Dear Members of the AU Undergraduate Senate,
It’s a new semester. It’s a new calendar year. You had a good first few meetings in October and November, enjoyed a nearly two month break, and today you return to the realm of Ward 5 with three straight months ahead of you to dictate the direction of our student government. But I beg you, please don’t just dive blindly into the wading pool of agendas and bills and motions. Take this moment for reflection, and look at yourselves as a body. Who are you?
It’s not hard to find the original reason for your existence. You don’t have to look any farther than the second paragraph of the SG’s Constitution, where it reads, “The purpose of the Undergraduate Senate shall be to represent, legislate, and delineate policies regarding the concerns of the American University undergraduate student body with regards to academics, programming, and university policy.” And then, perhaps as an afterthought, the paragraph continues, “The Undergraduate Senate shall also serve to ensure proper consideration and exercise of the judicial and executive powers of the Student Government.”
Well, I’ve spent thirteen months observing you from my role as your parliamentarian during the 4th & 5th Senate sessions, and as an interested student (and two-time proxy) during the current 6th Senate session, and I am concerned that you are continuing to fall short of fulfilling your duty to represent the needs of AU students.
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This is part two of my five-part blog series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the District of Columbia. The series will be published on each Monday in January 2011.
Last week, I inaugurated this blog series with a history of DC’s Home Rule efforts, but this week, I’m going to lighten it up a bit with more of a primer on how to navigate your way around the city. Because Washington is a city that has been laid out and planned in a very interesting way that is quite logical and systematic on paper, but in reality, it gets quite confusing for a lot of people.
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It is hard for me to believe everything that has transpired in the past two days. Forty-eight hours ago, I wrapped up a restful and uneventful Winter Break by celebrating my brother’s birthday with my family, and proceeded to pack my bags and hop an early morning flight to DC. But since I’ve arrived here, settling in and stewing ahead of the start of the next semester, the amount of news developments, both local and national, and the characterization of them has really hit home and led me to wonder just what else 2011 has in store for us.
I mean, I can live with a minor earthquake hitting near home right after I left. But what about some of the other things that have been happening this past week? What does it really say about the state of our society, and our nation?
On Sunday, a bunch of teens beat up a man at L’Enfant Plaza Metro here in Washington, but no one at the station bothered to intervene or help. Even the station manager didn’t intervene until after the bloodied man pounded on the info kiosk begging for them to call 911. And then Metro didn’t even acknowledge the incident until Thursday, after the video of the incident went viral.
On Thursday, packages sent to Maryland Gov. O’Malley ignited with incendiaries, a scenario which repeated yesterday at a post office annex in Northeast DC with a package sent to Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano. And apparently whoever’s been sending these is still at large.
And the big on-campus news that I arrived to yesterday was that picketers from the Westboro Baptist Church will protest outside of campus on Friday. Apparently they consider my campus to be “fag-infested” and “pervert-run” and will be protesting our campus’ “promotion of homosexuality.” Funny, I seemed to have not noticed that portion of the curriculum that much.
And finally, there was the news that broke today from Tuscon, Arizona of the unspeakable violence that was carried out against Representative Giffords and her constituents, and of course my prayers are with her, the six people (including one nine-year-old girl) killed, the others wounded, and their families and friends. It is unthinkable that now, in 2011, we are still witnessing assassination attempts against political leaders the likes of which we saw in the 1960s.
What has happened to us?
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It seems to have become a tradition for me to write a pre-game blog post at the start of each semester, typically a day or two before I head to the airport to make the cross-country trek. And usually I share my class schedule for the semester and then expound on a list of goals and expectations that I have for that semester to be better than the one previous. But why? Because quite frankly, almost none of my expectations and goals have ended up coming to pass after all was said and done. So, here I go again, as if I’m suffering from insanity or something. Perhaps I am.
Nevertheless, I start out this spring semester in quite a different place than I started out last fall. I left summertime in San Francisco with the belief that this was going to be a different, more enjoyable sophomore year, where I would be able to take things less seriously and enjoy myself. And my big area of interest was my pursuit of all things Student Government, as I anticipated the coming launch of their new website and a continued career in the Undergraduate Senate.
Then I went back to campus only to find that AU wanted to turn us all into “wonks,” our orchestra director was incredulously denied tenure, and as SG IT Director, it was more important for me to sit in a noisy office for fifteen hours a week than be able to focus on getting real work done on important projects. And that Student Government work that seemed so important to me at the beginning of the semester is no more, as I am no longer a part of the Student Government.
But regardless of whether or not I look back on this semester believing that I was naive, I firmly believe that this semester will be different. For starters, I’ve got a pretty good looking schedule this year:
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This is part one of my five-part blog series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the District of Columbia. The series will be published on each Monday in January 2011.
Yesterday, Vincent Gray was sworn in as the seventh Mayor of the District of Columbia. Also sworn in for new terms were seven members of the thirteen-member DC Council and 268 commissioners of the 37 Advisory Neighborhood Commissions in the District.
Did you follow any of that? Chances are, probably not. Before I started attending AU, the fact that the federal government wasn’t the only government in Washington, DC certainly hadn’t crossed my mind that dramatically. But now, after calling Washington my second home for a year and a half, I’ve learned quite a lot about my adoptive city, hence why I’m dedicating this month to write this new blog series.
The District of Columbia actually has quite a bit more within its 68 square miles than monuments, museums, and federal government buildings. Throw in eleven public and private four-year educational institutions, a number of parks, and oh yeah, actual residents. The 2010 Census just announced that the District’s population has risen to 601,723 residents. That’s almost 40,000 more residents than the entire state of Wyoming, and only about 24,000 shy of the state of Vermont. Yet despite this, residents in DC have almost no representation in the national government, and have only had control over their own local affairs for the past 36 years.
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