Yay! I go to a really liberal school! Yay!

From IMAO:

He then looked at the students. "High school is not a time for foolishness like this. This is a time to learn math and grammarness and play sports, or, alternatively, to flunk out and ruin your life. It is not the time to learn to be a political retard; that's what college is for. You students need to demand more from your teachers."

That quote relates to what I'm going to be talking about... so, I'm on the student government at my very elite, very liberal college...and you might be surprised to learn that lots of other conservatives are as well...maybe someone noticed that we knew how to get things done. However...there are still plenty of flaming liberals. And they're cool...I love them just like the rest of my friends...especially when they make me laugh...like this week.

On the agenda for this week are two priceless motions...one of which doesn't matter, and one of which is scary 'cause it just might pass.

The non-scary one is a Free Burma motion. Ok. Cool. Opressed country...dangerous dictator...I've heard this story before. I just don't think these students want to solve this problem in the same way we solved the other on. However...they do have some suggestions...we've got a statement 'respectfully urging and recomending' the appropriate shareholder activism and letter writing by important people at our school...cool, fine. That's ok. I don't remember turning Student Government Association's President's Council into the UN, but whatever...it's a recomendation to the right people, and it can't hurt. But it is funny to think that we might actually make a difference, so I say we should go for it.

The scary one is a motion to prohibit clubs and groups that get money from us (that's all the student run groups and clubs) from spending that money at Walmart...Woah, Nelly! This is scary because it might actually pass, and it's something that we might actually be able to cary out. Now, I'm not walmarts biggest fan, but this strikes me as going a bit too far. I mean...I know it's constitutional, but do we really want to force students to boycott a company, essentially just because it's succesful? I don't even care about the reasons for the boycott...do we really want to force clubs to spend their money at approved locations? It strikes me as slightly fascist...(and by that I mean something bad, not necesarily something fascists actually did). Like I said above...I'm not walmarts biggest fan...but that has more to do with crummy customer service and crummy non-name brand goods than the fears about what walmart does to a local economy. Just last week the economist ran piece about walmart that you should go check out...it found that when walmart comes to town, it only destroys 30 jobs for every 97 it creates. But that doesn't even matter. We can all agree that walmart is evil and I still wouldn't want to restrict student clubs from spending money there...anything else is just rediculus.
Hopefully I'll be able to amend the motion to just a recomendation...then everyone feels good and we still get a list of alternatives presented...so we can all find out that K-Mart is right next to Walmart...and they even accept purchase orders so that clubs leaders won't have to spend their own money and then wait a month to get reimbursed...what a novel idea. I probably won't tell everyone that this is what I do when I need to spend club money because I'm trying to get the motion to fail...but the option is out there.

Anyway, those things (plus the Bluedog democrats on C-Span) made me laugh last night, so I thought I'd pass them along. Let me know what you think...and if you have any suggestions about how I should convince college students that walmart isn't evil, I'd love to hear it...why don't you try out the new e-mail address? or you could just post a comment....