Waste not, want not, YUSU
Ditch the Freshers’ Fair freebies and stop sucking our souls.
Waste, excess, extravagance: Freshers’ week in a slogan, and nowhere was this clearer than in the aftermath of the Freshers’ Fair. The ravaging hordes came, went and left only wreckage, like some barbarian-ravaged border outpost. Discarded fliers drift like tumbleweed across the floor, posters hang limply and impotently from walls. If ever there was a case of university as microcosm of society, it was this: a scrum for time and money that sucks at the soul of the unwary individual.
University Societies do a lot that’s worthwhile, and I would not say otherwise for a moment, but the developed world should be past the point where it treats resources as playthings. Take your pick of environmental issues, but underlying them all is an uncomfortable bottom-line: our society uses too much stuff, and the first thing to go should be nonsense like this.
Freshers’ week is hardly an exception to the consumerist rule. Rather than seeking out what we want, we say: “go on then, impress me; and if you don’t, I have options.” The onus is on the producer to constantly provide better this, improved that and new the other. In this case, it means bigger and brighter posters, more fliers, more free sweets, more gimmicks.
Here’s my dream. YUSU limits the resources used on P&P to a handful of posters. Fliers and free sweets are banned. Lets say a third of the resources then saved, confiscated from societies, are spent on getting freshers to the Fair, informing them about student services and societies, and buying everyone an impartial tasty treat. The other two thirds could then be used for something more worthwhile than the extra advertising for Go-Down-The-Pub-With-Your-Mates Soc.
And if there are any liberals objecting to this authoritarian proposal, please look into your souls and ask: is the right to shove pieces of paper into the hands of bemused first-years really a fundamental liberty?
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