I remember a while back reading The Polytechnic editorials section and hearing the rather verbose comments on how horrific the usage of vulgar speech was. That it was compared with filling the airwaves with garbage to write or say it. It particularly rises to my mind how absolutely silent such voices are when a similar type of trash fills our campus. I’m speaking of the sheer audacity of political student advertising these days.
When I arrived back from spring break, I came in the back door of my suite. I found it plastered with ads for the Banana Party. It brought to mind how ridiculous advertising got last GM Week and wondering to what levels they’d go this time—above the beautiful graffiti in bathrooms and covering windows with paper methods of last year.
It didn’t take me long to find out; I hiked upstairs and found that my suite had been similarly matched with political ads. Truly, a lovely welcome back to being a student here to find such litter happily dumped over the doors of the suite. Since then, I’ve had to deal with their political advertising invading all manners of personal space, from them coming and campaigning table-to-table during dinner, to them swarming work areas to tell me to vote for them, to the entire pathway from my dorm room to the far end of campus not having a single spot I can stand and not be looking at a political poster.
It’s ridiculous. There’s simply no restraint whatsoever. It is completely out of line how much these fifteen to twenty people are allowed to cover our campus with their trash for weeks. The most mocking part of it all is, for the large part, I do not have a clue what these idiots campaigning stand for. I’ve seen a grand total of two posters out of the thousands posted around our campus that even mention so much as a stance and don’t just indicate that they want a fancy title next to their name and so that they can brag on their resumes. During our meals, in the bathrooms, and at work, they harass us students who are actually here to work for degrees and not play around. And we allow this? Free speech is important, but it shouldn’t mean that the campus gets covered in trash for weeks.
Notably, the one venue that they haven’t tried to feed political trash down so far has been e-mail. The one venue that would at least allow students to say, “I don’t want to hear this,” and ignore the e-mails and be done with it is avoided in favor of plastering over our nice campus with all sorts of multicolored, “Vote for Me, random name,” signs.
It’s disgusting, it’s litter, and I’d much like to see it gone from our campus and those responsible for continually raising the bar on what’s “acceptable” punished. For three years now, I’ve watched this spectacle continue to get worse. Here’s hoping someone in charge realizes how ridiculously out of line it’s gotten and curtails this abuse of our campus.
Philip Bloom
CSYS ’06
