Being in Walla Walla often gives me a sense of isolation from the political world that I read about in The New York Times. There are democratic revolutions occurring right now in the Middle East. Republicans and Democrats are bitterly contesting the government budget and threatening to shut down the government. Not to beat a dead horse but climate change, well, is still happening. If you want to make a difference what can you do? I mean, by comparison, whatever is at stake in Walla Walla and Whitman seems insignificant.

But maybe that is precisely the problem, the implicit comparison we make when we’re faced with the seeming slowness of passing our days on Ankeny and the steady drumbeat of catastrophe and democracy. Rather, what if we can pay attention to current events but not be distracted by them from focusing on the challenge of making Whitman a better and more democratic place?

Remember how Ralph Nader called for a civic engagement course at Whitman, as if you could learn how to be a “change-agent” from reading a textbook or taught by a professor. One response is to throw ourselves into changing Walla Walla. Aside from how it can be pretentious (so contrary to the way Whitman is marketed) for transient college kids to devote a few hours a week to changing a community most of them do not intend to reside in, I wonder if there isn’t work left undone in the Whitman community itself.

I mean there is ASWC, which controls hundreds of thousands of dollars and is meant to broadly encompass many aspects of student life. It funds WEB. It funds student clubs. And ASWC is comprised of some talented students but surely, not all the talented students at Whitman. Yet, how competitive are ASWC elections? How “representative” is ASWC? Even if these elections are competitive, are there actual issues discussed in these elections? Or do most people vote based off of a listserv e-mail and word-of-mouth? In other words, is the semblance of “voting” enough to call ASWC democratic?

The challenge I am advancing here is that campus democracy is an ideal worth striving for and to that end, it’s important to go beyond just being apathetic and then voting once every April. I hear complaints about ASWC all the time from students about how it is a special interests bank account. (Full disclosure, I am a senator and have requested money through ASWC before.) Students complain that ASWC isn’t “transparent” enough which leads to everyone running for ASWC on a platform based off of “transparency”. (Trust us, don’t investigate us, especially on issues of gender or Greek affiliation.) And I don’t mean to belittle the good work that ASWC does. I mean a whole ASWC campaign was aimed at getting student representation on the curriculum committee. Yesterday, the proposal passed thanks to students lobbying faculty members.

So, in answer to Nader’s call for civic engagement, I would respond that there exists a venue for students to be civically engaged in our own community. It all depends on if we treat our four years at Whitman as a stop in a train station or something along the lines of an actual community. This doesn’t mean we should all run for senate or president. It does mean that we can make our clubs function better. Students can hold ASWC accountable by going to meetings. The Pioneer can increasingly call out ASWC when it feels like ASWC is making a mistake.

The most important thing that needs to happen is a conversation between students and their elected officials and between their elected officials and other organizations like the press. As a political junkie, this would be a great thing in and of itself because in the conversations we have about Whitman and about this community, we’re making it our community. I mean, the emphasis on deliberative democracy is on the word “deliberative” not on democracy. Well, why? Because there’s no reason for Whitman to just be a bus stop and for us to be its temporary passengers.