Take notice, take action

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Mary Fan

Here at the Memorial Student Union, beset with credit card vendors and their ilk luring unwitting students with T-shirts and spin toys, we only protest by striding past with frozen smiles on our faces.

After all, we're just passing through.

Same goes for the real world. They're clearcutting forests, they're draining wetlands, they're forcing out the politically disenfranchised but it's all a story and we want to be moving on now, teacher, to what's going to be on the test Friday. And hurry, please, because if you let us out early I get to pull out of the parking lot before everybody else.

The forces of commercialism encroach to the very core of our campus, crowding through the Student Union and even into the residence halls where the Pepsi machine doesn't take your CatCard anymore, so you better be putting your money on your SmartChip (dumb move because you lose the card you lose the money ; guess who keeps it?)

We lampoon it all, we laugh wryly at it. But hey, we're just passing through and it's so easy to say it's just a joke.

That's why the Student Environmental Action Coalition table in the Student Union is always such a surprise. Something that grabs my eye every time I pass by.

Amidst the chaff of free trips to Bora Bora if you mortgage your college loans, is the seed of what a college is all about. What a Student Union, a core point on campus for students to congregate, is all about.

The very thing we students are forgetting we're all about.

Student activism.

SEAC's banner may be handpainted among the brochures, but it puts every glossy nothing to shame. And it calls every student to finally start questioning shamefulness.

Even if you care nothing about saving Mount Graham or the Twilight Canyon Campground, when you see those banners and the patient activists manning their table, you see the potential of a real Student Union far from the mockery of a marketplace sprung up in the Student Union. You see something real.

It's like putting a mirror to the Union so that we may finally see that no shadows are being cast.

Overturning tables and toppling wares could just be a metaphor for this peaceful act. And Lord knows we are long overdue for some table-toppling on this commercially overtaken campus. Consider: Leif Kahl, a SEAC member, goes on the Mall talking to people about genetically engineered vegetables, Twilight Campground and so on.

"I say hello I'm not selling VISA and they say well what are you selling then?" said the theater arts sophomore. "I say it's not a product, I'm a volunteer. They don't believe me.

"People are so used to having to put up with sales slogans they become very cynical," he said.

Here's a reason to begin believing again. And a cause for more to begin. Contrary to what is apparently believed of us, we are not merely a target market conveniently congregated in one place. We are not so one-dimensional that we'd rather every day see a new and more amazing offer accompanied by a toy, not so one-dimensional that we would not be more moved, more reached by the simple picture of people our age taking their rightful place in the Union. The Student Union.

Not so jaded that we are fated to forever pass things by and be passed by. Never to take up our own place, our own table and try to move the earth as we would like to see it moved, rather than be carried unwilling, but not fighting, the tides sweeping us.

Now is the time to stand out there with your homemade sign and your home-grown cares and make someone care. Make someone stop. Pay attention rather than duck quickly by, a whole world of people passing by.

Now is the time to simply stop passing through.

Believe in something. Stand for something. So that the clean force of your belief can, without you ever raising a voice or a hand, daily put every glossy nothing to shame. That's how the most revered activists among us began moving the world.

Mary Fan is a journalism and molecular and cellular biology senior. Her column, Skyfall, appears every Thursday and she can be reached via e-mail at Mary.Fan@wildcat.arizona.edu.