I was in most regards a terrible senator. Residents of KB 2008/2009: I am sorry. Attendance-wise I think I did pretty well, although I’m sure I squandered many a critical pre-meeting schmooze by insisting on arriving no earlier than 7:14pm. During debates, I sought to make meaningful contributions toward solving the problems at hand while using as few latinate words as possible. I did orientation drills and tabled at the blood drives and even stayed for the awkwardly obligatory post-meeting parlor games, but I never wrote legislation or made calm, concerned faces at our critics, or actually extended a warm welcome to our guest speaker this evening from the Red Cross.
And then there were the Cans. I hung my Cans sporadically at best, which’s basically the worst offense a negligent senator can commit. As if to add insult to injury, I didn’t even have the decency to respond to good old-fashioned guilting and threats, as the times I did put my Cans up seemed pretty unrelated to how many people claimed to be upset about their absence. In the end, only poor Gili Ben-Yosef could get through to me. Gili chaired SAC with cheerful resolve from her command center on the fourth floor, and she had the most disarming mixture of “threat” and “plead” I had ever encountered. Her children won’t stand a chance. If you stumbled awake on Friday morning and found SGA On The Can hanging in your favorite stall (provided we had the same favorite stall–I only did 1-2 stalls per bathroom, max), you had Gili to thank.
So I was lousy with the Cans. My debating was inflammatory, my Charades were unguessable, and my commitment to bathroom reading was nil. But there was one thing I did do well, albeit just as sporadically. Every so often I would take my anglo-hieroglyphic notes from the previous meeting, lay them out on the old Haywood Wakefield, and type out an email to my House: The (not even kind of) Bi-Weekly Senator’s Update. The emails read quite a bit like this and were comprised of little blurbs about the issues that were discussed in the meetings, legislation that got passed, upcoming events of note, and the occasional public service-y type message about not drinking like a fool. No idea how many of the House’s 200 residents actually read it (going to conservatively guess 50), but sometimes those that did would come up to me and tell me they enjoyed it. Gili loved it, which, of course, was all the encouragement I needed. Most of all, it fulfilled one of the key tenets of the Senator position: It opened a dialogue with the House about the issues that affected them.
I’d be surprised if I did more than four or five of these in the two semesters I served, but even that was four or five more than got writ by the average Assembleyman. I don’t know by whom and how often they’ve been done this year, but I’d be surprised if it jumped much at all. Whereas your House stood to loose access to playtime monies if you were absent too many times, there was (and still is) no penalty for failing to sit down for an hour and bang out an informative letter to your constituents, even though it’s right there in the C-Book alongside “go to all the meetings”. And because writing is arduous and time-consuming and at least 75% of those emails get tossed anyways, who’s going to make the effort?
Here’s the thing: You have to make the effort. Informing and soliciting from your neighbors is I promise you the only thing that can save SGA from devolving into a complete closed-circuit echo chamber clusterfuck. Other voices. Vanity stagnates debate and good ideas disappear into oblivion because two people on Earth are reading the weekly minutes and only one of them wasn’t in the room the first time around. Accountability is just one of the many upsides to involvement. Another is the proliferation of new ideas. Given enough involvement, there might even be the possibility of some real representative governance.
Last week, following a nicely polarizing debate over a recent Voice article (“Less Facebook, More Facetime [insert date]), SGA Parliamentarian Grace Astrove took the first step in the right direction: She announced that all Senators were required to email their Houses not just bi-weekly but every week, and that failing to do so and cc her for proof would constitute an absence. If enforced, this new policy is nothing short of a landmark decision for SGA, ten times more wide-reaching in its implications than keycards or Arabic lessons. Now, here’s a golden opportunity for a student-led group inside CC to start taking the school’s commitment to digital literacy seriously. Forget about emails. An email to 200 people is an announcement, not a conversation. Crosswords and jumbles notwithstanding, SGA On The Can is even less interactive, and still more difficult to care about. None of that will do today. There’s a better use of the worlds we already live in.
My proposal, for those with the ambition and thirst for experimentation to make it happen: Let each House have its own blog, each Senator become a blogger, and each resident learn how to read that blog on the regular. I mean this not just as a civic duty but as an actual computer skill. How many Conn Freshmen today know what an RSS reader is? And the comments. The difference between the 200-person email and the blog post is all in the capacity of readers to wrestle with content in an intuitive way. Set up a platform that can serve as a forum and all of the sudden “take it back to your Houses” actually becomes a viable prospect. Make reading that blog as normal as checking Facebook–same boldface names and everything!–and people might finally stop asking “What does SGA do anyways?” Sure, it’ll take some time to catch on and feel normal, and, yes, all Senators will have to write (although nobody’s asking them to become writers), but if you’re not making some good-faith effort to communicate the weird drama unfolding in the ’41 Room every week, you’re not doing your job any better than I was.
Of course, no matter what happens, you’ve still got to go out and talk to people.
Jacques Swartz ’09, is an alumni blogger for The College Voice. His blog, Jacques Attaques, can be found here
