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Why Ground Zero? by April Snoparsky ’05, Leuvis Olivero ’05, Roberto Santamaria ‘05

We (Leuvis, Roberto, and April) took the Corporations class last spring with Vijay Prashad who’s way of teaching helped inspire the birth of this publication. During our semester project, we chose to research the Coors Company. We would meet about once a week in MCEC to do research and to write our paper, but the problem was that our meetings never lasted for just an hour, in fact they usually lasted more than two hours. Though after spending two long hours talking we would have nothing substantial to show for it. Honestly, we spent most of our time bitching about how bad things were. We would start talking about the lack of visible diversity at Trinity and how minority students were often grouped together. We discussed how there wasn’t enough interaction between different groups and how people always blamed others for their problems, never taking the initiative to do something about the problem. .

While we were supposed to be writing our final draft which was due the next day, we decided we needed to stop complaining and actually do something. We realized we had all these ideas and opinions about Trinity but no way to tell people about them. We figured the Tripod wasn’t the best avenue. We felt that if we were to write in the Tripod about how we felt about these types of issues, we would have to censor ourselves. So we decided to create a new forum--a means by which people like us could express their ideas about diversity freely and frankly. We were pumped. Finally we were taking action. Instead of complaining and doing nothing, we were doing something.

So what was the first step? We decided we needed more than three people to do all the work this project was going to require, so we recruited our fourth member, Jim Bisbee. (The token white dude. –Jim) The next step was to figure out what we were going to call our project. It took us about two hours to figure out we were going to call it Ground Zero. This was to be a new beginning, a start of a conversation that was long overdue on this campus. We wanted to get past the political correctness bullshit and get to truth, to find out what people at Trinity really think about diversity issues, whether it be on race, sex, class, money, art, literature, or important social issues not covered by other publications on this campus. Here is the manifestation of our idea. This is our first issue…. and it all starts here.