Let them eat crab

Students are burdened with a dueling dilemma: Fiery, naive passion for what is right is stifled by inexperience and a lack of access to power. Rarely do students have a choice other than to mount glorious but ultimately futile campaigns fighting the good fight. What divine providence then, that two seats on the College Park City Council opened up. Riding the tailwinds of record turnout from mid-term elections, student dorms and apartment complexes towering in the voting districts held all the cards.

And yet, the fight is already lost. A poison combination of collusion and incompetence has all but snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. And Emma Simson's Student Government Association has been a conspirator in this university's melancholy, operating as if students did not exist.

When council members Eric Olson and Joseline Peña-Melnyk won Democratic primaries on Sept. 12, it could be safely assumed their seats would become vacant, and the special election to fill these seats would take place at the end of winter break, when students are missing.

The SGA should have been kicking and screaming immediately. Amendments to the town charter moving the election date could have been pursued when there was still time. When someone tries to steal an election, you don't just give it to them.

Yet, the SGA barely raised more than a meek finger of protest.

The problem is this - the SGA is operating under the naive notion that the city is warming up to them. By staying silent and "working from the inside," they hope to gain respectability. Impossible.

The city is delighted by such a mute, easy to please bunch. See how the council hisses when The Diamondback dares to have an opinion. We're not saying we're always right, but ask yourself this telling question: Has the SGA this year publicly voiced an opinion against the actions of any institution other than The Diamondback?

The SGA is gallivanting around the city and university administration as if it were anything other than tolerated. Instead, it needs to be home with the students pursuing an absentee ballot drive far more enthusiastically than its current attempts. It's a simple process … the city sends a ballot, with envelope, to the address of your choice. Tables in front of the dining halls and friendly greeters outside dorms in the voting districts should be enough to generate hundreds of student votes. But the SGA is nowhere to be seen. They knew since Sept. 13 that an election would take place.

Election Day is more than a month away, but students have lost already. The elected leaders are completely ignoring their constituency's existence. Unfortunately, the motto of the SGA this year appears to be, "Let them eat crab."