A Shakespearean tragedy in the making

Written by Adam Desautal Tuesday, 03 November 2009 08:00

In both issues last week, one of our writers here at The Spectrum didn’t accomplish a whole lot with his time and energy other than bashing Student Government for pretty much no discernable reason at all. That writer was me.

For years and years now, Student Government and The Spectrum have more or less not gotten along very well. Arriving at NDSU was like walking right into the middle of “Romeo and Juliet.”

The Montagues and Capulets have already been fighting for quite a while, due to things that happened long ago, and there really seems to be no end in sight.

Part of this is due to the very nature of media and government, two entities that really have no business sharing an ice cream sundae romantically at the local diner. But part of it isn’t. A lot of us aren’t even sure where any of it is coming from.

None of this is doing anybody at all any good.

Me bashing Student Government doesn’t help The Spectrum any, and Student Government members having hostility for the campus newspaper just ends up resulting in a battle of wills when they want to publish an article.

But most importantly, it doesn’t help the students. None of this helps them one bit.

There’s no question that I, myself, have done nothing but further this problem; however, I’m a product of this ongoing gang war, not the cause of it. I’m just the latest person to fall into the unofficial tradition passed down by all our predecesors.

People on both sides are to blame. I simply unfortunately happen to have a bigger mouth than most and simply made public what’s already being said behind closed doors.

I think all of this is unproductive and unhelpful, and I hope that it can stop.

Sure, if Student Government were involved with a massive cover-up of extra terrestrials that crash-landed on campus, The Spectrum would absolutely be the very first to call them out on it. (As long as it happened just before a Tuesday or Friday.)

But regarding things that are actually happening on campus and aren’t part of an imaginary metaphor involving alien spaceships, I don’t see any reason why Student Government and The Spectrum couldn’t try to get along better.

We both have the same ultimate common goal: publicly representing NDSU’s students and making our campus a better place to live and learn.

Maybe it’s too much to ask, completely impossible, and I’m absolutely nuts, but working together as separate groups is something I believe can only help the students.

This isn’t The Spectrum sending a relationship request to Student Government’s Facebook profile. This is not any sort of official apology to or from either party.

This is simply my opinion. Just Adam Desautel using the aforementioned big mouth I was blessed/cursed with to tell both The Spectrum and Student Government that maybe it’s time to call a truce, be civil, and actually work together.

This is my way of doing my part to attempt to reconstruct a bridge that was burned down many years ago.

Let’s end this pointless poo-flinging before ... well, you know how Romeo and Juliet end up at the end of the play.

Adam is a sophomore studying jounrnalism.