Petoskey freshman Traven Michaels stands alongside Marine City freshman Blake Cahill while he raises his sign for Occupy Mount Pleasant as cars pass in front of the Bovee University Center Nov. 29, 2011. (Charlotte Bodak/Staff Photographer)

Occupy Mount Pleasant’s most recent general assembly meeting brought out a small but inspired turnout.

Only three people attended the most recent meeting Sunday in the Charles V. Park Library’s Java City.

Traven Michaels, a Petoskey freshman and one of the attendees, said the local movement helps spread the same messages and issues as Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy movements across the country. The local movement has been in solidarity with the larger movements since being founded last fall.

“We can’t make as much of an impact as NYC, but we can get the word out,” he said. “That’s the main thing.”

He said since the group was founded, fliers have been posted about rallies and direct actions have occurred. Michaels said they have held three or four rallies since forming.

A direct action is a non-violent action or protest to draw attention to a particular movement, Michaels said.

The last one was held on Dec. 10 in downtown Mount Pleasant, and he said the response was generally positive, but had some hecklers.

Michaels, along with the other meeting attendees, Illinois freshman Stephen Lokos and Marine City freshman Blake Cahill, all joined about three weeks into the local movement’s existence.

“Politics got me into the Occupy movement,” Lokos said. “How little control we actually have and how (the politicians) haven’t changed how they do things.”

Cahill said following the political money trail is interesting to him.

“As soon as you start learning about the government, it all comes back to money,” he said.

Cahill said the small group, usually about seven to 10 people every week, have a lot of agreement about the goals of Occupy Mount Pleasant, but differ on the approach as to how to execute them.

The group has a few plans in the works for the early spring. They plan to show the film “Inside Job,” about the 2008 financial crisis sometime in February, but other details are still forthcoming.

Michaels said the movement is not going away. This spring it will be back, he said.

As the 2012 presidential election nears, the group agreed they, and the rest of the Occupy movement, will have their work cut out for them to get attention. The local group agreed they try to make it out to larger events when possible.

“You’re not going to have a presidential candidate support the Occupy movement” Lokos said.

Browne, Mount Pleasant Police public information officer, said he likes the law because he was once struck on duty while on a motorcycle.

“Had it not been for my helmet, I’m not sure how much of my head would have been left,” Browne said. “I got hit and then bounced off the cement several times, and it left a pretty big patch in my helmet.”

Earlier this month, the state House approved to repeal the current law with legislation that gives motorcyclists older than 21 the right to drive without a helmet if they have at least two years of experience and at least $20,000 worth of medical insurance.

Rep. Kevin Cotter, R-Mount Pleasant, co-sponsored the bill, which will now head to the state Senate, where a different version of the bill was already approved in June.

“The (helmet) law should be repealed because it is a matter of personal choice,” said Vince Consiglio, president of American Bikers Aiming Toward Education of Michigan. “Michigan motorcycle fatalities are higher when compared to the surrounding states, which are all adult choice. Helmets do not prevent accidents.”

Tougher motorcycle licensing, motorcycle safety and car driver awareness of motorcycles are the ways to prevent motorcycle accidents, not mandatory helmet laws, Consiglio said.

Browne added enforcement of the law is rarely an issue because Mount Pleasant motorcyclists usually follow it.

“I understand that people want their choice to wear a helmet. But for me, it’s just a big safety precaution,” Browne said.

The bill could be approved by the Senate once state legislature comes back into session after Thanksgiving.

Gov. Rick Snyder’s office said it is unclear if the governor would sign the bill into law.

“Governor Snyder has been consistently clear that in order for him to consider any repeal, it would have to be in the context of broader auto insurance reform, so that motorists and drivers aren’t held responsible,” said a spokeswoman from the governor’s office.

Jon Huntsman, the candidate with the most foreign policy experience had by far the best grasp on what America needs to do. Huntsman and Ron Paul both came out against waterboarding, labeling it as torture, while Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann said they would support its use.

Waterboarding is torture — for 70 years this was not debated — whether you call it “torture” or “enhanced interrogation,” it is wrong, and lowers America to the level of the terrorists we are fighting.

On the topic of Afghanistan, Huntsman said it is time for us to leave Afghanistan, leaving behind only enough troops to help finish training the Afghani soldiers and police and to provide a counter-terror presence until the Afghanis are ready to fully take over.

They do not want hundreds of thousands of troops there for years to come, and now that the country is stabilizing, it is time that we respect their desires.

On Iran, Romney made a huge mistake, saying, “if we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon, and … if you’d elect me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon.” How can he guarantee that Iran will not acquire a nuclear weapon? He can’t, and to say that to the American people is not only misleading, but it could also destroy his presidency if his promise fails.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum also had poor answers to the topic of Iran, with Santorum saying, “There have been scientists turning up dead in Russia and in Iran … There have been problems at their facility. I hope that the U.S. has been involved with that.” The last thing America needs is to begin covertly killing scientists — especially in places like Russia, who we have treaties with.

Paul had the right idea when he said, “For us to get in the middle of that and prop up the different dictatorships, this is why we get into this trouble … We don’t need to lose any more troops.” The less meddling we do in other countries, the better.

When it came to the topic of foreign aid, Rick Perry said he would start all countries at $0 and increase from there, but this ignores that we already have standing agreements for aid to many countries.

The last main topic was Pakistan, and whether it is our “friend or foe.” This was where Santorum shined, stressing that because they are a nuclear country, we need to cooperate with them to ensure that they are our friend.

Ultimately, Huntsman and Paul performed best on the issue, but they trail in the polls, and with the economy, foreign policy may take a back seat in this election.

Ron Paul’s platform is radical. Americans don’t like extremes, which is why the Texan OBGYN and modern prophet will never be President. But he’s worth more than a glance.

He’s all about state’s rights. They’re kind of a big deal. It’s the reason behind the Civil War (not slavery), and it calls into question the role of government.

The $3.7 trillion question is this: How much control over the lives of individual citizens should the centralized federal government have?

I had a really phenomenal teacher in high school who told us the best way to teach about the relationship between the state and federal governments was pot, booze, and gay marriage.

A great example: Medicinal marijuana is legal in Michigan. But it’s not really legal, because the feds say it isn’t. If US Attorney General Eric Holder hadn’t announced the Obama administration’s decision to let the states alone, there would be even more problems with dispensaries than there already are.

Another good example is the drinking age. It’s 21 all around the country. States are allowed to set their own drinking ages, but they really don’t. South Dakota tried doing it in the ’80s and the feds threatened to pull interstate highway funding. The state screamed “You can’t do that!” but the Supreme Court said “Yes we can” in 1987′s South Dakota v. Dole.

Why not let the states decide these things for themselves? If a married man wants to go to a brothel, it’s not the government’s job to stop him. It’s his wife’s.

If the people in the states bordering Mexico decide they’ve had it with the money being spent patrolling the borders for drug smugglers and imprisoning petty offenders, if they decide they’ve had enough of the kidnappings and murders and that they want to run the drug dealers out of business using classic laissez faire economics, whose place is it to tell them no?

Ron Paul doesn’t want everybody doing heroin. But he thinks that if you really, really want to do heroin, then you should be able to go right ahead.

But Ron Paul also wants to eliminate the IRS and the income tax, and maybe that’s not such a good idea, because that would mean colossal spending cuts. It’s true, massive spending cuts are going to have to happen, along with raised taxes, to get the deficit under control and prevent financial collapse, but some programs need to be kept around because they do more good than harm.

And cuts as deep as Paul calls for would mean an end to a lot of things.

So maybe it’s a good thing that Ron Paul will never be President.

I think he knows that he’ll never occupy the Oval Office, but if he yells loud enough and causes people to really question the government and challenge it to be fiscally responsible, then he’s a real prophet, as far as I’m concerned.

I have noticed a disturbing trend as I speak with my friends, relatives, and opponents.

We are becoming afraid to offend people.

It must be conceded that Republicans generally do not have this problem. Perhaps it is the nature of right-wingers to be loud and assertive.

My Democratic friends are often timid in their political assertions. Challenging moderates and liberals seems to be an exercise in futility. As such, conservatives get their way and reasonable political views are trampled.

I am not advocating that it is time to throw respect out the window. I am advocating a return to the old ways of discussing politics: Civil, level-headed and incredibly assertive.

When I listen to my elderly friends and relatives talk politics, it never becomes personal, no one turns red and storms away and no one resorts to name-calling. They may disagree and have strong words for each other, but that is the nature of sharing ideas.

When I talk politics to people my parents’ age or my own age, things get heated quickly. They either shut down or get defensive. Words are never heard and ideas are never shared. In fact, many people I know will stop political conversations before they begin so no one will get offended.

People need to stop being so sensitive. It is preposterous to stop uncomfortable conversation simply because some may get offended. Do not be afraid to be challenged. Otherwise, you may run into the problem Democrats are having in Washington, D.C.

For example, President Obama recently decided he wanted to give a speech to a joint session of Congress on their first day back after recess. This turned out to be mildly controversial because that was the same night Republican presidential hopefuls were going to have one of their many debates.

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner told President Obama he could take his speech and shove it, the debate was more important. That should have been a bad political move for Speaker Boehner, as it was highly disrespectful to the office of the president.

Instead of political consequences for the Speaker, President Obama decided to once again to cave to Republican demands and move the date of the speech. The headlines the next day emphasized Boehner’s strength and Obama’s weakness as politicians. All Speaker Boehner did was forcefully put forward his point, and he won the battle.

Democrats should take a lesson. So should you. Get tough to get results.

On the first day of my “Seminar in the Study of Religion” course last semester, Dr. Michael Ostling, an assistant professor, made an interesting comment.

All of the theorists that we’d soon be discussing in the class, he stated flatly, are wrong. The course syllabus included readings from the likes of Freud, Marx and Weber. How could these accomplished intellectuals, I thought, be wrong? And if they are, then why are we bothering to read their work?

Of course, all of the theorists we analyzed had redeeming qualities and noteworthy insights that made them worthy of study. But they also had serious flaws that, at times, undermined their theories.

It turns out that, unlike the cold world of mathematics, or the formulaic certainties of chemistry, the study of religion is composed of large swaths of ambiguity.

Clearly, when endeavoring to fathom such a subject, learning by rote is not sufficient. It is also not possible to simply apply the standard paradigm of the field, because in the discipline of religion, no such paradigm exists!

How, then, is one to make sense of the subject?

One could say that, in this regard, the study of religion is quite comparable to political and civil affairs. In those arenas, the lines between right and wrong are often blurred.

There is no panacea, for example, to the daunting challenges facing the world today, and the solutions to those problems do not reside entirely in one ideology or political party. To think otherwise is akin to suggesting that Freud, and Freud alone, had entirely unearthed the secret to understanding religion. Such thinking is pure naiveté.

For that reason, “blind faith” in any one cause is dangerous and irresponsible. In my religion class, we learned not to trust any one theory, but to question all of them and retain the parts that are useful. Likewise, citizens should engage their world with diligence, questioning politicians, the media and even the academy.

My religion seminar class never did “solve” the phenomenon of religion, nor did we establish a ground-breaking paradigm that would fundamentally alter the discipline. We did, however, learn how to analyze material from various sources, synthesize across disciplines, and critically evaluate theories and arguments.

I may one day forget much of the information I learned in that class (e.g., Freud’s conjectures on the “primitive” nature). But the skills that I acquired from it — particularly the ability to think critically — will remain with me long after my four years at CMU.

Nicolas Persons

Bay City Senior

First, the good. The president asked our country to come together as the American family that we are. He made sure to include Muslim Americans as well as gay Americans, who will soon be able to openly serve in the military. In these times of divisiveness and partisanship, it was refreshing for the president to appeal to our better angles.

He used strong words to support those immigrants whose parents brought them here illegally, which in practice means he is supporting the DREAM Act. He rightfully attacked giant oil companies, who get billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies while making many more billions in profit.

Secondly, the bad. President Obama came out in support of a five-year government spending freeze. It would seem as though the economic lessons learned from the Great Depression have been lost on President Obama. When the economy contracts there is a gap between what the economy could potentially produce and what it is actually producing.

To fill this demand-based gap, the government must temporarily step in and increase spending.

President Obama also seems to have stepped into the Republican trap of thinking that any regulation kills jobs. Granted, he threw a bone and mentioned that certain regulations are fine, such as child labor laws, but he seems to be under the impression that regulations from many decades ago are somehow stopping job creation right now.

Lack of regulation enforcement is what caused the banking crisis as well as the BP oil spill, but hopefully President Obama does not need reminding of that.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, President Obama managed to avoid the truly ugly. There was much hand-wringing in the lead up to the State of the Union speech that President Obama was going to come out in favor of cuts to Social Security.

Any cuts to Social Security are wildly unpopular politically but, more importantly, any cuts would be a violation of the public’s trust in the “security” portion of Social Security.

Instead of coming out in favor of cuts to Social Security, President Obama reasserted his stance that no cuts, including raising the retirement age, are acceptable. It is comforting to know we have a president who is willing to protect and strengthen such a critical social safety net.

Politically it is good to know that it was Democrats who created Social Security, and it is Democrats who are willing to fight to protect and strengthen it.

The 2011 State of the Union address was a fantastic and centrist speech given by a centrist president. President Obama asserted himself as a leader, and sent strong signals that he intends to fight for his core beliefs. It will be interesting to see how such a visionary president deals with a divided Congress.

He also threw  in the yearly section on clean and renewable energy, and while there is nothing wrong with that, he failed to give clear examples on how we will achieve his goals. Having 80% of Americans’ electricity come from clean energy sources by 2035 is a great goal, but how will we get there?

Like last year, he emphasized that education starts in the home, and that parents need to instill a sense of responsibility in children. Parents not only need to ensure their children keep up in their studies, but also “teach [them] that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.”

The other half of education is the school side. One of the best things Obama has done since assuming office was implement the Race to the Top program, a program that saw 40 Democratic and Republican governors implement higher standards for teaching and learning in their states.

Race to the Top ended the failed era of No Child Left Behind and started the process of getting our education system back on track.

He discussed jobs, saying, “At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else,” and went on to describe the actions taken to improve the economy, such as extending the Bush tax cuts and unemployment benefits.

He announced a plan to examine current regulations, so that useless regulations that harm businesses can be repealed, while leaving in place regulations that ensure the protection of consumers; however, he failed to say what further actions he would like to take to improve the economy.

He did, however, go into details about how he plans on reducing the deficit, such as a freeze on annual domestic spending for the next five years, a move that he claims will reduce the deficit by over $400 billion. This freeze will stretch from salaries of federal employees to wasteful spending on extraneous defense projects.

Obama also announced that he is open to the Republicans’ idea of reforming medical malpractice laws, so that the number of frivolous lawsuits is reduced.

While these are steps in the right direction, they are only a small part of reducing the deficit, and with the President announcing plans to increase spending on infrastructure, Congress is going to need to find more areas to cut spending or raise revenue.

While the speech had some good ideas as well as bad, it was lacking a plan to get the economy back on track, and until we do that, all other issues become irrelevant. Without a strong economy, we cannot function as a country.

The President’s focus must be on reducing the deficit and getting the economy back on track, so that we can get Americans back to work.

When Loughner opened fire 31 times into a crowd at Giffords’ town hall-style meeting, he killed six people, seriously wounded a U.S. Congresswoman and injured 13 others.

This tragedy should not be politicized by the media on either side of the aisle.

What Loughner did was inexcusable and was most likely the result of his own thinking, not the ramblings of pundits on the left or right.

A lot has been made of Sarah Palin’s target map, which had cross-hairs over the districts of 20 members of Congress who voted for the Affordable Health Care Act. Among those in Palin’s sights was Giffords, and while distasteful, it was just an attempt to get a rise out of her base. Nothing more.

The trend of using hyperbolic violence (“Don’t Retreat — Instead Reload”) in politics is on the rise, but it is of paramount importance to realize it is always meant to act as an attention-getter. To accuse Palin of actually wanting American citizens to bear arms and fire on U.S. Representatives is as absurd as blaming the FBI for President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Also, there is no evidence that Loughner ever saw Palin’s map. In fact, based on his Facebook and MySpace profiles, he was more in line with the writings of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler.

CBS conducted a poll Sunday through Monday asking 673 adults whether the “recent harsh political tone had anything to do with the Arizona shooting” and 57 percent said it did not and 32 percent said they do.

It is crucial that people take heed of these results. Instead of throwing grenades from one side of the aisle to another, the focus should be on how to better prevent actions like this in the future and how to better protect our elected national officials.

Giffords has been hailed by members of Congress on both the left and the right as a hardworking politician who is willing to work across party lines. While people like Loughner may be influenced by America’s intense political climate, it is both unfair and unscrupulous to solely attribute his actions to that climate.

Members of Congress and the media should be coming together in support of Giffords, the other victims and their families. It is shameful for one side or the other to take an act such as this and transform it into a political spear.

The political swords drawn in the aftermath of Giffords’ shooting should be sheathed. There are plenty of arenas for political fighting, but this is not one.

It has been reported that Giffords is now breathing on her own and slowly starting to recover from her bullet wound; this is what is important, not gaining ground in the political battlefield.

U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a three-term Democrat, was injured in her home district in Tucson, Ariz. during a campaign event outside a grocery store when a 22-year-old man fired indiscriminately into a crowd. Six others were killed in the events.

State Rep. Kevin Cotter, R-Mount Pleasant, said his thoughts and prayers are with Giffords’ and other victims’ families.

“This is tragic and unacceptable,” Cotter said. “I don’t know what the shooter’s motives were. I don’t know if we’ll ever know what the shooter’s motives were. I don’t know if they were politically motivated or what.”

Michelle Shamaly, vice president of CMU College Democrats, said she looks forward to Giffords’ recovery.

“It’s tragic when that violence is used,” the Clinton Township junior said. “Violence is not an appropriate way to express a political opinion in democracy.”

Former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Holland, told the Grand Rapids Press members often do not have security when they are in their home districts.

Cotter said he traveled with U.S. Rep. Dave Camp, R-Midland, and observed the security of members of Congress is lower over the weekend and at home.

“Higher profile positions should look at heightened security,” Cotter said.

He said there is security at the Capitol and in the legislative offices, but cautions against jumping toward heightened security at the state level because of this one instance.

“I’m not concerned about my own security,” Cotter said. “There’s really some level of risk, and we can’t control irrational behavior. I don’t think I have a heightened level of risk because of my position. It’s impossible to guard against all violent activity, and I don’t think we need to look at security at the state level.”

According to recent reports, any lasting damage or potential for recovery is unknown from the bullet which hit Giffords in the head.

metro@cm-life.com