By Brent Gerson
The first round of campus elections is over. What a relief. If
you’re like me, what annoyed you the most was that the people
giving out free sodas and snacks on Thursday to reward
participation had to see the sticker that said, “I
voted.” As far as I know, election officials ran out of
stickers on Wednesday. They must have. Otherwise, why did all of
those people on Bruin Walk who told me they voted refuse to put
their sticker on?
If you didn’t get a sticker last week, I can’t blame
you. Voting participation in general elections topped 23 percent
this year, a clear reflection of the dialogue that is obviously
taking place among our myriad viewpoints. Every time I got a flyer
shoved in my face, it forced me to consider all points of view,
envision a methodology of unity as opposed to divisiveness, develop
an enlightened perspective from which I was open to new ideas, and
abandon my apathetic, cynical zero-sum game mentality. And that
catharsis happened every single time I got a flyer shoved in my
face.
Wait, no it didn’t.
I accidentally confused that with my complete disengagement with
the empty rhetoric printed on those pieces of paper, and my
commitment to ignoring all the red, yellow and blue shirts.
It’s unfortunate that so many people voted this year.
Twenty-three out of every 100 undergraduates admitted that rhetoric
is enough to earn a quiet mandate for their student government.
It’s clearly enough to simply shove flyers in people’s
faces because that is a great way to keep voter participation
low.
Just think what might happen if half of our student body were to
vote. Most of them would not have sworn allegiance to a particular
interest group ahead of time. They would be genuinely confused with
all of these candidates and what exactly they stood for. They would
demand a public dialogue in which the rhetoric would be clearly
stated, and not merely implied.
Candidates would have to define terms like
“diversity,” “access,” “unity”
and “progress.” Imagine what they might say. Some of
them would get vicious. A few people would say mean things they
shouldn’t. It would get ugly. But perhaps the state of
Undergraduate Students Association Council election is already as
ugly as it can get.
I challenge all undergraduates to consider what these elections
mean to them on a personal level. They have meant something to me
because of what I have been able to observe about my fellow
students, not because of their outcome.
On Thursday night, as the results were pending announcement on
the steps of Kerckhoff Hall, a crowd gathered. Hundreds of people
were amassed in cadres shouting, chanting, talking and sharing.
My first reaction to this, as I have seen it before in recent
weeks, was one of frustration ““ that these moments were so
incredibly partisan. But my second, much stronger reaction was one
of painfully clear hope. I saw the smiles and heard the voices of
so many of my fellow students, united while still divided, in their
respective dreams.
What struck me as tragic was the degree to which the aims of all
groups represented (as I saw few true individuals) seemed so
totally irreconcilable. The only way to achieve unity is through a
form of exchange, compromise and vulnerability we call
“dialogue.”
Consider that our apathy as a campus toward student government
elections is a symptom of a greater problem. We have been
conditioned to believe that if you stand for nothing, you’ll
fall for anything. It’s a beautiful piece of poetry, but this
phrase breeds a fatalistic perspective in which tolerance is a risk
we can’t afford to take. Perhaps it should be called the
insecurity dilemma.
Making a difference, if it’s trying to open access to
education or trying to make our society more fulfilling and less
exclusive, requires more than empty phrases and slogans. If there
is any piece of wisdom my short time on Earth has offered, it is
that true leadership is not about taking a side.
Our world can be frightening, but we have so much more to gain
if we include each other, and really mean it. Tolerance as a
watchword implies the hopelessness of identity, because it connotes
a separation that will always exist among coalitions of
individuals.
The time has come for the people of our society to realize that
there is more to life, and to education, than standing for
something. Perhaps the relevant challenge would be to ask yourself,
simply, where you stand.
Please vote this week in USAC runoffs, but not before you find
out why you should. USAC is not just about money or about power.
It’s about you ““ that is, unless they forgot to give
you a sticker.
Gerson is a first-year political science and economics
student.