Make Yourself Heard

I plan to vote in the AS Elections this week.

Not because I particularly believe in the process, as much as any decently educated college student, I consider myself pretty disillusioned with the democratic process, but the fact remains that expressing yourself and helping choose the people whose decisions will affect your education and college experience is vital to the process.

"The nation, the state defines identity."

My anthropology professor was talking about the cultural identity of a country, but the same principle applies very much to those smaller autonomous organizations of people we find ourselves a part of: school, work, clubs, sports. What is nationalism or patriotism but school pride on a grossly larger scale?

This is Viking Territory. Blue and white is about as common as, well anything the majority of us have in our closets and wear pretty much daily.

Your vote may not mean much to you. You're one voice among some 15 thousand here at Western. But last year only about 1700 actually voted in the AS elections.

If you're concerned about your voice being heard, then don't sit in silence. Say something, make some noise and then give it meaning.

I've heard complaints about the AS Board not representing the students, about them making campaign promises about being available to hear every student's voice. Quite frankly, that's impossible and a waste of time. There are 7 students representing several thousand they don't have the time in a month to exchange five minutes with even half. When it comes down to it, if the Board set up an event where they could interact with the student population, the people who would show up are the kinds of students who are already politically involved within the community.

The kind of people who aren't being represented are the ones who aren't representing themselves.

People like me, the ones who somehow seek out our representatives and know who's speaking on our behalf, we're connected to the process and as I've come to realize, it's not that hard. You learn faces, you learn names. Hello in passing soon turns into traveling conversations.

In the last few weeks I've gotten to know a good half of the candidates and while I'm not sure if I would go so far as to call more than one of them a good friend, they're all run by a passion that I think would make any one of them suitable for the respective positions they are each running for.

I don't know if any one is necessarily better than another, which is why I'm using this forum to endorse voting and not any particular candidates, but I trust that if, as college students, they're willing to put themselves through this process and take on that responsibility and live up to that trust, then they deserve my respect.

The rest of us need to hold them accountable though. If we want our voices heard, if we want them to represent us, then we need to make sure they're listening, which means we need to be saying something.

This doesn't mean talking to the Board or demanding that the Board regularly make themselves available to the student body. Though those are valuable options in their own way, they're impractical on the kind of scale necessary to represent everyone.

Instead, utilize the groups available to you. If you're part of a club and want something done, then see if the club shares your ideals. Treat yourselves like a lobbying group to light a fire under the issues you care about. Work within the system (or outside of it) to shine a light on the problems you see.

But before you do any of that, take the minute and a half it takes to log in to MyWestern and cast your vote.