The other day, the guys on 99.5 FM were talking about last week’s celebrity immigration reform bill, which ultimately was swept off the Senate floor. They spoke in support of the bill—one which calls for a 700-mile wall on the U.S./Mexico border and felony status for all illegal aliens, a group of individuals well into the millions. Them Mexicans got pissed.

So, they organized—half a million or so—in Los Angeles last week. As Allan Uthman said in The Beast, “It’s a sad state of affairs when illegal immigrants are the only group in America willing to assert their power to strike.” He continued, “The poorest, least empowered people in the country are schooling us on how to protest effectively. Perhaps they’ll teach us how real popular resistance works.”

The behavior of these hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens might seem strange to some students here at the University at Buffalo. The notoriously apathetic 18-24-year-old demographic is even more lackadaisical here in Amherst, where the most pressing issue facing students generally involves where to score drugs.

Thankfully, not everyone maintains that mentality.

The UB Students Against Sweatshops campaign went all out last Tuesday by staging a rally in front of the Student Union, followed by a march through North Campus, to further their campaign for better treatment of UB’s Janitorial staff (which UB administrators recently promised will be fully unionized within three years). It wasn’t cute or attractive, nor was it quiet. UBSAS went 1967-style and protested like a bunch of tattered-American-flag-bandana sporting hippies. And for some reason, their efforts went unappreciated by much of the student populace.

Last Friday, The Spectrum’s Katie Beczak spoke out in an editorial condemning UBSAS’s techniques as well as the concept of visible protest in general. Her basic sentiment: activism is annoying.

She railed on UBSAS’s chalk displays and flyer use, evoking an image of the “lonely janitor” tasked with removing the messages (presumably within a single white spotlight with violin accompaniment) that will wash away with the next rainfall. “I’m sure at that moment,” Beczak wrote, “[the janitor] was delighted to have UB students fighting for his rights.”

Maybe not, but the hypothetical custodial worker probably does appreciate the extra $3.75/hour or so that UBSAS’s efforts will help ensure him. That might not seem like a big deal to Ms. Beczak, but in the real world, that money will probably be spent feeding his family rather than spilled drunkenly onto the floor of The Steer.

Beczak may be entitled to her opinion, but it is one that supports the apathy that is currently suffocating the power students hold to make a difference. I feel terrible for the prospective 10,000 of you who learned that Beczak “[likes] janitors, in a reasonable sense,” but “would not, however, stand outside and chant for their jobs.”

It reads more like she “likes janitors, so long as I don’t have to see or think about them.” Beczak continues on to name her “worthwhile cause:” new lids on Starbucks coffee. If your spilled, overpriced frappa-mocha-polka-chino is equivocal to the ability for your fellow man to earn a living at a decent job, apathy isn’t the problem—it’s advocacy in all the wrong places.

Cheers,

Peter Scheck

Pulse Editor