Both Matthew Wallace and Kyle Triplett have encouraged a clearer detail of what suffrage entails. Student trustee suffrage can be many things. But mostly it is an idea that should be qualified as a serious issue that students should be interested in.
The topic of this letter is the definition of suffrage and popular ideas of it in Athens.
Suffrage is not merely a right to vote. Many people have possessed a right to vote while others, at the same time, have not. Suffrage, distinct from mere voting rights, is the attainment of those rights through the democratic process.
The popular concept of suffrage originated after conventional wisdom saw freedmen, natives and women as able to own property like land. Perhaps to protect property, but maybe for other reasons, a plurality of people with voting rights affirmed, via the democratic process, the suffrage of blacks, natives and finally women.
Historians assess recent suffrage movements as coincidental with other movements, religions of protest and pioneers.
Though suffrage bares no resemblance to a person, it does a device. The year is 2011, and two ideas about suffrage exist at Ohio University.
The first involves the method of selection. Suffrage as allowing OU students to directly vote, from ten finalists, to send one final student nominee to the governor would be a contrast to having just the members of committees and administrators decide what five applicants to send for appointment to the governor of Ohio.
The second, more popularized idea of suffrage here is granting student trustees rights to vote on the Board of Trustees. This is the idea that has been flagrantly heralded by student campaigns for the past four years. And idleness has given way to apathy.
Questions to Matthew Wallace and Kyle Triplett concerning suffrage are: As President, would you address suffrage as the former or the latter concept? And will you act, as President, to ensure students attain our suffrage?
The device of the ballot is a powerful thing. It is the offering of pioneering voices. The ghost of progress chokes us when we forget that. But like youth, some folks smile when they see that ghost; some people gnash their teeth; some people drink to it. And that ghost speaks louder in a historic place.
The frontierspeople, mostly Scot-Irish Catholics, fugitive black slaves, freedmen, trappers and various clans of Shawnee, who pioneered this wilderness have not lost their echoes, it seems, in the course of history. But what might be said is that the only ghosts we see are the ones we try to leave behind.
Is youth more forgotten than remembered? Progress cannot be an afterthought.
To keep it, we stay out of the clouds — nearer to friends who need us; who want to see progress but do not. We stay down to earth. And we lift each other up, in good times and bad, no matter the cost; we do what’s right, what’s hard, what’s got to be done.
We hope for a better life, a freer world, a greener planet — all subjective things. We decide to leave youth because others leave it too. We try to find it again — to put ourselves to rest.
Another sight, another taste, another feel, another mood or whatever kept us going before. Youth isn’t deceptive, but we do numb ourselves for nothing. And sometimes we have nightmares: Why would we want to wake up to a reality where we are speechless?
When we get to commencement, we walk instead of run. There’s a higher calling than progress, right? Maybe not.
And before we go, we remember how to rise and shine without that ghost. Because justice only gets louder when we ignore it.
Whomever wins, make OU the place where history’s alive and our voices — shouts, conversations and whispers — are heard.
Give us the reason we came here.
We need our suffrage: It’s 2011, we’re young, and we’re not at OU forever. But by grace — or faith — or both, we can try to be in spirit.
Christopher Myers is a senior studying philosophy.
