Last week, an embarrassingly small fraction of us will have camped out in the main quad, called long lists of people to encourage them to vote yes on E, or taken part in teach-ins and workshops. 

Actually, an equally embarrassingly small number of us have any idea what Measure E even is. If you are among the uninitiated, here’s the basic rundown: it’s a property tax for all the pampered rich people who can afford to live in the area.

If I’m correct in my assumptions about how many of us actually live in the district (which includes Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Santa Clara, and only a few bits of San Jose) many of our families will not even be subject to this tax. 

And those of us who know what it means to have thousands of properties in the area paying the colleges $69 a year, which for once are paid and not borrowed (like bonds) have probably considered doing more than crossing our fingers to help it pass – and that’s real De Anza pride.

You might remember that there was a Tent City on campus last year that attracted local newscasters, and that members of our college community gave, what I feel comfortable labeling “rousing” speeches in front of thousands of protestors marching against budget cuts. Not too shabby. 

Then came Measure C bond money, which wasn’t exactly a drawback, but is the reason why you see so much construction on campus and get turned away from one of the measly two Precalculus B sections – it was money exclusively for construction and renovation, which is nice, but not what we need most. And now? Now what? 

We still have three weeks left until November, give or take. The deflation of the Tent City doesn’t mean we can sit pretty and pat ourselves on the back for being movers and shakers. 

It means more time on the phone, getting hung up on angrily. More time at Kinko’s. More Wikipedia edits. More, more, more. We’re not done yet. Inevitably, we’ll spend a lot of time trying to justify to critics that we’re making people spend their money on additional sections of classes that we’ll drop halfway through the quarter.

It’s tough to go up against the kind of logic that paints all community college students as disinterested layabouts who wouldn’t know what to do with more classes if they had them. But to me, having 10 sections of 49A half full because people dropped them still results in five times as many so-called layabouts moving on to calculus than having two half full sections of 49A. 

If my math is correct, that means more classes is always better than the status quo. 

Let’s make that happen.