According to our student senate, student apathy is a severe problem on campus. Only a small percentage of students read La Voz Weekly, let alone know that it exists. Five percent of all eligible students voted in the most recent senate election, despite the painstaking efforts of the political candidates to get students to cast their ballot.

With that being said, it’s safe to say that most students couldn’t care less about their government. For students who take campus activism seriously, political apathy has always been a constant struggle — but instead of asking how students can become more involved, it seems they should be focusing on why. The answer is that students are too selfish, too lazy and too busy to find a place for politics in their stressful lives.

I mean, it’s a Wednesday night. You have class at 9 a.m. Are you going to research ways to get involved on campus to better the lives of generations to come, or are you going to go to your friend’s apartment and play the new Call of Duty game until your eyes bleed? When weighing the benefits between the two, it seems that most would choose to dilute their scholarly minds in virtual shoot-‘em-up scenarios. The exceptions to this decision are the ones tabling in the quad and wearing those “de.vote.d” shirts, frustrated that more people aren’t taking an interest in improving their community.

And yes, we lost in the Pepsi Refresh Project, placing 21 out of 400. Winning would have provided us with $250,000 to create a program for peer mentors. And believe me, that money would have done a great deal of good to our constantly deteriorating budget.

But we’re all human, so selfishness is deeply embedded into our pseudo-genetic code, so why fight Mother Nature? Well, having any sort of interest in a future far better than the present could be a decent reason. This isn’t any sort of call to arms for student involvement; I’m simply asking readers to think. A professor once told me that we need to think in a more complicated way, and I agree. We need the knowledge we’re supposedly seeking by attending college, but what we need even more is to actually care, to use the knowledge we’ve gained from the past and are gaining from the present in order to set ourselves up for a better, brighter future.