A Note to Campus Apathy

A+Note+to+Campus+Apathy

This campus is so void of information that it took me two days to find out about the Las Vegas Massacre. It took two days for my Tumblr account to pull me into the loops by posting a GoFundMe page onto my dashboard. It took me two days to search what exactly the “Las Vegas Massacre” is, and why people are up in arms about such a thing. It took me two days, two days of people suffering and families crying before I even heard the terms. And none of the information was given to me by our school.

Now maybe I am ill-informed, and maybe I am not in the right social groups to have such news hit my ears, but maybe that’s not an excuse. A school as accepting and socially aware as this one should have been extremely up in arms about an event such as the Las Vegas Massacre. People died in Nevada that day, and there was no news of it anywhere to be seen throughout campus that I saw.

I have been at Loyola for nearly two months now, and I’ve noticed just how cut off from the world I have become in that time span. This school has shut me out from the outside world to the point in which I need to turn notifications on my phone for when major news networks post articles. There is no sign of external Loyola support outside of the classrooms, and no sign of necessity for an informed campus outside the small booths of newspapers that are at the base of each dorm building.

It is ludicrous to think a school that prides itself in being an informed institution of education would skip such a step as informing the public of anything other than what exciting activities are planned for the coming weekend.

I’ve experienced the same thing with other important topics, topics that should anger this student body and should motivate them to enact plans for change.

Take a walk around campus and listen. Do you hear the debates on the election or the millions of reforms that are being shoved down America’s throat? Do you hear the call for change, or the wish for a voice in the ever-growing stereotype that is the United States? Do you hear anyone thinking, questioning, or discussing the world around them? Or do you hear people chatting about their weekends, their plans, and their bombardment of tests?

What happened to college being a place for radical thought and radical change? Have we grown numb to the political onslaught that now haunts us whenever we turn on the news?

Loyola doesn’t seem to want to see that side of its students. A world of thought leads to a world of action, but a world of silence leads to only more of the same. As much as this school preaches its activity in the world, it seems to leave its student out of the very fundamental parts of it.

There are students at this school from Nevada. There are students here from Las Vegas. There are students who know that hotel that the shooter shot from. There are students who know that Country Music Festival, who had wished they were home to go. There are students who learned about this like I did, and there are students who learned from family and friends. There is no condolence for these people, shocked and numbed by the deaths of their people. There is no voice.

I learned about the Massacre from my social media two days after the fact. Loyola should’ve been the first I heard from.