Are you suffering from Post- Student Government Elections Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSGETSD)? PSGETSD comes from walking in the breezeway during the Student Government election campaigns.
The most common symptoms include avoiding the breezeway at all costs, an overwhelming temptation to spit in the candidates faces and paper cuts all over the hands from receiving large amounts of fliers.
I myself suffer from the second symptom but I just can’t stay away from the breezeway, probably because I’m Colombian and can’t stay away the sensuous aroma of coffee. However there are others that may have been discouraged from using the breezeway and thus making life a little less convenient.
During the Student Government’s election campaign they pulled all the stops. They prostituted themselves to unsuspecting passers-by, hustled students for votes, bribed them with pizza, and of course some stuck to the basics by shaking hands and giving insincere smiles to all the potential voters. One candidate even dehumanized himself by walking around as one of those human sandwiches.
They also tried to make people care by announcing their $5.5 million budget. This only gave me nightmares. Just think, the candidates waste their own money on fliers, posters, t-shirts and pizzas to get into SG. What are they going to do with our money? Do you really think someone with these spending habits should control that much money?
They also had an interesting psychological approach. They would tell people to not forget to vote, hand them their flier and smile. It’s called association of ideas. Just what we need, people in SG that can mess with our heads.
It’s pretty embarrassing when SG hopefuls have to resort to such tactics. What does that tell you? It tells me that these people only care about getting elected and putting that on their scholarship and/or graduate school applications.
They stood in the middle of the breezeway and harassed and pushed and pestered every single student. Their excuse was that they needed to get the word out, which is what by the way? Oh that’s right, “vote for me!” çQue Ridí_culo!
It’s ridiculous because unless you’ve been ditching school for the past month or are that oblivious to oh, say . . . everything, you would know that SG elections are going on. Posters are up everywhere and you just have to look at the ground and you’ll see their fliers.
What was really creative was the “original” idea of jumping on the patriotic bandwagon. Big posters and laminated fliers with candidates dressing as nice as they can with their big fake smiles. Surrounding their pictures is an excellent red, white and blue design to remind people of their American duty to vote for the prettiest candidates. What I thought was interesting was that since we had the red party and the blue party, that neither came up with the slogan “this color doesn’t run”.
There were so many fliers just thrown on the ground (sometimes by the candidates themselves) that I was tempted to go around collecting them and seeing if I can make something out of them. But alas the fliers were mere remnants of their former life as a tree. It makes you wonder if SG can even recycle them, especially the laminated ones?
For two and a half weeks they took the breezeway, what’s supposed to be an oasis from the smoldering sun and the pouring rain, and they violated it. SG converted it into a circus and used it for the time-dishonored tradition of trading votes for pizza and shaking down students for their party support.
I’m not saying that SG elections are bad, but it’s disgraceful the way that they run their campaigns. This isn’t just another one of my diatribes, I honestly think the way SG runs their campaigns needs to be changed.
