USyd Rep
My university is known for its architecture, and gorgeous sandstone it is! I love more the moments of united campus fervour like the University of Sydney Union Board Elections (that’s why we call it USU, okay?). They were last week, so last week was pretty fascinating.
Chalked pavements everywhere was crazy.
I was offered enough dead trees to paper my room in fliers (several times over. Seriously).
It was as though we were voting for our next head of state there were so many pushy candidate-promoters!
Free food helped. My favourite propagandists were the ones who stood on the sidewalk and urged me to take their pamphlet because ‘You get 5 bucks!’ ….. well, kinda.
Uni students clearly learn alliteration. In with Flynn is now our USU president, beating Dynamic Deb (a personal favourite entirely because she made way too many boys wear bright pink shirts for a few weeks), supported by Hell Yeah Alastair, Keep the Union Strong with Peter Hong and plenty more, whose slogans I clearly don’t remember because they didn’t crash my lectures often enough.
Need to galvanise supporters for a cause? If it appeals to uni students, you have a fairly expedient basis! If you’re a socialist, even better (who doesn’t want to ‘Un**** the World?’). Coming from a school context where most people simply didn’t care, I’m still astonished by the preponderance of students who value their own opinions, and so consciously exert an effort towards reforming society (even if ‘society’ can just be the microcosm of our campus). Apathy is so disheartening.
I did walkup last week too; a funny Christian way of saying that I started talking to unsuspecting people I didn’t know about Jesus. I loved it! And in reflection, almost nobody was overly ambivalent. People agreed, they disagreed, they had beliefs and they respected that we had beliefs we wanted to share too. Jesus changes hearts. He’s changed mine, changed Andy’s, but to plenty of the people I know, Jesus still seems like one more option alongside Broadway Access benefits or fair-trade reform. Except that we don’t need rhyming slogans to sell what he’s done.
