Rock the Vote

Today’s message from the Snark is brought to you by the Department of Those Highly Politically Active College Students, You Know The Type, Who Color-Code Their Fabric-Softened Clothes, Run For Every Available Office Including Vice President of Vending Machine Affairs, and Still Wet The Bed. Please give them a hand.*

This one is for all you college students out there. People: get out there and vote in your school elections. The Snark doesn’t want to have to say this again. Do you understand, fully understand, what it means to exercise your democratic rights as a student? No, the Snark didn’t think so. Well, allow me to explain it more fully to you. It works like this: if you DON’T exercise your democratic rights as a student, then there will be NO students for apathetic students like the Snark to hide behind. So there. I hope you are ashamed of yourselves.

This has been much on my mind, because recently, election season got into full swing at my current school, the Université Paris IV Centre Malesherbes (named after the eminent seventeenth-century royal court guy the Marquis de l’Université Paris IV Centre Malesherbes). Now you’ll have to forgive me my sentimentality here, but there is something profoundly stirring about the moment when your fellow students – the politically-minded leaders of tomorrow, with the dreams of leadership in their hearts and the condoms of leadership in their pockets – stand up before class, go up there in front of the whole auditorium, and bravely, steadily, voice their visions of the future. “Blah,” they say. “Blah blah. Blah blah, blah, blah blah blah.” I have no idea what they are saying, because everybody is talking over them about other things. But I am nonetheless profoundly stirred by this occasion, and with good reason: it shaves off class time. Therefore I am free to kick back and do my own thing,** and occasionally look up to realize the Leader of Tomorrow is still blah-blah-blahing about whatever. Blah-blah-BLAH BLAH BLAH, they say, reaching their climax of passion,*** at which point SPLOOSH I am free to dunk myself back down into the Great Pool of Cozy Apathy, which is where I write these columns.****

Getting a new cafeteria seems to be the central issue of most of the candidates’ platforms. Though I am not a full-time student over at old Marquis de l’Université, I can frankly understand the need. Our current cafeteria consists of the following:

1. Food (occasionally available, unless sold out) (usually sold out)
2. Vending machines that do not accept certain coins, defined as “coins used by humans.”
3. Students sleeping on windowsills.

So until this pressing issue is resolved, us students will be subject to frenzied Leaders of Tomorrow, with crazed eyes and foamy mouths, leaping upon our persons at every corner and promising to give us pedicures on the spot or whatever if we will only listen to their deepest feelings on blah blah blah. Me, I always do, and I highly suggest you do the same. You might be lucky enough to have an experience such as mine the other day. At the time, I was with a friend of mine who has the remarkable ability – like laser vision or picking things up with his toes – to be interested in The Issues. We were going about our business when we were accosted by a girl who wanted to campaign at us. This included handing us a brochure with the names of the candidates on it. Now in my defense, I tried, HONESTLY I did, to listen carefully to the girl’s speech and consider her views, but unfortunately this was impossible due to the fact that I happened to look down at her brochure and see that one of the candidates is named – really – “Aphrodite Hung.” I do not have to tell you how much The Issues began to mean to me at that point, except to describe the ensuing tableau in which my friend stood there nodding thoughtfully, making Informed Political Decisions, while I was doubled over like a person with a full-body bowel disorder, trying not to spit out her own skull ; that is how profoundly I was affected at that moment by The Issues. I only wish that you will one day experience the same.

Which is all to come back to my original point, which is:***** EXERCISE YOUR POLITICAL RIGHTS, STUDENTS. Don’t relax, react. Think not of your Facebook, but of your future.****** Get out there, whenever it is those elections are,******* and vote, vote, vote. Vote for improvement. Vote for justice.

And please please plEEEEEase -- you will make the Snark's day -- vote for Aphrodite.

* They need it.

** Usually draw pictures of dogs.

*** This is usually the part where they talk about a new cafeteria.

**** That’s why they’re always a little wet when I first post them.

***** Beats me.

****** When you will be on Facebook.

******** Probably yesterday or something.

©2010 Nicola McEldowney