To the newly elected officials of the Student Government Association,
You have to be insane to want to work at a newspaper, or in government. Especially the student varieties of both.
The student government and newspaper work not only at our jobs, but to make people care about what we are saying and putting into print. Few care about our opinions and the work we do, not even the administration. And they’ll tell us so. The body of people we want to serve barely know we exist, how we work, or whether we can be trusted. The only response we ever get about our work is when we get something wrong. Our power to act is always constrained, if not by the direct hand of intervention, then by the number of hours in a day. We wake up at five in the morning, we sweat out 16-hour days, and we work ever with one hand tied behind our backs.
Students, who are not involved in the inner workings of SGA or the Cardinal, know that there are hundreds of other resume-padding organizations one can join. There are places and people who would make it easy for us, where our opinions would be listened to. There are places where people would teach us how to improve at something instead of berating us when we fail to meet their expectations. It’s not too late. We could still get out of this. Everyone would understand, and no one would fault us.
If, knowing all this, we decide still to press on, we will have no one’s pity, only the enmity and suspicion that accompanies the insane. People won’t understand why we are doing this to ourselves. Sometimes we won’t either. For their sake, and ours, let us explain it to them:
We do it for the same reason we took our first step. Because we have always been the ones to take action. We do it for the same reason we clench our fists. Because we must defend that about which we are passionate. We do it because we have yet to be robbed of our will to do good, and because even if we fail, we will have stood our ground. We do it because it wakes us up at night and keeps us up at night. We do it because someone has to. Even if we don’t know what we’re doing, we do it because we know that it is important. And that it is our obligation to protect the keep until someone better shows up.
So before the Louisville Cardinal and the SGA find ourselves on opposing sides of an issue, perhaps it is best to take this moment to show you that we’re not so very different at our core. And to say, at the very least, congratulations.
