It has been said that the Student Government Association doesn’t care the slightest about the students, but instead, only about its resumes. This has been said, likely and by most accounts, since the inception of “Student Government Associations,” whatever those are, really.

            There are a few reasons for this. For the most part, students don’t really care that much about the issues the SGA talks about amongst themselves. They don’t care about the pats on the back that senators and treasurers and presidents and vice presidents give each other. They care about laundry, they care about not having to give money to the school so they can buy food and beer, they care about narrow minded things.

            The laundry problem hasn’t been fixed. The SGA, no matter how much they talk about fee increases and decreases, won’t change a thing. The SGA is, to make an accurate comparison, worth as much as a child playing house by themselves in a plastic kitchen with plastic food and plastic utensils.

            But for the first time, they actually did something the students wanted. After how many years, I have no idea besides far too many, they finally passed online voting. And they deserve, for that, a big “hip, hip hooray!”

            Hip hip, hooray!

            To celebrate this, as I’m sure many other students did, I went out and didn’t vote. And by that, I mean I didn’t go online and click a button.

            It could be apathy. It could be laziness. It could be absolutely nothing. I don’t even care why I didn’t, why most of the people I know didn’t, and why I predict the voting turnout won’t be much higher than years previous which went without online voting.

            Kurt Vonnegut, in his book “A Man Without a Country,” shares an insight which seems too true to be funny: “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be President.”

            That doesn’t implicate only those who want to be President of the United States, but those who wish to be in positions of power – no matter how pseudo-powerful they are – in government, whether local or at a university.

            Now, that wouldn’t be entirely bad if that were the only thing. After all, there is always a little charm or genius in the mad and the crazy. But unfortunately, we are not dealing with pictures, art or words. If I was able to see a pretty craypas painting, or a small little prose piece, that would be fine.

            But I’m not. What I’m seeing is a bunch of people who talk about grown up matters and deal with them in childish ways. They try to craft our university when they couldn’t craft a pot if they were in pottery class.

            Even though they finally passed online voting, doing so only after the tiring years of trying to keep the people they knew in, they are still useless. The online voting just makes it so a few more people can contribute to the useless institution of student government. Instead of only a couple percent of people caring, they might get a few percent.

            The problems we are facing as students, whether it is fee increases, dealing new contracts with the companies that control the laundry machines or the recent sexual abuse scandals and what should be done about them, are all at a level that is solvable only through administration. For other things, like the dealing of funds to Registered Student Organizations, we have seen the fraud and pocketing into friends that has happened.

            It seems, then, only sensical that these issues be put to the people who can do them effectively, with grace, and with experience: the administration.

There is no check and balance by having a SGA and an administration. There is only students, playing games with themselves, gaining recognition on their resume, all for doing nothing but wasting their time.

And that, I would say, is a waste of time for all of us. If some young adults want to play house, they can find a kid to babysit.

Ben Moriarty is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].