I have nothing to write about.
I get writer’s block, but this is one of the worse cases I’ve had in a while. I can’t think of a “campus issue” to address. I think I’ve used them all up.
Had this been last year, when I was more involved and more distraught with the trifle behavior on this campus, maybe I could sustain this column for more than five weeks. Has it really only been five weeks?
Nothing really happens on campus either. Let me edit that: Nothing _transparent_ happens on campus. I’m sure there are a lot of things being worked on right now that organizations and parts of the administration don’t want the public to know about yet.
What has happened at MU this week? RHA is looking into a new laundry payment system. MSA is looking into updating the M-Book, which we all know should have been done years ago. Four Front, the minority and social justice organizations student government, went on a retreat. The MU Homecoming Top 10 were announced.
Exciting.
In the past week, the only piece of interesting and problematic campus news occurred at UC-Berkeley. The UC-Berkeley College Republicans held an affirmative action bake sale (nothing new — MU College Republicans did that March 2010), but what sets this apart from the other schools is how the university got involved.
According to NPR’s interview with UC-Berkeley College Republicans’s president and the UC-Berkeley student body president, the school’s chancellor sent an open letter condemning the bake sale and called for respectful debate.
As soon as the state school’s administration got involved, many people saw this as an oppression of free speech, turning an already divisive issue into a complicated one. If you [read about it](http://www.dailycal.org/2011/09/26/uc-berkeley-bake-sale-controversy/) on the DailyCal (their The Maneater), you get a spectrum of opinion. Some of the language is too aggressive for my taste, but at least there is a conversation.
That’s all I want at MU: conversation.
I ask for it in most of my columns, and here I am asking for it again. It would be asking a lot to have a conversation at a comparable scale to UC-Berkeley’s. For whatever reason, that school draws active students.
Take an interest in the occurrences going on around campus and Columbia. If there doesn’t seem to be much of anything going on, then get involved somewhere and do something to start a conversation.
All of this is vague. I am quite aware of that. But I am sick of walking around campus watching the desultory students not take a stand for anything.
Remember when the Missouri House of Representatives backed a law that would make it mandatory to show a government-issued ID to vote? Remember how this law would disenfranchise the youth, senior and low-income vote? Remember how no one cared? Yeah, this law is appearing on the November 2012 ballot.
Remember the inane Sharia law bill? Remember the concealed weapons law? Remember how… oh, what does it matter. The only things that get the youth riled up are Facebook changes (not its privacy policy, but aesthetics) and Netflix raising costs and splitting into two companies.
All I want for MU is to encourage student activism and involvement. Get your events, politics, campaigns and issues out to the rest of campus. Create (constructive) controversy. Let’s stop playing it safe and encourage our peers to talk about issues that have an impact on our personal, and MU’s, future.
But most importantly — GIVE ME SOMETHING TO WRITE ABOUT.