Fliers pose pollution problem during homecoming week
Ok. I admit it. The first dropping in the litter box about fliers and chalking on the opposite page is mine. I hate it so much I’ve decided to take it on in a column of my own.
I hate the fliers because they are in annoying abundance and are no more than fluorescent litter on wooden craft sticks. They pollute the campus like a busted bag of discarded food wrappers.
The chalking has taken a toll on our sidewalks. It’s one thing to read about the girls and guys running for homecoming court with each waking step I take, but it’s another to witness what looks like sabotage-wet chalk on a sunny day.
But more important than the awful aesthetic these fliers and chalkings add to campus is the question why. Why such activism now? Why not for SGA elections? Why not for the tsunami relief?
Copies on this campus are 10 cents a page. I’m sure there are at least one hundred pages of poorly designed fliers out there, which totals $10. I’ve also seen t-shirts, banners, pins, table-toppers and other miscellaneous paraphernalia that must have taken money to create and time to organize. So that’s $10 here, $30 there and so on. While that may not seem like much on a smaller scale, let’s look at the bigger picture.
Ten dollars could buy a couple of fast-food value meals, or possibly a discounted CD. But it can also assist in the rebuilding of Asian countries ravaged by the tsunamis. It can help send a care package to soldiers still fighting in Iraq. It’s $10 that could go to something a little more important than a popularity contest on a small college campus.
How can Student Activities not control this? While the messages on the fliers are generally not obscene, Student Activities must ensure that what is published is not inappropriate (check last week’s Colonnade for more on that mess). They ignore the fact that the method of distributing fliers could be just as obscene as any slogan or message printed on them.
Post-election Friday will be fun, too. Like the expired fliers that have remained untouched on many a bulletin board, will these artifacts of homecoming stay around until every drop of neon nastiness fades to a psychedelic front campus? Probably not.
The campus groups will join their respective representatives and shovel all the fliers into a non-biodegradable plastic bag to be thrown in a dump to rot away for all eternity.
All of this, for a popularity contest on a small college campus.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Feb 4 2005. Filed under Opinion.
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