There is no student body.
It doesn’t exist. There is no cohesive group of students. Everyone has retreated so far into individualism, into digital and physical isolation, that an overall sense of community has been lost. This is why you are lonely. This is why you feel powerless. You are chasing something that you cannot even picture, because it ceased to exist before you even stepped foot on campus.
“Individualism” is bullshit. It champions the ideals of self-sufficiency and stoicism but, when you think about it, true independence is misery. It’s the deepest pits of loneliness, peddled as the route to success in a market-based world where you must sell yourself at every turn. It will drive you insane. Quietly.
And this is why, now that a university degree is just a product to be bought and paid for, you have no real reason to be here. You certainly don’t have a reason to care about uni politics, and even less reason to care about student government, because you are an individual. And this is why “divide and conquer” works so well: if you can reduce an organised community to a mere group of individuals who happen to be in the same place, they lose all power. They cease to function as a unit, and they cede power to other individuals who know that with the bare minimum effort, they can take up the responsibility relinquished by the masses.
Voter and nominee turnout for student politics is at an all-time low, to the point where this year nobody even wanted to run for OUSA president. Keegan Wells decided to throw her name in the hat pretty much the day of, figuring that she was better than literally nothing. And she won. A race that has in the past been the source of genuine screaming matches has now been reduced to a five-minute yarn on stage in front of a dozen people and an easy coast to presidency. Nobody cares, because it doesn’t affect them. Them personally. “Why should I care?” Me, personally.
This is what happens when people grow apathetic to democracy: you get people in positions of power who will take advantage of you and milk that position for all its worth. You get charlatans, crooks and all their ilk, people who will rely on your disinterest to pursue their own interests, people who will use your student fee dollars to pay for their pet projects. You get Keegan. You get what you bloody well deserve.
Fortunately for you, Keegan is not what you deserve. You deserve so much worse. She’s crook, to be sure, but she is not a crook. She actually does care about you, the student body, and she’s pretty well-prepared to lead the charge. You could have ended up with anyone in this role. You could have ended up with Evil Keegan, the one on the cover, the one interviewed in this issue. Think about it: Keegan could have been someone who actually gave so few fucks about the role that she blew the whole budget on pimping out the ski club, and you still wouldn’t have had a choice.
Guess you dodged a bullet on that one. In the meantime, if you’ve ever wanted to be a power-hungry student government dictator, there has literally never been a better opportunity. Do with that what you will.