Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2003/04/17/file_swapping_students_quit_toking/

File swapping students – quit toking, start voting

By Andrew Orlowski

Posted in Bootnotes, 17th April 2003 22:36 GMT

Letter Re: Liberation abroad, repression at home - a student's tale

Repression in Ohio? This corner of the USA need not belong to the puritans, as this letter eloquently explains.

The following is advice for that student.

If campus repression is this big a problem for students at OSU/Columbus, organize, register locally and vote in your own local government that has something better to do than harass students. Just about every student at your school is old enough to vote, and 10-20K students voting as a bloc will have a *big* impact on local elections, especially anywhere that city councilcritters are elected by city electoral district.

Perhaps there are other things wrong with the local government as well. Do the roads look like they belong in the Third World due to bad maintenance? Unusual corruption? Are the public schools known to be shitholes? I don't know your area, but unless your city is looked to by the rest of the US as a "model of good government", there are *always* things the government is massively and visibly screwing up that a fair number of the locals pissed off. From your description of misplaced government priorities, I consider the odds that your city is a "model of good government" as roughly zero.

And look for ways to monitor the voting process, especially if the voting machines are the new touchscreen type with no paper audit trails.

If the students can't organize to cover their own asses, I don't see why I should be concerned about them other than another set of victims of the RIAA/MPAA situation which makes the members of these organizations collectively "the common enemies of mankind".

I assume a certain number of students at the school are poltical science majors. Would any like to get some practical experience of the sort that looks good on resumes?

"Campaign Manager - Columbus City Councilman [insert name here]" looks pretty good.

If you "best and brightest" at OSU can't get your acts together, your personal option is to change schools.

In any case, don't whine to us about it. We can't help you unless you are willing to help yourself and I don't think anybody is inclined to try. The tools to fix the problem are in your hands, not ours. If you students do want to organize to fix the problem, there's lots of political expertise from hard-core political types online, ask in the right place and you'll probably get some.

A.Lizard ®