As a student body, can we really complain about our school and rally for change if we don’t show up? Yes our housing needs work, yes some of these professors and staff need a major reality check, yes Southern is money hungry and yes Southern needs to stop charging us for a jaguar that hasn’t been on campus since 2007 but how can we rally for change and expect it to be done when we don’t actually get up and go talk or protest to the people that can make it happen. Administration and SGA had an entire town hall meeting where they stated word for word “Bring your Sidechat concerns” and we could go up in these people’s faces and tell them this is the problem with the school we need it fixed, but for the amount of people that like to bark and complain on Sidechat or on Social Media about things like this, the place was less packed than expected.
Even if we aren’t focusing on the recent town hall what about regular Senate meetings? Senate meetings are every Tuesday evening in the Union yet they are almost always scarce. These Senate meetings have the student leaders that we can actually bring up our complaints to and they can get the word out for us, yet we don’t use them. We love to be Sidechat warriors about how this or that needs to be changed, but we don’t show up to the places that would help us make the change needed on this campus. Is it fear? Is it not wanting to be bothered with the concern? Either way, why state something that needs to be changed if you’re not willing to help become an active solution to the problem?
While Southern University isn’t a perfect school by a long shot, and it definitely needs a bunch of changes with staff, housing, fees, and way more, can we truthfully sit here and complain if we don’t talk to the people who can change it for us? As a student body, we’re more powerful than we realize if we band together not only electing student representatives for our SGA based on policies and their willingness to actively change what happens here on campus rather than voting for our friends and who gave the best crawfish at Pretty Wednesday, we can get the stuff changed that we want to see on campus instead of sitting around and waiting for it to be handed to us.