Everyone needs to leave me alone.

When I say “everyone,” I’m pointing fingers at anyone that feels the need to encourage my participation in campus life. It’s like listening to a broken record. Year after year, I hear speech after speech about how the students at this University are “apathetic,” “lacking in spirit” and “uninvolved,” et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.

The people responsible for these statements need to understand something: we don’t care that we don’t care.

High school is over, children. We can drop the fa√É.√ßade now. We don’t have to pretend to care about the pep rally, or the big game, or whether our Bearcat pride-o-meters are maxed out or not.

School spirit is, and should be, reserved for southern schools with winning football teams that experience the joys of sunlight more than once a week. It doesn’t belong in gloomy mountain-valley universities populated by embittered, cynical Cornell rejects. It’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole: only those incapable of accepting reality would attempt it.

I’ll never understand people that complain about lack of student participation in activities like the Student Assembly. From what I’ve seen, student government is just like the real government: a group of self-interested individuals who will do what they want with our money in order to pad their resumes and further their careers, regardless of how it impacts the people they were elected to serve. Just like the real government, the SA is ultimately controlled by an insidious administration hell-bent on controlling every facet of our lives. Resistance is futile.

In a country where the voter turnout for the last presidential election was below 50 percent of the nation’s total population, do you really think a group of horny, drunken post-adolescents are going to give a shit about petty student politics? Why should we? History has taught us that we can vote down administrative referendums on new building projects, request funding for needy departments and argue vehemently against school policies we deem unfair, and we’ll just be ignored. If you beat a dog enough times, it learns to play dead when you walk in the room.

In the rare event that a member of our ranks actually does open his or her mouth, garbage is usually what falls out.

Take, for example, the widely publicized case of Aaron Akaberi. This attention-craving “activist” decides that he wants to lead the crusade against the monopoly that Sodexho holds on campus dining. His lack of a practical plan and abundance of pretentious dramatics allows campus dining officials to appear not just rational, but downright generous. Now, thanks to Akaberi, anyone with a legitimate reason for defying the University’s dining policies has a far greater chance of being dismissed as just another immature student whose childish complaints aren’t worth serious deliberation. If student involvement in campus affairs means you’re going to be placed in the same category as this guy, you’d probably keep your mouth shut, too.

So explain to me, once again, why exactly we should care?

I’d bet hard cash that the majority of students on this campus are just trying to get through their four years as painlessly as possible. They’ll make a few friends, have a lot of good times and go on with their lives, and I guarantee that Binghamton University will be no worse for the wear. For those of you who feel bad for not throwing your heart and soul into the BU experience, don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to pretend to care about things that don’t matter when you get old.

Matt McFadden is a senior English and Arabic major. He wants to care, but he’s afraid you won’t love him back.