I hope to see little of my own name in this section this semester, and to replace it with yours. Twice a week I plan to see the world as you do, and to watch you present that vision to the Statesman audience.

I’m offering up the Opinion section as a platform, hoping to find your voice, and your sensibility. Ultimately, the issue you choose to focus on for a particular column — be it the unfolding of our new national or University presidency, social,or humanitarian goals you think this nation or campus can achieve, your personal concerns for the future or the present, or any other issue that engages you — will fade in favor of your perspective on it.

This campus is teeming with individual points of view. We have access to people who have lived in different places, absorbed different perspectives, and have different value systems from our own. Based on our influences and interests, our past experience, our families and cultures, our moods, and more, some of us view the past and the present very differently from others, and that affects what happens to all of us in the future. We tend to isolate ourselves in the face of this diversity, to clique up and stay in our comfort zones when we should be taking advantage of this atmosphere by exposing ourselves to the most viewpoints available. The college environment is the place to let guards of convenience and comfort down–to focus on what can change the way we think about what we used to find commonplace, to question what we once accepted.

With enough voices, this column is just as likely to cause unrest and argument as it is to resolve it. While the medium is pacific, the goal is unsettling and stimulating exchange.

Dialogue isn’t a matter of tempering or tampering with our opinions or beliefs so as not to offend others, or to ally with a political party; it’s the capable articulation of individual beliefs presented in a way that evokes understanding.

We are lucky to have a means to discuss these individual differences through this widely-available and widely-read student medium. We are blessed to live in a time and a nation that embraces and celebrates the right to individual belief, individual opinion, and individual action.

In the context of news, politics, or an 800-person lecture hall, our individuality sometimes seems like an incarnation of self-importance or denial of our own insignificance. We affect one another, we evoke responses from one another, we incite arguments with one another. We synthesize the perspectives of others to form our own. But in reality, we independently perform the original, inherently individual act that defines us and cements the notion of individuality: we voice our opinions.

We can choose how to be affected by our news. It changes hands so many times that we have to accept even our most longstanding publications as only an interpretation of events that have conspired. We affect what we learn as we learn it; none of us transfer information transparently. In this column, I hope to recognize and even celebrate the interaction that we have with our news rather than deny it.

News as we see it is therefore both personal and universal; what affects our beliefs affects our behavior. Relating to the news, realizing that your enviroment is shaped by it and that you shape your enviroment by creating it, is knowledge.

Whether your cause is change or the status quo, write for your own sake: sharpen your tongue, your pen, and your perceptions. If you offer your view, others will reciprocate.

Plato once referred to opinion as the medium between ignorance and knowledge. We can take this to refer to both self-knowledge and outside knowledge; our opinions show us our characters, and how we exercise them will develop those characters.

We’ve all developed a lens through which we absorb and view news, and class material alike.

Write a column for the Statesman on any issue that interests you and you will receive a response to that lens from a diverse and unique audience. Take advantage of the opportunity to have 6,000 people listen to what you say; whether you agree or disagree with them is up to you.

I hope to see you at the Media and Student Involvement Fairs taking place during Campus Lifetime over the next two weeks. Collect a few bylines and meet with the staff; decide the course of your own college experience.