Managing Editor
Washtenaw County and more specifically, Ann Arbor is the one of the most affluent communities in Michigan. It’s full of individuals with the means and the will to do their part to protect our community and, more specifically, our environment.
You’d think the great, cutting edge Washtenaw Community College would be a hotbed of young, ambitious students looking forward into the future and embracing the concept of reducing their carbon footprint while conserving valuable resources.
This, sadly, is not the case.
Apathy runs rampant at WCC. Students here are overly focused on their own agendas and pursuits and thus unconcerned with doing their part to save a dying planet Earth. Many of our students are in transition to higher education from the workforce grind and while struggling to adapt, may be unable to fit any sympathy for their home planet into their busy schedules.
I know, I’ve been there. And I still am to some extent. But this is no excuse for the carnage.
Trash litters our parking lots and is embedded abrasively in the grass and bushes that populate the exterior of campus. An ironic and twisted fate for plants set to root in hopes of beautifying our school.
An extensive survey of early morning clean-up efforts in WCC’s parking lots performed by one of The Voice’s most dedicated reporters revealed the magnitude of trash and debris left behind every day by a
student body that simply does not care.
Smokers toss their cigarette butts all over the lush and well-watered lawns, everyday making it harder and harder for non-smokers to accept them. Is it so hard to smoke at home?
I found myself in a cloud of apathy with a colleague earlier in the year. We were smoking our tasty tobacco outside the Business Education building.
We didn’t flagrantly puff away to spite our school
and its security officers. We didn’t smoke there because of some immature sense of rebellion and disdain for the rules and non-smokers. It was
sheer apathy.
As we had watched other smokers easily pace, unabated near similar entrances, uncaring of the fellow citizens they might be harming, we too lost a part of that strong sense of the empathy that lead us to pursue journalism in the first place.
More recently, as I attempted to tell the story of an initiative designating certain parking spots on campus for low-emission vehicles (LEV), I was dismayed as not one but two high-ranking school administrators revealed to me that the initiative was dead in the water.
“Why?” I asked. It seemed like such a good idea to encourage the use of recent advancements in fuel-efficient technology. But Vice President of Facilities Management, Damon Flowers and former President Larry Whitworth both confessed the same
sad story.
Students would not participate, they said. Despite the signage and the hopeful initiativem, no one cared.
The SUVs parked belligerently in the two spots still labeled “LEV Only” outside the Technical & Industrial building remind me every day that students need to wake up and get on board with their forward-thinking elders. It was their wisdom that gave us this great arena of self-advancement.
What are we doing?
