We Don’t Care
Opinions Editor & Associate Opinions Editor
anthonydeanharris@gmail.com & subjektxero@gmail.com
The culmination of this article (and this week’s Opinions section) took a painstaking amount of time. We considered at length how we would come up with three pages of editorial content from previous contributing writers, staff writers, fellow editors, and ourselves. In the last issue of the paper last year, we asked if we could replace the SGA with robots. We reiterate this for this year if only to make the SGA seem more interesting overall.
SGA Executive Director and presidential candidate Marcus Daniels, representing Alpha Phi Alpha, oversaw an unsuccessful voter registration drive in February which resulted in the loss numerous voter registration forms, effectively disfranchising dozens of students.
Mark Anthony Green attempts to place his name in any sentence involving the words Barack Obama or hope, but many of us would “hope” that he actually does something for this student body.
Neither of us had any idea who Chad Mance was until he called one of us personally with the typically “trying to pick your brain” phone call a month ago. This was the extent of his perceived presence on campus.
The executive branch is accused of stealing $2,000 from the budget in February and after one article in the newspaper, the issue was closed. No one is really sure if we’ve just gotten accustomed to scandal or if we’ve been swept up by the all-out brawl with the Democrats or the new color-by-numbers book the Republicans rolled out on how to make a scandal, but the SGA has managed to successfully make namedropping, disfranchisement, and embezzlement boring.
The Republican Party never seemed so interesting or even human since its own scandals: sex with men, profiting over the Iraq War, or sleeping with lobbyists. Scandals like these made the middle look at the Republicans as actual people with flaws… or pulses. The scandals in the SGA only bring apathy.
Our SGA is a group who managed to avoid scandal for the most part this year, but even in their improprieties, they managed to be uninteresting. Our SGA is a caricature. It is something to turn on during a writers’ strike.
In the years we’ve spent here, we’ve seen figurehead after figurehead promise change on this campus but both of us (if not this entire campus) have known the SGA is not that powerful of an organization. We cannot trust our student “trust”ees to inform us of their votes to determine whether or not they represent us. Our senators are the furthest from the Latin translation of “old” men who council for the greater good. Our justices do not ensure justice but merely make recommendations to the office of Student Services.
When you look at this neutered organization, can you really blame us for being so apathetic? Can you really blame our staff of writers for not coming up with strong opinions about a student government that does little considerable governing? We can try to blame our apathy on focusing on living our own lives as students and men, but really, they really are a boring group.
None of them try to butt heads with administrators about making this campus a better place, at least not to our knowledge. Other than their providing the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, their presence on campus isn’t noticeable. Prices haven’t dropped and nothing is more efficient. Student activity is the same as always, high around homecoming, low in the winter, high in the spring to make up for the lackluster winter and the humdrum homecoming.
If we continue to elect the same kind of people who don’t fight their damnedest for their jobs and for the students they represent, how could we expect anything different from them? We’ve spent years voting for résumé-filling, bowtie wearing, expense account padding Negroes and frankly doing it again isn’t all that appealing.
And writing about it doesn’t brighten our days that much, either.
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