By Dan Shannon

Tuesday morning, as you may have noticed, some unknown individuals graced our campus with their biting, witty social commentary. Some pearls of wisdom: "Save a cow, eat a vegan." "Go chalk ways." "Medical chalk saves lives." Wow. Someone get these guys a job writing those obnoxious bumper stickers that they sell at Newbury Comics. However, I wasn’t able to find the chalking that explained their motives. I’d imagine it would have gone something like this: "We’re big apathetic losers who don’t give a shit

about anything and have no respect for people who do."

OK, let’s back up a bit: I fully and completely support the ideals of freedom of expression and diversity of thought. I am, actually, glad that someone decided to use the venue of chalking for something other than the standard Wesleyan liberal rhetoric.

"Diversity," which we here at Wesleyan apparently value so much, doesn’t simply mean a group of people who have different color skin but all think the same. A range of opinion amongst the student body is, I think, an invaluable quality, and these chalkings show that Wesleyan still possesses that.

Unfortunately, I think that’s about the only useful purpose of these chalkings. True, maybe if you’re a fan of trite, overdone humor they provided some entertainment, but I didn’t see much of a clear political statement contained within. On the surface, these chalking were merely a humorous (debatable) attempt to poke fun at the amount of chalking that takes place on this campus. But let’s look closer.

Yes, there are a lot of chalkings on this campus, and maybe some of them are sort of silly. But these chalkings are a very powerful form of expression for student groups, and are representative of everything these groups are trying to do. By saying that these chalkings are silly or annoying, you are placing your own desire to see clean sidewalks over the idea of student activism as a whole.

It upsets me to think that there are Wesleyan students who view activism and political expression in this manner. What would they, instead of lots of chalkings, rather see? A school where all of the students are apathetic, lazy yuppies who are only interested in going to law school and making lots of money? I can think of a few schools like that; I’ll send you the transfer applications. I, for one, am glad to attend a school where the students have opinions and causes, even (especially) if it means that I have to look at chalkings on the ground as I walk to class.

Unfortunately, we may not have this issue to argue over for much longer. It’s no big secret that The Powers That Be at this university have a Plan to turn this into a more media-friendly, apolitical, Ambercrombie campus, much like our friends in Amherst, MA. This sort of anti-political backlash is exactly what these forces are pushing

toward: apathetic students who aren’t involved in causes, don’t chalk up their campus, do their schoolwork and don’t care about anything. We, as the students in question, can’t let this happen.

A final point: So who did these chalkings, anyway? Care to reveal/defend yourselves? Maybe you did have some agenda to your chalkings that I missed. We’ll never know unless you speak. I’d love to set up some sort of forum where we could discuss these

ideas and see what students on this campus really think of activism. So get in touch with me; I’d love talk to you (dshannon01@wesleyan.edu, x6123).

Or maybe I’ll just write you some chalkings.

Shannon is a member of the class of 2001.