Guess who’s back…back again…. It’s good to be back, for a special guest appearance. For those who don’t care, I wrote for this paper last semester. You usually found me on the front page with a recap of what you missed at the NAITSA meetings. I quit in December, because I was being shipped off to my practicum. Right now, I’m earning valuable work experience in the City of Cold Lake, which is actually a pretty cool town once you get used to the low-flying CF-18s.

My boss gave me a day off recently, where I went back to NAIT to tie up a few loose ends. Naturally, I grabbed a copy of the Nugget to see what I’d been missing. Now, while I loved Trevor Elliot’s near-obsessive sports coverage, Cody Paton-Perkin’s tales of convenience stores after hours, and Jenny Annett’s treatise on shopping, well, what can I say? As the song says, it just feels so empty without me.

By now, if you haven’t flipped to the Grapevines, you’re probably wondering why the heck I came back. Well, it was for one very important reason: the NAITSA elections. Even though I’m a three-hour drive away, I’m still a student, and I still wanted to have my say in who’ll be in charge next year. I came down to vote in the advance polls, and I’ll admit I was a little disappointed that things had been changed this year. The candidate’s “vote for me!” articles didn’t run in the Nugget the week before the election, but rather in the issue that came out the day of the election. So, I was stuck gathering all my info about candidates purely on the posters, until I found that the candidate’s “vote for me” articles were posted at the future sites of polling stations. Nothing really Earth-shattering. Most everyone ran on the platform of “vote for me, cuz I know how to PARTY! WOO!!” Their posters reflected it. What I found funniest about the election, though, was the fact that Dwayne Williams, running for re-election on a platform of increased communication, wasn’t bothered to put up at least one poster telling people that he was running again. Now that’s your high-quality, China-cut irony.

But I’m not here to rip on the winners or the candidates. Nope. I’m here to rip on you. You see, I made a special appointment to vote in the advance polls, begged my boss for a day off work, and drove three hours to vote.

So, if you didn’t vote, YOU SUCK!

I haven’t seen the final statistics, but I’m sure it’s safe to assume that voter turnout was pitifully low again. I mean, what the hell is wrong with you, if you can’t take 2 minutes out of your day as you’re sprinting down to the Second Cup or Bytes or wherever for a cup of coffee to mark an X on a piece of paper? And now that they publish the special election edition of the Nugget on the day of the election, you have even less of an excuse! It’s all outlined in black and white who’s running and what they stand for. No excuse, no excuse at all!

Now, in the past 12 months, we’ve been pretty lucky, democracy-wise. We had federal elections, municipal elections, and provincial elections. I could understand if you felt a little burnt-out by the time our little ol’ NAITSA elections rolled around. So, if you were a little too tired to exercise a right that people have fought and died for all around the world, well then…actually, that’s no excuse. In fact, if you didn’t vote in any election in the past 12 months, YOU SUCK MORE!

Here at NAIT, you have even MORE democracy! Dwayne Williams was running unopposed. In the real world, he’d get in by acclimation; he’d get his second term automatically. But not here. Here, he’s put to a yes/no vote. So, if you didn’t like the way Dwayne did things this year, you could still vote him out of office! You can’t do that in the real world. In the real world, you’d be stuck with Dwayne year after year after year until he went mad with power, just like Ralph Klein. But that’s a rant for another day…and probably another paper.

So, the next time you’re sitting around complaining about how NAITSA does things, and you didn’t vote, you have no one to blame but yourself. Ask your best friend to kick your ass, because YOU SUCK! As a wise man once said, “The best way to get power is to not give up any that you already have.” When you don’t vote, you give up your power over how this place is run. So, if you didn’t vote, just go. Go back to your corner, you powerless little suck.

That’s it. I’m ranted out. I’m now officially done. Although, I did find Jenny Annett’s shopping adventures rather stimulating. Call me when she does the photo essay on trying on lingerie.