issue185【自由女神小组第十七次作业】

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issue185【自由女神小组第十七次作业】
题目：ISSUE185 - "Scandals-whether in politics, academia, or other areas-can
be useful. They focus our attention on problems in ways that no speaker or
reformer ever could."
字数：449          用时：0:43:00          日期：2007-2-10

Nowadays, we always see the scandals about the celebrities in politics,
academia, economic, or other areas on TV, newspaper, magazines and so on. As
speaker asserts, scandals can be useful because they focus our attention on
problems in ways that no speaker or reformer ever could. In my point of
view, scandals play an important role in our society and life, but we should
not overemphasize the scandals, and the scandal can alert people not to
commit the same error.

On the one hand, the scandals can focus our attention on problems which are
critical to our society. The main function of the scandals is to surprise
people not to abuse their power. For example, Nixon, the president of the
American in 1970s, who conducted the "Water gate" abuse his power in
presidential selection. The "Water gate" scandal revealed the inequitable
competition. It raised a strong wave of impeaching president and caused
Nixon's resignation. After disclosing, the congress and the government enact
several laws to prevent the presidents abusing their privilege power. Take a
good example in the realm of academia, the South Korea's coloner Hwang Woo
Suk who claimed in his published paper to have exact the first embryonic
stem cells from the adults human tissue and was named "man matter 2004" in
Time magazines. However the fabricated data in his research consume his
future and made his whole effect amount to nothing. Therefore, from the
above cases, we can see the scandals can push us to focus the problem which
we are never care about.

On the other hand, we should not overemphasize the scandals. The famous sex
scandal of former president of America Bill Clinton is a case in point.
Although Clinton is guilty in morality, the scandal is only the privacy of
the former president. Furthermore, the large amount of the public recourses
which are spent on probing into the intimate details between Clinton and
Lewinsky are wasted. The funds would be more beneficial to the world if they
could be spent in helping the sick children in the Africa or otherwise be
used for addressing the problems of the environment pollution and
unemployment in American.

All in all, maybe it is hard to say a scandal is “good” since we don’t
want to see any occurrence of a scandal because it means some one has made a
rather serious mistake. Once it happens, it always becomes the focus of
attention and all that we have to decide is perhaps what to learn from the
lessons. In this sense, the scandal is good indeed. But at the same time,
not all the scandals draw wide attention and the power of scandals should
not be overestimated.