This isn't going to be a column about the disgusting level of self-interest being displayed by our elected Student Association Executive Board.
Rather, I'm going to tackle the two column ideas I had in the last two weeks that actually wound up amounting to something.
The first was going to be a tongue-in-cheek pornography starring a building lock, a key card and a keychain fob, celebrating the decision by the administration to engage in the needless expense of replacing all the doors on the buildings in Hadley Village to prevent unauthorized subletting for apartments they're already being paid for.
Not to mention the cost of replacing one's ID card, since the $30 hike and the inconvenience of having to keep track of a card rather than the keys, and never mind that when our door broke last fall, the administration tried to get by having to repair our door by claiming that in three months, we'd have new locks.
The second was going to be gender wars as related to the Super Bowl beer campaigns and the basic realization that pop culture fosters a disrespectful attitude toward women. But I went online to watch the commercials - since I made a point of avoiding the Super Bowl itself - and my feminist side was repressed by the sheer ridiculousness of the Bush administration's attempts to quash drug use.
To kick off:
Since late November, Hadley Village has been advising its residents that we would need to have our UB cards for the spring semester. Replacing these cards used to cost $20, which was enough money to reinforce the need to keep track of the card without financially crippling those students who lost a card through no fault of their own.
Last year, however, UB decided to pump the cost up to $50 a pop for a piece of "equipment" that is virtually required if you attend our university - so much so that often, it was impossible to mount a proper search for your card when it was lost simply because you needed it again immediately.
The hitch, of course, was that if you reported your card as stolen rather than lost and filed a police report, your card could be replaced for free. No doubt there were people who lied on their reports to get a free card, but since the rest of us were being charged for a process that took less than 10 minutes for someone who was on a salary (and would be sitting at the UB Mart regardless of whether we needed our cards replaced), everything worked out.
Hiking the card price to $50 makes a new card the equivalent of over 10 hours of work, after taxes, at the sort of minimum-wage job most undergrads hold. By increasing the number of reasons students need to have their card on them at all times, the university not only forced those students who decided they could get by without the UB libraries, overpriced meal plans and a free USA Today to shell out $50, but stands to make a decent haul in the process.
On a case-by-case basis, it might be more expensive to refit locks for apartments when students lose their keys. But for the university to go to the expense of refitting the locks, and then decide they're going to raise security deposits and monthly bills as well, plus sustain the price increase for UB Card replacements ...
... Well, it certainly doesn't surprise me that e-board members at said university are trying to milk their fellow students for every penny they possibly can. It's only the example set by the administration of every other bureaucratic office in this institution.
The second column I had prepared was based on a friend's experience on Super Bowl Sunday and subsequent viewings of ads that ran during "the most important game of the year."
Originally, I was going to point out that men need goals other than "hot chicks in bikinis" serving them beer. After viewing most of the ads on iFilm.com, I realize that aside from the notion that all women should strive to drink light beer so their butts don't look like they were mail-ordered from Texas, or put up with male friends who pretend to care when really they're just watching football, there was an even more ludicrous campaign going on.
The White House Office for National Drug Control Policy aired two spots, titled "Knocked Up" and "The Visit." Both are about 30 seconds long. The first spot features a pair of adults, husband and wife, taking a pregnancy test... for their daughter, who apparently smoked marijuana. Their lives are about to change, viewers hear. They're about to become the youngest grandparents in town.
Like most spots meant to win the War on Drugs (a war which, like that on terrorism, we are currently losing), "Knocked Up" does nothing to address the reasons why a teen would start smoking pot. It simply sensationalizes the issue with a hot-button citation of a possible result of smoking weed.
"Marijuana," the piece says, is "more harmful than we all thought." Why? Because this girl is now pregnant? Because her clean-cut suburban parents, in their gorgeous house, aren't going to make sure she has the very best of everything? Or is the point of the ad that nice-looking parents aren't necessarily that, and she's going to suffer the worst beating of her life because of what she did?
"The Visit," on the other hand, shows a clean-cut man who receives a visit from the ghosts of people killed in drug-related incidents. One woman tells him how she had her throat slit and another victim says he was shot. They end the spot by reminding the man that drug money "supports terrible things."
Although I'm restraining myself from saying much on the State of the Union (except for "Who is the guy who was talking for the first half of the speech, and how did our war-mongering president manage to slip in there when nobody was looking?"), I would like to point out that "drug money supports terrible things" is an interesting approach to be taken by the committee that operates at the discretion of a man whose interests in Middle Eastern oil have brought us to the brink of war... again.
