Dear Editor,
As long as I can remember I have been raised to follow one overriding principle, and that is to treat others as you would like to be treated. You’ll notice it does not stipulate that we treat only “good” people well. It does not say if someone has treated you poorly, go ahead and throw the Golden Rule out the window.
That’s why it’s a principle. It’s not supposed to be easy, and it doesn’t always seem fair, but it exists for a reason. After all, true justice is often quite and subdued. It is almost never the most exciting or sensational route. No matter how just your end goal might be, if you have to sacrifice all principle to get there how are you any better than the ill you set out to correct?
Wednesday night MSA showed how far it’s willing to stoop to win. Cruelty and bullying are not traits of leadership, and yet they run rampant through this association. Regardless of who you think Haden Gomez and Chris Hanner are, they are HUMAN BEINGS. Virtually no one Wednesday night acknowledged that.
Wednesday wasn’t a Senate hearing. It was a public execution. Wednesday wasn’t a discussion of the issues; it was a quest to destroy the wellbeing and lives of two human beings.
That is not what MSA is about, it’s not the organization I joined, and it’s not an organization I will be a part of. That’s why effective January 27 I resigned from my position as Chairman of MSA Senate’s Campus & Community Relations Committee.
But this was not a brash decision made in the heat of the moment. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve watched MSA become this way over the course of my involvement, and I have been contemplating resignation for quite some time. I assure you that I tried very hard to keep things from getting to this point, but unfortunately I failed. This is something I’ve lost countless hours of sleep over.
When I joined MSA Senate we could debate things on the senate floor all night, but they always remained civil. No matter how much we disagreed, they were disagreements of policy. Never did it become personal. Yet over the last semester that has become less and less the case.
Wednesday night might have been the boiling point, but it was certainly not the sole example of an atmosphere that is riddled with bullying and cliques. An atmosphere where dissent and legitimate concern are met with dismissal and condescension.
I assure you this is not about any one person. It’s about what I see in the collective body of MSA. Please, I implore each of those in the Association to take a long hard look in the mirror and examine what motivates them; what they believe is acceptable behavior of leadership. Often times leadership means being the bigger person. If we are going to call ourselves student leaders, then I think we owe this campus at least that much.
Respectfully Yours,
Alex Higginbotham
Former CCRC Chairman
