I thought nothing had the ability to drag me kicking and screaming away from a television when high-stakes international curling was on, but the substantial debate surrounding the Student Government elections at UF this year managed to do the trick.
For the longest time, I thought SG elections for the fraction of students who were deeply committed bore a striking resemblance to the relationship I have with curling. At specific intervals of time, we would get impassioned about wholly insignificant things and furious at people we would otherwise completely ignore or attempt to sleep with.
For all of my professed love for the sport of curling, I still have absolutely no idea how one gets to handle the vaunted broom or gingerly slide the big-stone-disc-thingy for my beloved Belgian curling team. All I really know is that every four years I get so dang worked up over curling that I sometimes pass out from a heady combination of sheer unadulterated joy, virulent anger toward those bastards who dare to face my Belgian warriors and the luck-inducing habit of placing a celebratory plastic bag over my head during especially close matches.
In a similar vein, nobody knows anything about what SG actually does outside of propping up the entire high-gloss flier industry in this part of the state. Sure, it is an excellent outlet for ambitious, type-A personalities who would otherwise be wasting their time stuck in some dead-end charitable organization or church group. In light of recent developments in electioneering at UF, though, my preconceived notions about the entire world of SG have been irreparably altered.
Somebody put a bunch of fliers on some cars. I am no scholar of history, but I struggle to think of a warlord or dictator who has even come close to this level of wanton disregard for the sanctity of the human condition.
I know, it sounds ridiculously over-the-top and outside the realm of human decency — but if it happened in our sleepy, little, college town, it could happen anywhere. This threat is real. Maybe where your parents or grandparents live, some shadowy figure is crouching in the dark right now waiting to pounce with shiny paper in hand.
I don’t use the word hero very often, but whatever brave soul first got seriously worked up about this is the greatest hero in American history. With this blight on our very way of life out in the open, a healthy and vigorous debate has taken place across the pages of this newspaper regarding issues that speak to the core of our shared humanity. And fliers.
Whichever group of earnest and eager go-getters wins next week will invariably get dressed up in grown-up clothes and spend millions of dollars, but this most recent development in modern, American politics puts to bear the efforts of our best and brightest young scions on some of the contemporary issues that will shape our changing world. And fliers.
Certain that the future of our country is secure in the hands of such promising proto-politicians may be soothing, but it doesn’t come close to the sweet calm induced by my lucky plastic bag.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His columns appear on Thursdays.
