COLUMN!!!

MY LAST POST served as the template for my first newspaper column. Word on the street is that people liked it! 

http://media.www.hamlineoracle.net/media/storage/paper1367/news/2009/04/21/Opinion/This-Liberal.Sandbox-3718293.shtml

When Nothing Needs to be Done.

Recently, I've been doing some thinking about my life, the college I chose, and the environment into which I chose to be thrust. Hamline is a liberal university, yes? And that's cool because I have a liberal political ideology. This means that Hamline loves its gays, its ethnic minorities, and its culturally underprivileged. A lot.

Unfortunately, this also means that nobody cares.

This is the odd problem that we face when we choose to exist within a safe pod of like-minded people. It is incredibly evident in some of its organizations.

Spectrum is Hamline's LGBT organization. I was exceedingly excited to find myself a part of an LGBT organization because I worked so hard to put one together at my Catholic high school. I figured that my experience with a college org would be so much better because I expected it to be active in the community, serving and working to benefit society.

NO SUCH LUCK.

Every meeting I ever attended was exceptionally... pointless. I thought it was stupid, so i just fell out of the organization. I stopped attending meetings, and I lost my respect for the leaders of the organization. Few people came, and only the same handful of people ever came to the meetings. The most memorable meeting involved a rousing game of Pretty Pretty Princess. Kind of pathetic.

Then I visited St. Thomas's LGBT org.

They were pretty amazing. They went out and participated in self-orchestrated service projects, requiring hours of service for its members. And St. Thomas is a conservative Catholic university! I was pretty shocked. Then I thought about it and I realized something.

If everyone is okay with it, what needs to be changed? Hamline's openness to the socially underprivileged is okay... but when the students never expose themselves to the greater community, it encourages a sense that no more changes need to take place because everything is okay. 

Everything is open at Hamline! But there happens to be a world outside of Hamline that Hamline too many Hamline students choose to neglect. 

What... is going on?