingtonRemember Sept. 12, Kruzan asked of the crowd at Ivy Tech.It was the day the country began to recover, the day people began to recognize what happened.“It was the day we explained it fully, the best we could, to our children,” Kruzan said.He asked the crowd to acknowledge that everyone stands among heroes.“A hero is someone that puts their own life at risk to save a person they’ve never met and may never know,” Kruzan said.