Clark Chronicle
An 'undemocratic' student body?Friday, March 27, 2009 By Chronicle staff
(November 1, 2005) -- For seniors, the year has just started, but stress is mounting already. Quickly. But then again, it is a combination of stress and relaxation. Perhaps the relaxation aspect follows after the stress. So when it’s time to pay off the hard work, the whole senior class should have the ability to make their senior year worthwhile. That only a select few have the power to make decisions for us is a detriment to the idea of democracy. True, in class elections, we vote for those who, in our minds, will successfully represent us. Voting, however, should not be the only means by which the ideal of democracy is fulfilled. It seems as though once we vote for candidates, we give away our power to make further decisions. We give away our power so that others may garner more. Representatives should represent us, not those who share the same power. Take senior prom, for instance. Prom night sticks out as the event that completes senior year, our whole school year, in fact. To offer the best prom there is, a prom committee of volunteers meets. It does what any prom committee does: decide a location. Once a number of locations are investigated, our elected student body members decide the place for it to be held. Anyone can volunteer for the committee, but there are still those who are unaware the committee’s existence. Those certain people should have the ability to vote for those locations the committee has discussed. In other words, the vote should not be left only to selective members. Whether people care about the location or not, if all of the student body voted fairness would be promoted. We voted for these selective members, but the problem is, we didn’t vote in order for them to make decisions for us. We voted for them to carry out the decisions once we made the choice ourselves. If anything, the whole senior class should be allowed to get feedback from the prom committee in the form of a list of locations. The elected student body should then tally up the votes for locations. Of course, it is too late for that now, seeing that the location was chosen two years ago. Either way, choosing the location as a whole student body could have happened two years ago and can still happen in the future. The elected students’ job of “representation” should not be taken lightly. Instead, it should be taken literally—representation of our senior class, our opinions, our concerns. |