We get harpooned for it all the time - at the dinner table back home, on television, by suits wearing power ties and even in The Spectrum.
I speak, naturally, of apathy.
No one votes less than us, no one is less politically involved, and to make matters worse, it's not like we're collectively losing any sleep over it. So what happened here? What changed between the politically charged dynamic of our parents' generation and the general social malaise of our own?
As a student of politics and of history I can see an overwhelming trend that accounts for pervasive apathy among those in our generation, and that is information.
We've been bombarded by information though billboards, television, radio, PDAs, and the Internet for as long as many of us care to remember. We grew up in a marketed environment, where politicians had the same image as Crazy Eddie or Carrot Top - prepackaged, contrived and phony.
Because we had to deal with so much information at once, we got really good at filtering out the stuff that appeared empty and useless, thus disregarding the nonsense that politicians and their ilk spew at us.
We got so good at ignoring these phonies that even when we're directly affected by what they do we recognize them for what they are - largely empty and useless.
Which says a lot considering how much time we spend playing Snood.
Last spring 1,777 students took part in voting in the Student Association general election, a number that comes out to about 10 percent of the undergraduate student body. We did a little better than that the year before when there was competition on the ballot, scoring 2,001 voters.
The fact is, UB students are just like anyone in our demographic, easily recognizing empty promises and empty leadership, and ignoring them accordingly.
Clearly it's not necessarily wise to ignore people who spend your money, but I'm not speaking to the wisdom of apathy, merely to its causes.
I personally congratulated George Pape following the announcement of Chris Rock's agreement to perform here, and I'll be there Sunday night too for the show. But with that being said, the leadership at the student government level is making the same mistake that leadership on the national level makes - they're far too much about simply how cool something will look and sound.
For instance, it was really cool seeing that statue of Saddam Hussein fall down in Baghdad in April, but it's a whole lot less cool seeing Baghdad in November in the aftermath of poor planning.
Chris Rock I'm sure will be great, but is life appreciably better at UB for the rank and file since the Momentum Party took office?
The answer is no. I'm sure the books are balanced, and I'm sure they work really hard, just like I'm sure George W. Bush and his band of merry men work really hard when their not raising hundreds of millions of dollars for an election.
Still, when they promise the world and say what they think we want to hear it's no better than the offers I get from e-mail spam. Despite that, I still vote and stay informed, but I like I said, politics is something I'm actually interested in. For the people too busy with biochemistry or statistics to know the difference between the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Howard Dean, I think it all goes into the brain's equivalent of the junk mail box.
We get blasted for apathy, and sometimes we deserve it. But frankly these cookie-cutter wastes of linen and lapel pins ought to get their acts together and recognize that our generation isn't going anywhere for a while.
And we are really good at seeing though them.
