Editorial: Breaking up with SG

Dear Student Government,

You really blew it.

For a while, we had some high hopes for you. Even if things weren’t perfect, you really had potential. You promised us a lot of great things, like the bike share program, the library act and OrgSync. So what happened? Why is it all about empty promises and never about action?

Maybe that’s not your fault, but we’re not in the mood to hear excuses. If those weren’t things you could do, then you shouldn’t have promised to do things in the first place. If you didn’t have the time, or the money, or the influence, then you should have taken that into account from the beginning. If there was something stopping you, you should have faced it instead of turning back and trying something easier.

Since you won’t admit it, let me tell you the real problem. You’ve made it all about you, and not about the people you’re supposed to be representing. Instead of really thinking about what you could do to help the students, you lost sight of what it meant. Your senators passed resolution after resolution, and for what? Was it meant to be an accomplishment for the students, or was it just supposed to be an accomplishment for that one person? Are we supposed to be pacified by SG-sponsored drawstring bags and buses to hockey games?

Stop hiding. No matter how many resolutions with pretty rhetoric you pass, no matter how many cool pins you order or how many times you slap the SG logo on a T-shirt to hand out, it doesn’t make you successful. It only provides something to hide behind and comfort yourself over. It’s an illusion created so you don’t have to take a good, long look at the reality of the situation and confront your failures.

Don’t even get us started on the infighting. Instead of being leaders, you’re becoming laughingstocks. Instead of being role models, you’re becoming the examples of what not to do and who not to be. The big picture died, buried underneath apathy and pettiness and a reluctance to act.

Feel bad yet? Good. You’re listening, and acceptance is the first step to recovery.

Ask yourself this: did you do everything you could have? Did you dedicate yourself one hundred percent to carrying out the will of the students as you understood it? Did you spend every moment of every meeting asking yourself how you could be better, what you could be doing in order to be the solution to the problems SG was facing that week?

From where we’re standing, it doesn’t look like it.

The worst thing was, for a while, we really believed in you. We sat in your meetings, we wrote articles about you and we listened to your ideas. There was a lot of passion and productive conversations.

We fell in love with the idea of a student government that was strong, a cohesive body of people all striving for the same ultimate goals even if individuals had different methods of getting there. We fell in love with something that doesn’t exist.

Maybe that’s a little bit our fault, too.

We’re left with what you are now. Not an idea, not an organization. You’re a group of people all fighting over not what’s right, but who’s right. What we fell in love with was worth our attention, but the mess you are now is most definitely not.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not going to stop coming to your meetings and ignore you completely. You still have potential, and if you start making something of that potential, we’ll be the first to break the news. No matter what, we will continue to provide students with the most important and relevant information for them. When you deserve our attention, you’ll get it.

Sincerely,

The Independent Collegian