Student orgs aren’t all worth funds

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ You will sometimes hear about controversies over Student Government Board’s… ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ You will sometimes hear about controversies over Student Government Board’s allocations choices. It’s a hard row to hoe, doling out cash to folks who all offer intriguing uses for those dollars. Because of time and information constraints on our officers, they can’t always make the best choices. And so I hold my tongue on most issues, but on two matters I cannot. ‘ ‘ ‘ First, Habitat Against Humanity is a complete waste of money. ‘But why?’ you ask? ‘ ‘ ‘ For one, Habitat Against Humanity burns down poor people’s houses all the time. It rejoices in carnage and discomfort. Members of the group put a torch and battering ram to anything that approaches adequate shelter, and they take more pride and pleasure in their work than most professors do. Here is the Habitat Against Humanity mission statement: ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘Habitat Against Humanity is heinously dedicated to razing affordable housing freaking all the way to the ground, giving Jimmy Carter nightmares and ‘mdash; as a tertiary objective ‘mdash; telling little kids that the school they go to is secretly a ‘special’ school and no one is supposed to let them know about it.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ For my activities fee to sponsor the organization’s brilliantly executed midnight swarm attacks on innocent households is absurd. I won’t stand for it! And I especially won’t pay for it. These people should be stopped, and they especially should be unfunded! ‘ ‘ ‘ Likewise, it is hard to walk more than a block without hearing that we should send peacekeepers to another backwater nation where the supply of tolerance falls far behind a bottomless demand for machete sharpeners. ‘ ‘ ‘ Most of the students playing Paul Revere to these massacres are good kids with a fire in their souls. Maybe you disagree with them. Maybe you say, ‘Our troops must be conserved. Here we find ourselves overextended in all corners. And now is not that time.’ But you must respect these electrified minions of the pure-at-heart. ‘ ‘ ‘ The same cannot be said of STANDM, a group united by unflinching commitment to waste billions deploying UN Peacekeepers to Darfur, Minn. Members of Students Taking Action Now, Darfur, Minnesota, are nothing but idle interlopers who have shouldered a cause of absolutely no merit. Their allegations of genocide are baseless. The tiny village of Darfur, Minn., is little more than a church, a lounge and a bank by a railroad crossing. ‘ ‘ ‘ Here is STANDM’s mission statement: ‘Students Taking Action Now, Darfur, Minnesota, aims to tie up at least 40,000 soldiers from an expensive and highly trained international coalition by sending them to puddle around, twiddling their little thumbsies in Darfur, Minn. We think there might be a genocide there.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ How STANDM ever got a faculty sponsor or any membership is beyond me. I was particularly unimpressed by STANDM’s awareness-raising project where it folded 137 origami cranes and put up signs saying, ‘Each of these cranes stands for one person who could be killed by genocide in Darfur, Minn., if there was a genocide in Darfur, Minn., and they killed every single person in the whole place.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ Who cares? Darfur, Minn., is 15 hours away! Call me cold-hearted, but it’s no sweat off my back! And also, there is no genocide there. ‘ ‘ ‘ I argue that STANDM’s recent divestment campaign did more harm than good. All it accomplished was to deprive Darfur of its dollar store. The bewildered locals found themselves compelled to travel long distances to nearby Comfrey just to obtain basic supplies for some festive Halloween and Thanksgiving decorating. Everyone is just trying not to even think about Christmas. A coat drive for the 10,000 isolated and ill-equipped African Union troops huddled over campfires in a beet field has strained everybody’s pocketbook. ‘ ‘ ‘ Now a people on the brink, the simple villagers find their lives complicated by faraway undergrads with too much free time on their hands. Two whole days of the city clerk’s week are sunk sifting through buckets of letters, heartfully rendered by English writing majors, demanding she quit ordering air attacks. ‘ ‘ ‘ Worship at the Lutheran church serving the region’s Christian majority ‘mdash; estimated at 100 percent of the population ‘mdash; is spooky and tense ever since some bright-eyed Pitt students came one day to announce Arab marauders from the North would arrive any moment and start cutting everyone’s hands off. ‘ ‘ ‘ Many locals are packing up their confused lives to cross the border into Jackson County. Relief organizations will be overwhelmed, because, who knows for sure, but there is probably not even a homeless shelter there or any relief organizations of any sort at all, given the small population and last week’s Habitat Against Humanity emergency field trip to the area. ‘ ‘ ‘ I hope that in the upcoming SGB elections, a candidate addresses my concerns. E-mail Lewis at ljl10@pitt.edu.