Acorn

Issue date: 11/8/06 Section: Opinions

Voting is not rocket science.

Casting a ballot in a Student Government Association senatorial election requires two things: going into the University Center and drawing a circle.

Now, we all go into the UC at least once a day, and if, on Election Day, you have no business in the building, chances are you have to at least walk by it.

And I shudder to think that college students have made it this far without learning how to draw a primary shape. Granted, there were a lot of write-ins, but voting really isn�t that difficult a task.

A very rough estimate puts this year�s voter turnout at less than 30 percent.

The numbers dipped to 472 ballots from last year�s 675, not that either is exceptional.

Why such a poor showing?

It is easy to brush this off as student apathy or to say that Drew�s SGA does not reach out to students, but I think that the reason goes much deeper.

Students just don�t realize how powerful their voices can be.

While sitting at the voting table in the UC, Elections Chair sophomore Yasin Abbak yelled to students, �Use your power to vote now, so that you can use your power to complain later.�

This does sometimes seem like the only time students do raise their voices�when they have something to complain about.

What they don�t realize is that they really don�t have much of a right to complain if they are not also proactive.

Voting is only one example of activism.

Student-run clubs and organizations are a great way for students to throw themselves into causes that they are passionate about and to educate the rest of the campus on issues that they find important. A lot of clubs take this responsibility seriously.

The Women�s Concerns club is a great example of an active club. Notice those signs about human trafficking in your bathroom stall?

It may not seem like a big deal to you, but that flyer is educating you every time you look at it, even if it�s only for a few seconds.

This week has also been flooded with events for Sexual Assault Awareness Week. It�s hard not to take note of, or be overwhelmed by, the signs and T-shirts that are everywhere.

The members of Women�s Concerns are using the power of their voices to bring attention to an issue that they feel passionate about exposing and to inform Drew�s student body, whether it listens or not.

The Drew Environmental Action League (DEAL) has also been a great presence on campus, especially during Recyclemania.

The performances of That Medieval Thing are hard to miss as it prepares for MedFest. Most clubs have a few weeks throughout the year on which they focus, and, although they are comparatively quieter during the rest of the year, they are not dormant.

There are plenty of students who don�t enjoy being in clubs and tend to focus more on academic work or athletic teams, which are both equally important aspects of college life.

And being in a club doesn�t necessarily mean that one is actively working to improve his or her surroundings.

What I am concerned most about is that students are losing their drive to let their views be heard and to let the world, or at least the campus, know what they are passionate about.

I think there are two main reasons for this. Students may think that their voices won�t accomplish anything and that being openly passionate about something makes a person �dorky.�

I will address the latter first. Admittedly, this is not an original idea but one that Sarah Bunting put into my mind when I read her column called �Dork: The Other White Meet� on her site tomatonation.com.

She explains that a thing (her example is a TV show) becomes dorky because of �the intensity with which [it] is loved.�

I would like to take this idea and further apply it to the hesitation that teens and 20-somethings have for voicing their opinions and expressing their passions.

They may be considered dorks�or worse, outcasts�if they show the small community of Drew how much they love the environment or knitting or writing or fighting for gay rights.

And don�t tell me this isn�t true. People on this campus constantly get joked about because of their passions.

This is a horrible deterrent that keeps students from addressing important issues in the Drew community.

The former, perhaps deeper, problem is that students don�t think they can change anything.

Take a look at the Opinions section in The Acorn not just this year, but over the past few, if you�ve been around. There is a wealth of diverse opinions, but it always seems to be the same people expressing them.

The right to submit an opinions piece isn�t reserved to club presidents, politically minded people or upperclassmen. Anyone can write, and everyone with an opinion about something, especially a proactive one, should.

Student voices can go far. Take a look at Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAN:D).

The coalition was started by one student at Georgetown University. Now, there are over 200 chapters in high schools and colleges in the United States and Canada.

In May 2005, the Georgetown chapter received a $40,000 grant from mtvU and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation �to support its efforts in bringing together the national student coalition and to pursue the Sponsor-a-Camp Initiative to raise funds and help provide secondary education to some of the more than two million Darfuri people affected by the genocide,� according to standnow.org. Don�t tell me student voices don�t matter.

Now, I�m not saying you have to go found a national coalition to put an end to genocide.

But my point is that every student should feel as though he or she has something important to say and that the rest of the campus, and even the rest of the world, would benefit from learning from his or her ideas.

We shouldn�t be afraid to say what we think, and we should want to teach our peers, and even our teachers themselves, about what we think is important.

You will be heard.

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