Our Voice

So, where were you last weekend? I can tell you where you probably weren’t: Milledgeville.
Yeah, we know some of you stayed. But we bet we know where you weren’t on Monday: The city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.
Here at The Colonnade we’ve gone into this tirade in “The Voice” before, where we admonish the students for not actually staying in town on the weekends and doing things with the community. But we polled the room as this was written, and found out that of the eight editors in the office, only five of us had been in town that weekend. Several of us stayed in town overnight but would go to Macon during the day or evening.
And yes, only one of our reporters attended the MLK Day celebration, and the rest of us were occupied elsewhere.
So now that we’ve ‘fessed up’ and stepped off our soapbox, let’s take a look at the situation here from the same standpoint as everyone else.
It’s not that there’s nothing to do in Milledgeville – we’ve got restaurants and bars open every night of the week, a movie theatre with some of the latest films, a skating rink that only a few members of the staff have visited, a bowling alley and a nice lake not even ten minutes up the road.
So what does your home city have that Milledgeville doesn’t?
The key word was home. Home, wherever that is, feels warm and inviting, with family and old friends waiting for you. Milledgeville, particularly for new students may feel a bit daunting and unfriendly.
It seems to be a common feeling among students that the majority of the residents of Milledgeville don’t like the college students much. And unless we’re very much mistaken, it would seem that many college students are none-too-friendly back.
It seems like the lack of students in town and their attending town functions is related to this mutual distaste that the students and residents share for each other.
Of course, the students dislike Milledgeville because of such changes as two-hour parking and the rezoning to limit where students can live. The city dislikes us because we hurt downtown business by clogging the parking places and the presence of a badly maintained college-student house can kill the value of homes in a neighborhood.
It seems like a vicious cycle – the city has to look out for its best interests, the students have to look out for theirs, and when there is overlap, the two clash.
So no wonder some students are inclined to leave on weekends. Who would want to stay in the middle of a relative war zone? Especially not when a more familiar town awaits back home – wherever that may be.
So what can we, the students do? And what can the residents of Milledgeville, and the City Council do? How can we mutually overcome these hurdles and create an environment in which the students and residents live in harmony?
Hell if we know.

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Posted by Colonnade Archives on Jan 25 2008. Filed under Opinion, Our Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry