Apathetic.

I believe it’s a good word to describe our generation.

Blame it on whatever (or whoever) you want — we simply don’t care anymore.

Our apathy goes beyond not caring about apparently cursory things like who was elected president or what’s going on in other parts of the world. It includes the things that directly affect us on our very own campus. It’s safe to say our apathy is running rampant.

I’ve watched it happen all year. Each week, I sit at my desk and peruse Twitter for the “Tweets of the Week” section, scrolling endlessly through complaints about campus safety, Sodexo, residence halls, parking — the list goes on and on.

My question is this: why is it easier to sit and tweet incessantly about what we dislike rather than do something to change it?

Have we become so apathetic that we believe things will simply remain as is, no matter what we do or say, so why bother to even try?

I may be the pot calling the kettle black here, but I feel like my position on staff with The Flor-Ala affords me a good perspective on the subject.

I go to the SGA Senate meeting each week. Granted, I’m there to cover them for the paper, but I’m there, nonetheless. These are open meetings, yet I rarely see anyone outside of SGA there. After interviewing UPC officials for an article I recently wrote, I learned the same is true for their weekly meetings, which are also open.

Yet, in the same breath, I can log on to Facebook or Twitter and find handfuls of complaints about who UPC booked for the spring concert and plenty of suggestions for who they should have booked.

I can find dozens of students complaining about the food in Towers, but how many of them showed up to the open forum Senate hosted with Sodexo last semester? I was there, and I can assure you it wasn’t many.

Some students have made great strides to change things on this campus, but we still have a long way to go.

I attended Higher Education Day last week in Montgomery. I have never seen a more apathetic group of students, UNA included. I watched as UNA’s representative student group, along with a couple of other schools, left a rally for increased funding for higher education halfway through just to go stand in line for a free lunch. When officials from the Higher Education Partnership told them to go back to the rally, they stood on the outskirts of the crowd, disinterested and ready to do nothing more than go stand back in the lunch line.

I have never been more embarrassed to call myself a UNA student, because at that moment, I realized how great our apathy is.

We care, but only to the point of putting it on social media for others to agree (or disagree) with us. Any action beyond that is simply not worth it. Would it not be better, not to mention more productive, to take our concerns and do something about them other than tweet?

If you have concerns with residence life, apply to work for the department. If you hate the food in Towers, call Sodexo with suggestions about what you would like to see there. If you have a certain artist in mind for spring concert, do your research and present your idea to UPC officials. The scenarios are endless.

No, change won’t happen immediately. Change might not happen at all. But isn’t trying better than letting our apathy ruin the time we spend here?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to look back on mediocre college years. But at this point, I just don’t care anymore.