2020

Why Urban America Can’t Forget Its Farmers

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Why do agricultural issues matter to young cosmopolites attending an Ivy League institution and who quite possibly are from a family in the top one percent? Besides being consistently ranked as one of the top agricultural schools in the country and the world, Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences conducts an enormous amount of research and outreach to help end food insecurity, combat climate change and, most recently, protect food production workers against COVID-19; just check out the litany of innovations here. Cornell is in a unique position to conduct its research; unlike many of its peers, it’s role as a land-grant institution informs its involvement in communities surrounding it. 43 percent of the counties in the Southern Tier are classified as rural. If you include upstate micropolities, such as Corning and Cortland, as semi-rural, that figure jumps to 57 percent.

2nd Presidential Debate

ST. HILAIRE | This Is What Donald Trump Has Done for Me

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Like many people, I tuned into the last presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle last week. The fragile masculinity of two American grandfathers and the way it manifested itself took up 90 minutes on every major news-media station and held the attention of myself and 63 million others on Thursday night. In a way, I think that we have been spoiled. I spent so much of the first debate pointing out disrespectful quips, laughing, internally crying and outwardly cursing our founding fathers for drafting a governmental system that could be completely decimated by “an unlikely candidate.” You know, as if ‘unlikely’ has recently become synonymous with racist, misogynist, xenophobic and ignorant. I have been seeing this new classification of the incumbent President Trump as “an underdog.” I had to refresh my definition of the word and found that it meant “a victim of injustice or persecution.” I feel obligated to express my displeasure that we classify the offender, our persecutor-in-chief, as “an underdog.”

Returning to the more tame and traditional Presidential debate that I tuned into on Thursday, I was bored.

2020 presidential election

BERNSTEIN | Don’t Just Settle for Joe Biden, Stand for him

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After a brutal primary season, many democrats have feared that a young progressive bloc would refuse to vote for Joe Biden out of a strong rejection of leadership and moderate positions. Since the vice president all but wrapped up the democrat nomination, one plea to progressives seems to be more popular than the rest: Settle. The “Settle for Biden” mantra is going strong; in fact, there’s a grassroots organization of former Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) supporters leading the way in sharing the motto, fit with a 230,000-plus follower Instagram account. The organization wants to convince young progressives who were turned off to the Biden campaign that not voting would lead to four more years of President Trump. This mission is important — Biden may be ahead in the polls, but if they’re as wrong as they were in 2016, this race could be close.