We Need Action

I can recall a discussion one day at dinner. After the debacle that was our IT department cutting off internet for the students, we still haven’t quite resolved the issue. I have many gamer friends who are more tech savvy than me.

One of my friends, outraged at the prospect of never hooking up his Xbox 360 to the network (out of the notion that it’s too much of a strain on the network), has started a letter writing campaign over Facebook to increase the expediency of their working on the issue. After having this discussion, I began to notice the plight.

It took me two minutes to download a single megabyte from Mozilla for a new Firefox theme. My internet browsing isn’t as swift as it used to be. When is the last time anyone has used the wireless around here? These are real problems that imply that we aren’t getting the full value out of the $107 we’re paying this semester in technology fees.

So as I was discussing this at the aforementioned dinner, a person who Esquire Magazine Chuck Klosterman would call my archenemy stated in his absolute lack of sense that this is all because we haven’t been proactive enough. In retrospect, I really he was partially true.

If there were legions of people nagging those in the basement of Sale Hall everyday, I could guess all our technology woes would be solved quicker. If there was a protest on Gloster Hall for more assistance in the cost of schooling, I would guess there’d be more people who could afford being here. If there were more people flooding the mail with how we as students feel unsafe here, I could surmise our campus police would watch the gates and surrounding neighborhoods more than being the nuisance to the students and spraying less mace in the face of Spelmanites.

When Morehouse’s priorities are in order, we would have the capacity to succeed in the ways we have always stated. This is dependant not only with the administration or with student government but with the actual students. We’re the one’s that pay the bills so we should be the ones demanding the service.

We should be the ones who demand better food before workers tell me to take off my hat. We should be the ones who demand adequate living conditions before a residential staff presses togetherness. We should be the ones who demand the administration taking a stance on the young men of Jena, Louisiana before they take a stance on the height of our pants.

In a student centered institution that has the power to not pay the bills, we should act like the dissatisfied customers that we know that we are. The student is the client.

----------------
Now playing: Aram Khachaturian - Adagio Of Spartacus And Phrygia
via FoxyTunes

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artistic Partnerships

I had intended for my next post to be about America's socio-economic economy, but I'll save that for a little bit later. I was just reading through my normal load of publications and I ran across a brief article that bothered me so much upon reading it that I just had to write something about it. NME reports this morning that John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page got tired of waiting for Robert Plant to make up his mind about doing a new tour with Led Zeppelin and they're just going on without him . Considering how late to the game I am to one of the best bands ever, I cannot feel right in saying whether or not this must stand, but I know this certainly bothers me. Maybe it's a matter of perspective, but at what is the art still pure from its source when the authors are missing? Is Led Zeppelin still Led Zeppelin if Bonzo's son is playing the drums and some other dude is doing all the singing? When it was 75% original band and things were kept in the family for the ot
Read more

To Be Young, Gifted, Black, and a Jazz Enthusiast: Apparent Needle in a Haystack

About a month ago, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR's A Blog Supreme  put together a group of lists of recent gateway jazz albums from prominent young jazz enthusiasts and bloggers.  The Jazz Now Project was a rather brilliant idea and opened up a lot of discussion and awareness about the future of jazz and really shows what the field looks like right now.  Early on the the culmination of this project, Jarenwattananon opened the submission of suggestions not only to those he specifically asked but also to other readers of the blog and on the email list.  So it didn't take me long for me to submit my own Jazz Now list .  (And special thanks to him for linking the post on the compilation of Jazz Now submissions. I got my highest hit count yet of 29 readers because of him. I really need more readers.) When I emailed him the link to my blog for submission, Jarenwattananon thanked me for my list and mentioned that I was the only black guy to have sent anything.  He figured that this
Read more

2022: I Lost My Father and Got Into Milton Nascimento

Image
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." --Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Folks have been bandying that quotation around the last few weeks on Twitter, the social network that just won't quit no matter what literal Apartheid-era Afrikaner and dumb Bond villain does to stomp all over it, asking what 2022 was for them. I didn't know after ruminating on it for some time, ultimately joking it was a year that made very pointed, declarative statements about how my life herein would go in some ways and made phrases that trailed off into nothing, leaving me to guess its intentions in others. It was a year of feast and famine as my years often are, and always interesting, as I often hope my life is. I wasn't not entertained, even when I was sad or even when I was irritated, and that's always been my hope to approach life that way. But I still don't know what this year was to me. Freelance music journalist Larry Fitzm
Read more