When my friends and I signed the lease binding us to the house with bars on the windows on… When my friends and I signed the lease binding us to the house with bars on the windows on Ward Street, in many ways it was like signing the Declaration of Independence. We made the choice to tell the University of Pittsburgh, “No thank you! We don’t need you anymore! We’re starting our own housing and meal plan!” We stood up and said to the University, “Give us Sodexho and we will pray for death!” Hopefully they don’t invade us.

Thomas Jefferson, our landlord, wrote the lease and gave it to us to sign. My roommate, John Hancock, signed first. The rest of us followed. I’d like to think of myself as Ben Franklin. My fellow roommates are more among the ranks of Thomas Stone from Maryland or William Williams from Connecticut. Nevertheless, we all agreed that even after this document was signed, many troubles lay ahead.

We may find ourselves engaged in a civil war because of a dispute between the upper half of the house and the lower half of the house over kitchen abuse. There may be times when we wage war with our neighbors to the east because their oil bill is cheaper than ours. Perhaps we will have to build a fence around our home to prevent southerners from sneaking onto our land. We may greatly disagree with a dating choice of one of our roommates and try to deny him his freedom. But there is one decision we must make that not even this great nation has been faced with. I am talking, of course, about the allocation of bedrooms.

See, basically every bedroom in our house is the same size but one. There is one room – I’ll call it the New Jersey of the house – that is not equal size to the others. It is essentially a closet with another closet attached. So how do we decide who gets that room? It’s a difficult thing to deal with. Right now everyone has their favorite space and no one’s favorite is the smallest. How can we work together to solve this problem? We all have ideas for the solution.

Take my friend Will. He has made up his mind that he is getting the front room on the second floor. He has made it very clear that he will willingly fight someone for that room. From the meekest woman to the most infinitesimal sick child, he is ready and willing to engage in a fistfight. But this isn’t exactly fair, because he could easily beat the crap out of pretty much everyone in our group. To him, using brute force is the only acceptable conflict resolution.

But I am more diplomatic. My ideas are much more constructive and less likely to spill blood on the furniture. We could draw straws for example. Or perhaps play rock-paper-scissors. We could draw our names from a baseball cap. Maybe eenie-meenie-minee-mo is the best method. The problem is that my brethren don’t like those ideas because they rely too heavily on chance and luck.

So I think this brings me back to the analogy of the birth of our nation. My friends and I came together just like the Founding Fathers did. We were tired of persecution, and we believed in an idea called freedom.

We grew weary of eating terrible British – Sodexho – food. (Imagine a Pittsburgh Sodexho Party: all Pitt students together throwing deep fried sandwiches of all kinds onto the streets.) We were tired of having to silence ourselves at the stroke of eleven. We were tired of patrolling British soldiers – RAs – knocking on our doors.

So together we crossed the Atlantic – Boulevard of the Allies – to start anew. And now that we have come to a crossroads we must make a decision. Go forth with violence? Resolve with diplomacy? What would our Founding Fathers do? Perhaps we can sit down as men and negotiate. We can have an open and free conversation that will eventually come to some sort of peaceful conclusion. By working together we will successfully ensure everyone’s happiness as it has been endowed by their Creator – or parents.

So friends, if you are reading, let us meet later today and work toward a democracy as it was seen in the minds of Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton and O’Reilly. We must all be equal, and we must all agree. As long as I don’t have to live that freaking small room