I’m blogging…OUTSIDE. The weather here has been bearable, even though snow is scheduled for Tuesday. I’m sitting in this chair outside the Honors College that has “fuck you” faintly carved into one of the armrests. There’s a name also craved underneath, but it’s too hard to make out. An extremely yellow leaf just blew off the tree a few feet away from me and smacked me in the face. It’s quite a rainbow looking at all the nature around here. They don’t call it Tree City for no reason, unless they decide to make everything Esplanade flat and perfectly mowed and boring.
Taylor Hall is a glance away. I was sitting on Blanket Hill facing the old victory bell a few minutes ago, but I couldn’t concentrate on blogging just sitting on the ground. Quite a few people have been walking by looking at the unfinished memorial and the May 4 informational signs today. It’s pretty much always older people, no matter which side of Taylor you’re facing.
I think about that a lot, and the more I see how this campus functions, the more I feel that urge to enact some change. Things feel frozen in time here, and to be frank, it’s not in a good way. The weather might be okay for a cardigan, but I feel like too many people here are frozen in ice cube trays of apathy and acceptance. When people are encouraged to take action, they rarely do. On a general level, depending on the world view of whoever you’re asking, the only way to make change is to either vote for someone who doesn’t truly represent you or risk your life marching in the street and relying on buzzwords. They rarely tell you that there’s room for sneaky introverts in that process. And that sneaky, introverted work, the subversive work, the work that fits my style the most, is often the hardest.
Hell, half of the time the people who are rallying the most for change seem dismissive of the prospect of change actually occurring. There’s an exhibition of letterpress prints in Taylor right now, and some of them are truly amazing. There’s something so satisfying about a good letterpress design, with the jumbled remixed letters and strong colors. There’s just nothing better. But when I was walking through the exhibit the other day, one of the posters on display, frankly, made me angry. It was very post-Roe hopeless. All the text was about how women have the “freedom” to die of an ectopic pregnancy and be incubators and the like, topped off by the declaration, “so much freedom!” Like I’m going to let anyone tell me what I can do with my body. You make change by just not letting people do nefarious things to you. Or, alternatively, you make it by letting yourself do the things that you know are the best, even if they are unpopular. Both of these types of defiance can be very hard, especially the last one, and neither get you many political brownie points. You get those points by beginning and ending at complaining. That changes nothing. Speaking, writing, creating art and music, holding events, educating others, proving other people wrong is how you change things. You have to show that you own them when they try to own you.
With this in mind, no matter how hard it is to accomplish, I’m really hoping to skew the ratio.
