Insight

Why leaping on grenades beats thumb-twiddling any day

By Alan "Saboteur Charlie X-Ray" Franklin

George Eliot wrote that "any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing."

That's why I enjoyed reading the recent response of five (that's all five, right?) SGA senators to some thoughts I offered on last year's failed elections.

Not to mention all the clever ways one can use the word "pluck" in a rhyme.

So I'm not going to bore you, long-suffering Metropolitan reader sitting in the Tivoli trying to decide whether or not to use this paper as a napkin for that Big Mac special sauce you just dribbled, with 500 words of counterpoints for their ill-informed whine-fest.

Go read last year's Met archives, like they should have done before they wrote it, and refute it yourself.

No, let's talk about that shiny happy-assed future that Dennis Bergquist and our SGA says awaits us just as soon as they get their paperwork in order.

I'm as glad as anybody that the guy they threw off the election commission in 2003 is back with a new set of "bylaws" that gives him this bizarre, medieval torture chamber-style control over the campaigns and candidates.

Just like I laugh my ass off at the suggestion that the "illegal polling station" was, um, illegal-when the same laws they cite would make Metro's entire online ballot methodology a crime.

While your fresh-faced senators pore over Mickey Mouse Club hat specifications and jump on last year's grenades, this school is facing the greatest crisis in its history.

The outcome of the election taking place this Nov. 1 will have enormous consequences for everyone at Metro, faculty and students alike.

The prospect of thousands of good students being forced out of college by skyrocketing tuition is something that should have every single one of us outraged and volunteering down at the YES on Referendums C & D office.

I asked SGA Student Trustee Brian Glotzbach this past week why the SGA has been completely silent on the issue, in marked contrast to other student governments around the state.

Apparently, he got a memo saying "state employees" were verboten from getting involved.

He still hasn't responded to my question of how he was any more of a "state employee" than Andrew Romanoff or Bill Owens, or how the UCCS student government got away with holding a major pro-C&D rally last Thursday.

That's right, friends, even though president Jordan supports C&D in the most explicit terms possible under the circumstances, and CU president Hank Brown, student governments across Colorado, elected "state employees" across the state whose job it is to (wait for it) TAKE POSITIONS ON IMPORTANT ISSUES, your Metro SGA is stymied by a goddamn memo.

What's really frustrating is that if you corner them, to a man, they'll tell you they personally are for the referendums-like any student with the barest sense of his or her own interests.

But no, they're not, as fill-in President Dennis Bergquist says, a "do-nothing organization."

In fact, he says nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather than pointing out the obvious problems with this statement, I invite these eager and clearly verbose new senators to prove it accurate while they still can.

Alan Franklin is a history major. He maybe contacted at franklal@mscd.edu