OK, studious types. Time to get back to work. Or play, or whatever it is you do to pass the time during classes.
I pass the time thinking about our world, and wondering. Politically, socially, culturally — add whatever other social science word you like. My world revolves around human interaction and questioning the way we form the misshapen weirdness we call reality.
I’m Mike Kleckner, the Perspectives editor this year, and this page of the Emerald is going to take you on a trip into the whacked-out world of politics and society. We will all come back intact — probably — but if we do our job right, everyone will sustain some singed hair and maybe a few scars. It’s part of life, y’all.
Here’s the brief bio sketch. You get no elaboration, but read my columns and you’ll get context. I’m 28, a Taoist, an anarchist, I’m queer, a pacifist, a vegetarian and a malcontent who grew up in a Volkswagen van as a moderately conservative, hard-left liberal. Go figure.
So, my pitch is for politics. This page will cover as much of campus life as we can manage to get pissed off about. But my shtick is the sometimes cesspool of corruption we call the modern-day political system.
Politics is fun! Sure, it’s a game, and the rich tend to dominate, but it isn’t boring or a waste of time. Politics is about people deciding how to get along. The formal version of which we call society, but those rules are really practiced much more informally between people.
On a personal basis, we decide what’s right and what’s wrong. Don’t try this at home, but say we yell at some jerk in a car who doesn’t know how to drive. That’s a political decision. In such an outburst, we’ve determined how much distress we have to take and how close that driver was to interfering with someone else’s direct experience. That’s politics. The suits in Washington just codify their outbursts in law.
When we all interact in the codifying-law-type stuff, we have a say in society. We get to decide what’s equitable and how to go about providing that equity to the masses. We get to decide how much is acceptable to take from another person (or how much is required for free expression), what sort of rights exist and the basis for deciding and enforcing those rights. Thinking about those basic ideas of how people should live together is a lot of fun. No, really.
OK, maybe I overstate my case. Maybe some people don’t think that sort of intellectual endeavor is fun. Maybe it’s just people like me, who end up with jobs like this.
But this whole process is freedom, y’all. It’s what we’re all so stinkin’ proud about in this country. We have the power, the right and the duty to examine society’s structure and to decide ways to change it and make it more like the picture of utopia we hold in our head when we bitch about how crappy this world is.
Perhaps the Emerald’s opinion page won’t turn you all into political junkies. However, we — the editorial board and columnists — will try to explain the theories on society that underlie all the current political nonsense to which we’re subjected. We will try to make sense of the spin and the propaganda (we’ll try — we’re not geniuses here). And we’ll try to cut through the slime in an entertaining way, so that maybe together we can talk about what kind of world it is we want.
Because that’s what politics in America does. It decides how we live.
So read Perspectives. And join the conversation. We will try not to preach at you from our lofty tower of righteousness, the way many newspapers do, telling you the “right answers to the world’s most pressing problems” (even though we do peer down at campus life from some lofty offices in the EMU).
We’ll have opinions, sure. Bet on it. But if we can explain to you the process of acquiring that opinion, then you can share your opinion and we can build our world together.
Make sure to tell us where the writers or the paper has gone wrong and why. Use e-mail or post a message on the Emerald’s Web site after you’re done reading. Call me at the office. Write a letter to the editor. Talk to me about a guest column. And be assured, I will respond.
There are other treats in store. You’ll get to know about them soon enough.
Make sure you read, think and interact. It’s the only way our world will work.
We need you. We need all of us, together. Because soon we, the college student population, will be in power, and we better get ready.
The Perspectives page will try to help us all along the path. And yeah, I know it’s politics, but it will be fun. I promise.