To the Editor,
My name is Daniel Kington, and I am a freshman running for Student Senate as the Honors Tutorial College senator on the BARE ticket. When the year began, I had no inclination to run for Senate. In fact, when I was driving to campus for move-in, my sister told me the student government had been “taken over by radicals,” and — while I thought this sounded kind of cool — I also found it very intimidating. My intimidation did not fall away quickly.
After the now infamous “Blood Bucket Challenge,” I was left confused more than anything. I didn’t know much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the polarizing force of the action left me feeling even more disconnected from the student government than I was before.
“It’s true,” I remember thinking, “Our student government is run by radicals.”
However, as the year went on and I became increasingly involved in organizations, like the Sierra Student Coalition, Food Matters and eventually the Student Union, I began to realize that our student government was not radical — not at all. Regardless of what you think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is not radical to demand an accessible and affordable university. It is not radical to demand a safe space for all identities; it is not radical to say that students and faculty should have a say in the decisions that directly affect them, and it is not radical to demand socially and environmentally responsible investment, as decided upon by the students of the university.
These things are called radical; they are called radical because they are not yet normalized. Instead, tuition hikes have been normalized. Administrative overstepping, most brutally exemplified through the #GreatBatScareof2015, has been normalized. Complacency with current investments in fossil fuels, corporate food and oppressive regimes has been normalized. And above all, a disregard for the importance of student opinion has been normalized. I think what’s truly “radical,” at least as the term is generally used, is to remain complacent with these normalizations. The idea of such complacency is radical because it is out of touch and unreasonable.
So, no, radicals don’t run our student government. And if the BARE ticket is elected this year, it won’t be run by radicals next year. It will be run by people who see through current normalizations and who believe that a better future is possible within our university and within the world.
Daniel Kington is a freshman at Ohio University studying English.
