…one powerless student body…
And an ASUN…in a tree? In a bind? In…uh…different? Yeah. Indifferent.
How often do you think about the ASUN? Well, if you aren’t a crotchity Student for Liberty, an anonymous watchwolf group, a “secret society” existing solely for the betterment of UNR whose members are variously named Deeds, Chinook, Schlitzes, Smalls, Butters, Shylock, Judas, Yellow Belly,Kobayashi, The Graduate, $eaman, Boomerang, Johnny Utah, and Keiko, or an ASUN hack yourself, the answer is probably: Not a whole heck of a lot.
When people disregard their government, a beautiful freedom is coupled with an unacceptable encroachment. The beauty is hardly perceived: not worrying about what your government is doing, not caring what a bunch of robed bureaucrats have to say about anything, not listening to those in unjustified positions over their fellow citizens. It’s wonderful and liberating. It is freedom in every sense of the word.
Unfortunately, this also leaves that government free: free of accountability, of responsibility, of justification. This gives those same people who we all care so little about the ability to do whatever they like with whatever resources it would like to claim it has. One doesn’t need to be versed in the history of societies or trained in public choice theory or even pick up the morning paper to see these effects, just look at our model government: the ASUN.
Briefly, the ASUN is inefficient, unjustified, propped up on a false proposition, in no way in a position to intelligently spend the money of 12,000 people, full of people placed there not by a vast majority vote but by small proportion of the population which exudes a huge influence, fiscally irresponsible, riddled with inconsistencies, full of unfixable problems, managed by a superficial system of checks and balances, stitched together with an unworkable hodgepodge of outdated procedures to deal with current situations, and has more committees than it knows what to do with, use, understand the purpose of, or logically explain to you, me, or anyone who asks why, how, or for what reason they can, should, and do exist.
Did you get all that? Me neither. Who would? Governments talk more than we want to listen. They talk and talk and speak and whisper and shout and proclaim and say that this and this and that and this and other stuff should be done and that you should care and that if you don’t you’re part of the problem and you should be ashamed, ashamed, and blamed and blamed.
It’s not your fault that governments are bad.
It’s not your fault that you don’t care that they’re bad.
It’s not your fault that you don’t care that you don’t care that they’re bad.
Governments are bad (that is, they are plagued with the faults mentioned a few paragraphs above), regardless of whether or not you care about them. You know that. They should know that too. We over here at the UNR Students for Liberty have tried every which way we can to make ASUN better.
These approaches have varied from talking with senators to attending their meetings to making a stand against proposed legislation to (for those of the more radical amongst us) calling for their complete abolishment. The case could be made that no government > bad government, but that is ultimately a discussion for another time. One thing we can all agree on is that a Good Student Government is better than a Bad Student Government. And right now, we need ASUN to be something different than a bad student government.
In the spirit of the holidays, we have tried to show places where the ASUN (like all governments) has gone wrong and even suggested here and there how things might be better. Whether these “gifts” are cherished, burned like coal, left to accumulate dust in the corner, dreaded like a homemade knitted sweater, or simply returned for store credit, I’m not sure. But at the very least, we hope we’ve given you (and the ASUN) something to think about. Now, get off the computer and go enjoy your family and friends.
