Column 21

As I was trying to think of an appropriate way to adequately malign the perennial crop of slimy sycophants and idealistic activists who spring up this time every year attempting to assert nominal control over our own obscure and ineffectual vessel of student representation, I happened to walk into a nest of them in the Presidential Courtyard. Caught unawares, I quaked as they approached me, their oily hands pushing propaganda, their easy smiles entangling me in a conversation that for some masochistic sense of decency I could not escape. I hunkered down for what would surely be a mutually humiliating experience, when I suddenly came to the hitherto unexamined realization that these were not demons in human's clothing, out for purely self interest or angry hippies who wanted to sock it to The Man simply because The Man deserves socking. No, these were honest-to-Gandhi people. Trust me, I was as shocked as you are.

What does this mean? Well, for one it means they're apt to make mistakes, but it also means they can change. If SGA is made up of people, then one would hope that it too could change. Easier said than done, of course, but the possibility alone is inspiration enough to give it a go.

From the small amount I've seen, all of the parties propose a change to “the status quo,” and while I have my own opinions about which one is going about it the best way, I'd rather focus upon the implications and possibilities. Abe Lincoln (or 'Cottage Cheese' to his peeps) spoke that oft quoted phrase about a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and I think that's as pertinent as ever when discussing student organizations. Using the above as a framework, the idea behind SGA and every democratic organization is to represent the individuals that empowered it in the first place.

And while I'd like to parallel our SGA to Congress and the like, unfortunately we've already reached our first stumbling block: the students elect representatives to the SGA, but they don't empower it. That task lies with the UTK administration. And this fact alone accounts for the vast majority of disassociation, disillusionment, and sardonic commentary that accompanies any mention of the SGA in most circles.

But the idealist inside me (beneath the bitter realism but before the milk chocolate center) doesn't want the SGA to be a joke. It certainly needs a sense of humor, but humor's the subject (and hopefully content) of another column. No, the SGA needs to either have a backbone and significant efficacy or it needs to lose its pretensions of power and be dissolved, because the illusion of student representation is only detrimental to the reality of student representation.

From middle school to graduate school, we get these would be student “leaders” with ideas that can only fall within a dichotomy of “ineffectual” or “unrealistic.” And no one takes them seriously. If I was an employer and saw anything resembling student government on a resume, I would consider the individual qualified to either be a bureaucrat or a wedding planner. A “leader” is not someone who can get elected, it's someone who can get things done.

So when you vote next week, and I hope you do (even if it's to write me in as a “none of the above,” which I feel fully qualified to represent due to my firm anti-pants stance), vote for someone who will reverse the Big Orange Screw. Vote for someone who won't just take on the campus, but who'll take on the system that makes such a mockery of representative government in the first place. Vote for a student rights activist, not a student rights delusion.

People can change. The question is can SGA?